Todd Johnson - How to Build and Communicate with large Facebook Communities

Speaking with TJ Walker, the show where we dissect how and what world class leaders communicate. My special guest today is an expert on helping other experts monetize what it is they do, what it is they know. Todd Johnson is a wildly successful IT executive and founder of a technology company. But these days he spends his time giving business consulting advice to startup entrepreneurs and helping build communities for other idea entrepreneurs. His special niche is getting paid memberships on Facebook. And I tell you, the first time I heard about this, my head almost exploded. Because it's not that I'm looking for get rich quick gimmicks, but I just know so many people who have a message, have an expertise, they try to share it, and they're constantly going from one revenue model to another, never building anything sustainable and meaningful. And Todd seems to have cracked this puzzle. So I think you're going to enjoy this. Almost an hour spent with Todd Johnson. Let's hop right in with the interview. Todd Johnson, thank you for being our guest today.

Hey, you're quite welcome. Thank you, TJ for the invite. It's an honor.

Now, what fascinates me about you is it's not just your success in information technology in the past, but how you've been able to harness that to help yourself and others create communities where ongoing communication can take place. And it seems like everybody these days calls themselves I'm a best selling author, I am this, I'm that. And then you see that they've sold three books and they have four Facebook likes and nine Twitter followers. You actually have looked at this from almost a science perspective of how can you build a community around an expert. And you've done it with several people. How do you do it?

Well, first of all, you have to be really, really authentic. I think you have to. The very first thing you have to do is know who you're talking to and know who your audience is. Now that sounds very trite, right when you say that, because everybody says that. But you really have to dig in and understand who you're talking to. And if you don't do that, you're going to miss. If you don't do that, you're going to going to cost more money, it's going to cost more time. So we spend a lot of time making sure we're very focused on our audience and we know our avatar. So that's where it starts. And then everything sort of goes from there.

Let's break this down in specifics. One of your clients and a colleague and a business partner is J.J. smith and some of our audience will be familiar with him, but with her. But I'm guessing that actually most of our audience won't be familiar with who she is. Who is she?

Yeah. J.J. smith is a New York Times best selling author where she's been on the New York Times bestsellers list for over one year straight. She's the author of the 10 Day Green Smoothie Cleanse as well as a number of other books. But she is one, she's prolific in terms of helping people lose weight. So, yeah, that's who JJ is.

And then how did you help her build a real business around this? Because I got to tell you, for 30 plus years, I've worked with hundreds, if not thousands of authors, and many of them have been New York Times best sellers. Most of them really don't make much money. They don't really know who their readers are. They just write something, send it out to the world. Maybe they get a book royalty, but for the most part, they have to go back to teaching, back to a humdrum consulting job. You've turned her book success into something a little bigger. What is it?

Yeah, so we built a tremendous community online. So we have a Facebook, we have a private community that we, we cater to where we do. We have a private community of about 10,000 folks that we help and they pay monthly. We have folks that we talk to and help through the cleanse. It's about 450,000 folks or so that we help for free. And you start helping folks for free and providing value for free and demonstrating what you can do and your goodwill and your rule intent for free. And at some point, folks start to really scream out for things that they can buy or other things that you can help them with. And I translate it to things that they can buy. Right. Because I'm the business guy. But in starting it, really we just started making sure that we were communicating to folks and being very, very authentic, really listening, understanding what they needed and really responding to those things.

And how did you decide what the ideal place was for this communication? I mean, the problem so many authors, even successful authors have is they think, well, oh, I got to be on Twitter, I got to be on Facebook, I got to be on Pinterest, Instagram, and they're so scattered and there's not more than seven people following in any of them. Which one did you focus on? And then how did you build enough of a mass audience for it to mean anything?

Well, you know, where we've had our biggest success is Facebook, but we started Offline, actually, we started offline doing live events, and Internet radio show, actually, is what we started with. So we would do that. We would do that on. We would go to a local place that was struggling on Tuesday, let's say they were struggling on Tuesday. We would come in and we would talk about a particular topic. We would bring a lot of people in. The topic was hot, the format was hot. It was cool. So the focus was to make JJ a local celebrity.

