Unlock Career Success: Master the Art of Effective Communication

Welcome, I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today. We are live. It is Thursday around 10:45am January 18, and this is a time for you to ask questions, be a part of a community, and learn more about how to be more successful by improving your communication skills. If this is the first time to your channel. I'm TJ Walker and I devoted my professional life helping people become better communicators. It doesn't matter if you are a student about to give a book report and you're 10 years old and you're a little nervous, or if you are a president of a country or a prime minister. Chances are I've worked with someone just like you and I think I have some techniques that may help you get to the next level even further. I'm joined, as always, by our fantastic community manager, Barb Tomlin. Barb, how are you today?

Foreign. Having technical difficulties ever since I got up this morning. But you know, I'm here, that's what's important. And you're here and I'm kind of excited to see what comes down today.

Sure. And let me confess, I'm one of the worst in the world. Upset saying, oh, I'm not a tech technology guy, I'm not a techie. And when I'm honest with myself, what that really means is I'm lazy. And as I get older, I'm less patient. The reality is, unless you are a Google Python programmer, artificial intelligence engineer, so many products, virtually every consumer product these days does not require advanced technology skills, computer language skills. What it requires is patience, time, willingness to Google, how do you set this up? And I've been going through that a lot. For those of you who are regulars, this may all look a little different to you. This is a brand new set, new lights, new microphone, one new camera's up. I'm still trying to put two more cameras up. I'm trying to up my game. I'm trying to be more appealing to you and to attract more of an audience, to help more people. And I just didn't want to do any more videos where I'm sort of hunched over a laptop with a cheap plastic brick wall behind me. So I'm trying to up my game, but even I haven't mastered all the technology. I can't figure out, Barb, how do I really get the colors I want and without them changing and being distracted? So we may have to get. Now I can't even get back to the red. It was. There we go and it pulsates. I don't want that. So I'm trying to improve my technology until five minutes before we started today, I couldn't get my microphone to work. But all of it is stuff you can figure out if you're willing to put time in Tinker experiment, sometimes call tech support. These days, especially with audio video equipment, most products have one or more videos on how it works if you just go to YouTube. So the idea. Well, I'm not a techie. I can't do it again. I'm reaching to myself here, not you. You can do it if you're willing to put the time in to really focus. And it gets harder and harder for so many people, myself included. You start to read a manual and all of a sudden, oh, there's an interesting text. Oh, my friends ask me what I want to do Friday night. And a lot of these technology issues, you're not going to solve them unless you really, really concentrate for a sustained period of time, whether it's five minutes, ten minutes, an hour. I've been spending basically all day long the last couple of days trying to build a studio. We don't have it. All right. And Barb, you're very diplomatic, but I want to get feedback from you right now. You said, tj, are you happy with that, the way it looks? And I can tell you were trying to be polite, but basically you think it looks awful. And I do want to, you know, put your mind at rest. This is a work in progress. This is not a finished product. But give me your feedback. Give me your honest feedback right now in terms of any aspect, the video quality, the lighting quality, the audio quality. Because I can tell right now my microphone is blocked a little bit. I need to move it so it's pointed right at me more for even better quality. But there's going to be a million tweaks involved. Barb, any feedback?

Well, I don't know if I'm the one having technical difficulties during this live stream or it's coming from your end, but I've had the feed from your video right now. Has been.

And let me just.

I'm going to put you on solo layouts.

Nope.

It's still very. From my end, you're very blurry. And I. It's like a poor Internet connection.

Wow.

I've checked. I mean, just as the learning goes, the first thing I do is check my own Internet connection to see that it's strong. And it. It is showing that I'm up at the max on the bar. So it. I have every reason to believe that My Internet access is good, but there's something from. I don't know how your connection is set up.

When I look at it on my computer, which is now three and a half feet away, it's much greater clarity than in past weeks when I've just been using a webcam and I'm sitting right in front of it. So I don't know what that means exactly. Ultimately it is about how the end user sees it, not how I see it.

Exactly. Now you're back in focus again. It looks great. So I think it was just the access and I don't know, we don't want to take up time on screen today, but that, you know, the, the access that you have, time of day and so forth, that all has something to do with it, and of course, you've heard me say many times before in our sessions is to always clear your cache, make sure that you don't have a bunch of tabs open and multiple windows and so forth. So it's not coming from the computer end of your system and then check at your access, but it's coming through well now. And as far as the office goes, what's happening to me, what I'm seeing on screen today is that your screen is not filling the entire picture on the video. And so I question how you actually had your screen set up when you came in to Stream Yard. So see if it's that way or if it's, you know, just.

Are you talking about the black band that's like an inch left and the right correct. I don't even know how you deal with getting like that one other learning moment here. And so I like to be transparent and candid with the community here. Something a little different is going on compared to most weeks now. I have some powerful lights on. I'm also wearing a tie because of feedback from all of you last week. In the last four months, you seem to respond to videos. I do. Wearing a suit and tie rather than the casual look. But one result of all that is I'm now sweating massively. So excuse me, I'm just going to come over here and get some tissue before I melt. Now, I'm fortunate enough in that this building I'm in has good air conditioning and it has quiet air conditioning. So I actually did take the time to put the temperature down a couple of degrees.

Wonderful.

But this does happen to people. And here's the thing, I mean, this is a fairly low. I want to do the best I can possibly do, but this is a fairly low stake Situation in that I don't have, you know, no one has paid me $100,000 for a speaking fee today. It's not a job interview. What you don't want to do is have an important presentation, important client pitch, change a variable, and then find yourself sweating when you're doing a zoom meeting or any type of Microsoft Teams meeting, your picture presentation. Because then when you are sweating, you're now going to be thinking, oh, no, I'm sweating. People are looking at me. This is embarrassing. And you will perspire even more. So let me give you one other tip for this. Since we're going to be doing things together, sort of as friends, help each other out. One of the things I do, and I've done this for 30 plus years, and I recommend with clients, if you're going to be on video for very long and you want the absolute highest quality is put on some mosaic powder. By mosaic, I just mean a mixture of color. You don't want to give yourself a tan. You don't want to make your skin whiter or darker than it is. You need something that will match your skin tone, whether you're really dark or really light. You need something that's not going to change it. So what I do is just a brush powder. And what this does is it reduces the shine. Because if you really want to look your best, you don't want to be shining. Because then it can look like you're sweating, which you may be, but then it can make people wonder about, are you nervous? Oh, he's sweating. He must be lying. Now, this next tip doesn't apply to most of you, but I even put it on the top of my head, not to make it look like I have a thick head of hair or fool anyone, but just to reduce the shine. So just a quick tip there. Part of what I'm trying to do with these live sessions, which we're going to be doing a lot of in 2024, it's really kind of taking you behind the scenes of what I do. If I'm doing a media training with a CEO or president of a country or top political leader, and how you can essentially coach yourself and talk to you about the mistakes and the fumbles and how do you recover from it. So it's going to be more of a behind the scenes look in a lot of what we do here. And Barb, you were saying something and I got so hot and sweaty I had to walk away. So I think I interrupted you. Go ahead.

Well, right now your feed is Also coming in all blurry again. And in through that entire session of you sharing your tips, it was blurry. And I actually looked on another window to the feed on YouTube and it was also blurry there.

It may be because I have auto focus on and maybe that I need to take the auto focus on. The fact that I'm moving is messing it up.

Absolutely.

That's one of the things we're going to have to check with my technology team and then feedback from you as well.

Yeah, that's exactly. That's exactly an issue.

