Therapy Session - Who Are We Even Talking To?

Like, if you're a podcaster or content creator, like, a little thing that could help you is in refining your messaging and all that to something like, for us, it's a little more tactical, talking about specific topics. We'll. We'll talk about in a little bit here and. But it just helps us. It makes our jobs easier because now we know the line of questioning that we're going down as this defined purpose, whereas before it was kind of like, we'll see what happens. This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float, Shark with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf. Jo Fier. Hey, welcome back. Hey. I got this feeling inside your bones, I do.

Is it electric?

Oh, when I turn it on, it is. Gear up.

Joe is just telling me that his daughter is going through a trolls phase.

Hardcore.

My kids went through a trolls phase too, so I know a lot of those songs as well.

Oh, yes. It's every morning at 7am Typically, my wife Heather is up early because the baby is up very early, and I'm in bed till about seven, and then I hear hair up. I'm like, get up now. It's like my wake up song too.

It could be worse, could be worse, could be worse.

It's a banger, man.

Banger.

Had a bunch of bangers.

Well, today we're doing a therapy session. We are, by popular request, no guests with us right now.

By popular request, stop bringing guests, Stop.

Talking to other people.

I mean, that would make our lives easier, actually.

Yeah. Well, today, in some respects. Today, I think what we're going to do on this one is we actually recently did a survey where we kind of asked what you like about the show, what you don't like about the show, what you want us to talk more about, what you want us to talk less about. Favorite guests, least favorite guests, all that sort of stuff. And I think we want to kind of chat about some of the responses, but also like the changes we're making to our business, to our podcast, to, like, a lot of things as a result of this survey. So that's kind of the chat today.

Yeah, no, this is like the inside look. We've had a lot of people tell us, hey, you got to bring these. Do more therapy sessions. And trust us, if we had more, I think, more days available. Yeah, we record episodes. We totally would because we love them too.

Yeah, we got like, these things, they're called. What do you call them? Families.

Yeah, families and a business behind the podcast to run and a team to manage. And. Yeah, yeah, I'd Say the families is probably the biggest part.

Yeah. But we are going to work in some more therapy sessions and we're also going to do therapy session type stuff in a creative way, which we'll talk about. If you've been listening to the show, you already know what we're about to talk about. Yeah.

And if you haven't, welcome. Thank you for attending our a therapy session. You're probably wondering what the hell's a therapy session? Basically it's us just talking about kind of all the newest things that we're focused on, the struggles we're facing. It's kind of like our behind the scenes type of show. Yep.

And that's what it is. And we take notes on it every episode, this one included. So we will have notes for you on this episode. If you go to hustleandflowchart.com comp, you'll be able to download the notes for this episode. And this episode is once again sponsored.

By our favorite SEO company, our friends at Ahrefs. That's A H R E F S. And they are an amazing SEO company and they have a software tool called Ahrefs but basically does everything you ever want to do with software. Sorry, with SEO.

Yeah.

And anything. Getting free traffic essentially can even probably. Can you use it a little bit with paid traffic?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've talked about some paid traffic strategies I've used Ahrefs for in the past where I will find keywords to go after in Google for that. For Google Ads and things like that.

Like finding opportunities, basically.

Yeah, yeah. And another really cool thing that like, I don't know if we've chatted about it a whole lot when talking about Ahrefs, but they have this thing called the Content Gap where you go in there and you plug like your URL. Like I'd plug in evergreenprofits.com and then I would plug in, let's say digitalmarketer.com. right. And it'll tell me all of the keywords that they're ranking for that we're not ranking for yet. So you can go and plug in like a competitor's website. It'll say they rank for these keywords. Maybe you should try to rank for them as well. And I thought that was a really cool feature because it sort of helps you find some blind spots that maybe you're not thinking of.

Yeah. So you basically if you. And we'll actually talk about this in the episode. But really identifying your avatar and something that we're doing. But yeah, I guess Once you identify your avatar, know some competitors and where those people might be reading and watching videos and all that, throw em in the hrefs and do that content gap. So like digital marketer, we know a lot of people that are in digital marketers ecosystem also are not ours. Yeah. So yeah, it makes sense to kind of like figure out what they're talking about. Maybe we can talk about some of that for sure. Ranks. That's cool. So ahrefs is a seven day, $7 trial. You can actually sign up right now and give it a shot. I recommend it. We recommend it.

We do.

And they are sponsors, but we've been using them well beyond or before the sponsorship. So go to a H r e f s dot com. That's a h r e f s dot com $7 seven day trial. Get it.

Well, let's, let's get into some stuff.

Yeah. This all got sparked from Charlie Valor. Yeah. With business of podcasting Podcast.

Charlie had a podcast with Dave Jackson.

He did.

It was actually a two part interview and in part one of the interview, they were kind of talking about some of the mistakes that Dave sees.

Go ahead, Dave Jackson, introduce him really quick. So people here, not everyone's a podcast follower. Yeah.

So Dave Jackson, he's. He's kind of like an old school podcaster. He's been kind of podcasting since the very beginning. They talk about it on, on this episode with Charlie. So we'll, we'll link to it in the show notes so you can listen to that episode as well. I don't know his. I don't remember his entire backstory, but.

He'S a legendary podcaster. Yeah.

He's in the podcasting hall of fame, which. There's a podcasting hall of fame, apparently. Sorry, I didn't know. I didn't know there was a podcasting hall of fame. But he's in the podcasting hall of fame.

He doesn't.

He started, he started podcasting, I think before most people even knew what a podcast was. He mentioned the year that he started.

He said straight up, he was podcasting. When you could not stream podcasts, you had to load it up on your iPad. Whenever you ran out of podcast to listen to, you'd have to go and then actively download. Oh, I want to select that, loaded up my pad and off on my way.

And then he had a pod.

He.

I think he still has a show called the School of Podcasting, which is also, I think like an online course where you can join the School of Podcasting. But that's who Dave Jackson is. He's old school podcaster, been doing it forever, been teaching it forever. So he knows his stuff when it comes to podcasting. And on this episode, they talked a lot about, like, common mistakes that people make in podcasting and what they should do to improve the podcast. And one of the things they were talking about was most people don't know who they're speaking to. They don't know their avatar, they don't know who their ideal listener is. Another thing that they were talking about is they don't know, like, what problem their podcast solves. Like, why would somebody tune into this podcast over and over and over again? What problem are you solving for them? And then another idea that he, that he didn't come up with, but he was talking about on that thing is when you do the, like when you watch the show the Prophet with Marcus Lemonis on tv, one of the first things Marcus always does when he gets a new company is they do like a focus group. They get a bunch of people, they sit them around in a room, they show them the product, the packaging they get, let them try it, and then they ask for feedback. What do you like about it? What don't you like about it? What would you change? What do you think of the branding? And they get all sorts of feedback from those people. And he said podcasters should do the same thing. Do a focus group with your podcast. Find out what people do like about it, what they don't like about it, what they would change about it, all that sort of thing. And that sparked us to run this survey. And we sent the survey. If you're on our email list, you probably saw it. If you're in our Facebook group, you probably saw it. We put this survey out as this focus group of our, our current audience. What do you like about it? What don't you like about it? What should we change? And all sorts of questions. And so that episode led us down this path.

Yeah, no, it's. It's really cool because we noticed that we were, I think we felt it even before listening to that episode and before getting the feedback from y', all is we got a little broad with our episodes. And honestly, it's just our curiosity. That's what drives pretty much every person you find on the show. And any topic we're talking about, and not to say that's going to change because it won't change a lot, but it's the focus of our discussions will be more focused on what you told us. Basically, we realized, we went Broad and going broad a. It hurts your show growth, you know, so if you think about it, like, there's a lot of broad shows out there, so it's like, it's really hard to stand out, and it's really tough to just grow as a broad show. I mean, there's so many big players that are broad, so you're, like, competing against them or trying to everybody. Everybody be Joe Rogan, which. Yeah, I mean, I still like to have that influence.

I mean, we've talked a lot, probably even on air, but definitely a lot off air of, like, we want to get to Joe Rogan's status. Right. But.

