Travis Houston — A Content System For Product Launches

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

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

Ho ho. Is it that day again?

Nope. Oh, come back tomorrow.

Shit. Thought it was podcast day tomorrow. You don't want me here. It's gonna be Friday. You're hanging out with your kids or something. Hey, all right. Matt's not rolling with this. Hustle and Flowchart here. In your earballs.

In your ear.

I'm Matt Wolf.

Jesus. Matt's a little slow right now. Welcome to Earth, Mr. Matt.

I'm a little zoned out after a lot. I mean, we. A lot of good podcasts today, but I'm definitely zoned out after. Got a little tongue tied. A little tied. Tonguey.

Okay, moving on. We are, for some reason, we're looking at images of Joe Rogan back in his news radio days. Yeah, why not?

What else do you do?

It doesn't.

What else do you do with your.

We have a guy that doesn't look like Joe Rogan at all on our show today. His name is Travis Houston. He's not a dude in San Diego, and he's a good buddy of a lot of the guests we've had on our show.

He seems to know everybody.

Yeah, I mean, I could name names, but it'd be half our podcast list, so I'm not gonna. Bracken Stanza's a really good friend of his and actually co partner, Co partner, business partner in another venture. But Travis is. I would say he's kind of been a behind the scenes guy for a long time, but he's working on some massive launches, has done a lot of book launches, documentary type launches, and just information type launches products online and essentially breaks down how he's completely. He flopped on his first launch and pretty much we dissected why that happened. And now his approach to never flop like that ever again on a product launch. Even though launches can be very stressful if you're done right. He literally lays out the framework on how to do that. You will be setting your best foot forward.

Oh, yeah. He's got. He's got a lot of systems, a lot of processes that he breaks down. He breaks down for us. And I was just totally nerding out during these discussions because a big part of it was his 1, 3, 15 content strategy for launching products using very, very strategic content. So really, really fascinating stuff. Joe was taking furious notes. I was realizing that I can listen back to this recording later and then I' notes later, but it's amazing stuff.

Matt was pretty much soaking it in, I saw. And yeah, it's very content forward and it's not like dry content. You're just going to talk about writing the whole time. No, he breaks down this exact framework. Traffic is like a master at. I don't know how he memorizes all this stuff, by the way, but just like, he's quick, but he lays out all these frameworks to create content without any questions. And he's doing it with. He's actually aiming all of his content positioning in ways that it actually triggers like a personality. There's four main personality types out there and he basically creates content based off of every single person.

Don't give the whole thing away.

But I'm not telling how. I'm telling the what. So that's one of the cool things. There's a lot more to it. But who's backing us on the show? Matt.

So we got Jenn M. Genm who dat? Jenn M is amazing. If you haven't listened to our episode yet with Moabas from GenM, you definitely got to check that episode out. But GenM is a place where you can go and hire apprentices for your business for 50 bucks a month and they will manage things in your business for you. Like social media.

Say what?

Like SEO? Like content writing? No, like content curation. Like content repurposing. Like content management. Like content spreadsheeting. Like I'm just making up anything that after content at this point. But they will probably do it for you.

The reality is that they will.

They will. So genm a great place. You're helping people get into the workforce and develop marketing skills. You're paying 50 bucks a month. You get 40 hours a month of work with them.

Ridiculous.

And it's just a great service. We're using it. The people who help write our show notes are from there.

What's up, Steven?

Steven?

So genm.com check it out and you'll actually hear us kind of give our little pitch to Travis because we're trying to get Travis to start using GenM for some stuff too. So you'll hear us talk about it on the episode as well.

But hey, go get your discount and at least like go save it in the browser if you're driving. Don't do that. But just remember evergreenprofits.com ginm g e n M. Go do that.

Let's go talk to Travis.

Hey, Travis.

He's not here yet. In fact, you know what? What does Travis want to do?

Wiki Wiki Wiki.

Yeah, we're live.

Oh, I've been wanting to do that for a long time.

I love it. That was the email response after. Hey, you want to be on the podcast? Only if I could do that.

Dream achieved. Yes.

Check.

We're just happy to help people cross things off their bucket list.

I appreciate that.

It's as easy as that. Then we're all day long. How you doing, man?

Oh, man, it has been a busy week as we're kind of rolling into the end of the year for this podcast. And so I'm just doing a lot of planning right now, a lot of rollout and strategy and, hey, how can we make the next quarter the best one ever? Kind of conversations. How about you?

Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. And we probably don't plan like you plan, so we're going to dig into that. We do plan, probably differently, but I know you have a whole system around that, so we're going to break that down. But just to let everybody know. Yeah, we're in a mastermind together. A really good buddy of all of ours, Mr. Costanzo. I know he listens to every single episode of ours. Maybe I don't know if that's true or not, but this will be a.

Good test to find out. So, Brad, if you come up to us and say flag.

Then we know you listened.

Flag's the key word. Brad, seeing you soon.

Balls in your court now, bro.

Now we know. Now we'll know for sure. This is the red herring episode.

It is. I love it. So give us a catch everybody up. And probably us too, because we've known each other a bit, just with our circles. Obviously we're in a mastermind with Roland and a whole bunch of cool dudes. Serling, Bob, Serling, Brad, and whole bunch of good guys. But where. Where did you come from? What. What did you do in your past days and kind of what have led.

That's the weirdest way to word the question of like, hey, can you tell us what your business is and how you got there?

I spit on my mic in the process, so I'm on a good one right now.

Well, you know, I was actually. I was a Californian, born in Oregon of all places.

How does that happen?

I know. How did that happen? Always wanted to be in Southern California and, you know, figured out a way to make it happen. And I'm. I'm. I'm happy. L. Happy to be a Southern Californian. As you know, we just had a kind of voting to see if we wanted to split the state up into three different parts. Northern California, California and Southern California. And so I am, I say I'm Southern California proud.

Love it. Us too.

Made my way down here. Kind of like you guys, right?

Like we're from here, man. We're.

We're truly San Diego.

Yeah. I was born in the city of San Diego.

Helix area, right? Yeah.

You guys were east of here.

Yeah, we are now. Yeah. A little 20 minutes downtown. You're right by the coast. So I mean you're living that beach life.

Yeah. So I was in the Oregons and not loving it, not loving, you know, being where I was. And I wanted to make a big transition and so came down here, ended up getting into real estate, of all things. Sold real estate for a while. Had my real estate investing company called Rising Tide Real Estate where we travel around the country and we'd buy homes, new homes in blue chip market. So, you know, like Tennessee and Kentucky and Georgia and Washington state, we'd buy new homes. Like we buy like 25 to 30 homes in an area and then we'd hire our own property manager. And we did that for a while until.

2007 crashed and things went all to hell. And we ended up having a real bad year that year. In a lot of debt. Had to sell pretty much, I mean, literally everything we owned except for the car and a few surfboards. And we drove my 13 year old stepdaughter, my newborn son and my wife up to my mom's house. Had to move back to Oregon. So we moved to Salem, Oregon, moved into like one bedroom of my mom's house. And that was probably like what, late 08 or 09 and had the question, what do you want to be when you grow up? And so kind of got to turn everything around. And it was an interesting story. The very last client I had in real estate was a man by the name of Andy Jenkins.

No kidding. Wow.

And I got him into the house that he did Video Boss out of. So, you know, if anyone knows the space of, you know, marketing and online marketing, they may go way back. And remember the Video Boss launch, which was really heavy on like epic video. And Andy shot a lot of the video from his home and showed drone footage of his home back when drones weren't even known about. And it really established that house as a pretty epic place. And so I got him into that and became friends with him.

Just to pause you for one second, he was like a massive inspiration for me back in the day because I had a video business which slides the whole keynote thing. And because of him really helped kickstart my career.

That's funny because I started a company called Video Marketing Agency while going through Video Boss.

I love it, man. There you go. I knew we loved each other for a reason. Synergies happening.

And that's how I kind of, that's how I really got into the space. I mean, besides doing some clickbank products with my wife. That's how we really started out was we did something called Rock and Body Raw Food, put it up on clickbank. I shot, geez, it must have been like 106. At least 106 cooking videos, which, you know, that's like three cameras, multiple angles, lots of editing. And we spent six months creating a product, put it up on clickbank, built the membership site, the website, the funnel, the emails, everything that goes along with it, and then launched it. And it was a wah wah because we've done no market research to see if someone actually wanted it.

