The One About Consumer Guides, Books and Business Cards - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #99

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast. Hey, everybody. It's Dean Jackson and me, Joe Polish.

That's right.

Here we are.

Yep.

Piranha World headquarters.

Where are we at? We're in the.

In the library conference. The world famous library.

Why is it world famous?

There's a lot of stuff. You may remember seeing this library in such famous videos as the Focus Factory tour, where Joe took us on a tour of his Focus Factory. And this room is surround. There's a lot of books in this room.

There's a very, very famous people in this room.

Yes. And there have been some very famous people in this room, both on the shelves and in these chairs.

That is true.

Yeah.

All right, so since people can't see it.

Right. You know, we'll just talk about it and move on.

All right, so you were gonna say something related to a Prince song, since this is episode 99. So how's that gonna be?

Yeah, this is. That we're gonna party like it's episode 99. Right. That was your joke, and now you're trying to, like, put it off on me to make it my joke in case it doesn't work.

Right?

Yeah. Nonetheless, we'll party like it's episode 99. Because it is episode 99.

So that's a. That's a pretty big deal. 99 episodes of this. And we're gonna stop after 100, right?

That's it. No more after 100.

Yeah.

I got Jesse working on the. The episode 51 to 100 yearbook.

Wow. Well, so, okay, well, here's. Here's.

It's been a good run.

We're gonna do a. Yeah, we're gonna do a breakthrough blueprint tomorrow. So we can't really talk about what took place at that one. Maybe we'll do a live one there. Kind of like we've done before. Maybe we'll see. Or after we'll.

The wrap up show.

We'll feel the people out.

Yeah.

And I gotta fly to. I gotta fly to, you know, Chicago the day after so I can go to my.

My home.

Yeah.

Yeah. Because you know how much I like being at home. Right.

So for the people listening, you know, I said, okay, well, let's talk about this Control Tool audit. I have this really cool piranha marketing tool that's called the Control Tool Audit, which. It has all these different forms of delivery systems. And we've. We've mentioned this and talked about this.

Before, but you know what? It reminds me of seeing this whole Long list. Like, do you remember, like around episode like 11 or 12 or something, we decided we'd make a list of all the things we could talk about, and we were going to have an episode where we just picked some things off the list, like the grab bag episode.

Right.

And then we ended up doing two episodes on number one on the list, which was free recorded messages. We had like 50 things on the list and we did two episodes on number one.

And people love what I feel, love.

Those, but they're so deep, you know, and so this was my. What I said, let's just focus on these. On these four. You know, for this episode.

I. I always thought about that, like, with all the consulting and work and stuff that I've done in the fitness and exercise industry and stuff, you know, I remember having a conversation with Bill Phillips years ago about, you know, he had a magazine years ago called Muscle Media 2000. Then it just became Muscle Media. Then he sold the company, then it eventually went away. And, you know, we were having this conversation about bodybuilding magazines when he first, you know, got started. Obviously he was reading everything. And then he got to a point where he kept. He just quit reading other competitors magazines because he just didn't feel it was. It would get him thinking about competition.

And stuff in ways to match what other people are doing.

Yeah, he just felt he knew more about how to market than any. Anything else. So I even have this sort of influence. And, you know, but there was a lot of bodybuilding magazines and there was a lot of workout magazines, and there still are. You know, there always has been. And, you know, it's. It's not like there's that many different forms of weightlifting. You know, there's. There's squat, bench press, deadlift, or the main strength moves, and then there's, you.

Know, curls and presses, all different variations on that.

But there's a.

But there's an infinite number of ways to talk about them.

Right, right. You know, and of course, you know, so it's. It's kind of like. The funny thing with marketing is marketing, in my opinion, has way more tentacles attached to it than even all the different forms of exercise. Right. Because there's. It's such an expansive industry, so we could pick any category and go deep with it.

Yeah.

And the reason that people that study and become a master at marketing and, and put in their time and learn about it and why they have such a great advantage is that it is so expansive that it gives you. Just knowing a lot about direct mail, as an example is A huge thing. I just recently was at Singularity University for a two day event recording a video product with Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis. And it was my idea to put this thing together and do it and it was awesome. They had all these people there. Dan Sullivan was there.

Yeah.

But in Singularity, is this like incredible? And there was one of the guys that was. There was Richard Vigory who's just literally.

I know Dan and I've had, when we had lunch, we've talked about Richard Vigory. He's good friends with Dan. Yeah, yeah.

And he's in Strategic coach.

Right.

And he's a, I mean he's a legend in the marketing world.

The first time you'd met him.

No, no, no. I've known him for several years.

Okay.

And he's, he's just a brilliant dude. And you know, so we're talking about direct mail and nonprofits. And he had talked about how the top nonprofits that do fundraising, the over 90% of them still bring in. 90%, not 90% of them, 90% of their revenue still comes from direct mail.

Right on.

Not from Internet, not from social media, not from all this stuff. And I was in. Richard Rossi was right there. We were talking. He goes, yeah, he goes, direct mail is the new thing. You know, he said it kind of jokingly, but it made me really think about. My God, you know, if you just think about that, that how valuable it would be today to become an expert in direct mail.

Right.

And there was another guy who was from India who had the top infomercial company in India, like a giant multimillion dollar business where they dub over products that are successful in different ways and they sell them there. And he was asking me about, you know, and he does direct mail.

