Social Media Influence & Making An Impact with Meggan Roxanne, Sam Qurashi and Joe Polish

When if you guys were to implement social media into your marketing campaigns, all the knowledge that you know anyway, fly, because everything is there.

Okay, I'm going to give you a little bit of setup before I introduce this individual who's never done an interview before, which is awesome. And Sam Qurachi, who is my dear friend, amazing psychiatrist, interviews some of the most bizarre, interesting people on the planet, who originally I was not going to have as part of this. I've asked him to actually come up because that's how I met Megan. And so here's what I'll say. Picture yourself eight years ago. You have no job, you have no clear future, and you are depressed. Then you hear a song that uplifts you and inspires you. So you Google a photo of the rapper Wiz Khalifi Khalifa, which shows you how dumb I am because I literally had no idea until I started watching videos several days ago. And you open up Photoshop, you then add text on the top of the image. You save it and post the image onto Tumblr, a social media site, to express your feelings. Then the next day you wake up and suddenly you have thousands of followers. That's exactly what happened to Megan. Roxanne. Today, Megan is a leader in the social media world with a following on Tumblr of over 4 million. And now she has an audience on Instagram of over 25 million followers. During this interview, I'm going to ask Megan the kind of questions that I think you would like to know and ask her as a Genius Network member. And then based on our time, we'll open it up to questions for all of you. And so I'd like to introduce both of them, Sam and Megan, all the way from England. She's a social media guru. And Sam, you know, he's just a cool dude. So come on up. And whoever wants to sit, I think you should sit here first. It'd be weird if I'm sitting next to Sam. He's a psychiatrist. He could do weird things. So first off, this is your welcome to Genius Network.

Thank you.

Yeah. How often do you come to America?

Quite frequently this year, but usually just on family holidays. Yeah, always in New York.

Yeah, New York's the place that's where stuff's happening. So how long have you guys known each other, Sam?

Since last December.

Yeah. So a little bit of background on you, just so people know.

Okay, short version. I was a psychiatrist for over seven years. Worked in an addiction hospital. And then to me, the Hippocratic oath turned into a hypocritical oath. And it was time to move on. And I believe in education over medication. So I just want to help people by educating them on how to handle emotions and control emotions. And the knowledge that I had from the experience that I had was very helpful, but I wanted to find something different. So I went outside the box and I started interviewing unorthodox psychologists, people that do things that psychologists can't. Like the horse whisperer who can communicate with horses through eye contact and body language and get the horse to move in the way that he likes without touching him. Or the top pickpocket in the UK who stole my phone three times in five minutes during the interview without me even noticing because he's a master of space and attention management. Or the top cold reader in the world who can convince anyone he's psychic. He was on BBC and he actually said that and he still blew everyone away. And I'm just working on this concept and. Yeah, so that kind of led me to creating this jigsaw puzzle tackling the mind. And the jigsaw puzzle pieces were basically these unorthodox psychologists. So the Iceman, Wim Hof, the Breakup Queen, which we could talk about at some point. And I wanted marketing because that's one of the jigsaw puzzle pieces. And that's where I connected with Joe.

Yeah.

Now you've been in Genius Network.

How long now?

Since May? Well, two years. Two years. Two years.

And we've had quite a few interesting adventures together, which is a whole nother story.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We've been to funerals together. We've played cards with Sandra Day o'. Connor. Justin Sandra Day o'.

Connor.

All kinds of interesting stuff. So. Yeah. And Megan, what should people know about you before we get started here that I haven't said?

I'm a digital entrepreneur. I've been on social media testing and disrupting for the last 10 years. I'm an influencer. I'm a writer. Yeah, that's it.

Awesome. Okay, well, I'm going to hit you with some questions. So hopefully during the course of this, people here feel a lot more capable in what to do with what you have learned how to do in an amazing way, both of you. So, I mean, what do you actually do, though? Like, in terms, how do you explain that? I mean, let's start with being an influencer. So how would you describe, like, what is a typical Megan Roxanne Day? It could be anywhere from calm or crazy or what?

It's usually quite repetitive. That's what social media Is, you know, if you're trying to create a career in social media, you have to get used to the fact that you're going to do the same thing every day for years. It's literally insane, you know, but you do actually grow. So what I do every day, I create content for my own personal pages and I create content for the pages that we entertain 32 million people every day. That's literally what I do. So we work with writers, we work with other big brands, we develop relationships and create networks, we do a lot of collaborations. And everything that I've done for the last 10 years has all been organic, you know, so I haven't paid for any form of advertising, definitely have not paid for any followers, which is a waste of time and money. And, yeah, it's just been a slow growth. And that all originated from an original idea and everybody just leaped on it and it was just successful after that.

And you invented the use of picture quotes on social media?

Yeah. So in 2011, as you were saying, I was going through a major depression. I didn't even realize I was depressed until Mondays and Fridays just merged into each other. And, you know, I'm in bed and I'm not realizing that I haven't had a bath or anything. You know, my mum's going crazy. And so I wasn't happy with the way my life was turning. I didn't want to conform to this whole, get a job, 40 hours a week, get stuck in a mortgage, die. I didn't want to do that. I genuinely have this belief that everyone has, like a soul mission and that if we all tap into our subconscious and realize what it is, we can really lead fulfilling lives. You know, I'm not silly enough. I know that we all have to work, but everybody in this room is doing things that is passionate to them and it's adding to the quality of their lives and others. Why can't the world do that? So I was not going to get stuck in a loop where I just have to do what everyone else is doing. Like that frightened me. And so I thought, if I can't do what I want to do, I'm not going to do anything at all. And so I was listening to hip hop, I listened to a Wiz Khalifa track. As he said, the lyric was something like, this isn't where we're supposed to be, but we'll get there in a minute. Something like that. So I took a picture, I slapped a lyric on top of the picture of Photoshop, added a filter, posted that on Tumblr woke up the next day to like just under 20,000 followers. And that was crazy. I used three or four hashtags, which was Wiz Khalifa, picture quotes, inspirational or quotes. And then I looked online because I couldn't believe what happened. So I looked online and I didn't see anything like this. You know, when I was going through that depression, I couldn't find anything to inspire me or even motivate me to get out of bed. Everything was just websites of all this text and, you know, nothing was aesthetically pleasing. So I thought through these positive hip hop lyrics, I can actually encourage other people to, you know, just get up. And this literally became a hobby. And I was in debt with my mum for like £20,000 of credit card debts, because as a young entrepreneur, I had all of these ideas, but I didn't have an audience. So I'd create really great products and, you know, mum, can you lend me a thousand pounds? And everything would get created and then. I have no idea.

Did you try to start businesses?

Yeah, like I've been doing.

You weren't just buying shoes and stuff?