Well, I'll elaborate on how I influenced from him is the way that he asked us questions, the way he's curious, the way that he likes to get different perspectives as well. I think that's cool because he's not in a silo kind of box. But I think the thing that maybe happened to us a little bit is that we almost got a little bit too broad with the topics, or at.

Least I think we felt like we were Joe Rogan before we were ever even close to Joe Rogan.

A little bit.

Influence, man. You know, it's who we. Because you and I listen to him a lot.

Yeah.

Like, honestly, I don't listen to a lot of podcasts on business stuff.

Yeah.

Just because we have so many amazing people in our show. So, like, I want to hear other stuff. You know, comedy shows and Rogan. And when I'm listening to Rogan, I'm listening to things like Mike Tyson, you know, people like Mike Tyson. Or right now, it's Edward Snowden.

Yeah, I haven't seen that one yet.

It's crazy, but it's like, that's. That's kind of like where I go. So that's my podcast influence.

Yeah. We have, like, a wide range of, like, things that we're fascinated by. And so we thought, let's bring on a lot of these things we're fascinated by on the show. Let's talk to people who are, you know, cultivating CBD in interesting ways. Let's talk to people who have figured out how to, you know, tune their body through biohacking and supplementation and things like that. Let's bring in real estate investors. So once we make our money off this business, we have sort of a roadmap for real estate, and let's bring in investor. And it got to this point where anything that interested us, we brought in, but we sort of let it get away from us. The fact that, like, okay, this is relevant to us, but is this stuff still relevant to the people listening?

Yeah. Bingo. So what we did is. Did that survey, got a ton of responses, and we'll go through some of them. And we're not going to bore you because there's a lot of responses. Thank you. If you actually took the time to do that. I know it took some time because most of you gave, like, crazy thorough responses. Yeah.

Well, we'll talk from the high level of, like, what our findings were, because the, like, patterns definitely emerged.

Yeah. So I think we talk about, like, what we learned, but also, like, I think it'd be cool to tell folks how we did the survey, too, because I think this is such an important thing that everyone should be doing as a marketing lesson.

Yeah.

So, you know, so you can actually. Well, just like, if you notice, you're. If you're starting from scratch, then if you have an audience to tap, that's a great way. Or if you. Like us, we've been around for a bit, but then we got wide. Like, our messaging kind of changed over time. So that was an indication as well. Like, okay, we got to go back to basics, talk to our people, and then that led us to figuring out an avatar, like, who is our ideal person that we're going to be speaking to.

Yeah.

Then, yeah, that whole exercise has been super helpful.

So. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the survey. You know, why we asked the specific questions, how we did the survey, all that kind of stuff. We'll talk about the actual results that we got from the survey, and then we'll talk about, like, here's the changes we're making as a result of the responses we got.

Cool.

So I guess let's start with how then.

Yeah, yeah. And you did it, so go for it.

So we used a tool called SurveyMonkey. Michael Kim, one of the guys that we used to. He used to consult with us. I don't know how to word it.

He.

He taught us. He was consulting us.

He was consulting with us.

Yeah.

So we hired him.

We hired him.

Yeah.

That's how you say it. And one of the things he told us to be doing is like, dude, get SurveyMonkey. And constantly be like, you know, getting data of what your customers want to hear and that sort of thing. And we did, and this was probably nine months ago, and we ran two surveys, and then nine months went by, and we're like, oh, we should. We still have a SurveyMonkey.

We've been reluctant to, like, pay for the annual I think it was.

Yeah.

Because we're like, is this even worth it? He's like, you should always be running surveys. Yeah. Oh, okay, then I guess it's worth it.

Yeah. So we used, by the way. Yeah, definitely. So we use. And we're not even affiliates yet. No, we should be. I wonder if they have an affiliate program.

Anyway, after this show, we'll look up. It might be linked in the episode if we are.

Yeah, there you go. But no. So we use SurveyMonkey. So when it comes to these surveys, SurveyMonkey will actually give you advice as you're creating it. And I think this is a fairly new thing because I didn't notice it when I was making surveys in the past, but I created the survey and it'll actually tell you, like, oh, maybe this is too many questions. Maybe you should add more questions. Start with. Maybe start with an easier question. So if you notice our survey, the very first question is, what is your favorite episode? Right. Because the suggestion SurveyMonkey gives you is ask the easiest question first to kind of start the momentum to get them answering more questions. So I actually started it with, like, what do you like most about the show? What don't you like most about this show? With big old long text boxes where they could, like, sort of fill in long answers. And as soon as I, like, finish that survey, it's like, maybe consider changing these questions around. Right. And it actually made recommendations to ask the easier questions first.

That's cool.

So I flipped it. So what is your favorite episode was the first question. Because that's just like typically two words, the first and last name.

Piece of cake. Yeah, it's top of mind already, so there's not a lot of mental, you know, expenditure.

Yeah. So then obviously the logical next question would be, what is your least favorite episode? Right. This kind of gives us insights into what you know, what topics you like, what discussions you liked, and which ones you really didn't like.

And wasn't it the Dan Ryan episode?

Yeah, we've never had a Dan Ryan episode. But, I mean, people basically said. People basically said, my least favorite episodes are the ones where you mentioned Dan Ryan.

Yeah. So no, I mean, we just had to put it out there because it's true, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's our own inside joke that only me, you, and Dan Ryan will get.

But carry on.

Anyway. So, yeah, I wanted to make the survey short, Right. Like if. If you email your list and say, hey, fill out this survey, it'll only take you 15 minutes. You'll get two responses. Right. So I wanted to make a survey that takes two minutes or less. And SurveyMonkey will actually tell you that. Right. So, like, when you create the survey, it'll say estimated time to completion, two minutes. Right. So I'm always trying to get it to like a two minute or so survey because that's within the range that people will help us out. And then to further incentivize it, I offered people a free copy of one of our books. So either the Traffic Playbook, the affiliate Playbook, or the podcast Playbook, you get one of those books for free. Your choice, fill out the survey. And then I used Zapier, which is a, you know, a connector tool. So when somebody finished a survey, it would automatically send out an email and say, here's the bonus that we promised you.

Right.

And so.

And you're also adding. Or are you tagging people in our autoresponder at all?

Yeah, so what, what the. Where we tag people in our autoresponder is based on which book they download.

Got it.

So when they pick. So the email goes out and it says, all right, we said you could pick between these three. Pick these three books. Which one do you want for your bonus? The affiliate, the traffic, or the podcast Playbook? When they click on one of those, we're tagging them inside of activecampaign. And that's just more data for us. Right? Like, I'm just collecting more data on, like, okay, do more people seem interested in affiliate marketing, podcasting, or traffic?

So that's a whole rabbit hole because we're building a whole different email system based off of that data.

Yeah, it's also just data for the podcast too.

Right? Like, we. If.

If I notice like a crap ton of people download the podcasting playbook, we'd obviously go, oh, we have a lot of people paying attention right now that are into podcasting. Let's talk about that more on the show. So it was data for the show, but also data for what? Some of the changes we're going to be making, which will probably be more of a future episode, because that'll be like a.

Let's not open that.

Yeah, like, we're doing some technical things with email. We're actually. There's a guy, Joe Kearns, who's helping us with a lot of that, and I already told him, dude, we got to bring you on the show to talk about some of these automations we're building together.

We'll wait until then.

So we'll open that loop. But when we have Joe Kearns on. That's when we'll break down this email strategy that, that we're building with him. But anyway, so we've got these bonuses that's incentivizing people. That is enough to get people to fill out a two minute survey. And, and I wanted to keep it short. So the questions I asked were, what's your favorite episode so far? What's your least favorite episode so far? What. What do you wish we'd do better with the podcast? What do you think we're doing good with on the podcast right now? What topics do you wish we'd talk about more? Which topics do you wish we'd talk about less? And then the very last question was sort of a, a multiple choice of like, these are the things we normally talk about. Out of all of these, which is the one you want us, which is your favorite of these? And they can only select one. So that was kind of like the end all, be all question. Among these options, if you had to pick just one, which would it be? Right. So that, that was kind of the whole flow of the survey. That was seven questions, but one of them was multiple choice.