You know, they do the shamwow.

I don't think we're going to get talk about shamwow. I met that guy once at a, at a Virgin Unite event. Very strange, Very strange guy. But anyway, so, you know, I was sitting there thinking, all these people that are studying and learning marketing, listening to our podcast, reading whatever it is they're, they're learning, like how many people focus on becoming an expert online, you know, and all the stuff you can do with social media and with apps and everything else and about all of the available opportunities with just crafting a well crafted letter to a appropriate targeted list. That money will never be realized or made because they just discount it. They just don't realize it. And so as it goes to, you know, my whole Point about, pick one of these subjects. We could talk about any of these things for two weeks because they're deep. I mean, to go really, really deep with something, you know, and in order to be good at direct mail, I mean, you literally, there's no one hour course. I mean, you're gonna. You're gonna read a lot of shit. You're gonna spend hundreds of hours, you know, before you even get to where you're probably really pretty good, you know. Now if you have smart people that, like, can get you the right list or you know, how to create your own list, and then you have a really great sales letter and, you know, I mean, not saying you can't make money right out of the gate.

Right.

Because you can. It's just really knowing all the nuances, though. So, like, anything, episode 99, hopefully we have quite a few people that have listened to every episode prior to this.

I think we do. Yeah.

And those are the people that, you know, they invested over 99 hours of their life listening to, you know, me and you babble about nonsense. Mostly me babbling. They're at a huge advantage for building, growing your business. And, you know, keep doing it, keep studying this stuff because it's. It's taken us for every hour we spend doing a podcast, there's probably, you know, several hundred hours attached to each episode of what we had to do to learn about the crap that we're talking about there. And that's. And that's assuming that any of this is even any good that we're talking about. You know, I mean, it might take us. We might have to go another 10 years, you know, to learn all this so we can really talk about useful stuff. Right. So now that I've eaten up a good nine minutes or so of this episode setting it up, let's. Let's go into the things you marked. You said free report, consumer guides, business cards, books, guarantees, you know, some things that we can talk about.

I was looking at that list. I was looking for the things that would be, like, actionable that somebody could do pretty quickly. You know, I got my list too. Right here. No, that's very cute.

Yeah. So Dean actually made a list for me and put it here in case I forgot.

This is really rare. Like the 99 episodes. How many times have we actually had, like, a written list of topics?

Yeah, it's happened.

It has happened. It has happened.

Not that much. Okay, so let's first start with what is a free report in a consumer guide? Why would somebody want to do such a Thing?

Well, I mean, we've talked about these forever and, you know, we both started using that concept of consumer awareness guides and free reports as the very first thing that we did. Like, the very first thing you did was your consumer awareness, this guide to carpet cleaning.

Right.

And the very first thing I did was the guide to Halton Hills real estate prices. And it was really interesting that there's a subtlety about the two different approaches, you know, in that the, my approach has been about offering something that's just going to get somebody to, that's going to compel them to raise their hand, offering information to them without any sense of commercial intent in it, as opposed to like a consumer awareness guide to buying carpet cleaning or to buying a car or to where the express intent of it is that you're, you're going to be buying something as a result of it, you know.

Well, let's, let's just stop for just a second, sir, when you say commercial intent, because some people like. Well, isn't everything going to have commercial intent?