No, no, no. But. But then just. I'm going all over the place. But before that happened, that whole story, I. I jumped on Facebook around 2007 and I realized that by creating pages, I'm able to gather a lot of people in the space. And so it was weird. I would create pages, you know, that's not how you pronounce my name. And then I would just promote that on my page and my friends would follow and then we would get like a million followers. I used to just sell those, you know, so when I. After my depression, after. When I launched Tumblr, I realized I had all these people following. So three days later, I launched a store where I was selling quotes on clothing. And by the end of that month, I made like my first 36,000. So I paid back my mum and then I got to office, and by the end of that first quarter, I made like 250, which is crazy because I was working in retail for seven pound an hour. So it was mad. And then I started getting loads of DMCA notices. People were like, you're using my pictures without my permission. So I had to stop the hip hop quotes and I went into more traditional quotes, like, you know, George Washington. And no one cared. All of my. No one cared. All of my demographic is between 13 and 34. So I started. I went onto Twitter and I found, like, all of these writers, light workers, people that talk about meditation, higher vibrational, living. And their stuff was so real because they swore in some of their quotes, but they used slang. So I just gathered, like, a massive collection of people and started using their quotes. And all of the kids just came onto Tumblr and just following us, and we were creating like 40 to 50 quotes a day. And so I did that, had a really great, successful two to three years, like 2011 to 2013. And then my mother got diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013. So I stopped everything. I stopped blogging. I told everybody on the blog what was happening. I got loads of support. That's when people started to tell me more about cannabis, oil and alternative treatments. And, you know, it was really great. And my mom recovered, and I met my business partner that year as well, and he said to me, listen, we need to get off Tumblr and get onto Instagram. Instagram is the place to be. Let's change the blog name from Kush and Wisdom. You know, no one's going to invest in Kush and Wisdom, and let's go into something more positive. So we rebranded and we called it the Good Quote or the Goods. And we had everything under there. The good vibe, the Good Quote, the Good Quote code, the good fitness, the good health, the good store. We just tried to take as many names as possible, and we received our first million followers in about four to six weeks. Yeah. So everybody from Tumblr came over. So that was pretty easy anyway, because we just kept telling people we're now on Instagram. And then we've been growing at about 5 million a year since 2011. So since 2014. Sorry. So on Instagram, we have about 23, 25 million. Tumblr, we have 5. In Facebook, we have 1.2. My personal pages only has 100,000. I'm not really trying to be on social media at the moment. And, yeah, that's the story.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. It's funny, Neil Strauss, who's a writer, he's written, he texted me because I told him about you, that you're coming down here. And so he pulls up your Megan Roxanne thing when it had 25 posts and you had over 100,000 followers. He's like, how is she doing this? So how does someone post 25 times and get 100,000 followers?

Because I have a large. I have all the other ones. So what I'm trying to do for Megan, Roxanne is I really want people to understand who I am as a woman and the story. So I don't want to be create mass content and just distribute that. I really want people to get who I am before I do that. So I'm testing. Everything I do is a test. We've been testing for years, you know, so it's easy to grow an account for us once we've got the good quote, the big. The biggest platform. If we post like 10 posts a day on an account that has zero followers, we can probably get 100,000 followers in the space of, like, two or three weeks. But with my personal account, I can't do 10 posts a day, you know, so I would post, like, writing or spoken word, and all of these people will come. And even though I only have five or six posts a week, people are sticking. And then I get to engage more of my audience. So I know that when I finally get to my goal at the end of this year, which is like 350,000, I can now sell a subscription service, whether it's a newsletter or whatever. And I know I'm going to get a lot of people coming back. So this is just a test.

So the magic number is 350,000.

Yeah. That gives me the whole of next year to get to a million.

Okay.

So, yeah, I think it would work.

So have you been doing what Megan has told you to do or just what you're figuring out? Kind of like a formula, because you have grown yours just very recently. Kind of give us a little background of what you've done and what your sort of model is.

Okay. I connect. Okay. I started my page in 2015, Sam Qurashi. And I wanted to grow my page, so I realized that I needed someone's help. So I reached out, I found the good quote, and I connected to the good quote, and they helped me grow to 6,000 in a few months. But for the next two years, I remained on the 6,000, and I didn't grow. And it was frustrating because no one.

Cared about what you had to say. No.

No one gave. No. No one did. It was basically photos. And I edit the photo, and then I basically asked myself, what does the photo inspire me to write about? And then I write a caption extracted from the photo rather than what other people do, which is you write an article and then you think of what you try to find a photo that matches. So I wanted to do something different and it was appealing to people. But the reason why, for two years, I was on and off being promoted on the Good Quote throughout that time. But I never went beyond the 6,000 simply because I never added more content and they were constantly showing the same content. I didn't figure that out. There's another reason. There's another tie in to that, which I'll mention in a second. But a lot of people from the Good Quote that followed me from the Good Quote started asking me, where can we find your quotes? Because my page is basically a photo and the article, I was resistant to posting a photo with a quote on it because I didn't want to contaminate my photos. I was just so attached to the beauty of the photo. And so I started doing that on the Good Quote. But after two years, I started receiving messages from people asking me, where can we find your quotes? Because it only lasts on the Good quote for a day or two or three days, depending. So I was like, okay, let me create a new page, like a storage. Let me call it Sam Qureshiquotes. And I actually found a hashtag that was created by my followers called Sam Qureshiquotes. I was like, perfect, so I'll just do that. So I did Sam Qureshi quotes. I posted about 30 of the posts that were originally posted on the Good Quote previously. And I got about 100, 200 followers. And I left it for a few months. This was in 2017, September3, a few months after the first meeting, right before the first, second meeting in September. Genius Network. I made a commitment to start posting on a daily basis because people love the quotes. And it's a lot easier for me to come up with a quote than an article. It's exhausting. I used to do that once a week in the previous page. But I can do this on a daily basis because it's just one line. How can I make this easy? Just make it one line. So I did that, and I started to dissect and analyze Instagram. I mean, the hours of trying to understand the psychology of how it works. I tried to utilize everything I learned from all the different experts and everything I know to try to break that down. And I went from 300 from 300 followers from 14th of October. I remember that shift. Suddenly something was changing from the 14th of October to 14th from 300 to 17,000 in four months. Then I went from 17,000 to 40,000 in five months. And then in one month, I went from 40,000 to 100,000. So that was 2,000 followers a day. This was two months ago. And now it's up to 136,000. And suddenly people started reaching out. How did you do it? How much do you charge? I'm like, that's not why I'm doing this. I just want to reach people and share what I know. So, yeah, to tie it back to why I didn't grow my page, even though I was constantly being promoted by the good quote on and off for two years, I thought that people weren't following my original page because I only had 30 posts. I figured if I have more than that, if I have like 100 or 200 posts, then there's a plethora of content that people can go through, so they're definitely going to follow me. That did not matter to people. The only thing that matters to people more than the content is the consistency. The first thing they see once they get. Once they get on your page, they see the last. They look at the last post and they look at the date. If it's three, four days ago, they're not going to follow you. It's that simple. Even if you have a thousand followers, Even if you have a thousand posts, which I don't, but I had a lot of content and I added videos and I added. So, yeah, interesting.

Yeah.

All right, well, I'm doing some really stupid stuff if I want.

My goal is to.

So you've been working in social media for over 10 years, Megan. And what should people know about social media that they don't think about? Because it's a weird animal.