We've had a number of people write in this week with specific questions if you could. And we don't have to give their last name or any of their information, but if you could share some of those, be happy to answer questions. And those of you watching this for the first time, any question you have about communicating, feel free to either post it here in the comments section in our Community tab on the YouTube page and just you can connect with us live right here through streamyard as well.

The first one we have is from Adam Sandbach and his question is I have a unique problem when talking while thinking of complex subjects. I find it very difficult to make eye contact. At the same time. I'm a highly intelligent dyslexic, which I think is the problem. My thoughts are highly visible to deal with this problem. Should I sometimes just come up and tell people I work with it in the meeting that my eye contact issue is a dyslexic quirk? It would be extremely helpful if you could suggest some other technique or trick because it's a personal issue. For me, this has been a lifetime problem and very difficult to overcome. But at this stage in my life I really want to become a great speaker and and believe that I can because I have great ideas to share.

Thanks for that question. Let me try to give you as much detail as possible. Quick note to our editors. This may be something that we use for an edited video. I'm going to do that just to see if that helps them find this. What do you do if you have a problem that prevents you from maintaining good eye contact with people in your audience? Should you tell them in advance? I think that's a bad strategy. Keep in mind most audiences have low standards for anyone speaking to them. In the business world, they're used to being bored. So telling someone any excuse I have a hard time with eye contact or I have this medical issue or that issue. I don't find people really care about it. All they really care about is can you say one thing interesting to them? If you do that, they'll love you. If you want to be seen as a great speaker, you don't have to have perfect eye contact, perfect hand gestures, perfect voice, perfect tie, or anything. All you have to do is deliver an idea that's understandable to your audience, that's interesting to your audience, that's memorable, that they can act upon. If you do that, they will love you. Sir Ken Robinson gave one of the most famous, successful TED Talks ever. He had a health issue where he couldn't even walk. He just sort of stood there. Guess what? Nobody cared. They loved his message, they loved his passion, they loved his stories, they loved his insights. So my advice, if you're self conscious about a problem, eye contact, dyslexia, voice. You have cold that day. Don't tell your audience about it. Just focus on doing your very best. Now, at some point, if you become really famous and people want to know all about you and how you overcame a problem. Sure, talk about your problems. Sir Richard Branson is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in history. Famously is dyslexic. So when he's giving a motivational speech, he does occasionally talk about that. But when he's there to talk about business or anything else, he doesn't start off by saying, I'm sorry, I can't read my annual report today. I have dyslexia. Let me just tell you the numbers. No, he just tells the numbers and tells the story behind the numbers. So that is my advice to you. If you really want to come across and make the best impression, just do what you can. Now, in answer to your particular question here, let me be very upfront. I do not know anything about dyslexia other than that a lot of wildly successful people, from Sir Richard Branson to the attorney David Boies, have become successful even though they were dyslexic. So there may be all sorts of practical tips on how to do this better that I'm not aware of. But the general principle I am confident in sharing with you is until your audience really, really cares about you. As a personality, a motivational speaker or a celebrity, I wouldn't go into your problems. I would focus on their problems. Solve someone's problem in the audience, they will love you and they will want more. Okay, Barb. And a note to our editor. I think we could make a short out of that and a long one. Now, a note to you of watching this. I'm sort of doing a couple of things at once here. This is Kind of a live laboratory on communication. I'm here talking to you live and I hope if you're here, you're getting some value out of it and you're enjoying it. But we're also using this as sort of a laboratory for making content for YouTube. Every single day on YouTube, I typically post at least two short form videos and they're posted across other social media as well. And I do at least one long video and may start doing several long meaning simply it's more than 60 seconds and it's horizontal. So that's what we're doing in this. But what I want you to get from this is to realize nobody's perfect at this. You'll see me make mistakes. You may see me say, ah, cut, let's not do that and let me do it again. And you can kind of see how this works in real life. What I'm hoping for is that it inspires you to start your own YouTube channel, your own TikTok channel, or your own Amazon Influencer storefront. Because many of you say nice things about me. I really don't believe I have any unique talents as a communicator that were inborn. It was all stuff learned by doing that anyone can learn to do with enough practice. Barb, I do want to talk to you a little more today about some updates with Amazon Influencer program. Those of you watching this for the first time, I'm not an employee of Amazon, I'm not a paid spokesperson, but I'm excited and Barb and others in our community are excited about the Amazon Influencer program because really for the first time ever that I've seen, it's a way for people who have a passion for communicating and speaking can actually make money without having some big pre existing audience and social media because they allow you to make videos speaking about a product you like and you can make money from it even though you don't have a million fans of your own. So we'll be talking about that in a moment. But Barb, did we have another question that came in and apologies a number of you, at least half a dozen of you did write in with specific questions this week. We're having some technical issues and it may be next week before we get to answer those. So I do apologize in advance. But Barb, did we find another question from one of our regulars?

Yes, and this one comes in from Kid Neptune from France and he says I don't know how to overcome my fear to speak in public. Every time I start to speak after a Few minutes, I lose control of myself or words.

Mm. So what do you do? And, Ted, I'm going to answer this directly for you, but I also want to create some content that is helpful to other people and other forms and content. So, again, I'm making a note to my editors that they may want to pull this piece. What do you do if every time you stand up to speak, you're overcome with fear and all of a sudden it feels like your brain's gone into overdrive and nothing comes out? If that's you, you're not alone. A lot of people feel this way. The number one solution is not to meditate or visualize a standing ovation, or to visualize your audience in their underwear or to take a beta blocker. There's a lot of bad advice out there on how to deal with this fear of public speaking, especially these first moments when you start and all of a sudden you can't think. The real secret is this. Don't think. It sounds like I'm being glib. What I mean by that is if you have an opportunity to speak in front of people, think about it before. Think about it the day before, the morning of. Jot down a few notes. Most important, practice out loud and record yourself on video. And then watch it. Figure out what you like, don't like. Do it several times until you like what you see. Now, if you know you're giving a 10 minute summary of what your department has done in the last quarter for your board of directors, that sounds like a stressful situation. You're going to make it infinitely less stressful if you practice it in advance on video and you look at it, I understand if you tell me you get nervous speaking in front of other people and your brain freezes. What I don't get is if you tell me you're not willing to watch yourself because that is just a function of work. No one else has to see it. But you've got to be willing to do the work. And the work is practice on video. Watch yourself. Figure out, what do you like, what do you not like. Keep doing it again and again and again until you're comfortable with it. This way. Certainly, the first 10 seconds, the first 30 seconds out of your mouth, you have muscle memory. You already know what you're going to say. You're not going to have to think of it. Barb, if I were to ask you, how did you meet your husband? Where do you live? You're not going to be, hmm, let me see. No, you've already said the answer to that question hundreds or thousands of times. There's muscle memory. You may say a little differently each time. You don't memorize an answer, but it's easy to say. And that's the real key of being comfortable anytime you speak is you need to practice it in advance. So that if you are actively nervous thinking, oh, there's all these people are looking at me. I'm a little uncomfortable, I'm a little tense. If that's what you're thinking, it's okay because you know in advance what you're going to say. You're not going to have to think about it. So that's going to help a great deal. The other thing that's going to boost your confidence is knowing that the first thing out of your mouth is going to be something interesting to the audience. If you know in advance, you're interesting and the people who, who are sitting around in a conference or a board meeting are going to hear you and they're going to put their phone down, they go, this guy actually said or this woman actually said something interesting. And you see them paying attention. That is going to relax you. So much of what makes us nervous as speakers is the fact that we feel guilty about boring our audience. Why are we boring our audience? Because we feel like we have to. Well, I have to say good morning and how are you? And I'm happy to be here today. I'm going to talk about X and Y and Z boring. So cut all that out. Start your presentation by saying one thing interesting to your audience that you're already comfortable saying. That's going to relax you. It's going to relax the audience and get them to pay attention. And then if you do have to think of something else, there's so much less stress. The human brain is structured as a defense mechanism to not think when you're feeling stressed. Because our body, we have biological evolutionary programming in us. If we feel stress, it might be because there's a saber tooth tiger lurking there. We need to run. It might be there's some other dangerous animal. We need to shut our brain down, use the adrenaline to start running really fast. That helped our ancestors stay alive. It helped them from getting eaten. It doesn't help you when your boss has said, stand up and say a few words about your latest project. So we have to fight that natural instinct. So I hope these tips helped in some way. Thanks so much for the question. A number of executives are not fans. Community members write to us with questions. And again, I apologize through a clerical error. I've misplaced them. I will find them and we will get back to you on those in the next time we have a live session. But did you. Were you able to find any others?