Well, it may. And here's the thing, though, is that you can, there's a, there's a difference between, I've talked about it before, we can talk about a little bit more here, a little bit more in depth and apply it to this concept. But there's a difference between compelling and convincing. And there's a sort of selflessness attached to providing information. So, you know, an example for the guide to Halton Hills real estate prices is really about offering somebody who is looking for a house in Halton Hills the information that they're looking for to gain the knowledge about the number one thing that's on their mind. Well, how much house can I get for my money in Halton Hills? Because it was an area where people would move sort of to from the city. They'd move out. It was like, you know, about 40 minutes from the city. And it's like people who work in New York and live in Connecticut. It's that kind of a thing. Right. Like a little bit out in the closer to the country, rolling hills, that whole thing. So not there wasn't a lot of, of information or access to information that people had at the time about what, you know, how much our houses in Georgetown or in Halton Hills, if you wanted to know, you'd have to drive out to Georgetown and you'd go into a real estate officer, you'd pick up the local real estate paper and you'd get to see, get a sense of what the prices were or go to the open houses. But I started advertising in a magazine, a homes magazine, went all around Toronto, on the west side of Toronto, and it offered the free guide to Halton Hills real estate prices. Because that's the thing that people would, would want to know. And that's different than offering the free consumer awareness guide to buying a house in Georgetown. See the difference that it's like, there's a. It's like the outer ring, you know, of the offer. It's all cheese. There's nothing. It's the cheese that, that people are going to, that are going to want. And in addition to that, I love the consumer awareness guide as a supplement as something that is going to be used in profit activator number three. Educate and motivate your prospects to meet you. Right. So if I were doing like, I know with your carpet cleaning, one, very valuable, very successful. And if I were overlaying the, the, you know, the free offer, the compelling offer thing, looking at who are the target markets for that, if it were allergies or pet owners or something like that, where it was offering some kind of information about allergies to get somebody who was interested in controlling the allergens in their environment to raise their hand. And by virtue of doing that, now we're giving them that information that they wanted and educating them about, about carpet cleaning. Because that's going to be one of the things that is one of the easiest things they can do to control the allergens in their house. Right, right. And so there's so many different ways of, of doing that. Like, we've seen so many different applications of the, the free reports and consumer awareness guides like Adrian Bannister, who's going to be coming here for our breakthrough blueprint event. They are in the business of doing mainframe outsourcing, like with Fortune, you know, 1,000 companies that are doing huge, you know, they might spend a million dollars on, on outsourcing their, their mainframe or more. And rather than trying to convince one of these companies to just choose them, you. When you think through the actual process of somebody starting to make the move to outsourcing from their legacy mainframe system, it probably starts in a boardroom like this room that we're sitting in, right. The table. And on the agenda is we should, what are we going to do about the mainframe? It's getting old and Johnson here is retiring. We should maybe look into outsourcing this. And then they'll look down the table and they'll say, terwilliger, look into that outsourcing stuff and see, you know, be prepared to come and prepare, you know, show us your findings next month. So now that's the genesis of the maybe 18 months to 2 years later move to outsourcing their mainframe. But what's Terwilliger gonna do? What's on his heat? What does he know about mainframe outsourcing? So first thing he's gonna do is he's gonna go in search of his file, his fact finding, doing all of the information to see what's. What's out there. And if all of a sudden he gets a postcard in his mail that offers the free January 2013 report on mainframe outsource prices with a survey of national providers and how much it's going to cost to. To outsource your current mainframe, that is going to be like a lifesaver for Terwilliger. You know, he's going to feel like a hero now. This is like, done his job. It's a dream come true that all the information that he needs is right there compiled for him. I have a friend who does sort of packaging and branding for junior hockey players who in. If you're going to be a. Do you remember in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers that if you want to be a professional hockey player, the number one advantage you could have is a January birthday, because you're basically a year bigger than the other kids in your age category. If you're. Whatever age you are on January 1st is your age for the. For the year. So if you're born on January 1st and some poor guy is born on December 31st, you're a full year bigger than that kid, you know, so you've got an advantage. Well, the other advantage that you could have is to be born in Ontario because that's like the hockey mecca of the world, right? There's like a real career option to be an NHL hockey player because you're surrounded by people who've done it. And that's probably a whole nother episode about the belief factor. You know, that when you're surrounded by people who have done something, it seems like it's more popular for you.

Yeah, that's why people gravitate to like Silicon Valley and stuff. People who.

Hockey is like a big thing. It's almost like mandatory military service. You have to play hockey. If you're born in Ontario and you, you know, your dream is to make it to the NHL or to get a college scholarship. And so what Jay does is help them package their stuff to stand Out. And I was saying to him that if I were looking at that business as, instead of offering them something on how to make yourself stand out and how to, you know, basically the things that people are doing are shared through the lens of what I do. Let me tell you about what I do and frame it in a way that seems like it's, you know, consumer educating type of thing, but it's really framing on what I do and why you should want to do what I do, why you should want me to have do it for you, what I do. But I said to him, if you think about what the dream is for those kids who want to get a hockey scholarship is the cheese would be if you offered them a directory of the, you know, hockey coaches and programs that offer hockey scholarships. If you offered the January, you know, the 2013 Guide to College Hockey Scholarships with the directory of the coaches and a little bit about the program and all these things. And it was like a, you know, pretty good, easy to get that information, but just compiling it all in one place, it's going to seem like the treasure map to somebody who's looking to get a hockey scholarship. So what they think is, wow, I've got the list. I've got everybody who wants it. And now everybody is going to be compelled to want to have that guide because they've got aspirations for getting a college scholarship. Not that they've got aspirations for packaging themselves to look good, you know, to create a branding thing. They're not going to know that they even need that until you educate and motivate them that they're going to need it when they approach these coaches about getting a scholarship. Right. So you're giving, you're leading with the information that they think is the most valuable thing, but then you're using your consumer awareness guide to educate them about how what it is you do is going to help them actually get what they really want. So it's same thing if some, you look at what's the most cheese like thing that you can offer, the thing that they're compelled to ask for because they're, they're, you know, blind to the fact that it's a, a commercial offer. You know, they don't, they're not thinking that initially. They're just seeing it and it's like free cheese. Right, right. And then now that they've got that, that's like the first step in knowing that they, that they're going to have a need that now you can educate them about how to use that information.