As cliche as it sounds, you have the world in your hands. I was saying, we were having a discussion downstairs for lunch, and I was saying when Windows 95 came out, I was five. And I can't imagine a world where you can't create a product and then just find somebody on Instagram to help market it for you. But the audience is there already waiting. And not just pay for that campaign. I really don't know how people did it. I'm sitting here, I'm listening to people's stories like, how. How on earth were you able to just do that without social media now? No, honestly, it's crazy. Like, so when. If you guys were to implement social media into your marketing campaigns, all the knowledge that you know anyway fly because everything is there. You know, a few facts. With Instagram, there were over 5,000 employees in 2017. And now there's 36,000. So Instagram's not going anywhere. We had a discussion recently, and in 2017, people spent over 1 billion on digital marketing. So social media is not going anywhere at all. It's not a fad, it's not a phase. This is it. This is the next level.

One billion. In what period of time?

Can I clarify that?

Actually, please do.

Yeah. The amount that was injected into Instagram towards Instagram influencers in 2017 by small businesses is a $1 billion throughout 2017. Yeah.

Okay.

So it's huge.

Wow.

So from your perspective, what do entrepreneurs need to do to be successful online?

I think the first thing you need to do is definitely spend a few hours a day researching. So you mentioned Gary Vee. I watch his videos all the time. I listen to an audiobook every day. I try not to consume too much useless content, you know, so you're not.

Like, watching just weird cat videos and stuff?

No way. No way. 24 hours in a day.

So the algorithms haven't, like, hijacked your brain to get you?

Not at all. I'm trying to educate myself every day. I dropped out of uni, and that really sticks with me. I don't want to ever be in a place where I'm not knowing as much as I should be, you know, So I educate myself every day, and that's definitely led me to be being able to just see things before they're going to happen. Disrupt. Disruption is huge.

I mean, what do you mean by disrupt? I mean, I think everyone has an idea of what that means, but I'd like, what do you mean by.

Okay, so my perspective. Okay, so you have old industries like mtv. You know, you have older industries like mtv. And I would always say to entrepreneurs that even though someone's already executed your idea, don't stop pursuing it, because we don't care about MTV anymore. I can't remember the last time I even said MTV. You know, we have channels on YouTube that we go to to watch videos and new music shows. You've got streaming, you've got all of these things. Like, you need to be able to look at old industries and figure out a way that you can transform into today's world. You know, so that's. That's. That's a huge thing. Collaborations and networking, things like this is huge. You know, even just I was saying to you before with Jay Shetty, he's one of our biggest clients, so we took him from 100,000 to 1.4 million in the space of a Year. And we have an agreement. So he helps us on Facebook, you know, so this is how you can grow.

He's got hundreds of millions.

Oh, he's huge. You know, so for entrepreneurs, I would say consistency, persistence. Also speaking to Sam, I was saying to him at one time, creating perfect content is taking up too much of my time. And he gave me a really good tip and he said.

Sam actually said that. Surprising perfectionist over there.

Yeah, surprisingly. Create as much mediocre content as you can until you are in a position to create perfect content. When I say mediocre, I don't mean generic stuff that's not going to impact people. But if you can only afford to create content on your phone, then do that. You know, you don't need a high tech camera. Just create as many videos as you can on your phone until people come and see you and you have enough clout or attention to invest into more things, you know, do. Do with what you have until you have what you need. And that's really it.

That's, that's the. Actually, that's the quote that changed everything for me because I was holding back on videos. I was uncomfortable on videos. I was uncomfortable. I cared too much about the way I looked, the way I sounded. I wasn't comfortable about my voice, about my accent. I was just really, really self conscious. And this quote which I posted kind of like took me on that path, which is if perfection is my prison, mediocrity is my escape. And that's when I focused on mediocrity. Because my mediocrity can be someone else's perfection. Because I'm just. The reason why I'm holding back is because I think that it's gotta be perfect when in fact all they care about is the content. They don't care about the quality. What got me from 40,000 to 100 is the quality of delivery, but what got me from 300 to 40,000 is the consistency and not caring about the way I look, the way I sounded. It doesn't matter. Just get the content out and you'll get the feedback to know what you need to change next time.

You know what's funny is like literally almost forced Sam to have to do his first podcast.

I remember that.

Who would we do it with is me, Ben. Ben Hardy. Where's Ben? Okay. Yeah. So we did a. Not only did we do a Facebook, I mean a podcast recording, we did it on Facebook Live. So we Facebook lived the recorded podcast. And Sam was like, you know, I mean, here's the thing. The cool thing about Sam, he's really thoughtful. He really wants to do. I mean, he. And that sort of thing. And I also was like, just, let's just do it. Like, you know, so much stuff. And it was great. It was great.

And yeah, thank you for that, by the way. It really. That was actually one of the things that it kind of broke me out of, the fear of getting on camera because I was like, oh, that, that was, that was easy.

Yeah.

But it's the fear of trying something for the first time because there's the unknown.

Yeah.

And you just broke that for me. So I'm deeply appreciative.

Yeah. And people loved it. It was, it was awesome. So. So you talk. I mean, I mentioned it in the bio. You had a lot of stress and depression in your life. So can you talk about that and lessons you learned from it?

Yeah. So, I mean, everyone has, everyone goes through pain and trauma. Right. No one gets to avoid that.

I honest to God think a lot of the most successful entrepreneurs that success and achievement is driven from, not some great inspiration from, but some from deep pain, deep trauma, some very difficult adverse situations. And they parlay it into creativity and entrepreneurship.

Yeah. I think because when you go through something traumatic, you kind of just have this. You don't want anyone else to go through that. So you just start creating things based on that to improve the world. That was literally what happened with myself. I mean, from a young age I was brought up in a single parent household. My mother's family were very abusive and toxic. I had a friend commit suicide at 15, which had a massive impact on me. I didn't even realize I was going through a breakdown until I think about two or three years ago. My friends were like, oh, you're wearing colours now. Because I wore black from like 2005 until like maybe two, three years ago. My friend got stabbed in the chest this year. You know, it's a lot, it's a lot of things that I've seen or that's happened or that traumas that's been inherited. So with that, I think when I got to a point where I realized that I was going through a depression, one of the main things I wanted to do was just make sure that no one else has to go through it alone and to create a safe place online. And by doing that I knew I had to create something consistent. So through depression, I guess through your darkness, you always find your light. And I don't regret that stage at all. I think it. Well, without it, I wouldn't have been here doing what I'm doing now. So.

Yeah, well, see, you know, I mean, I wouldn't be doing the stuff I'm doing with addiction if I was not an addict. And one of my interests in this is being able to reach addicts through what you guys know, which is one of my motivations here of learning what it is, you know, I'm asking you questions about is how do we take this and build just a really big reach for people that are struggling from my perspective with addiction. So what advice would you give to young people, people here that have kids who want to build a following online and not just a following, but be successful with it?

Okay, so we're going into the age of purpose, right? So people no longer care about what you're wearing or how much stuff you got or how rich you are or who you're standing next to. People care about you, your story and how it's going to impact others and how it's going to make them feel, you know. So if you are trying to go on and trying to start a business online, you need to have a story because there's so many products out there that's already out there. We don't. We don't care. We don't need another jewelry brand. We don't need any other stuff. But if you're coming up a story about why you. Why you created jewelry and why you. Who you. Who you're giving your profits to afterwards, that's most likely to get people on your page. So I would put aside a lot of hours. I would let you know from the jump that it's not easy. You're not going to see anything for the first three to four years. It's a really slow journey. But then after that, it just comes in, it pours.