Yes, I did find one more, and I think I. I think I found a way. I might be able to find a couple more as you go along, but it is not easy and we'll have to work that technology out the next time around. This one is from Savetta Moon, and she says she's been living in the United states for about 15 years. She's fluent in English, but she'd like to perfect it and be able to speak more like a native English speaker. I'd like to be able to interpret from my native language into English better and easier. I would like to expand my vocabulary and understand news better, plus learn new idioms. What would be the best way to do it?

Great.

Fantastic. Fantastic question. I'm doing a quick edit mark here for my editors because this is stuff that a lot of people are interested in and they're going to want to know the answer to. What do you do if you want to go from being a pretty good speaker to really sounding like a native speaker, whether it's native English or any other language? What do you do if you feel a little insecure about how you're coming across now in English or any other language? The biggest problem most people have is they think, I don't want to embarrass myself. Let me sort of lurk over here in the corner in the shadows. That's not what you want to do. You want to take every opportunity you can to speak more. The way to speak more effectively is to speak more often. The people who are the best at any skill typically do more of it. The best basketball players in the world typically are the ones who stay after practice and shoot free throws another hour when everyone else has gone home to play video games. It's no different in the speaking world. The people who speak more get better at it. They get more comfortable. They get more conversational with it, whether it's Joe Rogan here in the United States or Howard Stern. They both make 50, $100 million a year speaking well. They also speak four hours a day for decades. They get better at it, more comfortable with it, more fluent in it. So that's one way if you want to know more about vocabulary and idioms, read widely. Don't just read social media. Don't just read text. Don't just read superficial celebrity news. Read real books. Now you can read it on a Kindle. It doesn't have to be in a paper format, but read real literature, really real scientific technology, books about artificial intelligence that will build your vocabulary. But there's one other change of perspective I do want you to focus on, and that is be interesting. So many people are self conscious about, oh, people are judging me. My English isn't good enough. I mispronounced this one word. I said that a little off. In my experience, very few audience members and ever remember that the real risk when you stand up and speak is not typically that you make some negative impression on people. It's not that they say, oh well, TJ used that one word incorrectly or used the repetition or that ungrammar mistake. That's not what people remember. The biggest danger for most speakers, most executives, most people, everywhere in the world, when they speak, is that they stand up, they speak, or they sit down and speak and five seconds later nobody remembers anything they said because it wasn't particularly interesting. It was either a boring idea or it was presented in a boring manner because it was too abstract. It was just numbers or facts. It was disconnected. The number one way you can really boost your impression with audiences, whether it's a boss, a prospective employer, a couple of friends for that matter, is to say something interesting and memorable. The way to do that is by packaging your ideas with stories. And if you tell an interesting story that's relevant to me, that I can understand and I can see how there's a message that relates to me. I'll forgive spelling errors, I'll forgive grammar mistakes, I'll forgive vocabulary mistakes, and everyone else will too. So that's why I would urge you, it's fine to have high standards and want to improve yourself, but you can have perfect vocabulary, perfect grammar, know every idiom, sound like a native born speaker, and no one's impressed. Because most native born English speakers, when they stand up to speak in a business meeting, a conference, anyplace else, they're instantly forgotten. Nobody remembered them. They don't get credit for sounding like the average American. People are sort of politely listening and going through the motions. And the reality is most people, especially if it's a larger conference or big meeting or a lot of people in the room are thinking, yeah, this TJ guy, he's probably not that interesting. I'm probably not really going to miss anything important, Let me try to multitask. And they're looking at their cell phone. So I'm urging you, don't hold yourself up to the standard of I want to Sound just like a Native American or a native English speaking person. Instead, hold yourself to a completely different standard, which is every time I speak, I want the audience to understand my ideas, find them interesting, be able to remember my messages so they can take the actions that I want. That's a very different standard. And in a way it's harder because very few people do that. But another way, it's actually easier because few people are trying to consistently be understood and remembered. Because so many people go into a presentation with a defensive mentality. They think, as long as no one hears me make a grammar mistake, as long as no one hears me mispronounce a word, as long as no one thinks I left out an important number or that I'm stupid or I'm silly or I left out something, then I'll consider that a victory. That's a very negative mentality. That's like starting a business with the idea as long as I don't lose money for the next 10 years. No one would start a business with the idea of they're happy as long as they just never lose money. You would actually make money when you're speaking, when you are presenting, you want to gain ground to. Not because you want money out of every speech or presentation, but because you want to help the audience. You want them to understand you and you want them to remember your ideas so they can be helped and everyone can benefit. I mean, that's certainly what I'm doing with you right now. I'm hoping that I can really give you a few kernels of insight, very practical tips that will improve your career, your job hunting prospects, your ability to get more clients, your ability to win political office, if that's what you're in. That's really the goal here. Barb.

Yes, I did find another one.

Okay.

It's. It definitely is an adventure. And this one is from Michelle Holden. And let's see, by the way, those.

Of you joining us live, thanks so much for joining us. I'm hoping to do this very frequently and have more time like this available to you so we can have sort of essentially a daily workshop on communication right here where it's not just me answering questions, but you can share and be a part of this and be a part of this community where we try to help, we all try to help each other become more successful in life by communicating more effectively. And part of that is confidence. Part of that is pure technical skills. Part of that is the technology of how do you get the right camera necessarily and how do you know where to look or when to put enough makeup on. All of those things can play a role in actually motivating you to speak more often and to be more successful every time you do speak. Barb.

Okay, this is from Michelle Holden and it's a mouthful. So hang on. If I am wanting to help.

Excuse me.

If I am wanting to let people know that I can help them communicate one on one in a small group or in front of large audiences, or just communicating more effectively in their personal relationships, how do I say all of that in one sentence?

So the question is, how in one sentence do you tell people that you can help them one on one? Am I understanding the question correctly?

Right.

Yes, because she's got like three questions here, so. But that's the first one. And she wants to help people communicate one on one. And she wants to communicate more effectively in their personal relationships and she wants to know how she can say that in one sentence. So. Okay, that's her hook to bring her audience in.

Yeah.