Well, also for people that might have stumbled upon this podcast and not heard the episodes in the past and they're hearing you talk about cheese, they're like, what the hell is this guy talking about? Episode 23, I think it is 24. Yeah, 24. She's a whiskers. But if you just type in cheese and whiskers, Ilove marketing.com you can find it. But so I made a couple notes here about what you were saying and thinking. All of these things that we kind of know because we just sort of know the value of education based marketing and identifying what do people want, what are things that people don't know that they don't know, and putting that into a form which first started for us, you know, paper and ink, print, and now is, you know, video, audio, you name it, and delivering it in a way so it answers their questions and takes them from a, you know, a welcome, a annoying pest sort of positioning to a welcome guest sort of thing to like use Kennedy language. And the thing the notes I wrote are if you were to put yourself in your prospect's shoes or put yourself in your own shoes, thinking about something that you have recently had to google or do research on or find information about and compile it. And if someone just showed up with all of the fact finding done so that they provided the fact finding for you, they did all the research, they made the comparisons, they answered your biggest questions, including ones that you didn't even think about. But once they answered it for you, you realize how valuable it is to know that. And they googled all of the information and compiled it for you in easy to understand system that just helped you make an informed decision how useful that would be. Everyone that would hear me say that would, you know, that's paying attention would say, God, that would be so awesome on every decision that it that I would have to make in buying something from a washing machine to what restaurant to eat at, to what, you know, landscape company to hire, to what computer to buy, to, you know, you name it. If someone just did that, how much easier would my life be? Well, your life would be much easier. So the question is, in your industry, in your area, if you're not doing that for your prospects and clients, why are you not doing that? If you know that that's the thing to do now, if this is the first time you ever thought about that, then and boom, you know, you got, you got a goal now. Yeah, but there's a lot of people that they'll hear that, but they will still spend so Much of their time.

And they can't help. They can't help themselves from starting to convince people in profit activator too. I mean, so I'll tell you the other example. I did a breakthrough blueprint in London and one of the guys, the financial advisor, and we talked about this concept and one of the things that we suggested was offering a free report on UK annuity yields. Like just that somebody, because that's what he was saying is the big thing that retirees, pensioners do there is they buy annuities. And so you start thinking, well, what are they going to want to know about annuities? What's the highest yielding annuity annuities available. Right. So if you put that together in a report and you, you just offer the free, you know, January 2013 report on UK annuity yields, and it sounds like you've done all the research and it's going to be organized and here you go, just pick the top one kind of thing. It's just market data that's very compelling. So the first one of this, the first version they did offered the free, whatever month it was, November 2012, report on UK annuity yields, and then added the sentence and how to use this information, increase your retirement income by up to 40% or something like this. Right. Like offering something in addition to it that you're going beyond what it was. And I think he went from, you know, that was converting at like 3% or something when people would come to the page, because now it was, you know, you're. It's obvious what your intention is, that you're gonna give them the information, but you're gonna try and, and sell them on advice that's gonna help them get their higher yields. And then what happened? So just suggested take that out, take that out and just put the, just the offer for the annuity report, and it went from 3% to 18% immediately, just with no other change other than removing the next step. Trying to get them into thinking a new thought or connecting, you know, educating them on something new.

Yeah, it's kind of like asking, like, let's say you're a single man and you're in a bar and you're literally on the prowl.

On the prowl.

Yeah. You know, you just read the game by our buddy Neil Strauss. You think you're gonna, you know, you know, try to get someone into bed. Trying to be clean. As I say this, with this tendency to want to just be. So you're going for the approach and basically you've done all that right? And you say, can I have your phone number? And so she's writing down her phone number and right as she's writing down her phone number. Oh, and I like to sleep together. You just mumble that. You just kind of throw that out there. You don't even, you just kind of, you even whip desperate. But she just gets a little wind of it. Now you've completely created a threat, like a massive threat. And so the analogy that you're making is like you scare people off. You just scare off the response rate and see the best way that. Because I, when I first started selling stuff to carpet cleaners, I was constantly amazed at how, you know, you teach someone a multi step marketing system. You know, because what most people do is they name, rank, serial number, it's one step selling, here's what they do, you know, here's a phone number, you know, call and hire. You know, this is before the Internet stuff. So when I was doing this, people just run these image ads, blown up versions of their business cards, yellow page ads, example, and then they would just immediately try to get someone to call so that they could then engage in a sales job, you know, and try to convince them over the phone as to why they should hire them. And crossing their fingers at someone is going to call so ready and needing their stuff that they wouldn't have to be a salesperson and do any convincing whatsoever. Because frankly people are lazy and they don't want to make a good case as to why, you know, someone should do business with them in advance. So they're, they're not doing marketing, they're actually forced to do sort of, you know, selling. And so I would, you know, I have all these sales letters, they're just proven to work, you know, lead generation things. And they would drive people to free recorded messages and people would literally run my exact same copy. But they would take out the part with the call, this pre recorded message and they would just put their phone number there and they would take out really important elements to try to shorten it up or whatever, you know, and they put their logo on there thinking that their logo, it's like, no, no, no, you don't want your logo anywhere on there. This is not about advertising your company, this is about making a case. Right? And it would always of course fail. And one of the analogies that I would use is this is important to how you do this is adding yeast to bread. Now you know, if you have all the ingredients to bake bread, but you don't put the Yeast in there, it's never going to rise. So in this situation, like, you could actually, if you add something to try to sell, it actually burns the bread. You know, it actually. So in your particular case of your friend where they added that, that part, you know, it's kind of like you, you just burnt the bread. You had it right there, but then you added something and you burnt it. But if you don't add all the other stuff, it's. You don't have enough. So what most people's biggest problems are is they don't have enough ingredients. They don't think, you know, they don't even do Legion.

Well, you've got to connect the dots. You've got to know, in order to do something like that, in order to do something as seemingly selfless as compiling a directory of all the hockey programs that offer scholarships, or compiling a list of all of the top yielding annuities, or compiling a list of all the homes that have sold in Winter Haven in the last 12 months, or all the house prices in Halton Hills, in order to have an offer like that work, you have to know that. That you're going to be able to connect the dots after somebody raises their hand. Because all you're really trying to do is get that person to identify themselves as somebody who is potentially on the outer ring of the possibility of being your prospect. But you've got to be able to, once they start in that, have it like a vortex where it's drawing them to the center, it's drawing them into where you're going to be able to present your unique service offer.

Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Well, let's.

Just.

Because we're going to talk about business cards. But then you scratch it off the.

List, because I thought on this momentum here on the list is books. And there's been some really cool developments in that that I think really tie in nicely with this. Free reports and. And consumer awareness guides.

Well, yeah, but I just want to, like, totally screw up your mojo here. And since you scratched out business cards, I wanted to bring it back onto.

The list, let's put it next. Because I think right now, I think right now it'd be good to talk about books.

Yeah, I know that. But what I'm saying, you want to.

Just throw it all completely off because, you know, I can edit it to put it my way anyway, so whatever you want to do.

But you're not going to.

You never know. You never know. I'm very crazy.

Look, what. Here's what I'd like To say about business cards.

Cards. Yeah.

Okay.

Welcome to the business card section.

Because we could do. By Joe Polish, joe polish.com we could, we could do a whole episode just on business cards.

We could. Coming soon.

Yeah. One of the things like going back to name, rank, serial number, the same thing that applies to using any space is real estate to educate and motivate. Right. And one of the very first things I did because paper is expensive, inks cheap, is I got a red rubber stamp years ago. This is before like Vistaprint and places that would just you print them in 12 seconds and send them to you for free, hoping that you buy more stuff. This is like literally I got a red rubber stamp and put warning, don't call any carpet cleaner till you listen this free recorded message. And all of a sudden I took a plain business card and turned it into a salesperson because that expands what it is you're doing without adding more space. And so as it. And the reason I wanted to bring that up is one of the things that free reports do if you're going to do space advertising or you're going to send out a postcard, is it allows you to say more without paying for more space because of how you direct people to web or to free record a message. And that is a huge form of leverage that in my mind, I totally get that. But I have talked to so many people where they just, I don't know, they just don't really seem to get that concept. And I, you know, so if you get this, great. But for people out there that are somehow not figuring this out, I mean, just think of, you know, how, how do you leverage your message in very smart ways? And the way you do that is you, is you stair step people through, you know, you get their attention. There's a lot to be said, you know, about the old famous ADA rule, which I don't hear people talk about as much as I used to when I first started.

You know, the old attention, interest, desire, action.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to be said about that. Taking it out of the sales world though. I mean, and of course, the classic, you know, the Glengarry Glen Ross scene with, you know, which he changes the ADA thing, doesn't call it attention, interest, desire, action, he calls it something else. But, you know, the point is you, you really want to think about all of the messaging that you're doing and how well, you know, if you try to convince people before you compel them, it's just not gonna, it's not gonna Work the same. And there's an art and a science to doing this. And a business card is a really simple place to test stuff, because everyone's business card that I see, virtually almost every business card I see just sucks. I mean, all it is is their contact info, but it really doesn't. It's not very useful.

You hear something really interesting. So long business cards. So I have a friend who does pencil portraits. And so years ago, you know, he was looking for a way to kind of get the word out about his pencil portraits. And he was. So I had. I just designed him a little business card. Had a picture of one of the portraits, and just the headline on the thing said, you know, original pencil portraits from your photo, not from $99. And then on the back it said, send me any clean, clear picture, and I'll create a beautiful original pencil drawing, 8 by 14, that you'll love. Call this number for questions and to commission a photo or a drawing. And so he had like 500 of these printed up. And he. I said, and just put them out places like when you go places like put them up on the. On the bulletin boards. Just leave them by cash registers, leave them by payphones or ATM machines wherever you go. And he probably put out, you know, a hundred of these over a period of time, but ended up having like, you know, five or six portraits that people had called him to do from these 100 cards that he had put out. And. And I think still to this day, Joey still has this box of, you know, probably still 300 of these cards. But every time, you know, putting them out is getting business. You know, it's just such a simple offer, right? But just using that little business card to get that. My favorite business card story, though, is when you and I were in. This was a few years ago, but we were walking into Whole Foods, and there was this really colorful looking card on the. On the. On the driveway. As we're walking into Whole Foods, we look at it, and it's from this psychic. And we throw it in the garbage can. And we had lunch. And then we went across the street and up the road to Starbucks. And we came out right beside the car where we had parked. There was one of these same cards on the windshield. Yeah, there was like, they were following us. And I told you to grab it. And let's call her and say, do you know who I am? Do you know why I'm calling? Didn't we try that? But she wasn't having any part of us.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I Was like, that is so funny.

It was so freaky that she was following us. But those, Those kind of cards, they do work and they're so cheap, you know?

Yeah.

If you can. If you do something that somebody can make a decision from right on the. Right from a card. It's a great idea.

I hear you.

Yeah.

All right, so let's go to books. Now. You. There's some great news.

So, yeah, since we've just been talking about consumer awareness guides and we're going to continue on talking about books before we talk about business cards, we can. You know, there's been some great developments around.

Around business cards, around books.

Yeah. So.

So how does this tie into the business cards you just talked about.

Going to talk about?

People are going to go to. I love marketing. And comment on this. I mean, it's. It's going to be funny.