Well, let's say this, though. You say for the first three or four years, but if someone aligned themselves with, like, you.

Oh, and a visual idea. Yeah. If you have an original idea, then you can be a success overnight. It depends, you know, there's no rules to this. And that's why it's a bit. It's a bit crazy, a bit difficult to understand, and it's a bit difficult to even see the value in it. But I would say to people, dedicate some time, get a camera, record yourself, make as much videos as possible, like vlogging, you know, talk about your story, talk about your past, talk about things you've learned. Get it on social media network with bigger pages. You don't have to come to somebody like myself, you know, 14 million. If you can't afford that, you can go to someone of 100,000 and get them to share. Because if I see something, it doesn't matter if it's come from a page from 100,000, I'll just post it if it's good. Right. You know, so network, just continuously put out content. It's repetitive, but you have to put yourself out there. People need to know what it is about Joe, and why people have to even care about what you have to say.

Yeah. Do you think anyone should care about anything?

I have to say? Yeah, definitely. Your story is really interesting. In fact, we have recreate original content. We're really trying to get into that now. And we sat down with a lot of people. We did a casting call and got people to come in. And the biggest and most engaging pieces of content that we created was with a guy who was addicted to heroin and he's now a property developer. So he turned his life around and we got in, we really got deep. Because I know my audience. My audience is literally myself, you know, like people who have the same lifestyle as me, the same age as me. So I know what we want to hear. We don't want to have the whole pussy footing around addiction. We want to know, what did you do and you was really like desperate for drugs. Yeah, we want to know that. Because kids don't know these things. Everything is sugar coated until these kids get onto the Internet. So why lie to them? Tell them the truth. So when we were having that interview, if you saw the comments, we got like 800,000 views. And the rest of our original content probably gets about 250, 300,000, which is why I was so excited, and still am, to work with yourself and create some content. Because people are really suffering and addiction. We think addiction is just drugs, but it isn't, you know, you know, it's sex, it's drugs, it's habits, it's all kind of things.

It's food, it's Internet.

It's the Internet. It's down to coffee.

No, it is.

It's down to your thoughts. So it's like, if we can tackle that, why not? And, you know, I'm at that point now where as I'm getting older, my audience is getting older as well.

You're 28.

I'm 29. I'm gonna be 30 in three weeks.

Such an old woman here.

Yeah.

So over the hill with this.

I got eggs older than.

Yeah. I mean, for someone on social media, I'm considered like quite Old because I've been on social media for so long. I mean, people come up to me all the time and they say to me, you know, I was on your blog for when I'm 13 and they're like 23 now. And so all the ideologies that I've been raised with I was able to spread onto like Tumblr and Instagram. And it's just nice to know the things that my great grandmother told my mother that I then blogged about has impacted other people's lives, you know, so that's really cool.

What do you think about when you actually, you know, you just were. One day you created the picture quote. Now you see billions of these everywhere. I mean, how do you think about that? You created this sort of thing.

I think with picture quotes, I didn't really, I underestimated the power of what I did. You know, some people just see the picture quote, that's all they see. But what I see is I've seen single handedly changed the way people in my generation communicate, you know, before, for me to open up. I mean, I don't know if anyone believes in star signs. I'm a Scorpio, I don't open up to anybody. So if I'm feeling sad, I can now just find a picture quote, change my display picture to whatever it is that I'm feeling. And I know that somebody, one of my friends is going to be like, oh, what's going on? It removes all of the ice breaking, you know, so we've changed, I've changed the way that we communicate as a people as a, as a generation. It's also ways to, you know, share knowledge as well. I really didn't, I really didn't know what picture quotes was going to do. All I know is that when I first posted it, I just wanted to encourage people. So when I started seeing it on my friends pictures on BlackBerry messenger, I never told any of my friends. It was my blog, you know, for years, you know, because people change when, you know, so people started changing it as their display pictures, sending it to each other when they have things to say that they can't confront. Sending, sending. I mean, I got, we almost have family members that send annoying picture quotes every single day about appreciation and gratitude and stuff. It's just changed the way people communicate and it's incredible.

You know, it's interesting, I think like even myself included growing up, I mean, I remember when I was like 10 years old, I would go out into a field, you know, in the small town in Alpine, Texas, and just literally walk around for all day. I mean, literally all day, with no communication. There was no cell phone. There was no way to contact anyone. And the. I mean, it's like a completely different form of communication of how we communicate today. What are things that adults that are 20, 30 years older that didn't really grow up at 5 years old. When Microsoft. What version was it?

I think it was Windows 95.

Windows 95. Oh, Windows 95. So what are adults oblivious to that they just take for granted in terms of how they talk about social media, how they talk about young people's use of just digital technologies?

The fact that there's quick. Sorry, I'm stuttering. If I need help with something, I can get it instantly, which is amazing. If I'm going through something, I can quickly Google it and I have the results right there. So I think it's just the speed of getting information and knowledge. But I would never trade growing up now to growing up when I was younger, because I think I was the last. I was 80s, baby. So I was like the last of the generations of going to the park and not returning until the street lights go off or, you know, not having to worry about strange people taking you or kidnapping you. We didn't have any of those worries, but now it's just completely different. But I think with social media, what people underestimate the most is the communities that you can create. So even though you're in your room by yourself, especially for young children, you can create communities where you don't feel alone. One of the most impactful things I've ever heard about what my platform was able to do for somebody was when I was on Facebook going through my messages. I don't answer them anymore. I have someone else doing that because it takes so long. But I received a message from a mother whose daughter recently committed suicide, and she thanked me because when she was going through her daughter's laptop, she found a folder called Happiness, and it was full of loads of quotes from my blog. And that was really incredible to know that even though she decided to leave this world, the things that I created actually made her feel happy. So I think that's what a lot of people underestimate about social media, is the communities that you can develop. And, yeah, you know, I think a.

Lot of people underestimate just how much you can impact somebody. If you can get a message out.

And you can reach people, picture quotes, travel really far.

Yeah, totally. Wow. So the good quote, it's all about positivity, how Would we use this in very medieval ways and do just like, the opposite version? If you're like, if the Joker was in this room. I'm totally kidding.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. Yeah.

What strategies did you guys use to build your following? I mean, you got over 14 million on Instagram right now. Is there even more?

It's even more. It's between 23 and 25, but our biggest page has 14.6 million, and we get about 800 million impressions a week. And we grow about 10 to 15,000 new followers every week as well. Yeah. So. I know. Leave it down to the fact that it was an original idea that is nearly eight years old now. We've grown organically. We. Wow. In the beginning, we used to communicate a lot of our audience feedback. Somebody was doing a. Was it listen or die?

Yeah.

Yeah. That was incredible because that's literally what we did. We used to talk to our audience all the time through, like, Google sheets or questions. You know, these things really helped us create better content and then sharing, people would share. We would change our captions to tag friends or tag whatever, and people would tag more. And that's what literally grew our platform as well. So, yeah, I mean, I don't really care about algorithms. You know, when people ask me those things, I'm just like, it doesn't impact me because of how much followers we have and all the formulas that we've created.

Well, you kind of have your own because you've created your own following, literally.