And here's one thing I want you to think. I don't want to sound like I'm dodging the question, but I would challenge you. What does it matter if it's one sentence? If it takes 10 sentences but everyone is focused on it and it's interesting and 10 people come up to you afterwards, want a meeting with you, isn't that pretty good? Why does it necessarily need to be one sentence? Now let me step back a minute and confess. I have a bit of a sore spot here because so many clients around the world come to me and they say, tj, teach me how to be more concise. I want to be concise when I speak. And I always ask them, well, why? Why do you want to be concise? I've seen people stand up, finish their presentation in 20 seconds. Nobody remembered anything. They said they didn't accomplish anything. I've seen speakers speak from 10 in the morning till midnight. People wanted more because the speaker was interesting and compelling. So I do believe the starting point for any communication should always be you asking yourself, what is it I want this audience to do? Then ask yourself what messages are likely to help them? Want to do that, motivate them to do that? Of course, you do have to factor in time constraints. If someone's coming to a day long seminar with you and you have eight hours, that's very different from someone saying, okay, we've got a minute left on this broadcast, 10 seconds left for each person for final thoughts, then you've got to speak in 10 seconds. So you do need the ability to speak in varying lengths. There's no doubt about it. I'm speaking here today for an hour, maybe two hours. But every day I speak between 10 and 18 seconds on YouTube shorts. So I'm happy to speak in any length. But specifically, what do you do if you want people to come up to you for one on ones? If you're looking for active clients, and I don't know about you, but let's say you are someone actively seeking clients who have your own consulting business, there's a couple of things you can do. You need to be really interesting when you do have the floor. You need to tell some compelling story so that person can relate to it and think, wow, this person helps someone who's just like me. If they help that person, they help me and want to come up to it. You also need to give people a reason. So if I am, for example, speaking to a group of professional speakers, they're not going to come to me and say, tj, we want you to teach us how to speak. They're already good speakers. But for years I did this at the National Speakers Association. Everyone gets to stand up and for 10 seconds introduce themselves. And most people would say something like, hello, my name is TJ and I'm president of Media Training Worldwide. And I. It's boring. That's not how I hooked people in to come to me because I'm trying to get one on one clients at the time. I would say something like this. Imagine the phone rings. It's the New York Times. They want to interview you about your business. Are you completely confident that you can get the exact quote you want that you plan before the interview even starts? Hi, I'm TJ Walker and I teach people how to get the exact message they want. That's about 10 seconds. But then I would then close and say, if you want to master the art of speaking, I have a free book. I'll just email you a copy if you come up and give me your business card at the end of the meeting. So I gave people, and I would do that. I would give them a free copy of the book. So I gave people, and that's Media Training, A to Z book. So I would give people first of all a story essentially that they can relate to that addresses a real need they have. Then I gave them an easy way of approaching me where didn't cost them anything. I've already invited them. And then I gave them something of real value. It wasn't just a sales pitch. It wasn't a flyer on 50% off. It was a whole book that would really help them and that became a part of my sales funnel. So I would recommend something like that where you make it easy for people to learn more about you, even if they're not ready to pull out their checkbook and hire you because they don't know enough about you to hire you yet. Okay, Barb, next question.

Okay.

Excuse me. Yeah, right. This is the same person.

And.

She says, I want to advertise. I am thinking of putting a car magnet or QR code on my car, simply stating communication coach. Does that say it all or is there some better wording I could use?

Okay, communications coach. And you want to attract business by putting a text message on a magnet on your car. Let me just state very clearly up front, full disclosure, I've made a lot of ads over my career. I've helped other people. I'm now essentially doing ads every day for Amazon influencers. Having said all that, I'm a wildly unsuccessful advertiser when it comes to Google Ads and Facebook ads. I've tried a lot and I consider myself to be very bad at advertising marketing. So I don't want to just throw cold water on an idea. It might work. Maybe 100,000 people hate it. One person likes it, and they become your best client for a lifetime. You never know. You could try it. I don't really see a lot of downside. I can tell you as someone who's been a professional communications coach now for four decades, my gut reaction is I'm just being candid with you. My gut reaction is that's a horrible idea. Try it. If you're teaching, if you're a coach on communication, spoken communication, my question to you is why do you want to use a text ad? If you teach people how to speak, then your ad, I believe, needs to be you speaking. Now you can do YouTube ads, but you actually speaking, you could do micro targeting just to people in your town or your neighbor. It could be very inexpensive to advertise that way. And of course, I think the best possible way of you advertising is to not advertise but to be your own media company. By creating videos for YouTube, other social media platforms. LinkedIn is a great place, but TikTok, Twitter, they all allow video. And by posting on a regular basis, your expertise helping people communicate, you can attract the right sort of person who either becomes a client of yours or who is asked for referrals from other people. Those could become your client. I think long term you're on Much more of a solid foundation. If you're putting your expertise out to the world and you're attracting people, and long term, it's a lot less expensive. Because the problem with advertising, and I've never been someone who has really run a successful advertising campaign for my own business. But the problem is, even if it works for a while, algorithms can change. Ad rates can change. If you're spending $100 and you're making $1,000, do that all day long. But sometimes something can change. The message doesn't work. Things become saturated. All of a sudden you're spending $100 to make $90. And if you scale that out, you go bankrupt. If you're putting out your demonstration, your examples of how you actually help people communicate more effectively, it becomes wildly cost effective. I mentioned I believe it was the beginning of our time here today. I made a video at least a dozen years ago. Everything I knew about media training. Just me talking, no special effects, no editing, no B roll, and frankly, the audio was awful. But it's had more than a hundred thousand views. It's a rare month or even week that goes by where I don't get prospects, sometimes from major corporations and political parties around the world who find me through that video and end up hiring me. I think you're a lot better off demonstrating your expertise on communication skills rather than doing the magnet. You can try it. I think magnets and little things like that work really well for certain industries. Like if you're a dentist. If you're a dentist and you're putting up things and people say, oh, it's a dentist. Oh, it's in my. It's three blocks away. They want someone that's close to them. It's right there. It can work well for that. I don't think that's going to work particularly well in communications, but I could be wrong. Give it a try, Barb. Next question.

That's all the questions that we have for today, but I'd like to share with you that coming in from YouTube, we have some of our regular students and a couple of new folks. And because you are using a new methodology here, I want to see if you can see. See these comments on screen from where you are.

I can. I can see that there are comments again. I. I've got. I've got to configure this new studio a little better because. Okay, comments are now about five feet away. So I see Santiago says hi. Hi, all. So thank you. Santiago, if you could share some of the comments and I could you Know, say hello and acknowledge people.

Can you see the comment on the screen right now?

Yes, Santiago, if you're speaking with people at a, let's say at a seminar, coffee break, it can be good to have a one sentence introduction. Follow up questions will dive into the details. Santiago is exactly right. And the big problem most people have is they say, well, so what do you do? They go into this boilerplate off of a marketing brochure and it's boring. Or they're so short. I'm a lawyer and it doesn't hook people. It's not meaningful, it doesn't arouse people's curiosity, doesn't make them want to ask a question. So what I recommend is you've got to size up your audience. You need to really think, okay, what about what I do is going to be a of the most interest to people in this audience and this person I'm talking to now? How can I say something that's relevant to them and try to do that as briefly as possible, ideally in a way that arouses curiosity. So, for example, if I've known someone for years and we're talking about all sorts of things, I might tell them different parts of my background. But if someone calls up and says, tj, I'm looking for a media trainer for my client, it's the prime minister of such and such country. Tell me about yourself. I don't say, well, I got a public speaking merit badge in 1974 and I got my Eagle Scout in 1977. Because it's not interesting to them, it's not relevant to them, it's boring and it's burying belief. So you've got to really ask yourself, what is most important to this person? What do they need to know about me that's most relevant to them? Most people, if they're in a situation like that or they're asked to introduce themselves, they just give sort of a big general boilerplate. Well, I graduated in this college and this major, and maybe no one cares about your major. No one cares about my major has nothing to do with what I'm doing. I majored in philosophy, by the way, in case you do care. So, Santiago, I hope that was helpful. Elena writes, and it may not be very safe if people can track you where you live. I may have missed the first part of that. Barb, if you could.