I mean, it was. That's awesome. And I think that's. Yeah, you came up with that survey super fast too. I remember that because it was like a thought you had after listening to Charlie's episode. And then like, we got to survey these people.

Yeah. Well, I was just kind of thinking to myself, what information do I need to sort of change the course of this podcast? What information would I need to like, really figure out what people enjoy and don't enjoy? And I think those questions did a pretty good job of like, sort of honing in on it.

Right.

And then one last point about like actually running the survey. We really did two things to get the survey in front of people. We emailed the list of podcast listeners and then we also posted the link inside of our Hustle and Flowchart Facebook community. Right. Those are the only two places I posted it. I think we got, you know, 100ish people fill out the survey way more.

I mean, in the data. I mean, honestly, it's probably more than we expected just in a short because it came super fast. It was only took a couple days and we had those amount of responses and we had very in depth responses. I thought that was the coolest thing or meaning like more completed, fully completed surveys. And you could tell, you guys really took your time with it. It wasn't like just a rushed thing. And there were a lot of folks even apologizing for some of the things that. When they would suggest us to do things better. Yeah, like, don't be like, this is.

Why we wanted brutal. I literally put on the survey. Brutal honesty.

Okay. If it has to make us cry, so be it. Yeah, we have soft little.

I mean, I didn't. I thought it was weird that so many people were like, I don't like Joe's face. I'm like, but listen to the audio. But, you know, whatever.

Yeah, I wish I had a good comeback, but my face is horrendous.

Well, you know, I'll work on that. If you want to save, send some money over for plastic surgery fund, then I'll start wanting to go fund me.

There you go.

All right, so moving on. Is that the nose? I don't know. The nose changes the face typically.

I mean, that was just me saying that happened. Nobody really said they didn't like your face, Joe. It was more just about your voice and everything.

Nose has changed. The whole face, though, like, just.

Yeah, no, I mean, the real feedback was they just didn't like your voice or anything that you said.

This is true. Not true. All right, so it's actually. Yeah, smelly farts. You know, it's the whole smelly vision, Matt. You got to really stop, like, ripping them during podcasts because people. It seeps through. So carrying on. So the good. So we got a lot of feedback where I felt like we had. I guess before we got results back, we had a feeling of what people would tell us, but this just solidified it.

Yeah, I would think some things. There were quite a few things that were surprise. The things that were a surprise are probably the things we're not going to talk about a whole lot, because the things that surprised me the most were, like, people's least favorite guests. And I don't really want to talk about, like, these are who you didn't like.

Well, I mean, I think we don't even need to talk about those. Just more. I think the. The bigger changes in the show and, like, structurally and. Well, I think what we learned there I thought was pretty interesting.

Well, I think knowing what guests people really liked and which guests people really didn't like sort of helped us hone in on the avatar. That's why I'm bringing. That's why I brought that up. I will say this about.

This is.

This will be kind of the only statement I'll make about, like, what people said they didn't like is the trend seemed to be when we brought on like, really big name guests, like, guests that pretty much everybody knows their names. A lot of those tended to be a lot of people's least favorite guests, which I found interesting. It's like the names that people called out is like, I didn't really like that episode were all the sort of most quote unquote, famous names, most popular names. It was a lot of those names that popped up, but there wasn't really any, like, one name that just came up so many times that you're like, everybody hated that person.

And same with even the liking of podcast.

There was a couple. Yeah, there was a couple that were pretty dominant.

But, you know, like, we've kind of said it before about, like, the Roland.

Frazier that was the number one most voted for episode, which we've had three with him. So I'm not sure which one they were referring to. But, you know, as far as, like, favorite guest people like Roland number one, James Schramko number two, and I think George Bryant was number three.

Bryant was up there.

Pat Flynn was number three.

Pat Flynn. George Bryant's up there.

And Aaron Fletcher.

Aaron Fletcher, Yeah.

So those were five that people said they liked the most, which, I mean.

Let'S be honest, it could be swayed a little bit because we do mention some of those names often, so.

Well, if you look at those two, Roland Frazier's been on three times and Aaron Fletcher has been on twice.

Yep.

So, like, two of those people are multiple guests. George was very recent. Flynn was very recent.

Yeah. Pat's recent.

And yeah.

So, I mean, like, Shram Co has been on multiple times.

Yeah. So three out of the five have been on at least two times. Shramko and Roland, I think, have both been on three times. And then Pat and George are both very, like, recent episodes.

Let's be honest. It could be a little suede, but that's all right.

But, yeah, that helps us hone in on our avatar because there's a reason why people, you know, you all said you like them. But also on the other side, like, so more the, I guess the qualitative side of the podcast would be things like tactics are something that you guys said that you really want a lot of, a lot more of. And it's funny because that's kind of how we started this show. It was very tactical, but we, in full honesty and transparency, kind of got a little bored of just hearing marketing tactics all day long. But that's a reflection, I think, on us. I think that's just not us maybe getting curious enough or asking the Right. Questions or relating it to maybe the bigger picture of something. But what's kind of cool is. So one of the things that people loved but are liked but also didn't like as much is mindset. Y type stuff.

That one was interesting.

Not the tactics. The opposite of tactics.

The interesting thing about that was when we asked the question of what would you like to hear more of? And also the question, what would you like to hear less of? Mindset popped up multiple times in both categories, almost even. Yeah.

Like, it was freakishly even. Like, we even had a board where we were, like, tallying on a whiteboard, like, all that and finding trends in, like, mindset. When it was like, do less of and do more of. We're like, okay, so I guess that means we'll do the same. Yeah, but no. Well, and it's funny because we had Taylor Welch on the podcast. Like, he was the second episode that we had when we. Basically.

Because we started second. We recorded first. As far as release schedule.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking of. Of, like, recording time. So he was the second we recorded with, and we kind of told him like, hey, we just surveyed our people. Yeah. We were prepping them for the show right before we recorded and kind of said, hey, okay. They want a lot of tactics, like, specifics and strategies, because we used to kind of go broad and mindset and all this other stuff. He was like, okay, yeah.

Well, I think right before we hit record, he's like, my favorite tactic. Fix your mindset.

Yeah, he did that. And then we just hit record, and.

We'Re like, all right, let's do it.

And hit record. Giggled like little schoolgirls. But. But it was funny because in that episode, you'll hear it if you. If you check it out or if you have. If you remember it. He talks a lot about, like, we're. We're getting very tactical, strategic with him. But then, like, he would always kind of jab a little bit. He was like, yep, mindset. It's the way I'm thinking. It's all that. And then at the very end, he, like, laughed. Looped it all in there. He's like, mindset's the most important thing.

Which, let's be honest, we agree. Yeah. And. But I think what we'll do, really, I think what will. Our challenges on this podcast is to bring folks.

We go deeper than just the tactics. Like, there's tactics, there's strategies. I feel like it goes in this order, because this is kind of how I've been thinking about it. Is like, the obvious thing people want are tactics.

Yeah.

Get the Facebook ads.

They want something actionable.

Yeah. What's the latest, coolest, wicked smart thing you're doing? Okay, cool. We'll talk about it then. The second thing is a strategy. Strategies are like, how does that fit into the business? How does that fit into this campaign or fit into this overall picture thing? But then we have the mindset, and I'm going from most obvious to least obvious based off of results. The mindset is what holds. It's like the glue that holds all this stuff together. That's what keeps you not freaking fight or flight running around your business going.

Like, I'm gonna be God's now.

It's like, I just freaked out.

Thanks for just bursting everybody's eardrums.

Jake, can you hopefully lower the level of that section a little bit? We'll make sure we save some eardrums here. Sorry. But yeah, that little frantic energy just.

Actually woke up my dog.

Woke up her dog. Sorry. Little old lady. She probably just squeaked out a fart. It's really not Matt that farts all the time on podcast days.

It's the dog.

It's the dog. Just threw Matt under the bus. But yeah, think about if you don't have your mind tamed. And this is where our podcast kind of went a little broad, I feel like, is we would have a full, dedicated thing on not a lot of tactics, but just like, kind of like the deeper mindset stuff.

Yeah.

Which I know it's like, shoot, you were there for a long time. Is like thinking that the tactics outweighed the mindset a little.