I was in New York one time for New Year's, and it was the first of Jan, maybe one or two o' clock in the morning. I was going back to the hotel with my friends, and I noticed that a lot of the barbershops and convenience stores are still open. And I walked into one and I was heavily drunk, and I was like, guys, it's New Year's close up. Go home, enjoy yourself. And one woman, a vendor outside, she said to me, where are you from? And I said, london. And she goes, okay, do you work 9 to 5? And I was like, yeah. At the time, I was blogging 9 to 5. And she said, over here in the states, we work 24 hours a day. You know, we could work nine to five, then five to three, then three to nine. And I went back home and I changed the way that we distributed content. So I was only distributing it when I was awake, and now it's 24 hours. And that literally changed the whole thing, you know, so overnight we were growing. While I was sleeping, I was making money and these automation.

That's a good little thing, what you just said there.

If you didn't pick up on it, these are all the things like just talking to people. Honestly, a lot of the reasons why we've grown so fast is everything has been organic. Not just the idea, but just the communications and just the advice that we're getting. And we just, we literally eat, breathe this, you know, so I could, I couldn't recreate it. I couldn't, not now. You know, I'm glad that we started when we did, so. Yeah, well.

And of course, your main strategies is consistency.

Well, okay, speaking of algorithms, when I flew to Vegas two months ago to attend defcon, one of the largest hacking conferences, what's really funny about Sam, if.

You actually knew all the weird shit that he does, it's like he just got back from WIM Hof training. I mean, for the umpteenth time, I don't even know. But yeah, but anyway, let's go to defcon. I won't try to throw you off.

No, no, no. But just to comment on that, one of the interesting reactions I get was when I say, when I was in Japan last year training with a ninja in the woods, that always stops people.

Yeah, yeah.

Which actually did happen. But yeah. So I was sitting next to a British hacker who happened to be one of the speakers at DEFCON, and it's a 10 hour flight, so we had about five, six hours of talking about different things. And I mentioned Instagram and I told him what I did with the Instagram stories because that was my secret sauce. I really kind of tried to understand it psychologically. So he was listening, he was like, what exactly are you doing? I mentioned a couple of things. I have like 10 or 11 things that I do, but I mentioned like three of them. And he paused and he's like, you need to give a 10 minutes. You need to give a talk at next year's defcon because you just hacked the Instagram algorithm. I'm like, what are you talking about? And he said, you found the vulnerabilities, you exploited the vulnerabilities, and now you're exposing your content to more people and now they're following you because they like your content. But once you do that, the Instagram representatives at DEF CON are going to patch it up. So you need to make a choice. If you want to give the talk next year, you need to give away the secret sauce. I'm like, that's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. So. So that's regarding the Instagram story. Yeah. Because we have this conversation.

You guys should watch his. They're actually really good. I mean, they're very thoughtful and you'll learn a lot just by watching. They're very short. What's the average length?

Well, it's 15 seconds, but I try. This could be.

No, but I mean the longer ones that when you do the. I've watched, like, I don't know.

Are you talking about IGTV or Instastores?

Yeah, yeah.

IgTV is about 10 minutes. I break it down into five minute segments. I try to minimize the time that I utilize. I don't try to maximize it. I don't try to use all the time that Instagram gives me so I can build the trust with the followers that I'm not gonna take all their time, just the time I think they need. So with igtv, I just do five minutes. With Insta stories, I try to trim it down to 10 seconds so that when I. So they trust me. So that when I actually give them a 15 second story, a video on the story, they would trust that it is worth watching the whole way through, rather than just five seconds, which is what I do sometimes. So I try to. Yeah, that's one thing I do. The other thing is keeping them. If we're talking about strategy on the story, it's very important to be as unpredictable in a predictable way. So be unpredictable.

You need to stop that. Right?

You need to be unpredictable in a predictable way. That's perfect. So people need to have a theme in your story. So my story is about. And this ties into something else. I think it's very important for you to create a very strong contrast between the post and the story. The posts is basically what you do. The story is who you are. Don't teach in the story. So the stories about my events, magic convention, the interviews that I have just for fun. I mean, a lot of the experts that I meet are becoming friends as well. Music, singing, travel, family. They get to see who I am, which helps them trust me and learn and listen more to what I teach in the posts. So it's very important to create that contrast. If you can get people to say, I never knew he would. He does that. I never knew that about him. That, that helps them kind of. That's a pleasant surprise for them that they keep looking forward to in the story. Okay, I want to mention something about time. You remember the time thing? Oh, the. Okay. I think it was January or February. We were talking about different things. And then you were like, you know when you hit something like 50,000 followers? And at that time, I think I was still about 17. She said, I'll take you to a venue, I'll take you to a stadium so you can actually understand what 50,000 looks like, what 50,000 people look like. And it stuck with me. We never really did that. We haven't done that. But the idea stuck with me. And about two months ago, I attended a soccer match in London. And at that time, I had. Three months ago, I think I had about 85, 86,000. And I remembered Megan and I remembered what she said, and it was about 20,000 people. I'm like, I have four times that amount following me. And it was quite intimidating, grounding, humbling. And then we had that conversation.

There's just more evidence that humans are.

Monkeys that drive cars in a way. So I came across an article in the New York Times talking about how people have a hard time associating or linking themselves or having a proper perspective of numbers. So they wanted to teach people, what's the difference between a million and a billion in that article? So they did. So they said, basically, okay, so let's link it to time. So what's. Okay, so 11, 1 million seconds versus a billion seconds. And 1 million seconds was about 12 days. A billion seconds was 32 years. And it was just mind blowing. Mind blowing how we don't. And I think the idea of linking that was really grounding to me and it made me focus more on the content. But just to add one more thing to the content, if you. Okay, if you want to start today, growing your page, what would you do? First of all, I'd look at the bio and I'd ask myself three questions. Because these are the three questions that need to be answered in the bio. Who you are, what you do. Why should they follow you? These are the three things. Why would they follow you? What are you offering them? The other thing is promote the page, not the product. A lot of people focus on the product rather than the page, and the page becomes a bridge. And if the page becomes the bridge, no one's going to follow you. And if no one's going to follow you, no one's going to share your content to their friends. No one's going to constantly see your stories and connect with you and see. So you don't have that longevity with them because they're there just to click on that link with that icon pointing down so that they would just leave. Build your page by Promoting the page, not the product. And you will have loyal customers over time. And if somebody doesn't buy, they will buy eventually. Because you're investing so much, you're making the page so educational, so entertaining for them that they keep coming back. They keep sharing your posts, they share your stories, they physically talk and they show their phone. They're like, check out this guy on my phone. So I think that would be very valuable. The other thing is theme and pattern. You need to have a pattern on your page. If they don't see a proper pattern, they won't feel safe. They need to see a pattern in the first nine photos. They need to see a pattern that you keep repeating. It has to be. It has to be. It has to be repetitive enough for them to predict and feel safe, but not repetitive in a way that bores them. So the content is what is different, but the pattern is always the same. Lastly is the theme. You gotta have a theme. Models, photos of them, selfies the whole time, a dog the whole time. But when you see somebody that has food, a dog, a selfie, a quote, a video, it's very uncomfortable. It's not predictable. It might be unpredictably predictable, but it makes them feel uneasy, uncomfortable, and confused as to, should I follow, should I, should I not follow this guy? Because it's not clear, there's no clarity in the page. And if I need to think so hard and I need to put a lot of work in deciding whether I want to follow someone or not, then the easy decision is to not follow. I'm just going to walk away. So in a nutshell, these are like a couple of different things that I would recommend. Very good.