Okay, let me, let me clue you in. This is in regards to using the QR code on the vehicle or a magnet, you know, a magnetic sign. And just before you answer that, because I have been a marketing professional for over 35 years. For coaches and consultants, that is definitely not the thing to do. And you. And this is the time of year when you need to get all your marketing collaterals together, make sure that everything is uniform. You're sending out a consistent message. But this comment comes in from Elena and she did, you know, stop by a little bit earlier. I want to check. She. She just said hi. She's been with us once before. And thank you for joining us again, Elena. And then the next question. Question that's asked is from Karima. So if you'll hang on a second.

I apologize. I want to make sure I understood you correctly. Is Elena the one who mentioned you might not want to use the QR code because of security issues?

Right.

Okay.

And it's not just the security factor. The coaching and consulting business is people to people, very close. You're not, if you're doing a large groups and so forth, it's one thing. But if you're actually, you know, coaching clients, you know, you're probably with one or two people at a time at most, and you putting that out on your vehicle is not the thing to do. However, on as far as the vehicle, that form of advertising, the one thing I think has been missing on the Internet all along, since we had the World Wide Web available to us, is everybody's told to get a website, you know, drive everybody to your website. And every, you know, so often you see that it just still to this day, there are not many people advertising that website destination on their vehicles. And that is one thing, because if you look at truckers and commercial haulers, I mean, they've got a register to advertise all this stuff right on their vehicles. You don't have to do that on your personal vehicle. So it is something you can do. Now, the downside is, is let's say you have a wreck, you're just going to the grocery store, you have a wreck, they've got a website address for you to go to. So the type of website that you have, I mean, I have personal and I have professional. And the one that you want to advertise is the professional website. And then it's the way that you present yourself on that professional site to add that layer of security.

Okay, address one security issue, because it does come up with a lot of people. I still find a lot of people say, tj, a lot of your message is great. It's wonderful, and it's great that you're doing YouTube and social media. But I'm not going to show my face around. There's too many crazy people around and I'm concerned about security. It's a totally realistic concern. There have been cases, I forgot the individual's name, but it was, I believe, a child star from social media who went to some conference and there was mobbed by thousands of people and was killed. So I can't tell you that there's zero risk. And putting your face out of it, I mean, it's, you know, people run for city council in a small town and have been killed.

True.

So I can't tell you there's zero risk. All I can tell you is you got to make that decision yourself because there's risk in everything. There's risk in putting yourself out there. I also have personal friends, I'm sure you do too, who were so risk averse, they retreated further and further away in society and next thing you know, you haven't heard from them in two years and then you found out they ended things. So I'm sorry to sound like a glum note today. This isn't what we typically talk about, but it is something everyone has to think about. And there's no such thing as zero risk. You know, the greatest risk any of us ever do on a daily basis is get in the car to go to the grocery store. 1.2 million people around the globe each year die from car crashes. So statistically that is far and away the most dangerous thing you want to do. So in my view, if you want to reduce risk, do more videos, make more money, because having more money reduces a lot of health risks and spend less time in a car. I didn't walk, I didn't drive here today. I walked to work in part because I think it's healthier. So you've got to factor that in to your own assessment. There's no one size fits all. Sorry, Barb, go ahead.

Karima had to add on to that. She just said it was a great idea on having the professional website the Road and to get the people who are afraid of technology and need the course lessons to drive them there. Yes, I think we're caught up on that. Karima also had a question about the YouTube shorts and Elena answered it.

She.

She wanted to know if the shorts should be between 10 and 18 or 10 and 80 seconds. And Elena said that.

They can, they.

Can be as short, they can be under 60 seconds.

So you're most, most platforms define shorts these days as something less than 60 seconds. And you remember the days of mine, it was like Five seconds, they didn't last. And then initially Tick Tock had a limit of, I think, 15 seconds. Then they went to 30 and 60, and now it can be, I think, up to 10 minutes. But typically when someone says a short, what they mean is less than 60 seconds. And you can test. There's a young woman, I think she's 18 years old, from Miami, Florida, named, I believe it's Jenny Hoyo or O. Rose, who is wildly successful in the world of shorts. Every video she does has millions and millions of views. She's amazingly talented and she has figured out for her audience with her style, content. She needs to be exactly 33 seconds. And she writes and rewrites and really edits and spends weeks on each one. But she's getting tens and tens of millions of views every single month. So that's what works for her. I've done a lot of testing with my own videos too, and what I found is probably 90% of my top 10 videos in any month are between 12 and 18 seconds long. But I've had some that have been very successful that are 35 seconds long. Does that mean yours needs to be that? No. There is an extreme. Perhaps the most famous person in the communication space online today is Vin Zhang, and he has a lot of short videos that are 52 seconds, 47 seconds, and millions of views. So I don't think there's any one link. When you're first starting out, I would suggest experimenting. It's far more important to figure out, have I delivered one idea that's either really interesting and entertaining for people or really helpful and educational? Have I delivered some value? If you can do it in six seconds, it might be fantastic. If you can do it in 55 seconds and it holds people, that can be great too. So, Karima, I would recommend experimenting. Great. And if you're watching this, you don't even have to have a question, but feel free to leave a comment. And you can leave a comment on the platform you're watching on and we'd love to hear from you. And you can also leave a comment if you're in our stream yards and you can even. Come on. We'd love to have. Whether it's Santiago or anyone else who want. Who wants to join us, feel free to join us. And Barb, Okay. I am signed in the right way. Every once in a while I don't sign in the right way and it prevents me from seeing. Do we have any other comments today? Because I do want to poll the audience on a few things. Get some feedback from them as well. Were there any other comments, questions, thoughts or concerns?

And basically not. Not from YouTube. Karima just. She said one to 10 minutes were okay and 18 wasn't clear, but she's talking about the shorts and that's it from there. And again, I didn't find any more in the email, so. Okay, good to go.

I would like to shift gears a moment and talk about the Amazon Influencer program. For those of you who've never, like me, I had never heard of it about three and a half weeks ago. It's a program put on by Amazon where they invite Influencer. But I use Influencer with sort of, you know, scare quotes. You don't have to have a huge, huge following. They allow you to make profit. Product reviews, for example. I could do a review of this iPhone, since I have one and it's right here and I can show it and demonstrate it. They allow you to make videos and get a commission if someone watches it and then buys it. So you've got storefront, your own page on Amazon. And the real interesting wrinkle is, though, that your video can appear on a product page. So someone who's never heard of you, never followed, you never followed anyone, could type in, as I did yesterday, Magnus, tripod. See a tripod, think it may be pretty good, I'm not sure. How does this really work? And then scroll through the page, see a video of someone demonstrating the tripod, talking about why they like it, why they've used it, why they've been happy with it for five years. And if that makes me think, okay, I guess I do feel comfortable buying it. And I go from that video to buying it, then whoever made that video gets a commission on that. So it's a type of affiliate advertising. But what's unique about it and exciting about it and why I like talking about it is it's a way for people to practice presentation skills, use communication skills and make money and be sort of a mini motivational speaker, but in a way where you've got an audience delivered by Amazon and you have a revenue stream. Because for decades I've had people come to me and say, tj, I love to speak. I want to speak. How do I speak? How do I find any audience who will listen to me? How do I ever make any money? And there's all these chicken and egg issues. That's the beauty of this Amazon Influencer program is it kind of solves the chicken and egg issue. You've got essentially an advertiser. Whatever products in your house you can just talk about why you like it and you have an audience because Amazon will deliver an audience. So that's what's so exciting about it. And I've been talking about it a lot and I started the program and making videos on a regular basis too. So Barb, if there's anything else you want to give, just people who've never heard of it that I missed, do that and then give us an update on your end on what you're personally doing, number one. Number two, how you're trying to help our student community on our Facebook side, learning more about this and the various live tutorials you've been doing.