And this was in the Washington, D.C. area. And what sort of venues were you doing this?

We started out in a sports bar. We started out in a home. We moved to a sports bar in bigger venues. And as we got larger and we realized that we needed to reach our audience in a bigger way, we started really focusing on Facebook. This was some time ago. And then on Facebook, we really got a break when we decided that we were not really going to focus on at first. We never focused on monetizing any of what we were doing.

We.

What we're really focusing on is getting a following that we're going to be in authentic conversation with us. Because what I always say is that if you are a real relevant part of any conversation, the money is going to follow, right? So if you're relevant in a conversation and a topic that is meaningful today, there's a way to monetize that. And so that's what we focus on.

And too many people want to make the quick buck that they figure, oh, I've got one person here now, let me sell him my coaching program for $39,000, or let me go right for the quick sale. You didn't do that. How long does it take to really build a relationship with somebody before they're comfortable pulling out that credit card?

Well, I'll tell you what, give you a monetary answer. We gave away and created ebooks. Instead of selling the ebooks, we gave those away in the tune of $86,000. Meaning if we sold those at $7 a pop, whatever it was, or $14, whatever it was we were selling them for, it would have equated to $86,000 in terms of just giveaways. And so some would have said, look, that doesn't make sense. But in our strategy and my strategy in terms of specifically for authors, I say to authors all the time, they write a book, and to your point, the book, they have a hard time selling this book. And some people say it's really just really a business card. This is my business card, says, I'm an authority. And I say, you know, what you've created all that content and you are an authority. If you've probably written a book and it's a good book, it's a sign solid book, you are an authority, at least to some population. The approach for me is to always create sub content that's going to allow people, allow you to build credibility with your audience such that they're ready to buy your book and you're oftentimes able to monetize it better on an E book than you can on a real book anyway. So that's sort of the approach. So I'm sort of scattered here for a second. But the point is that what we did is gave away a lot of content and at some point people were really wanting a book, which we did. We turned it into a book very easily and started selling the book.

Now. But if you give away books for free, don't people get conditioned to expecting just free from you?

It depends on how long you do it. I think there is certainly a law of diminishing return at some point where you can go too far. And I think a mistake that people make on their sites is that they never sell anything, so they can go too long without selling anything. And so people can't really become conditioned. So I think a part of your content plan has to seed the fact that you are in business and you're selling things. And here are some of the things that you have to sell.

There is a school of thought, Todd, that says all you really need is a thousand true followers, whether it's Facebook anywhere and you can build a real business around that. You have gone for a larger audience out of the gate, haven't you? I mean, don't you take somewhat of a contrarian view there?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that might be, I don't know, I feel like that's old information or I don't think it's relevant today. Because here's if you have a thousand people on your email list and a certain percentage of those people are opening your emails and all that, not sending you off the spam, that might be different. But when you look at things like Facebook and Instagram, Twitter, then you need a much bigger following. And part of the reason for that is that they change the algorithm all the time. How many of those people, your followers are actually going to see your content today? For instance, if anybody goes into Facebook and looks looks at the likes and the talking about number, for any expert, that number would be very, very low because they changed their algorithm, next week they may change it again. So you would be at the whim of Facebook if you relied on just 1,000 followers to try to monetize it, or you wouldn't make very much money.

But you bring up a good point. Isn't that scary relying on Facebook as your home because they can just switch an algorithm and people you've perhaps advertised to become friends, never see your stuff again. Why not use the Facebook as a lure to bring them to your own site where you have control over the environment, I guess, is the question.