Do you have anything you could say that was better than what he just said? Because if you guys could, like, I know you're very dear friends, but if I could somehow create a little bit of animosity where you're trying to one up each other, it would make for much more. We could. Yeah, it would make for much more.

He actually mentioned most of it. Yeah. Honestly, I was sitting there and I was thinking, can you not say anything else? So, yeah, I would say. Next question.

How often do you, like, slapping him or like, shut up, Sam? Do you say that a lot?

No. I mean, we meet. We meet once. Once a week.

Sometimes once a week for about five, six hours.

Yeah. And I guess we just exchange. I mean, Sam's teaching me a lot about mind taming and I guess I'm teaching him a lot about social media. Sam's created his Own formula. And I've created years and years of formulas. So I'm just sitting back and it's just nice to see, you know, Sam, with all of this intellect, without social media. It's good.

Thank you. There's one thing that I have to mention, which is for a very long time, my page was basically quotes because you got, okay, 40% of engaged videos are 40% higher. Engagement do videos. That's something you gotta do videos. You gotta do more videos. Quotes are more appealing to people than just anything else. Just a photo. Writing captions, writing in the caption gives them more content. But for a very long time, my page was basically quote, video, quote, video. So it's like, yeah, now for six months, you've been trying so hard, you've been begging me, like, please give people a break. Do a white background quote rather than just the photos. And I was resisting that for a long time because the page is about the quotes that come out of my photos or the photos of the photographers that are now sending me to see what quote I can extract from their photos. So that was the whole thing. And I was resistant for a very long time.

Yeah, he was.

And yeah, okay, you don't have to. So basically I decided to try that.

Because, you know, 100 years ago, people were trying to figure out how they could travel like a few miles. And now we're.

The big issue resisting is, should I add a white background on our color?

Yeah. I mean, AC didn't even exist. I don't even think they invented toilet paper till the end of the 1800s. I don't know what the hell people did before that. Now we're like, over what? Anyway.

So when I started doing that, I realized the power of that because I'm giving people a break from color. And when I do, when I post a white, and then when I. When I go back to the color, I'm giving them a break from the white background. I could still.

It allows people to appreciate your photography even more because people, they're not going to. They don't care about your photography until you give them a reasons why. So it's like a break for the content and white background quotes. They're just easy to read. I'm obsessed with fonts, so I would say the best font to use is like, like Georgia or Times New Roman. These are really great fonts. Not too large, not too small, readable. Even if you come out of the picture itself and you're just scrolling through the feed, make it big enough so that you don't actually have to click into the picture. And like you said of the captions, when you click into the picture, you get to see the caption which emphasizes the quote, which allows people to understand how you got to that quote and how you think. So then that allows people to leave their comments and then people engage. Engage with others and.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I mean, anything else?

Well, I wanted to say something related to the white background and the color. You can always use video for your quote. So one thing I do, and there are two tips I can share about that. It actually made it easier for me because there are two ways I write quotes. One is from the photo, and the other is when I'm recording ideas, writing for the book. Whatever I'm doing, I'm basically writing any quote that comes out. I was like, that's a good quote. I have a list of quotes. So with the white background, I can't ask myself, what does the white background inspire me to write about? It's just. It's like a brick. It doesn't make sense. So that day is a break for my mind to just take one quote from that list and please it there. So it gives me a break. The two tips I would recommend for the story, One would be screen recording. If nobody's using screen recording, Actually, when I showed it to Megan, she was like, I've never seen anybody use that Screen recording. Screen record. This is something so easy. I connect with other influencers. I connect with. I screen record one of their stories that I like and I post it on my story, linking it to them and commenting on how much I like it because I like it. And suddenly I start connecting with them, but I get more content on my page. I also screen record. On your voice memo app, you can click and record and then play it back and screen record it. And you could chop it up through cut story to like four different videos and post those four videos on Instagram on the story. And people love that audio because it's personal, because it's something I actually record. It's not in a studio. Yeah, I think. I mean, what else? Yes, I post a quote. I'm just trying to put as much as I can.

No, no, this is great. You guys finding this valuable.

So I post whenever I post a quote on the story. Sorry. When I post a quote on my page, I promote it to my followers and to everyone else on the story mode as a video. So I turn the quote into a video with music in the background or I turn it into a video with music in the Background and me fleshing out what that quote is for 15 seconds. And so people know that there's a post coming, that there's a post that actually was posted. So it's a promotion for the people. Now how can I promote other or how can I promote it to people that aren't following me on the story? That's a bigger topic. But use location stories, location tags and hashtags. Every single video, if you just watch my stories, every single one has location, but you can't see the location. I minimize it. And this is the only one I'll mention for now, just for time. Part of one of the hacks. Basically. Basically, if I'm in London, I don't put the location London, I put the location. Let's say I posted 10 videos and I'm in London. I'm not gonna post, I'm not gonna put the location London in all those videos. I'm gonna put Dubai, Mumbai, Saudi Arabia, New York, Los Angeles, because those are the target. I just want to target more people, but to avoid confusing my followers because they're gonna be. They know I'm in London and they're gonna see New York and Mumbai, they're gonna be confused. I minimize it until it disappears, but it still counts. To the people that aren't following me, does that make sense? That's it.

Very cool. Very cool. Well, so since you've posted a bazillion quotes, do you have a favorite quote?

Was that Nelson Mandela? One of Nelson Mandela's speeches about our deepest fear is that we are not inadequate. It's that we are powerful beyond measure.

Yeah, the Marianne Williamson.

Yeah, that's. That, that's on my wall. Because I deal with a lot of like overthinking or self doubt. So, you know, I think sometimes I think, am I being too much of Meghan? Am I out shining people? No, I'm not. No. It's not my fault. I have all of this greatness, you know, and I have to express that and I encourage everybody else to do that as well.

Now that you're better than most of your friends, do you rub that in their face?

Never. Never. Never. No. Actually, a lot of my friends really encourage the journey and stuff, but they all have their own passion. So we're never conflicting on anything.

No.

And look, I know I say joke. So out of all the stuff you've done, what are a couple of stories of how that you're most, I guess you feel really great about or of how your. What you've done is helped people and Influenced people. What are some. I mean, you shared that one story, but what else?

I mean, in regards to our clients, we work with authors, we work with motivational speakers, we work with really cool brands and create really great partnerships. So I mentioned Jay Shetty is one of our clients, taking him from 100,000 to 1.4. We worked with a girl because our prices are quite steep, depending. But we don't like to alienate people that can't afford that. It's not part of our ethics at all. So there was a girl called Nadjwa Zabeem. She's a writer in Canada, and she came to us with 200 followers. She was literally on 200 followers and a small budget. And we said to her, okay, we can post maybe once or twice a week of this budget. And in the space of a year, she's grown to 780,000 followers. And her life has completely changed. Completely. She's doing speaking events. She. I think she was on Forbes. I'm not sure. Lewis Howes, we've worked with Brendan Burchard. We work with VaynerMedia all the time. So we have really great clients. I guess when we go into what we actually do, the business model, I could explain more.