Hang on just a minute. Trying to get back to where we are. Okay, I put your page up on screen. You can see that the whole situation at this point in time, as far as helping the students know, I had a select group of students and was streaming into the group, but I did not have enough interest in the group to continue that effort. But those who are participating in the program are moving forward.

Thank you very much for trying, Barb. And I know I was able to make one and really enjoyed and would do more. But with this building a new studio, I couldn't schedule it. But I really do want to appreciate you for making that effort.

Right. And that's kind of what has happened to many of the students who had great intentions and wanting to participate. And I think, you know what impressed me most is when I gave you that information and you ran with it. You've right away gone up and started posting. And I think that's a testimonial to all the students that it is possible that fast. And I want to encourage you to go to TJ's Amazon shop just to see what he's done in this three weeks time. Because it is about just coming in directly. You're not, you're not creating intros and outros. You're not talking about your business. You're there at, to give your testimony testimonial about a product. Now obviously Amazon is there to sell that product, so you're not going to, I mean the, if you, if it's not a product that you absolutely enjoy, do not promote it because it will come across in your message. And that's not something that you want to do. But I just wanted to scroll through on, on what you've been doing to keep up with it. I think it's really cool. And again, that branding is also very important. And if you're an Amazon influencer, there's got to be consistency in your brand. And that means if you are like TJ has chosen the TJ Walker success, you are on the YouTube channel TJ Walker success. So you're easy to find. What I have learned in the most recent days is how important for your Amazon participation that that community tab on YouTube is and how important it is for you to have a YouTube channel wherein you share your product reviews. So you kind of kill two birds with one stone because it gives you content there, but in the sense of community. Because I'm all about the community building thing.

Or if I could get your feedback. Do you mind pulling up my page for one minute? I have a couple of very specific questions and I would like your expertise. So you're right about brand and I've not been consistent yet. But I just want to go sort of behind the scenes and let people know what I was doing and why. If you, if you could just pull up my storefront, reference a couple of things and I'll just be transparent. I'm trying. I'm trying to kill two birds with one stone. Like, you see a coffee pot there? Well, what does that have to do with public speaking and stuff? So this is a fantastic Cuisinart coffee machine. I've had a couple of them and I've used them for, you know, 10 years. The reason it's there is I redecorated my office. I had to make a lot more space. So we have this big studio and so I knew I was just going to give it away or throw it away. So I gave it away to a friend. But I also thought it is a product I love and think I think it makes great coffee. The only reason I don't use it is the apartment building I live in gives us great free coffee every single day and I don't have to clean anything or clean out the beans from the machine. Plus, I happen to live right across the street from the Aloft Hotel and they give fabulous free coffee every day. So I had it in my office just taking up space. So I thought, well, let me get rid of it. But it is a machine I've legitimately recommended to friends and family for years. So I gave it away to a friend and I suppose I could have sold it on Facebook, Marketplace, but I didn't want to mess with it. And I thought, well, as I'm cleaning it out, why don't I just talk about it for 10 seconds and make a video and put it up? I make. What I do now is standard operating procedure is I pick a product that I genuinely like. I do a short, typically 15 second one idea vertical video with the idea that that increases the odds of it getting on the Inspire TikTok style feed that Amazon has. I then do a relatively short horizontal video and then I do a longer one where I just say anything and everything I like about the product and then I take a horizontal picture and a vertical picture. So I do five posts for every product. I have no idea if that's really the best practice. Amazon did put out in a newsletter guidance last week saying, hey, there's been a lot of questions about can you do more than one video? Are you penalized? Is this better? And we want to tell you, do as many as you want. The more the merrier. There's no penalty. You can get a bunch of them. So that's what I'm doing. It might not be the best practice, but I searched a lot of places and I haven't really figured heard anyone give better advice. So that's one thing I wanted to hear from you, Barb. My other question is I was going to start putting some of these videos in as like an insert when we're doing these things for an hour or two hours just to give people a break and for let me go get a fresh glass of water. I was going to run some of these ads but. But I didn't want to just post every video as a separate video because it seemed like it would clutter up and confuse my YouTube feed. So I was thinking about just putting them all on a second YouTube channel that is clearly marked as well.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. No go under TJ Walker. Success on that community tab. Bring them in there. Bring them because that's a post. Remember we're talking about the Community tab on your YouTube channel and we talk live. That's an opportunity for you to put in that post. I'm building my channel. My.

I'm not sure I understand.

I'm building my store on Amazon. I recently signed up for the Influencer program. I was accepted and I'm busy stocking the shelves, so to speak. And what I'm this is a short video I used for this product, right? You're mentioning in your text for the video you're sharing on that community channel. I'm sorry, Community tab on your YouTube channel. Do you want me to bring that up to show you your community tab?

Well, where would I. Sure, but where would I literally upload the video to?

You have an opportunity, whether you're on desktop or on on your phone to to upload an image or a video.

You're saying, let me make sure I'm understanding correctly. You're saying just link to the video on Amazon.

I wasn't saying that.

I was saying to put it there. That you could put it there as well as on Amazon.

How would I, how would I put it on my YouTube community without uploading it into my main YouTube channel and then anyone who subscribed getting a notification about it.

That's a good question. And I think on. Because again, YouTube is driving viewers to that community tab and it goes into.

The community tab, but they have specific directions that they're sending people to the community tab.

And I thought that we were alerted.

And, and don't quote me on this.

But I thought that as a YouTube subscriber to your channel, we are alerted when you post on your community tab. I'm almost positive that we are. So it would come as an alert to the.

Your channel that you have something there and you want to communicate.

The community tab is for additional communication with your viewers, your subscribers.

Well, I know if I put text there, that's the only place someone.

No, it's. And you can use media. You can actually conduct polls. And let me.

That I'm aware of. My question is specifically video. I don't know how to post a video on my community tab unless it also showed up on my home page is, you know, the most recent video from tj and I don't want somebody.

I don't think that does, but I'm not going to.

Don't quote me on it.

Well, let's just. Again, let's make this a little workshop today. Let's just pull up the page. Let's just. I'll do it on my end. If you could pull up my YouTube channel, my community channel, and let's just take a look a minute. Because it may be, as in the case of like the Amazon influencer program, I was just completely ignorant and there may be an opportunity.

Yeah, I can't, I can't demonstrate. I'd have to be in mine to.

Show where there's, you know, when you go to post.

When you go to post on that. Let me see. I might be able to go.

I wonder, because I, I do post, but I'm always posting like my most recent.

Yeah, but you're. And that doesn't solicit conversation. It's just saying that it's there. You need to change the wording for that to. I'm taking questions here at any time. If you have any questions on this master, this topic. I'm here for you. Just post them here because you want to drive them to the community channel. Because. Because YouTube has amped everything up for the community tab this year, so I can't. Because I'm not logged in. I can see that stuff there and I don't see any comments.

You know, I'll just log into mine for a second as if I were going to make a new post because it may be I've just. Are you the wrong way, the wrong place.

But anytime while you're there at your computer, you could share that. That here I'm going to stop sharing. And you can share that tab from your computer there while you're there. We can't move it, but you can see that exact place.

Okay, so here's my. Page. And if I'm going in to my. YouTube studio. Let's see, do I even need to be in my studio to post on?

I didn't think so. I don't think I did. To go to that community tab and.

See tab and post.

Okay. And that's under media training, not under TJ Walker Success. So they must have changed it, huh?

What happens is you renamed it, but they leave. They have a legacy URL, right?