Oh my God. All right, well we'll get into that in a bit here, I bet.

And so I've just failed more times than most anyone else.

Wow. Okay, so there's a lot to unpack there. That launch process is interesting. Or the, I guess the no launch process, you kind of learn through those mistakes. Let's do like, let's go through that part of your story right there. You did all this work, you recorded all these videos. What did you do wrong? You said market research. So let's dig into that. What would you do different now?

Well, I think you would have established some credibility first. Like, hey, put out some content and see if people respond to it. Maybe put up a sales page and see if anyone wants to buy it. Put out some social media, see if anyone's engaging with it. We didn't went the exact opposite direction and said, hey, let's shoot all the videos, edit all the videos, build them, learn how to build a full blown membership site and funnels and funnel pages and everything that goes along with that. And then set up the email and the tech behind everything and then test content. And so it was completely backwards. I mean, we really should have been blogging and shooting videos and putting out free content and building an audience first. That would make sense. So it really did help us come up with the process of what we call minimum viable programs, where what we do now is we'll put out a little bit of content and we'll go to a sales page. So whenever we're early stages of launching a product, we actually go straight to a Sales page right away. And if enough people sign up for it, we'll go through and we'll deliver the program live week over week. The first three or four times we launch the product, we get some like real iterative feedback instead of building everything first. So now I like to start really light, not a lot going on, really get people into the program, make sure that we've got a lot of feedback from people going through the program before we ever really go through and do a full on launch.

I love it. It's smart, it's selling. Do you have a magic number that you're looking for typically for buyers?

No, gosh no. I mean it's over.

As many as possible, as many as possible.

But honestly, I'll do it with 10.

Okay. Okay. That's what I was getting at. Just before you move on to the next stage of actually doing the full blown thing.

So are you talking about these are products that you create or is this something you're doing as a service for people who created products?

Matt? The answer to that is yes. Got it.

That's a good answer.

I mean honestly. So we've done it for our products over and over, but where what's been really helpful is I've worked with some pretty big name authors, speakers, experts, blah, blah, blah. And what we've done is before a book has come out and you know those published books can take months and months to come out. It's like an 18 month lead time on a New York Times book. And what we'll do is we'll launch the back end program in beta for the book so we can get case studies for the book and testimonials for the book and extra information. And how do we change things before we actually turn in the manuscript? We did that numerous times for a couple of different clients and it was really a great process because you have so much information before you ever actually get to the book launch. And then the book launch of course leads to some back end program launch. That backend program launch leads to like other things. So to have that information, like have to have that intel in your back pocket before you ever go to do a launch. So it's really, I mean doing a quality beta before you ever go into like a full scale product launch which could make or break you, to be quite honest.

Yeah, no. Launches are stressful as hell. Even if they're probably. Well, I don't know. Would you, would you say that? Like have you experienced obviously stressful launches? Have you had a zen like launch?

There is no Such a thing.

Okay. Yeah, I didn't think so. No matter how systemed you are and experience, it's going to be hell.

And it's because you can't control technology or when someone's going to update their system, or when an upsell link might break, or any of the technology things that you just literally, no matter how many of your vendors you call in advance, something generally seems to come up.

Yeah. I feel like every launch I've ever been involved with my life, there's something, at least one thing that waits till about two hours before the cart opens to get done. There's always stuff that's just like, okay, we're up. I didn't sleep for the last 36 hours because I have so much stuff to help build and I don't know, it's never been a fun process for me. So we figured out how to kind of phase them out. But it's always interesting to hear from people that are doing them fairly actively, how they've sort of managed and handled that kind of stuff well, which is.

Why the name of your company makes me breathe easy and sleep better at night.

Me too.

Thank you, Evergreen. I really do believe that's where that people get caught up in this launch model. And it's not. I think I heard Rich Sheffern say this once and I just fell in love with it. He says launches aren't a business, they're a bonus.

I agree. It's an awareness thing.

It should not be a business. It should really be a bolt on to your business occasionally maybe. But I really prefer things that are Evergreen that you can drive traffic to and that you're not held hostage by either joint venture partners or affiliates.

So what type of launches have you done? I know you worked with so many things. I'd like to. I'm just curious.

Sure. We've done it in the health and wellness space for a lot of different doctors. Geez, within about 18 months, maybe it's about 22 months. We launched three New York Times bestseller campaigns for JJ Virgin. That was wild doing that many in that short a period of time. Plus other ones in between that I've consulted on a lot of other launches in the space in terms of, you know, some doctors you may or may not have heard of. Natalie, Jill. We did a huge launch with. We've done one for Cult and Nutrition. Just did. My wife is just finishing up a big like front end project for Zymogen, which is a huge supplement company. We've done them for the Napoleon Hill foundation and Greg Reed done some like some of those projects for Les Brown. Just been, you know, a lot. It's fun to be involved with these, but to be quite honest, it's a, it's a rough business model to just be doing launches over and over again.

Oh, what's cool is that. And the thing I'm getting at, and I know this is where we'll really dig in, is content is involved with all of this stuff. It doesn't matter what type of launch it is. And you said that was one thing that you kind of flopped on in that first launch years on ClickBank was you didn't lead with content and awareness and testing and, but you know, testing, if people are actually interested in all these launches, book launches and even like docu series launches, docu documentaries, all that stuff's content. You need content out there. And I know you have a process to it, you and your wife Joy.

Very anal retentive process.

Yes, that's all right. We'll take that too, truth be told. So let's dig into that. It's the one what, 3:15, right.

That's some good math right there.

I'm trying. Yeah.

You know, it's after complicating the hell out of this multiple times. Have you ever saw the infusionsoft? The funnels I used to build? It was just, I mean they were enormous and connected from one to another to another. It was like really wanting to simplify things because that's when it gets interesting to me. When you can take the complex and really simplify it, that's when the whole business gets interesting. That's when you can put SOPs or standing operating procedures behind things and work yourself more out of the business than being a slave to it. Yeah, you know, my wife really pioneered this from things that we've been doing over the years. And when we call it the 1315 launch process and it's super simple and really easy and something that, you know, we still do and something that we help other clients implement. So the way it breaks down is like this. The one is an offer. So you really need some sort of an offer and a good offer at that. Now inside of that one, we do also like to have an upsell or a downsell or something on the back end. So with that offer, you may have something else that you can offer to go along with that after someone buys. I'm sure your audience completely understands this whole process. So with a good offer you need an upsell, downsell and possibly a few back end products that you'll sell as well. That doesn't need to come right away, but you got to have that one really good offer. And it's worth taking the time necessary to test getting one good offer without the offer.

I mean, that thing doesn't matter how much layers of content and great ads you can have.

It took me and Joe 10 years to figure out our best offer.

It's very true.

And that's a real thing.

I'm not joking.

It's hard as hell. Yeah.

We literally launched an offer this year, and it was the first offer that we've ever launched that's really just everybody gravitated towards and has loved so far.

Which offer is that?

It's our traffic course. It's called perpetual audience growth. I think you have access to it, actually.

I'll be going through that and loving it.

Thank you, sir.

Yeah, it's great.

Yeah.

I highly recommend pag.

Yeah.

So that's what it takes. It takes having one great offer, and it may take a few iterations of that. There's where people get stuck in the mud. Right. Like, I'm going to come out with an offer and it's gonna be great. The first time I tried that and it didn't work. And it takes time and it takes iterations, and it takes staying the course. So you really want to be an expert at what you do, passionate about what you do, because you're hit roadblocks, you're hit bumps, and you got to get through those. So you definitely want to like what you're selling. You know, I do have a client right now who I'm helping, and he doesn't love what he is currently selling. And we're transitioning into the thing that he does.

What was the trigger for him? Like, did he know he didn't like it prior to doing it? I don't know if you know that much information about him.

I do. And the issue is times change. And he aged and got married and had kids, and he was selling dating advice.

Okay.

Gotcha. Kind of a. Kind of a shift there is needed or else you're going to get slopped off.

If you're selling pickup advice and you're 40, right. You want to make a change, and so he has a vision for where he wants to go.

Yeah.

And now it's turned. You know, it's hard to turn off the faucet that's bringing you a lot of cash. Right.

That makes perfect sense.