I mean, not necessarily. I felt like the tactics outweighed the mindset as far as, like, like, like running a business. I thought when it came to creating a good podcast that people wanted to hear, it would be more valuable for. To give the tactics. And I felt like the tactics were more of what people wanted and that's what would draw people to the podcast. I don't know if I'd necessari had the philosophy of, like, tactics are greater than mindset, though.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And maybe that's where. Yeah. It's like the obvious thing is the tactics. Really.

Yeah.

And the mindset. I mean, that's the thing is we're going to balance it in there.

Yeah. I don't think the show can happen without working in mindset type stuff because mindset, like, the tactics are cool and we love learning new tactics. I nerd out about it. You hear about it in a lot of Episodes where I'm just like going down the rabbit hole, getting in the weeds, probably losing listeners because I'm getting too deep into the weeds. But, you know, I love, love, love the tactical stuff. But what I think has been created the results for our business the most and grown our business the most have been getting the mental things in order, overcoming challenges, obstacles, mental money blocks, things like that.

Outside of the podcast, it's been like some of the biggest gains we've had.

Yeah, that's. Those are the things that have made the biggest impact on my life financially, relationship wise. Like, like travel, leisure, like the whole spectrum. Right. It's all been the mindset stuff. The tactics are like, you know, that, that's like, okay, I can, I know what I can go and do now. But having that mindset, right. Is the, the thing that gets the feet moving to go do that thing.

Yeah. And that's. Yeah. And you nailed it. And I actually, that wasn't as, as tactical as Matt. Like, when we started this podcast, I thought a lot in and I still do, but like in broader strokes where getting more focused and where I think this will help me and like if you're a podcaster or a content creator, like a little thing that could help you is in refining your messaging and all that to something like, for us it's a little more tactical. Talking about specific topics. We'll talk about in a little bit here. But it just helps us. It makes our jobs easier because now we know the line of questioning that we're going down has this defined purpose. Whereas before it was kind of like, eh, we'll see what happens.

Yeah.

And that was kind of our. Yeah. Like literally before we hit record of almost every episode lately, like, even the guest was like, let's just flow with it and see where it goes. And we're still gonna do that, but now at least in our minds, we have more of like a North Star with where we're taking the episode with that specific guest.

Yeah, yeah. I just, I want to shout some of these out real quick. Like, these are the topics that people were saying they wanted more of, which is what led us to kind of believe. Okay. Like, they're asking for the more tactical stuff.

Right.

People want to hear more about traffic strategies. Affiliate marketing was a big one. Right. Like we expected, affiliate marketing was one of those ones that I actually put in the multiple choice down at the bottom. But like, even before people got to that question, when we said, what do you want to hear more about? Affiliate marketing was probably the most overwhelming Sort of repeated response. So traffic, affiliate marketing, how to grow a business that's sort of broad. Podcasting, mindset. Although mindset did show up on both the good and the bad.

Yeah, we started on the. On this. The affiliate marketing and mindset were starred on. Here is basically like these are the most prominent ones that.

Yep. And then therapy sessions. People wanted to hear more therapy sessions, which we'll talk about in a minute. People like the ones where we're talking about future trends. So we had, you know, like Mike Mark Joyner on. We had. We've had a handful of like futurist type people on that are also immersed in marketing. People like that stuff. And content marketing was another one that popped up a lot. As far as stuff that people didn't like self help and mindset.

Yeah, it was kind of lumped within mindset SEO.

Surprisingly, it was random because people also said traffic was one of the ones they wanted to hear more about. But SEO is one they want to hear less about.

That's like the not sexy traffic.

That's like the mindset of traffic.

Yeah. If you think about it, because it's hard work. It's not in the instantaneous. There's not like you can't really. I mean, you could speed it up with things like ahrefs, but at the same time, it takes time.

Yeah.

But shit, when it works, it works.

Yeah. And it keeps working.

Usually like it's our number one traffic source. Like, why would you not want to hear about it? Like, don't you want free traffic too?

Yeah. So I mean, with our actionable tactical podcast, there's going to be more SEO episodes. I'm sorry to those. And then cannabis was something that a lot of people said.

They.

A couple people even said they feel uncomfortable listening to us talk about cannabis because like, maybe their kids are in the car while listening to us and things like that. Which we can respect that. I mean, I really think that when it comes to the topic of cannabis, the problem is the fact that a taboo exists around it.

And like, do you want to quickly talk about that?

Sure.

I mean, because I feel like. Because I feel kind of passionate about just like the taboo ness of it. Because I think so.

I guess. Yeah. I'll go a little personal with why I feel like this is important. And it's not like it's however you stand is however you want to go with it. And that's cool. But like cannabis. Equate it to alcohol, equate it to anything. Sugar, equate it to like eating healthy Unhealthy, like this, this thing in your mind that you think is quote unquote bad or not good for others to hear about or know. Like. Yeah, my wife's family, they have a history of addiction. I mean, like, literally, my wife, her great uncle was Ernest Hemingway. He was an alcoholic and he shot himself. He had some issues and that's. It's passed down, you know, like we're all conditioned.

So Heather's dad looks like Ernest Hemingway.

He really does. It's pretty cool and freaky all at the same time. I'm used to it now, but yeah, it's pretty striking. But like, so addiction runs in her family. It runs in my family too. That runs in a lot of people's family. I mean, it could be addiction to anything, but in this case, alcohol. And yeah, obviously with her, Hemingway, you know, like, it was obvious. But like, so when my wife Heather was younger, whenever, you know, she saw people drinking a beer, like literally just a beer, like out in the restaurant or wherever, like she immediately thought they were an alcoholic.

Yeah.

So she had this kind of conditioning in her mind that the alcohol, like any alcohol, all that is horrible. It's bad, bad, bad. They need to go to rehab, they need to go to aa, you know, and like they got them stuff to figure out. It's like. But she didn't understand is like, okay, well maybe they were just enjoying and they just needed to like chill for a minute and it's one beer out of the week or something, you know, like, there's no. You don't know the story. And it can be a tool to release some anxiety that stresses.

Well, someone like me, like, I wouldn't say I'm a non drinker anymore, but I maybe have a drink like once a month. And if like someone like Heather back then would have in a restaurant ordering a beer, and that was like the one beer I had all month. She would have made assumptions. Right.

100% would judge you as an alcoholic. Right. And that's just because that's how she was raised. And so when, you know, like, there has not been beer in her house, like, because her parents don't drink. Well, I mean, that's actually not true. Her dad does not drink. So I partake with wine with her mom all the time. Just did last night. So. But the whole thing is like that conditioning. Like, Heather didn't drink till she was 23. And so because she was freaked out she was going to become an alcoholic. So looping this back to cannabis, think about the stereotype that Cannabis has had, like, in the world. And do a little research, independent research. I won't tell you where to go. Just go to your thing. Figure out the history of why that stigma has kind of been, you know, placed on society as a whole worldwide. And go back to some of the cannabis episodes that we've had. Go to Will Clyden. If you're against it, just listen to it and seriously listen to the history of it. And a knowledgeable guy who means well. But the big thing is the stigma. I see this, I'm like, man, I don't want to pass this on to my kids. The stigma that a plant is bad. This tool, this thing that's actually healthier than alcohol.

It's healthier than freaking Tylenol.

I honestly equate to. I mean, I've. Yes, you're right. And I will choose. And I've told Heather this many times, I will choose cannabis over Tylenol any day of the week. I don't want to put a drug in my body if it's, like, unnecessary. And, I mean, this is like, I want to leave it right there for that. But, like, the big point here is, like, stigmas are bad. Yeah. Because they're. They're conditioning. Like, like, if you're scared to listen to it around your kids, like, well, you know what? Maybe you should have a conversation with your kids and actually put some concreteness and actually don't live in emotion because it affects more than you believe. And seeing my wife, like, literally 23 years in, thinking she'd become an alcoholic if she had a sip, a sip of alcohol, even probably smelled alcohol, like, cannabis. Oh, man.

Yeah.

Just do a little research and you don't have to love it. You don't even have to agree with it. But just look at the research and just like, the stigma thing is just not healthy.