They. You rename the channel. Okay, so there you are.

So there's.

I can see it.

Look, look, look, look.

You have image at the bottom. Image pull. No, that when you clicked image, it showed. To get that video.

Click on video. Look.

Can you do that? That's the only option that you have.

Only option is somebody else's video on YouTube or one of mine. There's no way of putting it on directly unless it is a regular video. So from my standpoint, if someone comes to my page, or maybe they signed up and they hit, oh, what is latest video. I don't want them for a coffee pot.

Okay, so then you could, you could upload those to unlisted and pull them from there under your unlisted videos. Yeah, you can pull it in there. But I. That's why I sent you the link to that particular training session of Sean Kennels, because it was excellent. And that's something that you. I really hope you have the time.

To go and Sean, because I look at a lot of his stuff, but I haven't been able to as much the last three weeks. Is he doing Amazon Influencer?

I think he's been, you know, that's a good question. And I haven't paid attention, but I'm pretty sure he is.

And I'm an Amazon associate. And he talks a lot about affiliate marketing.

Right? Well, his people are there. That's why it's important to be in his programs and to stay up to date and keep your notifications on and actually participate. But that one a few days ago on the community tab is, is essential for you to watch and get up to speed as it is for myself.

To go back to.

What I had said because of all the meetings I attended at year end and then to have someone like Sean's team come in and specifically devote the attention to it. And also as you're watching this stream today, students just put the YouTube Community tab in the search bar in YouTube and you're going to find a whole bunch of new videos there because everybody's taking it serious now. So what you. And it ties in not just to your Amazon influencer account, but your sales on Amazon. And I think, I mean it's as I shared with you, that this is the one time this, you know, that perfect storm kind of case where you can go in and really be the Amazon influencer, even as an affiliate. I mean they, some of these, the two people I was working with from your class closely, they have, they didn't have quite enough to get into the influencer program right away, so they had to do the affiliate side. So they met the media minimums for that side there.

And looking at it, I mean I can just tell you, I mean I'll mention Katherine Baxter's name because she's, you know, my number one protege on doing that. So she's actually, you know, doing it every single day. Has, has put together a routine and at the time.

Oh, excuse me.

Three weeks ago when we first started talking about it, she didn't have 50 subscribers, I think to her YouTube channel and she's got 80 now and she's continued on that path. But you can include those videos in, in your live streams. You need to really check the Amazon terms of service. And nine out of 10 people who get in trouble with Amazon, it's all over the terms of service, like UDEMY instructors, the number one way they get in trouble is showing the back end the inside of when they're logged into their account. And when I was actually streaming to your group on Facebook and we were talking about Amazon, a couple, couple of people got upset because we weren't showing the inside of the account. You cannot do that. They, it's strictly against the terms of service. So while you, and you know, one on one, like Catherine and I went behind the scenes off where I could help her. But I can't stream that live because that is the in information that it is there.

It's there baby. And we're just visitors so they can do whatever they want. So that's always a risk when you're trying to figure out how much time do I want to invest in another platform.

Right.

Because I mean I've had a channel just deleted from YouTube. We don't have three hours for me to talk about it today. It's always a risk. I would say this about Amazon is they do want to make money. If you help them make money there's typically going to be a reason why they it kick you off well.

But they've done the very top influencers. One of them is in your, your group who went, you know, K had the highest rating on and six figure income and overnight it was stopped because something that happened and yet he built that back and exceeded the amount within six months. But they will, it doesn't matter to them if you are a six figure producer if you don't follow the terms of service. And it is our responsibility to always be monitoring them for updates. Always. Like you, you mentioned getting the newsletter from them that Amazon is one where you want to make sure in your, in your email that you've got it flagged as super important if you're doing business, you know that kind of business. Well, I would say anytime.

But.

Let me get your take on here's a concern I have. I mean someone could be 100% compliant. Maybe I'm not misunderstanding something with the terms of service but my impression is someone could be 100% compliant with Amazon's rules and they could have an adversary, an enemy come to their storefront, capture the URL for one of their products and then put it on Reddit or put it on a newsletter. Someone could see it, buy it and Amazon could say oh you're gone because a sale came in from something that wasn't on your list. What's to prevent that sort of malfeasance from occurring?

Not in General. There isn't 100% way to avoid that. There are various. Apps from, you know, from you can put in your browser to actually monitor stuff but there isn't a hundred percent this. It's still the wild, wild web when it comes to that. And the, and there are loads of groups on, on Facebook they're reporting that. And if you spend all your time trying oh well they copied my video or they did that, this, that or the other thing, you know, you're wasting your time because the, the situation is, is that they're in business to make money, they're pushing. I want to tell you something very personal. Yesterday, two days ago, I was in one of the private streams with Catherine and I said, you know, I'd like to do my nails because I don't, I. What I want to do is show opening the boxes and that and I don't want to be running out to do my nails every time. And I happen to know that using the gel nail polish is a big deal online. And she said, oh yes, I do my own every day. And I said, did you get it on Amazon? Yes.

Okay.

I said, well, there is a product for me then let's go shopping. And we did that. And in realizing, you know, all of that taking place, I get over there and it's like 4:30 in the afternoon at my time, right? And the product arrived to my doorstep the next morning at 5:10am the next morning. Not two days, not three days. I didn't pay any shipping for it. So that says a lot about Amazon's business because of having the centers that they do, the distribution centers, the distribution methodologies that they do, you know, that's what you're up against. But the one thing they're giving us as the consumer and as a person, as a marketer, because it's like you say, if you believe in something, you can talk about it all day. You know, it really has made a difference in your life. But if they're going to pay you to talk about it, that's even better.

That's exactly why I'm so excited about it. Because frankly, one of the things, even though I've been a professional speaker and trained people to speak for decades, I personally am not comfortable with the standard best practices for how to market on a webinar where you have to do the value stack and say if you bought this separately, it would be 10,000 and this separately a $10,000 worth and you get it today for $99. And but you have to act now or this offer's going away. All the artificial scarcity. There's just a lot of typical marketing pitches I'm not comfortable with. And with the Amazon influencer, I don't have to do that. I just exactly what I like about the product, how it's helped me on the longer videos, tell a little story about what it's done that's been meaningful in my life. So it's so much easier and it's more authentic and there's no one giving me a script that I have to load into the teleprompter and do 10 takes. It's just one take. What do I like about this that I think might be interesting to others? So that's, to me what's fascinating about it. One other note about any opportunity there's we live in a time where every day you wake up, if you have enough money to have a cell phone and an Internet connection, there's 10,000 possible ways you can make money. What I like about the Amazon Influencer thing is I still think it's early in the game. Now it's been around for a number of years. I still get the sense it's early in the game. Pretty much every product I've done so far, it's ended up on the product page. I do think whether it's a year from now or three years from now, it's going to be possible for someone to do a great video and it just never gets on the product page because there's already a thousand videos for their product. I do think that there's going to be a window where it's relatively easy to get on and then there's going to be so much glut that it's going to be really hard to do. And if you don't have your own following, you're not going to be able to sell anything. And I don't know when that is. But I still think there's a huge opportunity right now, which is one reason why I'm comfortable encouraging people to do this. I'm certainly not saying everyone's going to make six figures in the first year or the first month, but I think there's a lot of different things you can learn from it. There's also a lot of spin off benefits. I mean, I've only been doing it for a couple of weeks. I'm now getting pitched from other brands. Just yesterday the email came in from a company saying, hey, could you do a YouTube review of this purse and we'll send it to you for free and let us know what your rates are to do a YouTube video.

And that's.