And why would you. So the whole concept is, okay, let's put systems in place that Completely remove you from the company and hire a few people to take over all of those roles that you were doing to remove yourself from the business, but yet it still bring dividends to you.

Got it. Okay, so what would be number three then of this process?

Okay, so then the three is inside of your offer. You've got three really good things in there. We're looking for three awesome pieces of content or bits that you could use as a freemium, we call them lures. You may also call it a lead magnet, an opt in, something along those lines. And it could be an ebook, it could be a video, it could be anything that's going to separate someone from, give you their information, email address, text or pixel, or even Facebook messenger. Something along the lines where they're going to trade, they're going to say, I want that and I'll do whatever it takes to get it. They want it bad. You guys are great at creating these for the podcast. I love how you create the very specific opt ins you do for the podcast. If you go to the Paul Lemberg episode you guys did and you've got some really great notes from Paul there. So that, that's a great example of creating a lure for a very specific thing.

Got it. So basically, yeah, there are the different modalities or different things you can give away out there based around the offer.

Whatever that I would come up with five, six, maybe seven. You want to get to three good ones and it's never the three. You never just pick the perfect three. So along with testing, you want to pick a few and then be able to test to see what's going to get you the highest conversion rate. So the one is the offer, the three is three lures that you create. And then you branch off the three and you get 15. And so it's five pieces of content for each one of the lures. Now let me tell you how this breaks down. So we base it around what we call psychographic marketing. And so I prefer Myers Briggs. You could use disc, whatever you like. I don't think it really matters. But the one is the offer, the three are the lures. And then the 15 pieces of content go like this. So, so it's five pieces of content for every lure. And the way we make the five pieces of content is we make a personality style base of content. So we make one for competitives. So in Myers Briggs you've got competitives, humanistics, spontaneous and methodicals. Are you guys familiar with that?

Not that one specifically.

I did the Myers Briggs a Long time ago. And I could not even tell you what my sort of code is. So I don't remember much about Myers Briggs.

How about disc? You guys know the disc system?

We've done that.

We've done disc and we've done Colby recently, same thing.

So in Myers Briggs, if you're a competitive, that's like a D in disc or a driver.

Got it. Okay.

So it goes along with that. So we create a piece of content that's for a methodical, meaning that how does it help me win? How do I get results with this? How can I do it fast? Not a lot of data and you could go through it pretty quick. So one piece you want to be really related for a methodical, another one, you want it to be for a spontaneous type, which is who else is doing it and is it hot and why is it hot and what celebrities are doing this kind of thing and who in the space that's interesting is talking about it, what are the quotes around it and is it very visual and interesting?

So lots of social proof type stuff built into it.

Absolutely. Then you've got one for the people that are more humanistic and the humanistic types, those are the ones that want to know, well, how does this help me be closer with my friends or my family or how do we do this as a community? And that's where a lot of more of the social. There's different kinds of social proof. You could use social proof with each of the personality styles.

Right.

Testimonials, case studies, all of that can be. You can see them used in ways that really go towards that personality style. So you definitely want to tie those in as well. But the Humanist is a much longer post. There's a lot of story going into it. It's very inclusive and community based. And then the final. Well, the fourth piece is for methodicals. Now this is where you get really heavy into research. So you're getting your facts in your figures and your statistics and you're backing things up with third party irrefutable proof. And it's laid out very specifically, right?

Yeah. I don't think I've ever heard of any content produced based off of personality traits.

Oh, absolutely. Think about the copy that you would write. The thing, what you would. How you sell somebody that's a competitive is. Is entirely different than how you sell somebody that's a methodical or a spontaneous or. Right. They're different. They're totally different. So when you're writing copy for these kinds of things. Yes, it does take A little bit more effort to produce this kind of content, because you actually have to think about it very deliberately, but it will connect with the right person. Then think about the pixels or the tags or the segmentation you could do as a result of that.

Yeah, and we're all about that. You know that going through the course, it's. Everything is pixeled.

Yeah. No, this concept is interesting, but I have, like, so many questions about it.

I'll start with one. Unless you have one. Top of mind, Matt.

Go ahead. Chances are it's one that I was going to ask anyway.

How do you write all these types of content if you're not that type of person? Or do you have different writers? What's the process?

You know, I've got one really good writer who's smart with this.

Okay. So they just know the process and got it down.

Honestly, it's as simple as understanding personality styles, which isn't hard to do because there's tons of videos out there on just the basic four personality styles. You could go much deeper. But if you understand the four main personalities types and then be able to learn to write to that or to speak to that. I mean, it's basic sales 101. If you've ever been trained in sales whatsoever, this is always a part of pretty much any sales training program.

Matt, did you have one?

Yeah. So with the content that you're creating, is this like, you create, like, five pieces of content and then go and retweak each one to speak to everybody, or is this 15 unique pieces of content that are completely written from scratch each time?

15 unique pieces of content written from scratch each time.

Got it. And so then my other question, and this might just be totally getting ahead of you. How do you get the right piece of content in front of the right person?

That's a great question.

That is a great question.

I'm just gonna put one piece because the methodicals that are listening to this right now be like, well, he talked about four pieces of content, but he didn't talk about the fifth yet.

Okay, well, let's talk about the fifth, and then we'll circle back around to my question of me getting ahead of myself.

I'm leading into that. Damn it.

Okay, okay, carry on, sir.

The fifth piece of content is a wild card. You could combine different elements of any of that for your fifth piece. So the one is the offer. The three are the different lures that you have, or lead magnets, whatever the heck you want to call them. And then on each of those three Lures, you have five pieces of content that have a call to action to that lure.

Got it.

So there's five pieces of content, have a call to action that lead to the lure. Make sense?

Got so very direct one that basically leads right to the third part there. Yeah, the lures.

And then all of the lures, whatever format, whether it's an ebook, a video, a webinar or whatever, they all have all of the lures have a call to action to the offer.

Got it. So that's the flow right there, Matt.

Yep.

Yeah. So what's. So now to Matt's question is attracting people to I guess, the content. How does it work to find the proper eyeballs for those pieces of content?

So we're going to do some more math.

Yeah.

So it goes 1, 3, 15, 45.

Okay, this is getting interesting.

So now that we've got each. So imagine a whiteboard. This is very easy to draw out on a whiteboard using a basic diagram. So you got your one offer, then it branches off into three, much like you would a mind map. Right. So 1 to 3, the 3 to 15 and they all relate to each other obviously. Now you've got the 15 pieces of content. Well, if we take all one of those pieces of content.

And now we're going to write three different ads to that one piece of content and the ads to that piece of content. If I'm taking the competitive pieces of content, what are my ads going to be like? They're going to be very direct. How to help you win, how to get results, how to do it fast. And so the ads going to that piece of content match.

They're super relevant.

The languaging patterns, the personality style matches, it's all contextual and relevant and it maintains the same scent in terms of copy and structure.

Got it. So the people seeing the ads are going to be kind of self selecting based on which copy resonates with them in the ad.

I'm working on repelling the people who it doesn't attract.

Yeah, totally makes sense.

If I have something that's written for a methodical, it is going to repel a spontaneous.

Are you.

You're buddies with Kurt Molly, right?

Yes, I. We don't talk about it in public, but yes.

Well, he's listening probably too.

This just reminds me of. Because, you know, we're setting up a lot of the ads Matt's. Matt's doing it for, you know, using a very similar strategy like that, but on Facebook where you know, it's like get the whole cold audience Essentially, that's all these 45 different ads out there floating around. Obviously it's not perfect to the strategy, but the idea is just throw all these ads out there for content, promoting content, and bringing them a little deeper down the funnel as they're getting warmer and warmer.

Yep, that's exactly. And then when you do your retargeting like people that have landed on this page and this page and this page, but not this page, and then exclude people that have hit this page, that's where this gets interesting. It's complicated. I know you guys understand that piece, but that's where it gets interesting. And you're dropping the tags. So someone that lands enough times on a methodical based page, you can start to know what you want to retarget those people with.

Got it. Okay. Did you have other questions on that, Matt?

No.

How do you keep this all straight? So what kind of system are you using? Are they just elaborate spreadsheets? And.

How do you keep it all straight?

I used to be. I used to get very complicated with these kinds of things and I don't think that's where it's at. So we've just tried to keep it as simple as possible. So it's just a Google sheet now. I am being more drawn and drawn to airtable. I know you guys airtable, but air tables, I think the shiznizzle.