It's like we've got a time vortex.

Right.

So there's something really cool happening now with Create Space on Amazon where you can actually create books on demand that are, you know, $2 and 15 cents each. Printed, perfect bound, absolutely beautiful books. I showed you one of the breakthrough DNA.

Yeah. And you're obviously gonna make a bunch of noise now and pull it out right now and show that I have it right here. But that sounded horrible. Yeah.

You hear a zipper.

God. You're gonna pull it out right now. He's pulling out. I mean, unbelievable. So, like, people on the podcast cannot see the book?

No. Well, they don't. I don't have it. Anyway, I was just going to show you. But you've seen it. Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

So, Dan Sullivan. I was in London.

Oh, we said his name.

We got him. We got. It's gonna be a hundred episodes in a row. Dan Sullivan.

Yeah.

Our good friend Dan Sullivan.

Dan is awesome.

Yeah, he really is.

Yes. Go to Strategic Coach and join. Tell him we sent you.

You. That's perfect. Yeah, yeah. He likes it when that happens.

Of course. Why wouldn't he?

So. So I'm in London. You got a whole lot. Look at this whole shelf of Strategic Coach stuff right here in the library. With an eyesight of us in the library.

Yeah, Dan. You know, Dan's the smartest human being in the world.

He really is. So I'm in London for the. The Breakthrough Blueprint event. And just serendipitously, Dan and Babs are in London, too. They'd been. They'd been doing a workshop the week before. So I landed on that Saturday, ended up spending the whole day with them and we were talking about this book process of getting your book on, on Amazon, Create Space. And he said that somebody had done it in 21 days. And I said to Dan, our workshop was, you know, two weeks after I was doing the Breakthrough Blueprint, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. So Thursday was going to be the first, the day that I was going to be able to start working on it. And I told Dan that I'm going to do it from the day that Breakthrough Blueprint is over till our workshop was 14 days that I was going to put together the book, get it up on Amazon and have enough copies to give to everybody at the strategic coach workshop two weeks later to break the record of 21 days. And then. And Dan did the same thing, but he did his in. It ended up being nine days or something from. Oh, he just sent me one.

He sent me an email that was like 48 hour printing.

Exactly, exactly. So that whole thing now just to know that you can do this. So I turned the Breakthrough Blueprint, the Breakthrough DNA report into a 60 page perfect bound book, five by eight. It's absolutely beautiful. You've seen it. And when you think about it, that changes everything about what you can. Anybody who can create a consumer awareness guide. Because that's really, that's our consumer awareness guide. When you think about it. We're setting, we're laying the framework of everything that we talk about on the Isle of Marketing podcast is all revolving around the eight profit activators. And so somebody, if you get that and you buy into that, this is the podcast for you. It's the, you know, we're going to engage with somebody and there's an audio episode of I love marketing. I forget which one it is, but it's the one about Breakthrough DNA and the actual. It's just the audio version of the Breakthrough DNA report that I don't know what happened that you weren't around one week. And I did that as the episode and it was exactly an hour. You know, it's just funny how to go through the whole audio version of it is one hour and that one hour of audio turns into a 60 page book that looks like a really cool thing. And so I started thinking about how really anybody if they just took a 50 minute focus finder and outlined and of course you're saying things they want to talk about.

So for new people you have to type in focus finder and watch this silly video with Dean to get what he's saying here. But it's a good process.

There we go.

Do it.

Yeah, do it keep going. So they do a 50 minute focus finder outline. All the stuff that they, that they know or want to talk about. You know, just get the outline for their consumer awareness guide and then have somebody interview, just ask them the question so that they can talk for an hour about this process. And that turns into a. That turns into a perfect book, you know. So I've got. Now I've created. I've got something to show you. I got like four books now from different podcasts that we put on. On Create Space. So we've got the More Cheese, Less Whiskers, which is the three episodes that talk all about More Cheese, Less Whiskers. That concept. We got three episodes that are almost all about that. That are the transcripts of those into. That's probably like 90 page or more book. I've got one for my Project Cyrus program. All the transcripts that have done of that. But that just that way of turning audio into a book. Because most people, the big obstacle for them creating a book is that they don't like to write or they don't know how to write, but they can talk about whatever it is. If they just did an interview for an hour and had that transcribed and then have that put into a. Into a book on CreateSpace. It's like an incredible thing, you know, that is really valuable because then you've got two things. Then you've got, you know, you get a CD from. From, you know, from a CD duplicator for of the one hour audio of it. But you've also then got a book that goes with. You got two really cool like audio products that make you look like an expert.

Exactly. In the audio products. A great company is disc.com right? Talk to Joe Foley.

Our friend Joe Foley over there.

He doesn't like you.

He does like me. He just sent me an email telling me how much he likes me.

I think you're lying. He is. Specifically.

Hey, Kevin, hand me my phone.

You are banned from dis.com.

It'S like, hey, Dean, we really.

Well, we got Kevin Donahue sitting over here in the corner during this whole episode. Do you want to say anything? And you got to be close to the mic if you're going to say something. I'm just listening, intrigued as always and fascinated. You know, just trying to get some information for you guys. Could you get to it?