Well, it's interesting because there is this sort of, like, tough point with it where it literally is illegal in a lot of places still.

That's tough.

Most places it's still illegal. Right. Like the United States, it's kind of getting more and more legal, at least medicinally in most states now. But it's illegal in a lot of states. So now you've got people that have, like. Like, like leaning into what you're saying here is like, okay, we want to destigmatize it around our kids, but at the same time, it's like, kids, this thing isn't bad, but if you do it, you're breaking the law.

Yeah, that's the trickiest Part of it all right there.

And so, like, that, I think, is where the sort of, like, tough area is. You and I live in a state where it's legal. The stigma is pretty much non existent. Right. My parents smoke weed. Your parents smoke weed to help them sleep, right? My parents help to smoke, to sleep. And for some issues, surgeries and stuff, they had, they preferred over, you know, Vicodin and Percocet and stuff like that.

Right.

Used it.

Your dad's gone through some major surgery, like hip surgeries.

I've used it at night to sleep. Right. So like, dude, it's reframing.

It's made me therapeutically, like, get over my dad's death. I remember my dad before he killed himself, he was actually partaking for the first time in, like, a very long time. Well, yeah, I don't know how long time, but he was telling me, like, how he was just like, chilling out and. Yeah, it was like, actually putting really good vibes out. You know, it helped him out. But like, we're.

We're so I think, like, as it reflects on our show specifically, right. We live in a state where it's legal and there's literally, like, no taboo. Like, I can go and, like, I can see a cop and go talk to him about how I was smoking a joint last night and there's no repercussions.

The other day, I was just hanging out and there was a quote unquote drug deal happening right next to me in a parking lot. But it was just a weed guy from a dispensary, a legal dispensary down the street. It was actually Martin Ash. Cause I recognize his hat. And it's a local dispensary. And. And it was just, like, happening right next to us. I had my baby and Heather was there and we looked over. I'm like, oh, that's funny. He even waved at us. He was a happy drug dealer. And guess what? It was totally legal. But yes, we're very privileged. You're right.

Yeah. So we live in this state where the stigma is basically gone. You don't get the stigma. You don't fear about talking about it. So when you and I have conversations on the podcast, we talk about it like it's commonplace, it's normal, it's legal. Like, we talk about it in the same ways we talk about going and getting beers with friends. True, Right. But there's a big portion of the people who are listening who are like, it's freaking illegal where I live. I like, if I do it Where I live, I am literally breaking the law. Right. So as it kind of goes to our show, like, we might still mention it from time to time, but I think we will sort of back off on, like, bringing on guests to talk about that kind of subject and stuff. Because, again, it's one of those things where it's like, I think everybody should destigmatize it. There shouldn't be these taboos around it. But if you're in a place where it is illegal, we're talking about something that you cannot do right now legally.

And I would say the caveat to that is like, so Will Clyden, for instance, that episode, yes, he went deep into the cannabis space. But, like, if you take out cannabis and replace it with, like, whatever else, you know, dogs. I don't know, I'm looking at a dog over here. If you say, okay, here's a guy who's figured out how to use dogs to do all these cool stuff in the world. I mean, obviously not the same as what Will talked about, like powering jets and stuff. Dogs, I don't think you're not that powerful. But just replace it and you start to understand how this guy thinks. And you understand the pattern recognition, the way that this guy's playing chess in a game where a lot of people are playing checkers.

Like, the.

You can gleam a lot of business knowledge from a guy who just happens to be in the cannabis space, but he's, like, crushing it because he has, like, hundreds of patents and doing all this crazy stuff that, like, there's something to learn there.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, we'll. We'll probably bet we'll likely back away in the. In the blatant cannabis ness of things. But. But no, like, if there's going to be. If there's an entrepreneur, like, we've had Caleb. Not Caleb. What am I talking about? Jesus hemp daddies.

Yeah, Caleb Simpson.

Yeah, Caleb Simpson. Yeah. I was like, why is it didn't feel right. But Caleb, Caleb Simpson, we had him on the podcast. He's actually a loyal listener of our show now, which is really cool. And, like, he runs a CBD company. But, like, it was interesting to hear from his perspective of, like, have a company, and I can't actually use advertisements like Facebook ads or Google.

So how do you market if you're an industry that. That, like, sort of doesn't want you to be marketing on their platforms?

Yeah, and there's definitely other. Like, there's a lot of health companies out there in general that can't do claims or any advertising because, you know, because of all the claims. Yeah. I would say, like restrictions.

The Caleb Simpson episode, the. The sort of widget, the thing that he sells was cbd.

Yes.

Right. If you take out what he's selling out of the equation. Right. Just ignore the product that he's selling. That conversation was about how to market products in industries where marketing is sort of more difficult. Right. When you look at Will Clyden, you take out the product that he's selling. He's also a CBD guy. You take the CBD that. That's the widget that he sells and ignore the widget. That episode was about innovation and driving progress and finding alternative fuel sources and futurism thinking bigger. That's what the. So like with some of those episodes, if you take the product out of it and ignore that it was cbd, nobody would even think twice about those episodes.

Bingo. And my point exactly.

Yeah.

So like, like, we are not going to stop your education because of the widget being something that's a little taboo. I think we're all like. And obviously it's your choice. Yeah. But like, though I think the way we see it is like, we're going to give you the best of the best from our Rolodex and who we're connected with and all that. And, and yeah, so. And we have these bumpers now because of, you know, thankfully because of you guys spending time on the survey. We know we're going to keep it tactical. We're going to have really good strategies and we are going to lump it some mindset in there to kind of glue it all together. It may not be in every episode, but that's how we're going to do it for sure. And the topics that you mentioned, we'll definitely hit on those.

Yeah. And it also sort of. So those of you that are subscribers to the EGP letter and those of you who go and get the sort of companion guides after these action guides.

Yeah.

We're going to start to rebrand them as like action guides because some of you actually gave us this feedback in the survey. Like we weren't asking for feedback on the actual membership and the notes, but some of you put some feedback on the membership and notes in there, which we're very appreciative because it was helpful.

It was helpful.

But the feedback we got on the actual notes and the membership is that you kind of want less story in those notes and more of just like, give me the action steps. I want a guide. After listening to this Episode of How do I go and implement what I just heard on this episode. So we're actually sort of restructuring our notes now. There's gonna. There might be some episodes still lingering that we've recorded already that haven't gotten released that aren't. The notes aren't quite as actual yet. But you're gonna start to see these things change a little bit on the show. Is you're gonna. These notes are gonna be less like, hey, here's a synopsis of the story and everything we talked about. And more like, here's who we talk to. All right, here's what he told us to do. Here's the steps to go do that. And they're going to be more action guides and less synopsis, like, less Cliff's notes of the episode.

Yeah. And that was us feeling like. And again, we're learning, we're evolving. And, yeah, we hear, shoot, if you want the tactics, why wouldn't we reflect that into these guides, these notes that we're already taking, but make them super actionable? Because, yeah, we were trying to be more cliffnotesy rather than, hey, here's a literal step by step of how to set up an ads account or a Facebook ad, which Sam Bell laid out perfectly. And he was actually our first recorded podcast when we told him, yo, we want some tactics, we want some strategy. And he gave us so many. And we're like, boom, this is the perfect action guide I even thought about. I was like, wow, this is the easiest I've ever heard a Google or, sorry, a Facebook ad campaign set up.

Yeah.

And like, that can. Now it'd be in an action guide and can stand alone.

Oh, and the Jack Bourne one with all the scarcity, tactical, like, scarcity elements of, like, how to ethically employ scarcity. I think that's gonna be an awesome action guide that I'm looking forward to those. That action guide coming back to us. Because I'm like, I want to set this stuff up in our business.

Yeah. And that all translates. So, you know, if you're new to here or if you're just not, you know, if you ever haven't dug down the rabbit hole a little deeper. But, like, our action guides all turn into our newsletter monthly that we send out digital and in the mail. And so now we're gonna have, like, those things are gonna get better. So the product, if you're paying for that, only 15amonth or 59 a year for digital, now you're gonna have these action guides, eight of them per month at least. Depending on the month and how many weeks that fall. But, like, yeah, every episode, you're gonna get an action guide, and it's gonna be even more badass than it ever has been before.