I love air table.

I'll just kept Google sheet.

Got it. Okay. Yeah. No, Airtable is amazing. I know Brad Costanzo. He turned us onto it. He uses it for all of his podcast stuff. Wait, what?

Our entire podcast is essentially managed in Airtable now, but it used to be a Google sheet and Airtable is just a little bit cleaner for putting in large amounts of content, very cool stuff.

And sharing filtered views. So the thing I love about airtable is that if I want to share something with a va, but I also want to share it with my executive assistant, you can share different views with them so they don't see the same things. Which I think is really an awesome way of doing it.

Yep, yep.

We actually have public views. Like we have a. If you go to was it podcast? Evergreenprofits.com podcast archives.

Okay, sounds right.

Something like that. It's actually an open public list of every episode we've ever done with with like details about every episode. And all it is is an airtable that we share publicly that people can see all the episodes that have been.

Live and one's upcoming too.

I love that.

Yeah, no, it's super cool. So I just love this process for. Because the first time you and Joy kind of presented that to my wife Heather and I, we were looking at it, I was like, holy crap. This just makes, like, content development kind of not mindless, because it's obviously a lot of work, but it's ready for you. You have the structure. There's. And you just follow the structure. And I would assume if you're trying to write to these personality types, you could just do a disc or Myers Briggs, whatever, look at the printout, maybe get the baseline. I'm sure there's templates online. You just follow. Okay. These people like to be talked like or talk to like this. This is how they learn. Don't say this stuff.

That actually brings me to another question about the. So all the content, these 15 articles that you're writing, do you. Is that kind of, like, templatized, like, in the vein of creating systems and simplicity? Do you have templates that you can kind of plug products into to create this sort of content, or is it all off the top of your head from scratch every time?

Honestly, I don't like the model where they're all templatized and just doesn't feel real to me. I want to write things that people want to read or that give real value, and I definitely think it's worth taking the time to do that.

Yeah, yeah. Especially if you have someone use the formula.

You can use a format for writing like, you know, a lot of writers use. A lot of writers have a certain formula that they'll do. So I know they're out there, but we don't use it.

Right. I got you. Yeah. I mean, with our content, we have a sort of flow. You know, you get like, the, like the hero's journey kind of flow that you hear about in movies and books and things like that. You know, you need to touch on all these elements, and they kind of should be in this order. We have flows like that for some of our content of, like, we know we want to touch on all these elements, and they really should be in this order to have the best result. And that's about as far as we take it. It's just kind of like eight bullets of. Make sure you hit all of these in this order.

I saw a framework that I really liked. I went through a course by Adskills and Justin Brooke and their content marketing, one that they put out, and it was really good in terms of how to come up with ideas for content. And then they did have a few different structures and frameworks. For writing that I thought were really good.

Yeah, check that out.

I think we have access to all.

Of Justin's personality styles. So it's one of those things where I also want to be bringing that element into it, because we know that it works.

Sure, it definitely works. And then with a structure for different uses, I mean, you know, advertorials are written differently than a normal blog post. You know, there's all these structures that a lot of folks don't think about when they start to go down this path of creating content for their products and offers.

Right.

So do you go beyond the 15 posts? Once a product is launched and kind of running, do you continue to create content, or do you consider that system kind of done and set up and running?

No, no, no. That's just the very first stage. So you're looking at, like, you know, the first stage of a rocket launch. Right. Like, okay, now we've got the foundation built. Good. Okay. The rocket's up about 9ft, and it takes a lot of energy to get it up nine feet. Right. But now once the rocket's kind of in the air now the data starts kicking in. Right. Because you got to, like, keep that thing kind of going up instead of sideways, or that takes a lot of math and computational analysis. And that's what you need something like Google Analytics for. Right. So then you want to see, hey, what content is really resonating. Because if you do the strategy that you guys talk about for how to promote your content online, which I love in terms of buying the ads to it, you want to see the ones that are taking off. And then what we'll do is we'll say, okay, now that the data is telling us what's working, we want to go do more of that.

Are there specific data points you're looking at for that?

How many people are obviously clicking on a blog post? And then scroll depth.

Okay, scroll depth. Got it. Yeah. And that stuff. Yeah, you could. I mean, Google Analytics, that's the other thing. It's like there's just so much data.

There on that you could go down a deep rabbit hole.

Yes.

Honestly, just seeing the number of page views and scroll depth on that is one of the things you want to do. And then, of course, you want to understand how many clicks that you're getting that go to your call to action. So all of those are pretty simple metrics that you can have.

Yeah, for sure.

That makes sense. Yeah. Because that was. I think it was Chris Mercer in our podcast that said, like, or I believe it was him, but he was like, you know, before you ever go into Google Analytics, have a question in mind, something that you want to solve, you want to answer and then go in. Don't go in and just start looking.

Oh, it's a rabbit hole to just jump in there and start looking at numbers. But if you say, I wonder what my bounce rate is this week, you know, go in with a question so you don't get sucked into that rabbit hole. But yeah, I mean, I've never really looked at scroll depth. To be honest. I'm actually not quite sure how to look at. At scroll depth in Google Analytics. I've always looked at time on site, but I've never paid much attention to scroll depth.

So that's why you need Mercer, because he's the one that sets it up for me.

There you go.

So he's probably using Google Tag.

I'm going to put a plug in there. Measurement Marketing IO is who I use and who I go to when I'm doing any of the setup for clients for Analytics, Tag Manager and Data Studio.

Yeah, and definitely listen to our episode with Chris Mercer too, because he, he dove into stuff like this and how you can get crazy with like Google Tag Manager and yada yada, yada, all this crazy tech talk.

Yes, he's, he is, he's amazing. So he's the person I rely on to set up these dashboards, the dashboards he's setting up in Data Studio. To go along with these things is nothing short of brilliant.

Dude, Data Studio is amazing. I remember that came out like two years ago or so and we haven't.

Really taken advantage of it much.

Well, no, but, but I remember it. Then we had a content marketing agency and we were starting to report to our clients and they actually really loved it. But then we just hated doing that agency work. But I remember Data Studio or Data Studio. I was just like, holy crap. You could put everything in one dashboard and you pull in so much data.

So I have sort of a random question. Is awesome an acronym for you?

Yes, it absolutely is.

Okay. Because I looked on your, I was looking at your Facebook profile and I noticed like in your, your bio, it said awesome, but it had the periods like it's an acronym. What does that acronym mean?

It's a marketing framework that I use and here's what it stands for. So when I'm working with clients, these are the seven steps that I bring them through. So the first one is A, Attract. Then you've got welcome, engage, sort, offer, maximize and evaluate.

So It's a whole flow of the customer journey, it looks like.

Yeah. So in the attract phase, we're just really figuring out, like, what does your message need to believe? In that portion of attracting, we've got something we call the telepathy triangle. So in the attract phase, there's not a lot going on externally because there's so much going on internally with the brand. We do. We call it the telepathy triangle, which is competition telepathy, content telepathy, and then customer telepathy. So we're doing, you know, a really big, deep dive into what the competition is. And I've got a huge spreadsheet that we fill out on, you know, for three to five different competitors. Really establishes where's the hole in the marketplace and where can you have, you know, be unique and different and really propel your unique advantage in the marketplace by the things that other people aren't doing? And then with content telepathy there, you know, I'm diving deep into, you know, what are the Amazon books in your niche? What are the two to four star reviews? What are the people saying in there? We're looking for the pains and the gains of the marketplace, so we want to really be able to speak to all of their pains points. And so I'll have lots of different ways of going into forums or clickbank products or Amazon reviews or even going through what I love. This is my favorite when someone does a launch and they have Facebook comments on the, you know, right before they go live to the sales page. So a Launch goes generally four videos. There's three content videos, and then the fourth video, that's a sales video before the fourth video goes live. Sometimes on these launches, you'll have 3,000 comments in one of those Facebook threads underneath the launch. Well, I go through and I grab all of them and I put them into a spreadsheet. And I've taught my VA this process where he goes through and he looks for what are the pains that people are talking about in one sheet, and the next sheet is what are the gains? What are the things that people like? And then we go through and we. I've got a whole system for coding all of this, and it's nerdy and I love it, but it really tells us. And then I sort it all so I can really see what the top pains are. So I've done this for about 19 different launches in the last three years, and I have all of this crazy data on what people want to know. And then a lot of that gets turned into content.