Well, no, it's a good point. I think your conventionalism does say that it is scary to rely on these social media platforms that you have no control over to run your business. But reality is this, Facebook will change and do all those things. I think the thing that one has to do, an expert has to do, is to use Facebook as the place where you communicate and have interactive communication. And Facebook is great depending on the demographic that you're going after and what you're trying to do. So I'm all about building communities where people are going to be talking to one another. And I'm not even talking about just a fan page. I'm talking about actual groups and making large groups because those are very, very effective and very few people know how to use those very well. But in the case of those in Facebook, what you have to do is get people in your email list so that you have a conversation with them on Facebook, but also by email so you have them, a high percentage, or all of them, if you can, on your email list so that you can protect that relationship in case something does change.

And how do you communicate with people on Facebook? Let's look specifically at your colleague, J.J. smith. Is it just about a quick, witty text post? Is it an image? Is it a picture? How much of it is on demand video? How much of it is live video? How much of a difference does it make putting the video directly into Facebook versus linking to a YouTube video?

Oh, yeah, the. And I don't know what the percentages would be, but we just came back from, I had about eight of our team members off site and we spent five days literally planning our content for the next year and planning our launch strategies and things like that. And the one thing that's so really something, that's really unbelievable is the amount of time that we spent spend on content. And even sometimes content doesn't look like it's well thought out or it just looks like it's just a little quote.

Card.

Or something like that. Just a little post. There's A lot of thought that goes behind it. So we certainly do quote cards and little witty sorts of things to keep people inspired and entertained. But the hottest thing right now is certainly Facebook Live. So Facebook Live that are over 20 minutes gets a lot of play. We used to do our coaching in private, sort of tools that allowed us to do video conferencing and coaching calls. But now we do a lot of Facebook Live stuff because Facebook is given deference to Facebook Live videos because they have to be competitive with Periscope and YouTube and Snapchat. So they're giving a lot of deference and they're letting a lot of eyeballs see it. And I don't know how their algorithm works. No one does. But we know when we do the coaching calls, we're getting a lot of eyeballs on it. So we do that. The thing that we don't do very much of is just playing audio, but we'll do posts that have little video animation in it. We'll do the standard pictures with words on them, and we do as much Facebook Live stuff as we can. When you ask about YouTube and links over to YouTube, what we found is it doesn't work as well because people don't like clicking on the links and getting taken out of Facebook. And then not only that, Facebook doesn't show that content as well as it shows other content that is native to Facebook.

Oh, I've definitely noticed that myself. Where 10 or 100 to 1 more views on a video that I upload right into the Facebook platform as opposed to a YouTube link. So they definitely like keeping people on their own platform, which everybody who has a website likes to do. Speaking of websites, yours is in Hot pursuit dot com. We've linked to that in the show notes. You have had in some ways a traditional career working with large businesses, government agencies as an IT consultant. Now you are sharing your wisdom with people who are not Fortune 500 companies or the U.S. defense Department. Individuals, consultants, experts, or even people who are just trying to figure out how to start a gig on their own. How do people work with you and engage with you through in hut Pursuit?

The primary way is through. What I have is called the success club. So in Hot Pursuit is our fan page on Facebook. And the way I work with folks, I don't do a lot of individual teaming with folks unless it's an equity partnership, which I do do. But if it's not an equity partnership, and when I say equity partnership, it's where I'm full partner with someone. I'm helping Them build their brand.

And.

I bring my team into it and we help them do their whole product roadmap and do the entire marketing strategy and communication stuff. Unless it's that I don't do one on one. When I'm not doing one on one, I do group coaching, which I love. And I do it through what I call the success club. And that can be found on Facebook as well through my fan page.

Todd, I know a lot of people who are successes in business, big business. They are essentially trying to do the same as you. They hang out their shingle as a consultant, a guide, a guru, an expert. They may write a book or two, start a Facebook page. They speak at local organizations, some national organizations, and five, six, seven, 10 years go by and they have, you know, 119 Facebook fans, maybe 900 Twitter followers. They're just not building a community. You have way more than 100,000 people on your Facebook page. How do you do that? Number one. And number two, if advertising is involved, how do you advertise on Facebook without going into massive debt?