I did get a text from Brendan Burchard while we were doing this. I shot him a video. I was at Downtown Disney last night. Yeah. And I was at Wolfgang Pox and so I shot Brendan a video because Wolfgang Puck, you know, his slogan outside the restaurant is live, love, eat. And you know how Brendan's is Live, love, matter. Yeah. I said, you know, did I live? Did I love? Did I eat? That's Wolfgang's approach to life.

Did I live? Did I love? What would you say?

Did I matter? That's what I signed the lost damage.

Waiver when I wrecked that motorcycle.

Oh, there you go. And so anyway. Anyway, there you go. So he just sent me a text responding to my thing.

Well, I'm very proud of you.

Yeah, I know you are.

Yeah. So, okay, well, all right. So let's see.

Oh, that was all about Joe Foley. But regardless of who Joe Foley loves or doesn't love, which, he does love me. That. That's a great guy to actually do your. Your discs Duplicating.

Yeah, he's.

And anybody should do that, you know.

I have no doubt on that.

Yeah. And it's an easy way to create a product, you know, create a. And it doesn't have to be a product. I mean, it could create a book that you can send for $2.15, including in the package where you're educating and motivating people.

You know, so the point is, like, the process of. You need to quit coughing here, David.

Sorry. I can't help it.

The process of putting this together is so valuable because it gets you out of your shoes and puts you into the shoes of your prospect, and that's a good place to live. You know, I mean, I think a lot of times we get so wrapped up in our own companies and what we do and how we do it that we don't play prospect or customer in our own companies. But there's so much. There's so much that I learned when I was first. When I first hired a copywriter to write my consumer awareness guide. And I went through the Q and A sort of process with him. You know, not only did I create my very first consumer awareness guide, but I actually discovered what it was like to have to figure out what you need to say and how to say it, and all the things that people didn't know, they didn't know in order to do that. And no matter, you know, I've been teaching marketing stuff since, you know, the end of 1993 is when I really first started teaching stuff to people. Then I started my company in 1994. Most people just won't do this. They won't take the time. They won't do it. They'll hear it, they'll agree with it, but they won't do it. So I wanted to kind of get your. Just take on anything we could say to encourage and inspire people. It's a new year, great time to prune a bunch of crap out of your business, out of your life, and really do some things that will be a big game changer. And I know that this would be a huge game changer for any business that did it from a money standpoint, a positioning, saving time. I know very few things that could make a bigger impact in a positive way than creating a free report, creating a consumer guide, putting it in the form of the, of a book, just doing that stuff. So there's steps involved in this, like, you know, writing the copy or transcribing it, like you said. But what, what would you, what would you say to what stops people from doing this?

So this is, this is going to go pretty deep. But some of the thing is that we get paralyzed by aspiring too high on our, our verb list. And I'll share a little bit about that because I made a list of all of the, you know, how there's that emotional thermometer, you know, where you have the, the ascending intensities of emotion, where you know, you're feeling such and such naming those words, and each word is progressively more intense than the next. And so I started making a list of the verbs that are productivity verbs for me, like the actions, the things that I actually do, and the things that are effortless. You know, so effortless is talking like at a recording. A podcast is effortless because it's scheduled, it's synchronous. You and I are right here. There's not a lot of room for distraction. You know, where we're like this hour, like a bobsled run. You know, it's got boundaries, it's got. We're headed in a direction and there's gravity pulling us down towards it, right? And if we don't, okay, if we don't have that kind of structure, we don't have that kind of environment set up. I was telling you earlier I was having my second official session with, with Ned Hallowell and that he said without that kind of structure, our minds tend to wander like a toddler at a picnic. I just thought that visual is so. It's so perfect. But at one point, I was telling Ned just yesterday that I was making this list of verbs, the things that are effortless. Like, it's effortless for me to record a podcast. It's effortless for Me to talk. It's effortless to do a breakthrough blueprint. People in a room for three days where there's no other, you know, there's lots of structure around that, lots of gravity in it. You're, you're there, you're already set up for the focus, then getting outside of that with, not without that structure. I love to brainstorm. I love to brainstorm an outline on paper and then write is another verb that gets down there. But often we set our aspirations too high and we put it on our to do list. Write consumer awareness guide. We block off in the calendar that time to write it and then we get there, we're paralyzed because we don't know what we're going to write. But if you block it off and ratchet back to what's an effortless verb for you, which is to talk or to brainstorm. So you block off some time to sit down with somebody and say, I'm going to talk about the consumer awareness guide idea for half an hour, let's say, right? So you got that time in your calendar. You got somebody who's going to be helping you with the product, with the project and you talk about it and you make notes and then maybe you go away and you block off another amount of time and you say, okay, I'm going to take that, those notes, those ideas that I had and I'm going to brainstorm and outline the things that I'd like to talk about in this consumer awareness guide. And that now is an achievable aspiration. And then the next one might be, I'm going to record a one hour interview about the topics that I've said I'm going to cover in my consumer awareness guide. And that makes it so effortlessly achievable, you know that you can get that transcribed and there's your book and you've spent less than two hours on the whole process. It's, it's, you know, that is a.

Very good piece of advice.

Yeah, well, it's hard and it's learned, you know, I mean that's something that, that I've never heard anybody talk about. That, the verb, you know, that verb structure like that. Even Ned was pretty impressed with that.

So let's do a refresher of it again. Again, let's give some.