I remember doing this. We did a launch similar to what you're describing, had a live cast at the end with Amish Shah. And that was, I think, the first time I met you at his house. And we tried to do something like that, but I think we were kind of making it up in real time. But we're like, holy moly. There's a lot of. Of engagement happening. What do we do with all this data? And it's so valuable because I don't think a lot of people take advantage of it like you are. And there's just.

Honestly, it's just used for content. I'm always looking for what is the content that the market actually wants to know. And if you don't have to guess, because in writing these, the 15 pieces of content, if you don't have to guess, it's better. So if you can go and you can find this kind of information from the process that I just talked about, or there's another way that I've been doing it recently that I love, which is you guys use vidiq.com before.

No, I've never heard of it. Do tell.

Ooh, this is gonna be exciting for you. This is really. This is not hard to do. Could take you three hours if you're serious about it. Okay, so you get a Vidiq account, and I believe you can still get a month free. If you go, they've got a coupon code you can put in there, and it's VidSummit. If you go to VidSummit, if you put the coupon code VidSummit, you get a month free. So anyways, go to vidiq.com get an account for a month, and what you want to do is this. They've got an SEO tab. So you go into the SEO tab for Vidiq and you put in a keyword. So, geez. The one I did this morning was Tinnitus. So we were doing research for a client on Tinnitus, and so I put the keyword tinnitus in, and it brought up, you know, about 150 different keywords. Now here's what Vidiq does. This is why it's so great. This is why I love it. Vidiq searches YouTube, and this is important. It searches YouTube for the most popular and relevant keywords to the keyword you put in. Now, why is that important? It's important because YouTube is the number one search engine for how to advice, for informational advice.

So if you want to learn how to do something people go to YouTube, right?

Yep. I agree.

So the reason I love YouTube is I want those kind of keywords. I want. Because a lot of the stuff I do is in the how to space.

Yeah.

How to accomplish something, how to do something, how to get a result. I'm in that space and I want to find that kind of information. So I'll go into Vidiq, I'll click the SEO tab, and I'll start to put in relevant keywords for me. And then you just keep on. So then you. They've got about five different columns in there. You copy all of those columns in vidiq and then you paste it over into a Google sheet. So you do one keyword search. I did a keyword search for Tinnitus. It brought up about 150 different searches. It's five columns. I copied all of those five columns and put them into a Google sheet. Then I went back to vidiq and said, okay, I'm gonna search for another keyword. I'm at church. And I searched for ears ringing. And that brought me up another big search. And I kept on going through this process until I had about 2,000 different keywords across five columns. So there's five columns because the five columns are different things. It talks about the overall score, the search volume, the number of searches, the number of keywords. And it's got that information in there. You'll see it all when you get there. So here's the. Where the magic comes in. Now you've just got a bunch of data that's useless unless you do a sorting process on it. So the sorting process that I've come up with is you want to start looking at your competition score because the competition. The. There's competition on YouTube can be very fierce. Right. People are trying to.

They're trying to get their keywords optimized and they're trying to get their videos to show up first. Right. Have you guys done any. Have you guys ever done video marketing on YouTube?

See, we.

A little bit.

We have, but we've never cracked the code on it. No.

YouTube is one of the things that still eludes us a little bit. We've experimented with YouTube ads and YouTube organic, and we've never really managed to get any traction with YouTube so far.

Do guys continue. Do you guys shoot videos?

Currently, we don't see. So we're not like you, where you're just like, cranking out videos based off of topics. But we. We used to do that a lot. Yeah, but we really should. I know there's like a massive gap there for us and probably most everyone.

Honestly, I must say, shame, shame, shame, shame on you boys. Because you're so good at doing content. And I think video is the absolute number one place to be content right now.

Saying that over the last three or four months we've probably made 200 videos.

Yeah, yeah, but they're all quick, like.

Holding out our iPhone, like talking to the camera, saying, hey, here's a quick tip from somebody that was just on our show. And we give like a little two minute clip. And we've heard that those kinds of videos don't work well on YouTube. Like YouTube, people are expecting a little bit more polished, a little more quality. So we've kind of, we post those on YouTube, but we're not out there like trying to rank for them or anything.

Got it. Yeah. I think these are, I think you actually want to produce content videos that are made for YouTube. Got a nice production quality to it and it makes you look good.

Got it.

Right.

So how. Okay, so you have this data now.

I just want you guys to know these, these columns. So here's what I do. It's really, this is where it gets really important. So I create five columns in a spreadsheet. One is what's the keyword or the big idea that I was searching for? And that's a lot of the keywords that Vidiq brought you. And then there's four other columns in the spreadsheet. One is search volume. And what search volume is, is that's just that the number of searches there are for this search, and that's just a big number. I don't really worry about search volume so much. What I'm really concerned about is search score. What search score is, is it gives it a score based upon whatever algorithm Vidiq is doing in there. And I like this, this because what I do with search score is I'll take those 3,000 searches I have and I'll take the column that says search score and I'll sort it from biggest to smallest number and they're numbers from 100 to 0. And what I'll do is I'll color code any that are 75 and above. So my search score, which means it's good, you want a high search score. And I'll, I'll color code the ones that are 70, 75 and above. Green. That's just, that's one column. They got competition score. Competition score is. How competitive is this keyboard? How much competition is there for that? So what I'll do. There is anything that's between about a 10 and a 40. I'll color code because I want a high search score, I want a low competition score. And then it has this thing called an overall score, which is basically like a weighted average. I'll also sort the overall score from largest to smallest and I'll color code again. Basically anything 70, 75 and above is green.

So now you can go through this list and you can just start looking for things that have a high search score, a low competition score, and a solid good overall score that's going to give you your keywords. And once you see what those keywords are, now it's just a matter of writing content or producing podcasts or shooting videos around whatever that subject is with your unique perspective on it.

I love it. So you're basically looking for all the green boxes ticking at the same time. Ideally, yes. Yeah. And typically, are you finding that all those columns are lining up green? Do you have a good amount to work with there or do you have to, you know, have a couple green and maybe one yellow? I don't know what your second color is.

Okay. This is where I find a lot of people can get confused. And I want to say that it's not only about math. I could look at this and make it very analytical and math based, but it leaves out intuition. And as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we're entrepreneurs because we have really good business intuition. And so I'll look at those keywords and I do want to find the ones that have a solid search score, a low competition score, and a good overall score. But I also want to use my intuition. So if I combine that math with my business intuition, that's when the magic happens.

Yeah. Because you have knowledge of that marketplace, ideally. So you're kind of comparing what you're gathering from this big database here, comparing it with what you know already. Because, I mean, we do a very similar type of thing, but for keywords in Google and we use hrefs to do that, have a very similar sorting process, but for text based stuff. So this is really cool to hear, but we also run some ads to kind of gather real data that people are also clicking into as well. So it's kind of like a comboed event there happening.

So this is my. I call this the cheater method. This is not the method I think gives you the best intel.

Yeah.

You haven't talked to a real person. To me, the best intel is something we call customer telepathy. And that's where you figure out you know, what are the 20% of your market, your audience, your customers, the 20% of your customers that are making you 80% of the money. Get on the phone with as many people of those as you can and interview them, ask them what they like about your company. What could be better? We've got a whole about 16 questions that we ask them when we get them on the phone. And if you call 20 customers in, you know, two weeks, which is totally doable, or just call 20 customers in a month and interview them about your company, your business, your brand, your product, there's where the real gold happens.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Customers always give you the best content ideas or improvement ideas or whatever. Next product idea.

Yes. And it's talking to them.

Yeah. That's the key is be a human. Pick up the phone, meet up for coffee.

Literally the best thing to do. So we have. Part of our business is we do this for companies where we will get the analysis done that shows us which customers are your best customers. We want to get on the phone with those customers and we do an analysis and we come up with a complete, what we call avatar and empathy analysis, which we're creating. When I talked about the personality styles, we actually create the four different personality styles. Who are your market, what words they actually use, what pains they're actually going through, and what gains that they would like to see from your brand and your business, as well as what competitors are using, any suggestions they have, who else they're following. And we put that all into an avatar and empathy map. And then we know exactly the words of your market. And so when we go to write copy, that's how we do it. So the reason we can get big wins is because we're spending a lot of time in the front end really understanding the market and the customer and how they speak and what their issues are, and then being able to speak to that eloquently.