Well, a couple things when it comes to the first point, you know, I paid for coaching around marketing and stuff like that. Now I'm in a group, a small group of people. I was just engaged with those guys. I went out and looked at, and all of us paid one guy $50,000 to coach us for an entire year around marketing. Some of the things that they were doing because they were one of the top marketers in the world. And so I've gone out and I've looked at all of their pages just over the last couple days. And of all these guys, no one has even close to 50,000 fans or a massive following at all. And so I think the reason for that is not that folks lack knowledge. I think folks don't execute. Folks don't do the things that they need to do that they know to do right? So I don't know. A lot of folks are doing a lot of different things, and I don't think they stick with something long enough to build a following. That's one. And I think the other one is that folks don't do the thing that we talked about at first. Who's the avatar? Are we really clear on the avatar? Have you tested this avatar? I mean, I think that is so important, and I can't overstate how important that is.

And by avatar, I just wanted to find for our listeners many of them in other countries. English is a second language. Avatar means a couple of different things. You mean in this case who is the ideal viewer, person, reader, consumer, fan? Who is that person? What is the demographics of that person you're trying to reach?

Absolutely. Absolutely. That's what it means. And it also means who are you going to exclude? Because sometimes when you exclude people, you can be a lot more direct, you can be a lot more effective in terms of your communication. And I'll give you JJ as a good example. When we built out JJ's brand, one of the things that we were concerned about is who's going to be her avatar and try to figure that out. As we try to be too inclusive in terms of what the avatar was, we realized, we had more conversations about will this be offensive if I say this? Will people like if I say this? And the more you can get away from that and just be yourself, the more authentic and the more, the deeper connections you're going to build with an audience. And so it's sort of that political correctness in marketing, you know, so you have to. Because see, here's the thing. There's so many experts. You know the idea when you say expert, people automatically assume there's one expert. No, there's. That doesn't mean you're the expert, it just means you're an expert and there's a group of people that you can serve you ahead of them in some stuff and you can help them move the needle in their life. So you don't have to be the one and only expert. You can be an expert that can help some people move the needle. But who are those people specifically and why do those people like you and what do they expect from you?

Who is your avatar for? In hot pursuit. And then how do you use that profile to target people who haven't heard about you yet?

Yeah, good question. So the avatar for me or the 37 year old, 37 year old woman, she's probably, she has a degree from somewhere, she has a child, she's probably, probably been divorced and she's concerned about how she's going to spend her later years, but she's also concerned about how she's going to pay for education for her child who's been accepted to this wonderful, wonderful school. So she's trying to figure out how am I going to pay for this and how am I going to live my. How am I going to live the way I want it to, with more freedom, with more success. Right. With more money, with more time, how am I going to do that? And by the way, I've gotten away from all the things I wanted to do. Because I've been spending this time sacrificing and building a life, but I want to get back to doing something that's a little bit more. That I'm more passionate about, that's going to bring me more joy in life.

And then how do you find that once you've identified your avatar, do you then do Facebook advertising, going after people just like that, by age, by race, by any other factor?

What I do, tj, is I'll figure out first of all, what are all the problems that she's facing, right? So she's facing. And I'll come, I'll write them all down, right? So of course, I've gotten very specific with this particular avatar, right? And I'm not saying she is the only avatar, you know, that I'm going to serve, but I've gotten very specific with this avatar. So what that means is that I'm going to probably speak to folks that have issues with. With saving money, with having a better life than they've had before, with pursuing their dreams, with getting unstuck, with getting to a place in life where they're saying, wait a minute, how did I even get here? And how do I move on from this and do something that I can really. That I really enjoy and I really like? And then I started to try to figure out what are her concerns, what are her fears, and all of those things that we do when we. We create an avatar. And as I answer the questions, I started to create content that are solutions to her or content that she can relate to. And when she sees it, she says, yes, that's true. That's me. Right? So by doing that, what that's going to do is when I do Facebook advertisement, it's going to drive the cost of my advertisement down because my engagement is already good. So again, if I go over to Jay, because we got hers nailed down, when I do Facebook advertisement for her, it costs $0.02 or $0.01 per click per view. So it doesn't cost a lot to do Facebook advertisement because our avatar is so nailed. It's so clear, and the post is so engaging for those folks. So then what we do is we spend time making sure that we find where that audience is.