Yeah, no. So, yeah. So what is. What is your business model? And then I'll open it up for some questions for people.

Sure.

So surface level. We have a motivational platform. We have 32 million followers. We create unique content that empowers and encourages and motivates our audience. That's the surface underneath. We have a agency, we have a merchandise company, and we are going into publishing. So with our agency, we work with really cool brands. We work with authors, writers, motivational speakers. Anybody that has a story, that wants to sell, a product we work with, we have been able to hack the way we gain our audience's attention. So if you go onto my page, you would never see an advert. You wouldn't even know. We basically really dislike the marketing model as it stands. So what we do instead is that we work with each client and we create really dope content. Dope means cool. We create really cool content that inspires, educates, and empowers our audience, and then we provide them with the product that we're trying to sell.

No one would ever call Brendan Burchard dope, would they?

I don't know. They'll call Lewis, though.

I think they call him a dork, but I don't know if they call him a dork.

Actually, Brendan Burchard was a really and still is we still work with him. He's a very interesting case. I mean, I won't speak too much about what he does, but he's based on business. And what we do with him is that we try to speak more about the emotion and what people can get and how they can improve themselves and their lives. And then we sell his product. So we find that even though we're advertising to our clients, they're really just still taking as much as they would from any other content that we put up. So this results into high engagement, which then results into high sales. So all I do is test. Last year, I created a jewelry store. I posted a picture once a day and I made £300,000, like net profit. And you know, we're doing the same with clothing, so. Yeah, with motivational speakers, it's fairly simple. We just take clips of their work and then we just post it on our page and they grow, you know, One of our best case studies was with a guy I was expecting explaining today at lunch, his child is. He's like three or four years old and he has an obsession of the gym and fitness. So we took one of his videos and we posted it on our Instagram and He got like 4 to 5 million views and he grew 100,000 followers in a day, which was incredible. And that was literally because we were able to watch a child struggle to jump on a box. You know, he had many, many attempts and then when he finally jumped, everybody was excited. We received about 38,000 comments and he just. His following grew and it's grown massively since then. So, you know, depending on the content, we like to create things that's actually going to teach or empower people or inspire them. And that's the difference between our agency and other people's. So our ads are very seamless. Nobody really knows. We wouldn't want to just say, here's a product, Buy, buy, buy. You know, for instance, if I was working with somebody who's selling a cream, for example, right. What we would do is that not only would we take his cream and we would create like a cool one or two minute video demonstrating what that cream does. We would sit down with him and we would talk about his journey, his parents, his story, his upbringing, how he got to hear what it is that he passionate about, why he's creating this, and then we distribute that to our audience. They fall in love with him and then they'll fall in love with his product. And that's what we've learned. So that's with the agency with the merchandise, we just test. We're testing all different products because we're trying to. When we, when we work with brands that are selling products, we don't just work with anybody. We always say to people, we're not money motivated. It's all based on our following. At the end of the day, the ethos is to give this world good energy. And I personally just still want to be able to provide a safe place for people that are going through things that they need encouragement for. So the last thing I'd want anyone to do is go into the good quote and feel like I'm forcing them to buy something. So if we're going to promote a product, are you giving parts of the profits to a cause? What is the product even about? These are the things that we explain to our audience. So yeah, and in regards to publishing, we work with, I mean, we source all of our content from unknown writers, major writers. We've been able to see writers go from zero to like 400,000. You know, it's been crazy. Over the last eight years, we've been responsible for the sales of over 250,000 ebooks and books in general. Over the last 17 months, we've worked with some really great authors and created some crazy campaigns. Our simplest campaign is literally taking a picture of the page of the book and highlighting the part that inspires us the most and posting that. When we post that, people just directly read the highlighted version and each post allows us to be able to sell about 500 to 1,000 books each time. So it's really crazy. But then again, I can't sell a book about gardening. I could only sell books about things that empower people. That's it. As long as everything stays native to our content, then I can guarantee great sales.

That's fantastic. What about this idea? If you think this is good, like if I was to take your quotes and I was to create the polka dot quote page and I just put polka dots. So pictures of myself and polka dots, and I don't create anything except polka dots.

Yeah.

You think that would be a big hit?

I think I would block you.

What if you started the polka dot quote, though?

I think people would block me.

Yeah, that would be too damn dope.

Yeah.

Only dopes use dope. Remember that joke? Okay, so what's your perspective? And then this is. Now I want to open up for questions. What's your perspective on the social influencer industry? I mean, there's a lot of people that are wanting to do that and be Famous and stuff.

So what's your view for this?

Good and bad?

The great thing about it is that with an investment of two to four years online, you can change your life completely and you can have full control of your life. It's almost like being an independent artist. Once you create a platform and trust and love and you're showing the consistency of the content that you're providing and you're actually giving people a service as to how they feel better about themselves. Whether it is if you're encouraging them or you're making them laugh or you're educating them. If you're doing that, these people who, who are following you and investing their time into you, they will then purchase anything that you're selling. So that's incredible. And influencers don't have to look a certain way at all. I'm trying to encourage my mum to get on Instagram and actually give like a different perspective of advice, you know, because you don't have to be aesthetically pleasing as what you think people want you to look like. Just give your soul, just, you know, just give people a reason to feel better. So with social media influencers, you've got motivational speakers, you've got people that are taking pictures of them wearing clothing in their house and brands are just bombarding them with clothing. You've got kids, I mean, there's a child at the moment, I think he's 7, and he's got a YouTube channel of like 14 million followers. I can't remember his name. He's making like $200,000 a month, you know, so the social media, it's a.

Way underpaid 7 year old for that level of influence. I mean, come on, let's.

But the fact that you can get closer to your customers for using the right people. Customers. So it's. Using the right people is incredible. It allows you, with the insights on Instagram and social media, you're able to really tap into who your audience are. So if you can find the right influence influencer to sell your product, you've won. You know, you have.

What's the dark side of social media? Because there are like a lot of reports of people that you know on Facebook a lot that increases depression and stuff like that.

Yeah, it does. I mean, because it depends. My easy answer to that is to just unfollow everybody that's not promoting wellness. You know, like, my feed is fantastic. My feed is full of great stuff. Like I, I was having that conversation with the lady in the back there. We were talking yesterday about you know, you don't have to follow people that make you feel bad about yourself, you know, but social media in itself, it can create a lot of anxiety, a lot of comparing, comparison, a lot of depression. Sometimes unfiltered content is able to seek through so people are able to see things that they're not meant to. You can see a lot of killing online. You can see a lot of, really a lot of dark content depending on where you're at.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I remember reading an article a couple years ago where there's like a couple hundred thousand people in the Philippines and different parts of the world that work for the big social media companies. Far more employees than are even employed by the actual main companies that their job is to keep about scrape about 80% of the worst of the worst stuff that's online. I mean the most horrendous thing, and it was an interview with one person that like, it lasted like six months because it just destroys them. They're literally staring at the most horrendous things that humans can do all day long. But a lot of it seeps through. Like you can find, you know, anything.

Yeah, you really can, you know. So my advice would be to just monitor who you're following and that's it. You know, spend as little time as you can on social media as well. And I know it's coming from myself, but go outside more while you can.