Oh, man, I love it. And I'm just actually picturing. I'm thinking of. I think you showed me one of your spreadsheets one time for one of your campaigns, and I was like, holy moly, there's a lot going on here. But so I'm just trying to say is you're the real deal when you're saying all this stuff because. Because I've seen your work and it's amazing. And that's not to say it has to be like a lot of. A lot, a lot, a lot of data. Like you said, it could be done. However, airtable is very nice. Now, these days. Or you can keep it simple. Whatever system works for you guys listening here.

Airtable. Airtable. Airtable.

That's the one.

I have a question about the content themselves. So when you find out or you figure out all these content pieces you create, is there a specific, specific modality you're going for? Are you trying to do that on as many places as possible? Video, audio, text.

I like video, period. I think it should. I prefer video. So when we're producing this for a client, we are really video focused. And the reason is, is we can just do so much with a video. So if you. One of the things we really like to do is we like to use Zoom Webinars and push that into Facebook Live. And the reason you do that is because you want content for Facebook Live. But if you've ever just done a Facebook Live on your phone or your computer and then you want to pull that video back out of Facebook, it compresses it too much and it's not good quality. So the reason you want to use Zoom to push Zoom Webinar to push into Facebook Live is because you can pull a really solid quality video from Zoom. You can record it, and then we use that video to create a video, myriad of other things. We call it content exponentiation. How can you take a single piece of content and turn that into other things so it's literally a video? And then turn that video into a blog post and that video into multiple quote cards and that video into an infographic, and that video into something you would push into a LinkedIn article or upon a medium. And medium is great because you can put it in any of the publishers on medium that already have a large audience, submit it to the publisher and it goes in there. You can use it for Pinterest and Twitter and Facebook posts. There's so many things you can do with one video.

I love it.

Hold on. I want to. The Medium thing really grabbed my attention. So you can post stuff on Medium and get other publishers to help feature that content. How does that work?

I was kind of hoping you didn't hear that part.

I think I picked up on that. But yeah, let's dig in.

I'm kind of curious about how. I've never seen that part of Medium, I guess.

Oh.

So let's talk about the next thing real quick. Was the next question you had.

Gotcha. Okay. So this is one of those.

This is the ones where we have to dig in further. You just gave it away too well, too easy.

So on Medium, there are publishers so most people, what they'll do is they'll go on Medium and they'll create their own channel and then post their own stuff to Medium and it never gets seen. And they think Medium, shit.

Sounds about our experience. Yeah.

And that's most everyone's experience on Medium, though there are publishers. So, you know, I've worked a lot in the health and wellness space and there's one called Thrive Global, and they have a huge readership on Medium. And what you want to do is you need to write a good article. So it's one of the reasons that we like writing good content because it's so repurposable Medium. You need to, you know, you need to have great images and pictures that go along with it and maybe some infographics or drawings and really great content. And you submit that to the publisher of that, the medium. So the person who's posting the content into Medium, the publisher of Thrive Global, you'd want to submit an article to that person. Make sense?

Yeah, got it.

And if they, if it gets approved, then it goes up on there. Now the real secret is at the very end of the article, you want to send them to something very simple that's an opt in, like, hey, get my, you know, take my quiz or get my cheat sheet or get my checklist. That's all it says. And it goes to a very simple opt in form that says, hey, get my checklist.

There you go. And I'm sure the opt in rate on that thing's freaking huge.

If they read the whole thing.

I'm sure it would be if they click. Yeah, for sure.

People that consume it are all gonna opt in.

I would imagine it's just more eyeballs. So you want to combine your traffic strategy with an organic strategy. And that's part of the organic strategy we use.

Got it.

Yeah. And that's the thing we always preach as well. It's like you could. Starting with paid ads is great because you can kind of get data back quickly, see what works, what doesn't. But the nice byproduct of everything we're doing on say, Google, for instance, with these keywords is SEO, baby. Free traffic, right?

Think about Evergreen. YouTube's so evergreen. Medium's so evergreen. You really want to be on those high evergreen platforms. Because if you're posting on, on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, I mean, that's gone in 19 seconds after you post it.

Yeah, yep, yep, yeah. So yeah, with YouTube. God damn. Okay. This is making me really want to crack it open. YouTube now. And start cranking some videos and.

Yeah, what kind of videos do you post? Are they like face to camera videos or like slide videos? What's your video type that you go with?

It really depends on the market. So honestly, like, some of them, a lot of them are interviews for different clients that we'll do. A lot of them that are like the actual, like highly produced videos with like, you know, two cameras and then maybe recording a screen and then just throwing in some B roll. But I really like the interviews. So there's two ways I look at it. If you're a real expert in your space, I recommend that it's you doing the videos because then you don't always have to find experts to interview. So if you're someone that has a lot to say, you're a real expert, you help people get real results. I think it's great for that person to do videos and talk about their content and their processes.

If you're not a complete expert but want to be, then I think the interview process is perfect for that. Or you could do a combination which is some videos of you straight to camera showing what you do, and then others where you're interviewing people that are good associations for your brand to have.

Mm, got it. Yeah. So pretty much just if you're an expert, keep it simple and just go teach and do your thing. Be your personality and leverage these keywords and data that you're finding through that whole process that you just laid out.

And there's a great, there's a great plugin you can use. It's actually a piece of software, but it's also a plugin and it's called TubeBuddy. TubeBuddy.com and@TubeBuddy, they've got this really awesome checklist for every video. If you just go through and do the checklist that TubeBuddy gives you for every one of your YouTube videos, you will rank higher than all of your competition, I guarantee it. Just because the checklist is so good and TubeBuddy is one of those things that really helps you optimize the tags and you can split test the custom thumbnails and you can really get into the headlines and you can optimize YouTube so big and almost no one's using that.

Dude, we used to use TubeBuddy. Right, Matt? That sounds so familiar. That's the thing. We probably tried using it, but we didn't have a strategy that, you know, prior to doing that, we had the tool and we're like, this tool doesn't work. Yeah, it's Wrong approach. I know.

Give anything 10 years to get their software right and it generally gets improved.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah, that's true. I mean, there's so many other places we could go.

Do we want to keep going or do we want to plan a plate two?

Matt seems inundated with the content talk.

Here's the problem that we into when podcasting is that we could make like three hour podcast episodes if our guests would let us. So, you know, we gotta figure out when to cut it off and when to say, hey, let's go make a part two or what? But what?

I wanna. Yeah. Cause it's already been an hour.

I'm wearing adult diapers. So I could just go. I can just keep going.

How about this? I wanna hear your quarterly planning. So this is a different topic. But you said that this is a big thing you do, you're currently doing for yourself, but you also teach others, I believe.

How much time do we have?

How much do you need? Because we could do around two.

Okay. It's really simple. It's four steps every quarter. If you do this, you will get more done in literally 90 days than you do in six months to a year.

Bring it on.

It's only four steps. Okay, so step one is what's called idea generation. So you are just going to go into massive idea generation for your business, for things that you can do this quarter to move the needle big time in five different areas. Okay, so you're going to generate ideas. So imagine. So what I like to do is I like to use a big wall in the house or a big big ass whiteboard or something big, big windows, big whatever. And I get a huge stack of post it notes and a black Sharpie. And then I create five different columns. So column one is value creation, column two is marketing. Column column three is sales, column four is value delivery, and column five is finance and operations. So you create ideas and value creation. And that's like how do we discover what people want or need or could be encouraged to want? That's value creation. You've got to create value. This is all the content or free things or awesome stuff that you're going to do for your market. Create ideas. There go. Okay, next step then. You want to create ideas for marketing. How can we create heat and design desire and want for the value we just created? How can we get people to want it? What are those kind of things that we can do? Hey, a podcast is a great idea, right? Or other things. Just what are ideas that we can do to market our business this quarter. Next is sales. Well, now that we've created desire, how do we actually sell the thing that we've got? So you and your team generate a ton of ideas underneath sales and then value delivery. Value delivery is really like, wow, how do we. Now that we've sold something, how do we create a really amazing experience around this? Because as everyone knows, most of the profit is not in your first sale. Almost zero profit is in your very first sale. But your second, your third, your fourth sale that you make to your existing client base, that's where the profit is. So the better job we can do in value delivery, the better job will be profitable. And then the last is the boring stuff, finance and operations. Okay, what's our org chart look like? And are we getting the right TPS report reports stapled with a red stapler every week? And how's our Google doing? And all of those kinds of things you have to think about for finance and operations. So step one is generating ideas in those five areas. Cool.