Well, so I started thinking about, you know, just when the actions, you know, when people make to do lists, they, they make a list of all of the things. Like this is what I see when people do their 50 minute focus finder and do A brain dump. Get all the things that are on their mind out there. It's like they write down these lofty things like, right, consumer awareness guide. Or they might not even put right, but they might put on the list consumer awareness guide. That's not an action as, you know, that's not a. As our friend David Allen would say, that's not an actionable next step. Right, Consumer awareness guide. It's out there. That's not helpful to you in putting that on your calendar or getting that done and getting things done. That's not going to help you get that done. What helps you get it done is breaking it down to the next action step. Step that you can do. So I took that action step and turned that into verbs, because action steps are verbs. What's the verb that I'm gonna do with that and what are the verbs that I find enjoyable and what are the verbs that I find effortless? And where do I start to hit resistance on that verb list, you know?

Yep.

And writing for most people is like, you know, a pretty high aspiration on the list. But if you ratchet it down and say, you know, brainstorm and outline, that's a pretty. That. That sounds more fun than writing, right?

Indeed it does.

It really does.

Indeed it does.

Yeah.

What do you think of that, Kevin? Yeah, that's. I think that's pretty brilliant.

Yeah. No charge. Yep.

Thanks.

No charge for awesomeness.

Yeah. All right, so, well, here's I'd like to do. Because we were going to talk about guarantees, but we don't need to.

I think we've. I think this trifecta of the free reports, the consumer awareness guide, the books and then the business cards you're going to hear about in a minute is going to be a great podcast. It's going to be.

Or was it was a great dub that part in at the beginning. We could. Yeah, that's funny. All right, so, well, let's. Let's call this a wrap. I mean, we can do episode 90. Unless you want to go right to the 60 minute mark.

I think it'd be. I like to give people the extra. The value of seeing that one in the number 1.1. You know, one. Something.

You know, I've been. Here's one of the things I've been thinking about.

Maybe we should just expand and go 99 minutes. 99 minute episode.

Here's what I was sitting there thinking, though, because we have done some episodes that are. We've done a couple of shorter ones, but we've done a few that are like longer. And I actually, because I have the 10x talk podcast with Dan Sullivan, I was sitting there thinking about 30 minute episodes. If our audience would like those better than one hour. But I don't know. I mean, we've always kept this as an hour. What do you think?

I think, you know, Richard Rossi and I were just talking about that because we just did the first episode of our new podcast on. Yeah. What's it called right now. Let's be interesting here what people think. But our. The name that we're thinking about right now is A Perfect Life.

Okay.

But you haven't decided committed to that yet. There's a couple of reasons why. But we'll as we.

Well, yeah, because I have a perfect life and you're trying to aspire to.

To be like when you do, when you break it down, it is kind of the perfect name. Because it's a perfect life.

Right.

Well, a perfect life implies that there are many perfect lives. The perfect life implies that there's only one. And so.

Well, unless you spent the whole podcast talking about me, but then it would be weird like you and Richard talked about.

That's what we did on episode one. It was all about gel polish.

Right.

Yeah. That's why he said it wasn't very good. Huh. But that'll be. That's a great episode. But we were talking about that and I think that there's something. There's something luxurious about an hour, something.

Well, that could be said about anything though. You know, it could be said about TED talks or my 10 minutes. Minute talks or an hour or, you know, there could be something magical about 84 minutes.

Yeah, but.

No, I hear you. Yeah, but I'd be curious to see what people think.

Yeah. You want to put it to a vote? Maybe the next hundred episodes are ten minute episodes. What?

Okay, why don't we ask our audience if they would like three and a.

Half minute episodes, like just the hits.

Yeah, we'll do a.

On itunes. For what?

If we actually turned all of the TV teaching into like rap songs so we do some beatbox.

We could do like the iambic pentameter episode. Yeah, we all, we all. We do it like Dr. Seuss where we have to rhyme everything. I mean, It'd take us 10 hours to prepare for the three minute episode, but we would be right. Yeah. Very.

Well, we've only got 90 seconds left if you want to like make this an hour. That's assuming you don't have to edit anything out, which you actually probably do because There was a pause in here, so there's. There's no telling. Okay, well, so here's what I will say. Here's all I'll say.

It's the action.

The action is Happy New Year to everyone. And we hope that this is an awesome, phenomenal year for you. We hope you go back and listen to some of the past episodes of I love Marketing because there's some really good stuff on there. And we're gonna have, as usual, new surprises, fundamentals that we will discuss. And our goal and objective is to just help you be more effective with your marketing and advertising. Really respect this incredible, this art. I mean, it is an art, it is a science and it is a skill and it can be learned and you can kick ass and take names. And this doesn't just have to be focused on money making endeavors. Any area of life, business for profit, nonprofit, where it needs focus, attention, talent. The job of the marketer is to carry the message. And the more effective you are at communicating a compelling message, the better you're going to do, the better the cause is going to do, the better everyone's going to do. So whenever you come across people that poo poo marketing or have a bad perspective of it, just remember that those people are complete and total idiots. And you know, don't pay attention to that. And that's it.

That's.

I think, that's. I don't know.

Good night, everybody.

Yeah. Yeah. And as usual, it's a real pleasure spending time with the year.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, let's talk about business cards. All right, goodbye, everyone.

Bye.