And just so I understand, when they do a click, does that mean they've automatically liked your page or joined your community or they've just looked at one post?

No, they just engaged with that post.

Okay, but that gets them onto your page, essentially?

Generally, yeah. What it's going to do is to get them engaged with the Post and if they don't know J.J. now they know her. They don't know me now they know me and chances are when they see me again, wait a minute. I like this. So I'm going to like this page so I can get more of this type of content.

So you continue to target them with advertising, but if you're talking about one or two pennies, you can get an ad in front of them and have them click 100 times. It's only costing you a buck. Is that the economic.

Yes, it only costs me a buck to get them to engage to either comment, to like to share. You know that post.

And how does someone go about that? Here's the thing. I talk to experts in a wide variety of areas on this program and in real life and many of them best selling books in demand speakers. They say, oh, TJ, I just came back from this speech and 200 people stayed after the speech and asked me with questions for the next five hours. It was great. And then they go back and they work from home and they're sort of isolated and alone and they're just pitching meeting planners with no engagement from an avatar for the next six weeks. It seems like you've kind of worked out a solution to that. You're not dependent on meeting planners or convention planners delivering you an audience. You actually figured out a way to bring an engaged audience to you on a daily basis. How else can people do that?

Well, I mean, honestly, I think it's just creating compelling content, more compelling content, solving more problems. And you know, with jj, I'm pretty lucky, right? Because she's a super engaging personality. She's a fun personality. With me, you know, I'm not quite as fun, so I have to be a lot more scientific.

And your avatar, that was for JJ or that was for your specific site?

No, no, the avatar that I described was really for In Hot Pursuit. The avatar for JJ would be non fitness minded women that want to lose weight, that aren't necessarily, they don't want to be a size 2, they want to be a size 8. So her avatar is very different than mine.

And as long as you know what it is, you can focus your energies and be a lot more efficient with it. Now you mentioned something to me when we first met a year ago and I have to confess, I won't say it gave me nightmares, but I just, I couldn't stop thinking about it because I've been in the whole expert information products consulting game for 30 years. I know hundreds and thousands of others have too there's always a gazillion revenue streams, and everyone talks about multiple revenue streams. And, yeah, I've got my online courses and speeches and webinars, but you have mastered the art of creating memberships. And it's not dependent on advertising, it's not dependent on keynote speaking fees. It's its own little beast. Tell us about that.

Yeah, so membership. So I think in terms of when you build an online business, you're going to have a combination of things. You're going to have ebooks, which, you know, foundational things, which are really underrated and can make so much money and can build your audience really, really fast. And I think they should happen before you write your books. You know, then you have books, you have online classes.

Right.

You have live events, and you have membership services. And so membership services for me, is finding a way to serve folks on an ongoing basis, help folks with whatever it is. In my case, it's coaching around helping people get off the dime, stop procrastinating, finally build a life that they want, finally achieve some things. And in that, I teach people, I have a whole process called ASAP System, and I have a portal that can help folks kind of get clarity around their vision and what they're trying to do to what's preventing them from taking action, how they can take more action and that sort of thing. So, and then I provide coaching that supports that, because a lot of times, if you have a book or you have a class, that's great, but you still need to touch folks longer than that oftentimes. And so our membership programs and membership programs that I build often allow me to continue to support, coach, educate, help folks on an ongoing basis. And the strategy for us is to do something that is not costly on a monthly basis so that there's not this huge barrier to entry. And to be able to do it with a really large number, well, that's the trick.

How do you actually get a large number? Because I know hundreds of colleagues through the National Speakers association, other professional groups, and people started talking about membership sites half a dozen years ago, and everybody started one. And most people, after about six months, had five members. And when they figured out the time they were spending on it for the revenue, it was a huge loss, and they basically abandoned it. You somehow crack the nut on that. How do you do it?