Got it. Okay. Okay.

Then you vote. You vote on those ideas. So you and your team, or let's say it was, you know, Matt and Joe, get together and you've come up with 95 different ideas. Well, you don't get 95 votes each. You get like 10 or 15 votes each. So now you gotta go through all those 95 things across those five columns and be like, hmm, if I only had 10 votes, what are the 10 things that I'm going to vote that we do this next quarter?

Got it.

Those that you guys voted on. So let's say that you had 15 votes each and you voted on some of the same things, but not everything. And so we go to the next part of the spreadsheet, which is called the big ideas. And the big ideas are only the ones that got upvoted or even got votes. And so now in each of those five columns, maybe you've got like, you know, four or five per column. Maybe you've got like 25 ideas total. So you want to pare it down because you got too many ideas. You want to pare it down to just the best ones. And then the third part, and this is a spreadsheet, of course, the third part of the spreadsheet is where you go through a scoring process on this. And there's two different business frameworks I use. One is built by Dave McClure, the guy that runs 500 Startups, and he has something called, called pirate metrics because it spells ARR or aarrr, which is acquisition, activation, retention, referral and revenue. And it's binary. Does it help us acquire a customer? Yes or no. Does it help us create revenue? Yes or no. For this idea that you have. And you put your each of your ideas, each of your best ideas through that scoring. A yes or no. Yes or no? Yes or no. For each of those five. Activation, acquisition, retention, referral, revenue. And you get a score. And then you go to the next piece, the next framework, which is called the ICE method. And the ICE method was developed by Sean Ellis of Growth Hackers, and ICE stands for impact, confidence and ease. What's the impact this is going to have on the overall company? 1 to 10, 10 being the highest. What's the confidence that we believe we can do this? On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best? Easy. How easy is it to do this? If it's not very easy to do, it gets scored low. But if it's very easy to implement and do, and we can get out in a few weeks, a very high score. And then you get an ISO total, which is an average of those three numbers. And then Roland Frazier showed me a metric which is the weighted total, which takes your ICE and your R and combines it together into a weighted total. And what Roland says is if Your weighted total is 18 or greater, the idea is pretty damn good. If it's less than 18, kill it.

He actually, I think that scorecard you're mentioning in that whole thing, he, he outlined on the episode that we told you that we had him on here, and he broke that down.

Only this piece talked about this. I have four steps, like I said. The third piece is part from Roland. The other three are things that I've combined from books and other consultants and things that I've learned along the way.

Yeah, no, I get.

Because Roland.

Yeah. And I remember with Brackostanza, Matt, you and I and him, it was maybe a month ago we actually did the scorecard, the R part. I think we kind of skipped over some steps, so would have been better off doing the whole four steps here. Thanks, Brad, for not telling us.

And the last fourth step is you take all of the. You score everything and you use your intuition and you only pick the best things to move to your quarterly plan, because this is where you're going to actually use strategic planning, project management software. Your team and you go through a process of really making sure that your ladder is against the right wall with the projects that you have this quarter. And it takes you through the Project description, your hypothesis, start and end dates, how much this might cost, how much time it might take and who owns it. And that becomes your quarterly plan. And there's one piece that I haven't seen anyone else do that I've just learned the hard way. And that's why it's called the quarterly. So scorecard is this has a score, so at the end of the quarter you have to come back to the scorecard and score yourself. So you have to look at the status of a project which is, is it in progress or is it completed? If you completed that project, you get a 10, if it's still in progress, you get a five. And if it's just, still, if it's just an idea they haven't done anything with, you get a one. And then you times that by your expectation score. So you're looking back 90 days, you're looking back over your expectation, your plan. And the expectation score is it's a three, basically, which means a three is it matched our expectations. If it greatly exceeded your expectation, you get a five. And if it was way less than expected, you get a one. So you get a score of one, two, three or four or five. Three is it met expectations, a five is it greatly exceeded. And a one it did not exceed it at all was terrible. Times status, times X expectation. And you get your quarterly score. And for all of the projects that you put on here, you want to look at your average, your quarterly score average. If you're a 30 for your quarterly score average, you're doing something right.

So this is a, it's, it's, it's somewhat of complicated to talk about on a podcast, but I do have the entire thing laid out with the spreadsheet and an hour long video for the Humanistics and a 15 minute video for the competitives@QuarterlyScorecard.com Cool.

Good. Because I was going to say I need that.

I'm following the flow of everything and it's all making sense, but I'm like, I need templates, I need to see something tangible. Yeah.

So it's all, I mean it's all really well laid out. And I've got an explainer video.

Good.

You know, if you're a competitive will make your eyes cry and you'll be cringing because it's so long. It's an hour. But I also was like, because I understand personality styles, I also made a shorter people. Shorter, Shorter people. I also make short people. My son is a little small for his age.

You have a little son, but There's.

A shorter video and a longer video, so whichever version you want, it's all there. And, you know, every quarter, if you do this, this is where the real results come in.

Yeah. What was the website? One more time.

Quarterly scorecard.com.

Perfect. Very cool. I love that, man. I mean, I'm just. Feels like you're putting the big boy pants on of a business, because, like, Matt and I, we. We planned and we plan all the time and we design and all that, but we have not done that. That's. That's like real business type stuff, which obviously real business here, but come on.

Yeah, Our business runs more like, hey, I got an idea, and I just bought a domain name. Let's build it. And then a year later, that domain name expires, and we're like, remember we had that domain name that one time.

Let's renew.

One more year.

We're going to do something. 2019 is the year. No.

So, Travis, now, that's amazing, man. And you actually did a good job. You summed it up in under 10 minutes. So that was really solid, dude.

Real quickly, I know this is sort of an abrupt shift of topic, but your podcast that you've got going now, what's that called? And I'm curious what your sort of bigger picture game plan with that is. You know, what's the. How does that fit into your business?

Okay, great. It's called Make Marketing awesome is the podcast, and it's a little different. I looked at all the models that were out there for podcasting and said, how can I do something a little bit different? Because I didn't want to be chained to a weekly episode of having to get one out a week. I wanted to do something just slightly different. And I came up the idea of Netflix. Netflix was all my idea. And I decided that I would take that to podcasting. I'm totally kidding. The Netflix model, right? It's more Game of Thrones, honestly. You know where I got the idea is actually YouTube Red. My son and I were watching the. You know the Karate Kid that they did for.

Oh, yeah, Cobra Kai. Yeah, that was really good.

We watched the entire season in a day.

We totally.

My son and I binge watched that one. And then at the very last scene of the very last episode, my son looks at me and he goes, can we watch season two right now? And I'm like. I'm like, no, we can't, because I don't even know when it comes out. I'm like, oh, that's how they get you okay, this is good. So I decided I'd do seasons. So I took the awesome marketing framework, which is, you know, the attract, welcome, engage, sort, offer, maximize and evaluate. That's seven. So I do an episode on each one of those. I do an episode all about how do you attract someone into your business and how do you welcome them and welcome them onto your email list and how do you engage with them on go. So seven episodes is the awesome framework. And so I. So I just did seven episodes and I put them up. So the very first seven episodes are up. I actually recorded 14. So season two will be going live very shortly, next week sometime. So season two will be live when you actually hear this podcast. So every season goes out. Now I have a plan that I would like to launch a season a month, but I can't imagine that happening. I'm just putting out a season and then I can get another season ready whenever I want.

That's cool.

Seasons going out. So I'd like to just keep cranking it out. And today was the day that I was creating the standard operating procedure procedure for the podcast because I'm doing everything myself right now. But I've got a VA in the Philippines who I love, and he is going to be taking over probably 85% of it now that I got the SOP done.

Well, you can leverage some apprentices.

Yeah, I was going to say this. This is a good chance to plug one of our sponsors, actually.

Go for it, Matt.

So we actually. Have you heard of genm? G E N M co.

Yes, I was under the feeling that you could only have those for a few months.

So you can, but you have the option to hire them once you're done. So. So you get the apprentice for three months and then after three months, you have the option to bring them into the business.

This is also a true. This is also a true test of your SOPs.