Yeah. And the guests.

That bumps me up, too.

The guests that we're starting to bring on are so doing this survey.

What?

It sort of allowed us, like, our interviews and our guests. It sort of allowed us to go, okay, now that we know we're going to get to our avatar in a minute. But now that we know who our avatar is, who are. What are the best possible topics we could put in front of that avatar? Cool. Now we've got this list of 20 topics that would be good topics to teach this avatar. Now that we have these 20 topics, who is the best possible guest we could get on for each one of these topics? Cool. Now we have our hit list of who we want to go after as guests, because now we're sort of speaking to this ideal image of who we think you are on the other end.

Yeah. No, it changes everything. It changes how we accept people on the podcast because we get someone introduced to us literally every other every day. But it feels like, you know, like there's just kind of this pressure to bring them all on sometimes.

Yeah.

You know, especially when, you know, we're getting introductions from people that are well respected in our network. It's hard to say, like, no, it's.

Hard to have, like, an intro from, like, a Perry Marshall or a Roland Frazier and them going, this is a really, really great guest. You have to have them on and us go, they're not a good fit. Like, it's hard for us to do that based on, like, the who the intro came from a lot of the times. But now, because we're putting these bumpers up, it's getting easier and easier for us to go. You know what? You sound like you'd be a fascinating conversation, but I don't think you're a good fit for our audience.

Oh, yeah. Or at least like. Like in. In this time right now. Because this happens all the time with podcasts. Like when we've been, you know, introduced to a podcaster. Same thing's happened before. It's like, hey, we're actually focused around this topic for a while, or this. This outcome. We'll circle back maybe next year or something.

Yeah.

Or in the coming few months.

And that.

That's cool.

That for a while thing actually brings up a good point, too, because, like, I know defining your avatar, which is, I think, kind of one of the last things we're going to chat about here in a minute. I know.

And the therapy session, like how that.

Oh, yeah, we'll talk about.

The episodes will change too.

Yeah, so, but like the sort of doing this thing for a while thing. So I know, like defining your avatar, sort of marketing 101. Right? Like when you first get into marketing, you read any marketing book. Every single book, chapter one, figure out who your avatar is. Right.

Like, that's usually the chapter you skip over because you're like, I've heard this before.

My avatar is me. Okay? My avatar is me. I want more people like me.

Bullshit. You don't. And also, don't skip over that because it's very valuable.

Yeah, well, saying all that, the point I'm making is I also think it's important to reevaluate who your avatar is every so often.

Totally. Right.

And so, like, when Joe and I started this podcast four years ago, we probably had an avatar in mind. And our avatar would probably look something like, oh, we just want people like us, people we're into actually, you know, into mindset, into affiliate marketing, into lifestyle, cannabis lifestyle businesses. The types of things we're into. That's who's gonna listen to it. Right. And that was probably our definition of our avatar back then. But I do think it's important to like, every so often go and say, okay, let's reevaluate. Is this who we believe our avatar is now? Who's actually listening? Let's go figure out who's actually listening and see if the avatar we believe we have is the avatar we actually have.

Yeah. Think about how that translates to ads. Like we're attracting people based off that avatar. Like, that means our show's gonna change our listenership. So that means that, yeah, you should probably do an avatar worksheet or walkthrough. I don't know. However, at least yearly. Yeah, I would imagine.

Yeah, I agree. So, okay, before we talk about the avatar thing, let's talk about the therapy sessions thing.

Okay.

Because I think the avatar thing is kind of a good, like, sort of wrap up and it might be a bigger topic.

It could be. Yeah. And do we have the avatar? We actually have our dock. You want to pull that up? It's in our Dropbox.

It's in our Dropbox. Okay.

And I'll talk about therapy while I pull that up. Yeah, yeah, find that, because I think that'll be cool. So the therapy sessions, a lot of folks, and this has been so such a common thing that, you know, More therapy sessions. More therapy sessions. So what we're doing with each of the episodes now is we're actually trimming down the intro to like, we're trying to make it three minutes max. And that's with a sponsor in there. So without a sponsor, even quicker. But. So that was one of the pieces of feedback is for most of the people, not everyone, a lot of people did say, like, don't ever change your intro. We love it. Don't worry, it's not going to change too much. It's just going to be shortened and it's going to be enough to get to the episode. But therapy sessions, basically, we're going to have like mini therapy sessions at the end of each episode for about 10 minutes or so. There's. That's going to be where Matt and I, you know, we've signed off with the guests and now Matt and I flip on the mics to essentially talk about our takeaways from. From this whole thing. And how are you having a hard time finding it?

I don't know what it's called.

I'll find it for you. But yeah. So I might have to get my notebook out. Notebook. My laptop. Yeah. All right, so basically the end of the episodes are now mini therapy sessions. Every single episode. Which is cool.

Well, okay, so this also brings up another piece of feedback that I think probably 75% of the people that took the survey gave us. And that feedback was the intros are too long. Right. So, like, a lot of people were.

Saying, oh, yeah, I talked about that already.

Yeah, yeah, so the intros were too long. Cut out the banter. So we're like, all right, we still like the banter. We still like.

We like to hear ourselves talk.

We'd like to hear ourselves talk. We like. I mean, at the end of the day, we like to discuss what we just had on the interview. Like, we like to like, say, hey, this is what a big aha of ours. This was a big takeaway. This is what I liked about that episode. We like to talk about that. We used to put that in the intro of the show, but it would make our intros go for like 10, 12 minutes before we got to the interview. That's the part that a lot of people didn't seem to like. So we decided, let's put that discussion at the end of our episodes. And now you have basically a therapy session with every episode. So we still want to do sessions like this where we're doing like a full on hour, just discussion between me and Joe on Like what's going on in our business and world right now. We still want to do those, but for those people who like more of that, sort of like our perspectives on the discussions we just had, those are now going to be at the end of every single episode. So you can make it through the interview. And if you still want to hear our thoughts on it, those are there. If you just want to get to the next interview, you can skip that part. It's at the end. You've already heard the, the, the core of the content.

I think it's a better show flow too.

I do.

It's like we'll just, we'll just jump into the interview pretty much right away and then the end is gonna be just a recap of thoughts and it just makes. Yeah, it just makes more sense.

Yeah, it's kind of very Dax Shepherdy with his like fact checking at the end of those episodes.

Yeah, we're gonna start fact checking everyone.

Yeah. So we are gonna do, we're gonna work in more therapy sessions, maybe like full on episodes like this every other month or so. The struggle with these therapy sessions is we've had such a consistent flow of people wanting to be on our show and people we wanna get on our show that it was like, it was hard to squeeze everybody in and also squeeze in therapy sessions. So, you know, that's gonna change in a couple ways. One, we're accepting less types of guests. Right. We've sort of narrowed in on the types of guests we want to have on. And two, we're gonna, we're gonna slot those in once every other month. And then three, we're doing mini therapy sessions at the end of each episode. So like, if you want to know what's going on in our lives and our business and stuff like that, you could like essentially listen to the end of any episode from this point on and kind of get a state of the union in our business.

Yeah. So official.

Yeah.

All right. So yeah, therapy sessions are just gonna get better. I feel like. All right, so avatar and then we'll wrap this puppy up. So the avatar we've been talking about it, that's just defining the person that you think you should be best speaking to who your audience is. And most likely it is not you, it is someone else. So you should completely like put on a different hat and think differently.

There's gonna be elements of your avatar that reflect you for sure.

Right. Like, but it's not defined as you as your person.

Like, if we defined our avatar as people who hate Affiliate marketing and want us to talk about gardening all day. Well, that's not a podcast that we can create, so, you know, go check out Epic Gardening. Go check out Epic Gardening. Yeah, I actually watch that channel now, too, but.

Well, he has a podcast, too, but.

Yeah, but, like, you know, but. So there are going to be. There's got to be some things that are a reflection of us in our avatar, because, like, if we're not passionate about talking about it, we're not going to sustain it.