Well, I think a couple things. I think when you build anything and you sell anything, particularly online, you have to have what we call an incredible offer, meaning that it has to be something that you're going to provide that is way beyond the value. So that's one. And you have to then deliver on that, and you have to deliver constantly. So the challenge is most people aren't willing to do that long enough to build an audience. Now, there are some strategies that we.

Use.

That is focused on retention. So we have some retention strategies today. We've built out a huge audience in terms of JJ. We've got 10,000 people in a private group. We have folks that are certified to help sell some of her and help.

And let's just point out, that's not Facebook fans. Those are people who are actually paying money every month to be a member.

Yeah, that's correct. And with that, the thing about it is the cost is so low for folks to be in it, but the value and the return is so high. So you got to remember, in terms of JJ, she's helped people lose over £2 million where they couldn't before. So she's actually delivered on a promise. She's helped women that were not fertile because of weight, some issues or thyroid issues and things like that solve some of those problems. So the focus is for Jay. Obviously, I spend a lot of time with her, and I know that she spends. She's so passionate about what she does that she spends most of her waking time focused on how to serve this group. I think a lot of people will go into these types of things, and they don't have their mind right. They're going into it as a part of, here's my business. I'm going to just start this thing. But they're really not focused or committed to serving the group, because if you're not focused on serving the group, it's going to fail. It's not going to work very long. People very smart, they're going to figure it out pretty quickly.

Now, that does beg a question, though. If she's spending every waking moment on servicing the community, what happens if she needs to take a week or two vacation? Do people get angry? Does it just shut down? Do people get upset? How does that work?

Well, we have ambassadors, so we have about six, eight ambassadors that are in answering questions and helping. So it's not like she. So when I say that she's spending every waking moment focused on the group, it's not because she's in Facebook every waking moment. What it means is that she's so interested in what she's doing. She's out trying to figure out why Martha is still struggling from the phone call, and so she's still out testing things. And figuring things out because it's what her passion is, not that she's necessarily tied to the group every waking hour, by the way.

A little learning moment here. Media training tip. I try to practice what I preach, but I also try to be transparent. About 60 seconds ago, you may have heard a vibrating sound that was in fact my phone. I try to always not just power the phone off or the ringer off, but actually turn the phone off through the power. So it's not even possible. And unfortunately my phone was covered up with some notes, in fact with Todd's biography, and I just didn't see it. So that's my blunder. But little learning tip there. When you're doing a talk radio show, a TV show, don't just turn your ringer off, actually turn the phone off so you don't have embarrassing vibrations like I just did. Sorry for that interruption, Todd.

No worries at all.

Are there certain metrics you look for that someone should have before starting a membership site? Should they have at least 50,000 followers on Facebook? Should they have an email list of 30,000? Should they have at least 40 retweets on every tweet? How does someone know if they actually have enough of a fan base?

Well, that's a good question. I haven't thought about it in that way. Like I don't have that all laid out in terms of particular numbers, but the things that are, I think, important before you do a membership site, I think you want to have proven that you can sell things that have less of a commitment. People are willing to pay for an e book or online program faster than they're going to pay for or commit to paying you monthly, some particular thing because that means more of a commitment. So I would make sure that there was a. That you have some sort of. You have products that people have responded to favorably.

So a real sales.

That would be one.

A real sales track record. Yeah, it's not sort of.

It should sold with these folks because, you know, in terms of your audience, you have basically a cold audience and you have a warm audience. You have a hot audience. You have to be able to identify what those are and what your messages are to your cold audience. Warm audience and hot audience, you're not going to typically do very well. Selling to your conversion rate is not going to be great. Selling to a cold audience, a membership service you can sell, you can probably get a cold audience to buy an ebook, you know, and some other things, but you're not going to do as well. Selling the membership service and Then how.