It is.

And see how well those sops are if they break your SOPs and you're like, all right, back to the drawing board. Next apprentice.

Yeah. Well, if you're Interested, checking out genm@evergreenprofits.com GenM, you actually get $10 off if you were to use that link. But in the plug. And there's our plug. No, but GenM is really cool. The guy who's writing our show notes, Stephen. Hey, Stephen. He. He came from GenM. And then those episode companions that you were mentioning earlier, the, like, cheat sheets for the episodes, that's another person off of GenM that we hired. His name's Carrie. So they're both listening to this episode right now and they do great work.

Yeah.

Can't recommend that tool enough.

Just an option for you. But. But either way. Yeah, let's get that.

That podcast ask what does GenM cost after the three months?

So it's. It's $50 a month for the three months that you have them, and then it's. It basically starts over. So you can hire them, or you can go back on GenM and find new people to plug into your SOPs, and then it starts over at the $50 a month again.

Yeah, I love that model. Just curious, like, what they want after the three months is over? Because I'd like to.

Well, we'll tell you in about a month and a half.

Yeah, right.

Love it.

They have a lot of good options. Most of them are looking for jobs because this is like their transition. Instead of a college, like, degree, they're looking for direct experience. So most of the time they're looking for a gig career of some sort. So lots of options there. But the fact of the matter is. Yeah, because we've had so many podcasts now, and really, it wasn't until dialed in SOPs and having a team and having a structure, which you're good at, all of that and wrapping that around the podcast and that thing can sustain what you're looking to do.

Well, what I'm looking to do with it is I'm looking to get seven seasons in.

And then write a book around what I learned from all of the amazing. Really lucky to have some really amazing guests on there so far and just create a marketing book around the awesome marketing framework with things that I'm already doing and the learnings from the guests.

I love it.

And that's one of the things we've always talked about as a huge benefit of podcasts is Tim Ferriss did his Tools of Type book, which was essentially a giant curation of some of the best nuggets of wisdom from all of his podcast guests. And, you know, that's something that we may or may not have in the works for our podcast.

For the traffic stuff.

For the traffic stuff.

Yeah, exactly.

I just want my mom to be, like, to know what I do. All I really want is my mom to be like, oh, my son's an author and he's on Amazon and she'll finally be able to tell her friends what the heck I do.

Isn't that the thing? Like, it doesn't matter, like, what online business you have, but, like, her parents typically don't know what the hell you're doing. Like, still to this day, my parents don't understand, Matt. They're even business people. And I don't think they totally get it.

It's this dark hole that's like, what do you do in your house all day? You a drug dealer?

Sometimes I wonder what we do too. So.

That'S true. It's awesome. I just wanted to have some security around. Oh, he's on Amazon. It's all good.

I love what you're doing, man. Let's wrap it up. I know we're kind of a little long, but this has been fun. And I know we will be doing around two maybe with Brad Costanzo at the beach house.

Let's do that.

That would be fun.

We could do that on his roof.

Bacon Wrapped Hustle and awesome.

Awesome. Bacon Wrapped Hustle.

Yeah, that actually kind of sounds better.

We'll make a massive acronym for it. Yeah, I don't know what that is. All right, so wrapping it up, you probably know the answer or the question, but what books do you just often go back to or that you recommend to others quite often?

That's a good question. And honestly, I like the old school stuff I've been reading on a somewhat regular basis. Two books, and one is the very first book that had a huge, huge impact on my life. And that was Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. And then I ended up getting to work with the Napoleon Hill foundation and Greg reed on the 100th anniversary of that book and went around the country for a little over a year interviewing people for the next version of that book, which we released with Greg. And I got to shoot all the videos and meet the people. It was one of the most amazing experiences. So a book that had a huge shift for me personally when I was in high school. And then like, you know, many years later I got to go on the hundredth year anniversary of that book. So that one was. That one was huge for me. Although I don't think it's his best book. I think Grow Rich with Peace of Mind is Napoleon Hill's best book and it's the one he wrote right before he died. So Think and Grow Rich was his very. Is his first book that he wrote after interviewing those people. And then he had many ups and downs and successes and failures and when, you know, his story is quite interesting. But the book that he wrote before he died was Grow Rich with Peace of Mind and I think that's his best work.

I'll have to check that out. I Haven't heard anyone recommend that.

Yeah, I think you're the first person to bring that book specifically up.

Yeah, that's. That's. That's the point. So in terms of, like, personal development or mindset, I love that one. And then my favorite marketing book is Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz.

Oh, yeah, it's somewhere on the shelf here. Oh, there it is. I always like to look at Matt's bookshelf.

I have a giant bookshelf. So what? So it's like every time somebody mentions a book on the show, we turn around and look at my bookshelf to see if I have habit.

Don't know why we're doing that, but it's there.

Yeah, it's just, like, habit now. But I do definitely have Breakthrough Advertising.

Yeah.

Yeah, because you borrowed it for, like, a year and never read it.

No, that's not true.

Hard one to get.

I opened it and I used what I needed.

Luckily, Joel Polish had a lot of them at G. Because for years, the book wasn't for sale. It was not published for many, many years. Only recently has it been back on Amazon, because I think Brian Kirk Kurtz bought the rights to it.

Yeah. And I have the version that I.

Bought through Brian Kurtz Advertising Solution. Yeah. And that. That was a solid one as well. That's like a compilation of.

Well, no, the Eugene shorts one. Oh, there we released from Brian.

Brian Kurtz. That's right. Yeah. So those are two separate books. But Advertising Solution was another solid one, too.

That's another good one. And my last one that I think that anyone that wants to grow their business should use, and it's certainly my business bible, is Scaling up by Verne Harnish.

Okay, yeah, that's one I've never read, but you're probably about the seventh person on our show to mention that book, so I think it's probably about that time.

Mutual buddy of ours again, Misha. I remember he was reading that as, you know, we were going through that launch, I was telling you, and he was just like, oh, my God, this is blowing my mind. This book is completely unraveling. Everything I should be doing in my business right now.

That's the big boy pants right there. Even if you only do the opsp, and I'm not gonna tell you what it is, but if you do the OPSP from Scaling Up. Oh, God, it's good. It's so good.

Yeah.

Now I have to buy the damn book just to find out what the acronym is.

You got some space on that bookshelf. Let's go get it.

It's funny, I actually saw Vern Harnish speak at TNC a few years back and said I was gonna buy his book back then, and I still haven't, so I'm.

Well, now you're bad person fires on your butt. Everybody can hear. You're gonna buy it now. I don't know. Go do it. All right, so where should we send folks to go learn more or listen to ya? Anything that you want to direct folks to?

Yeah, I think that since this is a podcast, I think going to superfunnel.com podcast and I've got the Make Marketing awesome podcast that's got other information. So if you like podcasts, that's a good place to go.

Sweet. Superfunnel.com podcast. And that's an awesome domain name, by the way.

Super Funnel. It's like superheroes or something.

It's a newer domain because I had. I broke all my branding rules. So I have branding rules for clients and I completely broke all of them. I was like, ah, damn, I can't use this domain anymore.

That's cool. You know, it's a fresh start to reset.

I had one. It was called Launcher and Launcher was spelled wrong and it was a dot co. I'm like, oh, this is all. This is all broken.

Well, super funnel.com is an amazing, easy to remember domain, so I love the branding there.

Well, we'll link it all up in the show notes and we'll have a round two at a minimum with the three of us, possibly. Brad, there's a lot of veins. We didn't go down with your live events, crazy networking, and your connecting docu series, all these cool things that you've done. So we'll do it round two, later.

We just. We just scratched the surface on this one.

I mean, honestly, this is. This is a little dream come true. I love your show. I am a subscriber, a listener. I could name off my top 12 episodes. You guys are doing such great work. This is an amazing podcast. It's such a gift to our industry. So thank you. Thank you for doing it.

You demand. I appreciate it and you're welcome.

I love that. And just like every other time somebody's given us praise, I rip it out and I use it as an ad. So you're going to start hearing your voice everywhere.

All right, man. We really appreciate it. Thanks again.

See you, man.

Bye.

All right, thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now, right now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. Go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode and maybe one cool thing that you learned there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and Flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are getting going to get this awesome knowledge, this, this cool podcast training and a whole bunch of other cool free training that we give out@evergreen profits.com so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.