How many hours do you spend a day on it?

Nine hours a day.

Nine hours?

Yeah, nine hours a day. I try my best to not let it exceed 10, but the more I'm able to delegate. I think outsourcing is my hardest thing at the moment. Finding the right person to take over the tasks, which is really difficult. It's literally taken like.

Well, it's interesting here with you is, you know, now you're doing that for other people so they don't have to put in all that time. But it's now you getting yourself to that position, owning the company and stuff.

Yeah, because my business partner is a full time lawyer and I do this full time. And so it's literally myself doing all of this stuff. And then we've got like some staff that work part time. So, you know, I would, I would advise people to not spend too much time on social media because you can actually forget the real world. I was having a conversation with some of the crew backstage and one of the guys was saying how he doesn't like going places where everyone's just like this and it's just, it's bad. We have a thing where if we go out for a meal with our friends, everyone has to put their phone down and then whoever picks their phone up first has to pay the majority of the bill. So, yeah, that's my advice.

I would just, like, have to go to dinner with people. I don't have to pay all the time. That's the problem with being rich, you know. Just kidding.

Just kidding.

So questions from you guys for Megan or Sam. Let's do a few. Just make sure you have the mic.

Well, thank you first of all, for sharing your story. That has resonated with me, having built my own Instagram community, you know, organically as well. I noticed on a lot of your posts you have a prompt like, you know, if you agree, say yes. And I found with a prompt or a question, you know, tagged on to your. Whatever you're posting. That actually helps a lot with engagement and it's helped me, like, encourage a lot of discussion with it within that, you know, the comment thread and also, you know, build community. Have you felt that it's also helped your community with that prompt? Is that the reason why you always say yes?

Definitely. The whole, the whole aspect of the page is about community. We even have a hashtag where we're speaking to people. We call everyone who follows us the good Vibe tribe. You know, so when we're like, hey, tribe, what we doing today? Or check out this quote or check out this writer, because people feel a part of the community, they will sweep over to that writer. So I would encourage to continuously ask your audience question questions, whether it's in the captions or if it's in the stories. Always ask. Never stop asking. Never allow your audience to feel that your page is run by a robot because then they'll unfollow.

You. Guess I thought that was a really nice distinction about use the post to show what you do and then the stories to do who you are. What's the. Well, that was. How do you delineate between live and igtv and are you doing different content for the two? Or like, what's the. Like how do you mix in posting a video on your feed versus just doing like igtv.

Okay, with igtv, I, I do it once a week. I promote it on my story in advance and then when it's out, it's a swipe up as well. So when it comes out, I post another story with a swipe up so people can go to my igtv, which is on the same page anyway. But I Still, I want to make it easy for them to access that. The other thing is, once the IGTV episode comes out, I extract a minute and post that temporarily on my page and promote that for a few days and then archive it so it doesn't damage the pattern. But for a few days, I'm actually promoting the IGTV video until the next one comes out and so forth. For Instagram Live. I haven't been doing Instagram Live for a while, but. But if I were to go back to that, it was very random. And that was one of the ways to break the cycle. Because when you're posting as a video on a story, you can easily watch it before and then delete it. If it doesn't look good, you can edit it. But if it's Instagram Live, there is a shift in fear. I mean, I've been doing videos for a while, and then when I started doing Instagram Live, the. The first time I pressed that button, I have no idea how long it took me to press that button because, like, oh, my God, I can't edit this. I can't rehearse this. I don't know what's going to happen. I might fumble, I might fall. Anything can go wrong. But once I went past that, it was a way for me to train myself to be okay. But I haven't done it for a very long time, for at least six months. If I were to go back to it, I would definitely do it as either an interaction with the audience or. Which I haven't done. But I'd recommend, if you guys want to do it, to start doing it, have create an interview, interview somebody for 30 minutes or for 15 to 20 minutes, because that's a lot. 15 to 20 minutes once a week on Instagram, as an Instagram Live, and announce it in the post, announce it and promote it in the post story. And then a lot more people will tune in that are following you and that aren't following you. And there's a lot of good content that will come out of that. It's a split screen. You time it with the person and that person has their followers watching and your followers watching. So it's an exchange. It's like a. It's an, you know, like a video podcast on Instagram. I would do that. I haven't done that, but I would.

Can I just add to that, that as well? I was with the head of YouTube UK a few months ago, and his advice to me across all social media, whether it's Facebook Live, YouTube Live, or Instagram Live, do live as much as possible. And definitely next year, that's going to be part of my model to do that in regards to, like, live shows with podcasts, as Sam was explaining, before you can speak to somebody, split the screen and allow your audience to see the conversation between. Between you. Anytime we go live, we go top live in the country or the state. So if I was to go live right now, it would be live, top live in Arizona, you know, and so.

Why don't we just do that right now?

You can do that right now. Yeah. So with that, when you go top live, you are seen from anybody in that place, top of their Instagram for however long until someone else, like, beats you, you know? So if you could go live as much as possible, but only when you have something substantial to show people don't want to see you, like, eating and talking or with your friends. So going live with a podcast, as this woman here said, it's a really great idea. Let them know that not only are you doing your Instagram page, but you're actually doing something else, you know, really cool. So if I was to go live, it would be a podcast or a conversation or interview or what I'm gonna do right now.

So what should we do?

I'm just gonna film you.

Really?

Yeah. Hold on, let me. Okay, so.

Just to be clear, we're on Facebook Live, and now we're gonna be on Instagram Live within the Facebook Live. That's so meta.

Okay.

Okay, so start live video checking the connection. So I'm just going to show the room quickly.

This is the awesome Genius Network room of amazing entrepreneurs. Maybe put the lights up. Look at all these handsome people. Yes, yes.

So as you can see, we're now 226. Okay, look, we're top live now. So we're top live in Arizona.

Top live in Arizona. Oh, my God. This is fantastic.

So would you like to say something?

Well, I would like to say it's been awesome sitting here, having an amazing discussion with Sam and Megan from the Good quote. You know, everyone here, but everyone watching knows that, and they've been dropping some wisdom bombs to the Genius Network audience, which is a tribe of tribal leaders, and it's been pretty awesome. And I'm. It's been a privilege to be the first time to actually interview you, Megan, because you've never done this before. And I was introduced to you. You from Sam and. Yeah, so. And all these people here, they're some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, doing all kinds of Good stuff, helping people. We got some interesting people here. We got Chris Voss over here, who wrote an amazing book called Never Split the Difference. He was the lead hostage negotiator for the FBI. And then we've got this dude who's 77 years old, probably our oldest. He's got socks older than me. His name is Joel. Joel Weldon. What's that? Yes. Yeah, he does. And yeah, Anyone want to do a shout out to, like, mom or anything?

Okay.

But it's been awesome here. Yeah, it's been great. Genius network. Check it out. It's the best place in the world.

So I've ended that. I'm definitely going to save it. We had just. That was under two minutes. We had 2,382 people viewing us, and we were top live in Arizona. So. Yeah, that's pretty cool.

That is.

Thank you.

That was great.

You're welcome.

Okay. I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here. Go ahead. You're over here. Do it now.

Come on.

Thank you. Watch him.