So let me do a quick overview of just, like, for folks just understanding. Okay. If you want to do your own avatar, like, figure out your own perfect avatar. I'll give you some kind of frameworks here. But I would highly recommend to go check out the Fletcher Method. It is the best. And it's our buddy, Aaron Fletcher, who defected and moved to Oregon. Moved away from California and moved to Oregon. I'm still bitter.

Are you bitter because you're jealous? Are you bitter because you want him here?

A little of both. Yeah.

Yeah, we'll get back, or we'll just travel up there for a little podcast hang out. No, you know what I'm bitter actually about? And this is a little bit of a tangent, because we were all supposed to actually take a trip to la.

Comedy Store.

Go to the Comedy Store. And that was before COVID lockdown and before Joe Rogan moved to Texas and before every other comedian is probably moving outside of LA now. So now we're never going to have that experience. Experience until, like, all those people come back or like, until.

Yeah, but Joe Rogan's trying to open his own comedy club in Austin.

So road trip to Austin.

Road trip.

Done that before.

Fly to Austin. Flying is better.

Way too long.

But I'll just. I'll repeat what Joe Rogan keeps saying on his podcast over and over and over again. People who miss the Comedy Store, it ain't there right now. You can't go if you wanted to.

No, I know. And that's. That's. I know. I'm not really bitter. That was just. It's true, though. Yeah. I am bummed that we missed that opportunity. I know. All right.

It'll come back around.

It will. So the Fletcher Method. Check it out. I don't even think we have an affiliate link anymore, because who knows? But the Fletcher Method, you could find it. It's great because it's like marketing, foundation, and a lot of cool stuff, too. That's where we pulled this Avatar doc from. So quick, high level on Avatar. Essentially, you have demographics and you have psychographics, demographics. It's who they are. Things like name, gender, age, location, income, marital status. Psychographics are what they do and, like, where they hang out. So things like social media groups, publications, associations, brands, gurus, they follow software. They use activities, opinions, behaviors, events. I know there's a lot and I don't know, sue, if you're gonna get that on the notes, but you can if you wish. So we started describing who is our person kind of based off of that. And it's a lot of affiliate marketing type folks. A lot of the gurus, they, we realize is like Pat Flynn, Tramco, Tim Ferriss.

Pretty much our top five people that we mentioned are like, people who follow those guys are the people who also follow us, because those were the top five voted most popular episodes.

Totally. So. And then some of this is like, it's not hard facts. Like, we don't know specifically. These are all true. But like, hanging out in places like Click Funnels, Funnel Hacker Facebook group.

Yeah.

Using click funnels in general as a tool, using things like ClickBank, ThriveCart, SamCart, Pay, Kickstart, JV, going to places like Affiliate Summit, Traffic and Conversion Funnel, Hacker Live, you know, clickfunnels, events. So that's kind of painting a picture for us to kind of like, all right, well, that's where this person hangs out. We didn't actually name our person. Should we name our person?

If you want.

Steve. No, I don't want to. They will go nameless.

They're nameless.

Steve's okay. I mean, Steve's great.

Steve's good.

Steve, if you're listening, you're great. Yep. But this Steve, maybe. Maybe. We'll see. We'll see if this.

Well, remember we were talking to James one time, and James is like, when I make my content, you guys are my avatar.

Like, I. Yeah, yeah. That was actually really cool.

He was like, when I'm making my content, I'll pretend I'm talking to you guys because you guys are literally the definition of my avatar.

Yeah. And it'd be interesting to actually have a conversation with him about that.

Yeah.

Like how he defines his. Yeah. So I think that's cool.

When I was thinking about that, the first name that popped in my mind was Steve Dale. So I was like, steve. Yeah.

Okay. Actually, I'm down.

Yeah.

You know, because actually when you said Steve, that was the Steve I had in mind. I'm like, actually really love Steve. He's a great guy.

All right.

Steve's our avatar.

Yeah. Steve, if you're listening to this? We're talking to you.

Steve Dale is our avatar. I think we should probably. I don't know. Yeah. Now we gotta do some. We gotta do some stalking of Steve now. Hey, Steve, we're gonna start stalking you online now.

You're just making it creepy.

Chat. No, no, no. Just online. Well, we gotta figure out what Facebook groups he's hanging out in, what things he likes.

I think you just mentioned them.

I don't know for a fact that Steve is in funnel hacker Facebook group. Okay, okay. Just saying. Gotta stalk Steve now. All right. So.

Being honest, dude. Yeah. All right. So the bigger thing, I feel like, is what's kind of cool with this. I don't know how deep we want to go in the avatar.

I don't think we need to go too deep. I just wanted to kind of conceptually talk about, like, how we came to it and then, like, what sort of changes we're making as a result of knowing this information.

So one last thing in the avatar, which I think is really cool and unique to, and I think it's unique to Aaron Fletcher's Fletcher method, is that you have a person, Steve. And this is going to be very hypothetical because we actually don't know, you know, Steve Dale, if this. Let's call you Steve. So the person. And this goes for anybody. Like, where you're at right now, you have current frustrations and pains that you're experiencing right now in the present. And then you also have these goals and desires that you want to achieve right now. But then you have future things, things in the. In, you know, that are a little further away. So you have fears and implications. So, like, what's. Like, the deeper fears that are kind of lingering, but things that can show up in the future and that are kind of in the back of this avatar's brain as well, in their minds. But then they also have. On the positive side or like, the other side in the future, you have dreams and aspirations. Those are like, the bigger picture things. Like, not the very. Not like, I want to go buy a car. Like a new car in six months. Yeah. Like, no, it's like legacy family health, you know, it's like the bigger stuff. Investments. So I would say define those. Like, they're like four boxes. And we have a whole bunch of information here. We're not going to go down, but. But a lot of the pain, I guess the pains and frustrations. Some of our avatar are things like wanting more traffic, growing their email list, figuring out how to make more sales and increase their conversions because it's a frustration. Maybe they have an offer that's not converting. Well, that's one of the things in our survey that said, okay, we want to know more about audience building and traffic and we want to know how to sell more. And that's kind of the essence of how we've defined our avatar and how we're going to structure the show is based off of these frustrations and these goals that we know that exist because of the survey. But we just put it in this avatar framework for Steve.

I would say to sort of wrap up this episode and kind of put a bow on it, we could kind of sort of recap. Here's some of the. I don't think you need that anymore. I think we could kind of recap. Like, here are some of the tweaks, the changes that you're going to notice based on all of this sort of fact finding that we've done over the last few weeks. Right. So one, on the podcast itself, the intros are going to be a lot shorter. We're going to kind of get right to the point with this is who our guest is. We have any sponsors, we'll shout out our sponsors and then we'll get right to the interview. We're shooting for like three minutes on those intros. We're going to put a longer outro on it, which is kind of like our insights ahas takeaways from the episode so that we can keep those intros short and also give little mini therapy sessions with every episode with our actual guests. We're going to start sort of specifically bringing in guests that are more targeted to our ideal avatar. Right. We've kind of decided that the topics of this show, the problems that this show solves is we want to help people grow their audience and we want to help people monetize the audience they're growing. So that lends itself well to traffic strategies. Talking to influencers about their influencer growth.

Growth.

Talking to social media people about how they managed to grow big social media followings. Talking to podcasters about how they grew audiences. You know, talking about affiliate marketing, talking about growing membership sites to monetize your audience. Talking about doing strategic JV partnerships like the Roland Frazier stuff where Jay Abraham stuff. Jay Abraham stuff, where you sort of partner up with other companies and leverage your audience to help them grow. Exactly. So really, like, audience building, audience monetization is sort of like the core of what we're going to be talking about, which means we're going to be bringing on guests that we know can talk about those things. And we're going to be sort of steering our guests in a direction to talk about those things. We're all going to get more tactical on the show. So a little bit less backstory, a little bit more. Let's get into the tactics. And now that we're into the tactics, let's actually kind of get into the weeds and make sure that there's no questions left unasked on those tactics.

Tactics, overall strategy and then mindset. Yeah, yeah. And that's kind of like. Like lumped in every episode.