Much is too much on the site? I mean, you could these days, someone could have a live feed, camera feed on them and do Facebook Live an hour a day, four hours a day. I mean, you could live online. How much is too much content and exposure to an audience in terms of.

Your fan page or your community?

The community, I don't know.

That's changing. I think with the fan page, I just read something said a couple times and I do four times in terms of posts a day. That's a good gauge. The other thing is when you see the most active Facebook pages, they are people that are posting even a lot more often than that now. I don't know how well they're monetizing those things. I think a lot of folks are monetizing based on sponsorship, which is not what we do. I'm not focused on that because I can't control the content. I want to give folks content that I think they need and will like.

But how often are you speaking on video on your Facebook page? And how often is JJ speaking where people can see her, hear, engage with her directly?

So I would be just like you just now. I would be not doing what I would suggest in terms of speaking on the Facebook page because as you know, I've always been challenged in public speaking, and so I've always wanted to stay behind the scenes. So what I speak is on my. In my community today. I have a call with them today. It's an hour call where we get on and we kind of huddle around. We do it by Zoom and we get on Zoom and we're going to talk and folks will get on and we'll talk and we'll coach and we'll get through stuff. So I do that with them probably a couple times a week, meaning that I do a coaching call. I'm committed to doing a coaching call once weekly.

So that's an audio. Now, are you doing that through a Facebook application I'm not familiar with? Are you just promoting on Facebook to a regular conference call line or what?

On my coaching calls, I use outside tool that allows me to do conference call or video conference calls. So I do a video call and I have a portal where they go in and get that information. So what we've tested was doing Facebook Live, doing the conference calls and the coaching calls and Facebook Live. The challenge with it for me has been that it's not been as reliable.

It just breaks down or people can't.

Hear you well, it dies. At some point it might be going and then it might die and then it'll start over again, and then it takes a long time for people to reconnect. So with jj, we've been testing Facebook Live and testing a product called Zoom. We had a different product and it went out of business really just a couple of months ago. So we've been testing things. But Facebook Live, when you can do it on your fan page, is the best thing in the world. If you're doing content that's free, is the best thing in the world. And Facebook. But if you're. But for us, we're doing paid content, which means that only a certain people can get on this call and logins and stuff. And so we just have other tools that we use to do that.

Todd Johnson is our guest today. He is an entrepreneur extraordinaire. Now, Todd, you are active in the health diet space. You're active in the small business space. Are there other verticals you're looking to get into? Are you actively looking for other subject matter experts as partnership or do you grow it internally? What are you looking for now?

Yeah, I'm glad you asked that question.

I am.

I'm looking for partnerships with folks that. People that are great teachers in general, that and where the audience are women is good, but particularly folks that are teaching kids to crack the code and fall in love with math or fall in love with language. So folks that have a unique or a very specific proposition in terms of what they teach, particularly around kids, is something I'm very interested in. I'm also interested in folks that can help women in relationships and things like that. So there are a couple things that I'm looking at that I want to partner with in terms of some sort of equity partnership where we allow you to do what you do to keep the lights on and we do all the other stuff in terms of helping to build your business in the product roadmap.

And we have linked to Todd's Twitter account, his website, and other resources in the show notes as well. Todd Johnson, final comments from you. Just any other tips you have for experts, people who feel like they have a passionate message they want to share with people.

Yeah, well, I tell you what, you know, right now I think is the best time for people like us that have expertise, specific expertise, that are excited about it and willing to legitimately help people move the needle in their life. I think for folks that are listening, hopefully they're already started their fan page and already. But they really go back and revisit that avatar thing and ask a whole bunch of questions. And then build solutions around all of those and then do advertising based on that. We get away from that most basic thing. And that most basic thing is the thing that's going to really help us save so much time and save so much money. So I would say take action and do some of the things that we talked about earlier. I think this has been great. We do some of the things that we talked about earlier, and I think they're going to have a really good jump start on folks.

Todd Johnson, thank you for being our guest today.

Thank you. Tita, Good talking to you.

Thanks for listening to speaking with T. J Walker.