Yeah, tactics, strategy, mindset. That's kind of like the core. There will be a little bit of story in the beginning because we like to get that little bit of context. And also when we ask people to tell us their story, a lot of times we find little bits of wisdom in their story that we can kind of like, you know, we were planning on talking about this, but because you mentioned this, this is more interesting. Like, sometimes we pull out little bits where we're like, okay, that's a vein we need to go down on this episode.

Yeah.

So, like, I think we still need to get a little bit of the story.

So, like, on the actual podcast side, those are kind of the changes I think you're gonna see. Is there anything I missed, like, on the actual podcast?

No, no. The other thing is outside of the podcast, the action guides. Action guides gonna change right along with the podcast. So what's reflected in the podcast gets reflected in that. You know, it's the free notes every, what, two weeks of each episode going live. Those things are free. And of course, if you're an EGP letter member or membership member, you will have that also in the newsletters monthly.

Exactly.

And this will be more action guide newsletters now that compile all the stuff every single month. Yeah.

And when we look at it from like a marketing perspective. Right. How much easier is it for us to actually sell the newsletter to people? Because before our newsletter was like, hey, this is a newsletter of like, Cliff's notes of a whole bunch of podcasts. So if you get our newsletter, you're going to learn about affiliate marketing, lifestyle design, real estate, investing, biohacking, the cannabis industry. Like, it was a pretty wide ranging thing. Right. But now if we're like, hey, we're going to show you how to build your audience and how to monetize your audience. And every month you're going to get tactics, more tactics, deeper, dive tactics on how to A, grow your audience, B, monetize the audience you grew makes it so much easier to sell that newsletter because we know what problem this content is solving now.

Yeah, that's going to change the copy. Everything. Like, that's, that's how, like really this one survey has changed or will change a lot of our messaging, our copy.

Our advertising, who we target with ads, who we bring on as guests, what questions we ask when we go on other people's podcasts, it creates a filter for us. Is that podcast speaking to the audience we want to try to capture? Yes or no? No, they're not speaking to the audience we want to capture. Probably not worth our time right now.

Yeah. And that's the thing. Yeah, it's going to make our lives much easier. It makes our listeners lives easier, our customers lives easier. Because I kind of laughed when you were talking about when you're listening to all the different topics, because in our membership you actually made that sorter that works amazingly well for all the companions or action guides. When you're a member, you have access to all of them, the backlogs, and you have this sorter that basically has 50 freaking topics for people to choose. So it's like if you're looking specifically for email marketing or if you're looking for a cannabis thing, let's say, I don't know if that's actually a selection, but you can click that and it'll sort all the 300 plus episodes into.

One or two and show you just these companions that talk about that thing.

So it's just kind of funny to show how broad we've. And that's not going to change because that's cool to get specifics, but it is kind of wild to look at that list and like, yeah, like we've gone wide.

Ideally, we're not adding any more topics to it anymore.

I don't think we. I don't think we all need to, unless it's like some brand new thing that technology or something that exists.

We'll see. We'll see. But I think, yeah, I mean, that I think kind of encompasses what we've been doing for the past month, trying to sort of narrow in on, you know, making this podcast better show growth. Like really, we were thinking of show growth, quite honestly as like a tactic thing. Like, what tactics can we leverage to get more listeners on the show? But after listening to that episode I mentioned with Charlie Valor, we kind of flipped that and went, you know, instead of thinking of some tactic to get more listeners to the show to drive more traffic to the show, let's think of a tactic to improve the show, and maybe that will naturally bring us more listeners.

And then you just led me to just one more idea. Okay. Is Taylor Welch. So we were laughing, you and I, after the episode, I think, and kind of during, because Taylor was hinting at, you know, the power of mindset and what has made him progress and, you know, become, you know, he has a $45 million company a year, and the dude's, like, maybe 30.

Yeah. I don't know.

But, like, so he's done this wildly fast, and he does not come from, you know, that background, at least his previous profession. And the way he was talking about it is that, like, most people outsource their hand, you know, outsource the doing of things like being assistant or a content writer or whatever, but not the thinking. And, again, mindset, you know, and, like, really thinking through strategically and all that. But so we then started thinking about our business as well and how we're applying, like, how we've kind of failed in a lot of times because we've just hired hands out, hired the tactics out. Things like content writers, try to get copywriters, sometimes email writers and people who run our ads occasionally. But typically, those people haven't been the ones that do the thinking.

Yeah, we tell them what to do.

Yeah, it's all directed through us. The buck stops with us, not them. And since talking with Taylor and really doing this survey and thinking, like, oh, wait, hold on. That is the power of, I think, thinking a little bigger and knowing the mindset, knowing the strategy, and not getting wrapped up in the tactics. It's great to have the tactics. But, yeah, it's like, for us, Charlie, we're chatting with him for show growth straight up. We're like, well, he is the best that we know, and we trust him. Why don't we just have him actually do the thinking for the podcast?

Growth.

And he's been advising us on a lot of other elements, like our videos on YouTube, for instance. By the way, go check us out on YouTube. Hustle and Flowchart. Just find us.

HustleandFlowchart TV.

That's right. Yeah. You just bought the domain yesterday. So hustleandflowchart TV will get you to YouTube. Go subscribe, please, and hit the little bell. Yeah, I don't think I've ever said that.

Cultivate the like button, Joe.

All right, Kevin. Epic gardening shout out. I hope Kevin hears that.

He's a San Diego guy, too.

I know.

There's a podcast somehow. I don't know, maybe that's too broad again.

But that's the thing is like now we're hiring out the thinking. Charlie will probably help us with that stuff. Joe Kearns, like you just said, and his partner, blank on his partner's name, Mike Alvarez. Mike. All right, so Joe and Mike, we're gonna work. We are working with them to build out the automations and the email sequences and all that stuff. And that's something where you have been spearheaded that for years and have been the thinking there. But now these guys are coming with a completely different strategy and one that's like way updated and way more dynamic and crazy complicated. And they will talk about it later. But like we're trusting them for the thinking of that part of our business. Even Jacob on our team, who's editing our podcast and does all of our YouTube videos and pretty much all of our content. We had a chat with him almost immediately after we chatted with Taylor last week. And now we're like, dude, Buck stops with you with the content now. You know, and like, we want you to champion this thing. We don't want to be the bottleneck. And like, I feel like that has been our business bottleneck for a long time. We've talked about this.

Yeah. Doing too much of the stuff and doing too much of the decision making. We need to be at the higher level game planning and then letting and hiring people to help make the decisions.

So that's all to say is like, again, it's almost like anchoring. Like we gotta have it all. The tactics, the strategy and the mindset, it's all a lumped in thing. Yep. I think that's done.

That's. Yeah, I mean, I think we kind of covered and we can come back and listen to this episode whenever we need to.

Good point, good point.

So this episode, one last shout out on this episode. Easy Webinar.

Yes. Our boy.

Our boy over at Easy Webinar.

He and the crew. Yeah, Easy Webinar is amazing for if you're doing webinars. Thinking of doing webinars. They make it simple because basically every type of webinar is under one roof.

Yep. You can do live, automated, hybrid, where they look live, but it's actually a replay. You can do, I mean, pretty much any sort of webinar tactic that you've heard like on this show or elsewhere. You can do it with Easy Webinar. And they gave us a special coupon code. I believe it's 25% off annual and 20% off monthly, I believe. So if you go to what is it?

Easywebinar.com hustle yes, easywebinar.com hustle. And if you don't see the pricing, sometimes it's. It's going to say, like, you might need to add the HTTPs. Yeah, it's like, I don't know, sometimes it takes a couple times. But if you don't see the right pricing, don't worry, it's the right URL. Just maybe add in that little.

Yeah, there's some sort of redirect to get you going on that URL. But if you go to easywebinar.com hustle it should work. Sometimes you have to add the slash after hustle, so.

Yeah, that's right.

Easywebinar.com hustle. You type that.

Make sure you get your deal.

Yeah. So if you really want that percentage off, off, you know, try some variations. You'll get to the URL. We are going to talk to Casey and tell him that the link is kind of funky. Hopefully by the time this episode comes out, it's not funky anymore.

All right, thank you all for hanging out with us and we will see you in the next episode. Peace out.

Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart 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, 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 evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listened to, and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

Go get it.

Wiki.

We love you.