You definitely need to be very careful with that. Very, very careful. And it's interesting. I, I want to, sound bite wise, I want to get this in while you're talking about those companies and the offers from the companies. Because you also mentioned in your, just in, you know, as you were sharing your story that what is to prevent, you know, the other people taking your videos? Actually there are manufacturers taking videos. Like if you've done A great job on there. And this is something that Amazon has stepped up because it was a big complaint. You should be paid for that talent. You, as the video producer, you need to have forms to make sure that they're signed, sealed and delivered with whoever you're doing business with. That has not changed. If a manufacturer comes to you, don't give away all your rights. And influencers knew nothing about that story, that side of the story. And then they couldn't show their video. They were getting tons and tons of sale for that very same video on their shop, and they couldn't show it on their shop anymore because the manufacturer took it legitimately with their permission, but they didn't know how to protect themselves.

So, I mean, what influencer had a. Had that happen? And what they did is they just sent the manufacturer a bill, say, oh, I see you like my video, and you have it on your site. It costs $1,000. Here's an invoice. And you know the implication, pay now or I see it for $10,000 for theft. So, you know, with anything you, any content you create, for that matter, speaking in front of anyone other than one paid client, there's always that risk that someone could steal this. I mean, I get emails once a week from companies saying, hire us and we'll scour the Internet from all the online course companies that steal your courses. And I ignore all of that. And my theory is, someone steals my course, they're obviously so poorly run and poorly managed, they're not making any money off my courses. And so much of the value of my courses is that people can interact with me live, which they're not going to be able to if they buying it on some counterfeit site. And I just chalk it up to promotion and advertising because I, I certainly have friends my age, 10, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, when I started with online training, and their attitude was, I'm not going to do any of that. Someone could steal my ideas. And all of those people now are, you know, unemployed or retired and unemployed and lost millions of dollars because they were so afraid of someone stealing their content. I'm not saying it can't. It's not a legitimate issue. But I tend to err on the side of, let's get stuff out there enough and good things will come back. Zig Ziglar talked about that all the time. As you remember, he said, yeah, the more you give out, the more that comes back to you. And, you know, if you go on the Today show to talk about your book, you're giving away your ideas for free to the Today Show. Millions of people see it for free. Is that theft? No, that's building your brand and helping you sell everything else. So that's kind of the way I look at it. Back to the handbag thing, I said to my wife, because she started handbag companies before and she's been in fashion, I said, you know, this isn't a main part of my niche, but if you want to, we can get the bag. You can be the model. As I talk about it, and whether we do it for Amazon, which we would disclose if we got it for free, or YouTube or both, maybe it's a way of starting a relationship with a brand. The thing that really seeps into my mind with all of this is there's ultimately no difference between anyone watching here and them wanting to do an Amazon influencer video for $5 or 40 cents versus Tiger woods or Michael Jordan. Yeah, those guys have more talent certainly, than I do. But ultimately, both of those guys became billionaires because they're doing something that attracts a lot of eyeballs. And brands wanted to be associated with them and build a relationship with them, and that's how they both became billionaires. So we talk about influencer like this new thing. It's really the same old thing. It's people who can attract eyeballs and attention in a positive way are of value to brands and companies. And when you marry the two together, you can work. Now, we can't all become billionaires, but you can work your way up the value chain. So I've certainly heard of a number of influencers in the last two weeks who said, yeah, they started, they were pitched by someone. They did the first video for free. They liked it. They also made commissions on Amazon, but they built a relationship with the company. And what Amazon does is it tells you, I don't think this is breaking any rules. It tells you how many sales came from that video. So you can then go to that company and say, look, I like your brand, and I have proof that your customers like my brand. I have proof of how many people bought your product from my video. How about you sponsor my podcast? How about you sponsor my YouTube channel? How about I become an ambassador for you? So there's a lot of ways of working your way up the value chain of partnerships and brand deals. Because again, ultimately, that's all Martha Stewart has ever been. She, at one point, she was a billionaire, but it's about. She was able to attract an audience. She was able to attract brands. You do that Enough, you can create your own name of a brand, but it's really all the same thing, and we can all be a part of that today. Traditionally, the problem was always how do you start? How do you get enough of an audience? If you had an audience, how do you start a relationship with brand? And now it's never been easier. Am I saying it's easy to become a millionaire influencer and make a million dollars a year or even a hundred thousand? No, I'm not saying that. But the biggest thing that holds most people back today, I believe, is taking that first step of putting their face on camera. That's still the thing that keeps most people back. It's not the gatekeeper of the convention planner says you can't speak here. It's not the gatekeeper of the director of marketing for the Fortune 500 company that says, we don't want to advertise for you. It's the individual just starting themselves. Because everyone essentially has their own TV network these days. Everyone can form brand partnerships and deals if they want to as a starting point. And that's what I think is exciting about what's going on today. Barb, any final. I've been bloviating for quite a while here. I want to give you final thoughts on Amazon Influencer, but then I need to toss some questions out to the community to get some feedback on the set, other things going on here today, and getting some guidance on how I can improve this whole thing.

Well, I'm not here to sell the Amazon Influencer program. I, we both, I've been in it since the early beta days and I myself haven't taken advantage of it as I should have. And actually, you know, it was a timing issue and I needed the perfect storm to act because I also had a priority. I, I went, they came out, I think, with the, with the affiliate program in 96, and I signed on right at the beginning of 97 as an affiliate. And in the beginning it was marriage Made in Heaven, you know, is making money just dropping the links to the products and things I talked about. And it's, you know, there's millions with this story. And what I see is because of where we are today, and just like I told you that I was convinced that you will be successful with it is because you can just press the button in the spur of the moment and tell what you like about the. You're being honest, you're being yourself, and tell what you like about that product and go on. And so in working with some of your students here in the last three weeks, I would say that the most important, because Catherine is my superstar at.

The, at this point is that she.

Not her attitude was positive, but she said, I'm committing to doing this videos every day. I need to find a place where when the package comes in, I can just open it right there and record it. And so part of the advisement that I share with her is where and when to do that. And she followed through and it's just like, you know, she's just pushing it out there one right after another. And I say that anybody can do that. And I want to prove that with my husband's participation as well as, as my own. I have spent my career helping other people and I've enjoyed doing that. It's, you know, at my core to, you know, it's.

I'm a.

How can I do a great job of it.

But.

And I've made a lot of millionaires. I mean I've, I've contributed to their pocketbooks in the millions of dollars as a result of that happening. So I know that I'm on the right path and including, you know, and, and meeting Jeff Bezos for the first time and Steve Jobs for the first time, you know, in a bar in Florida from a tech conference. So all of those things are important. But I, I think that it's just if it's some. If you buy on Amazon and if you are online to actually promote whatever business you're in, you, it's just something you, you really should do.

Just, just like the video thing where we are today.

So that's all.

And Barb, I know you've had other challenges. Do you have a Target date for when your store is going to go live?

Well, I have a shop on there already.

I have that.

But videos up.

I have to go to the next level where I make the most money. I need to do three, three videos. And I have not things of. I have not. I set a date and I have.

Retracted that date because of my life story, because of what is going on. And I just don't know. So that's the bottom line.

Okay, well, we, we wish you well and we certainly want to look at your site and share it with others and generate some traffic once you, you are up. Please, please let us know about that.

Well, I think it's important. We're all here today. We're streaming to all these destinations. Destinations. And I have not different destinations. But my focus this year is on YouTube and of course I am a community manager on Facebook and it's still very much, you know, at the core, but I think more on YouTube than anything else and feeding that into Amazon. So it's, it's those three avenues that I'm going to.

I mean, another thing I like about Amazon is if you look at its success, Jeff, I mean, he was obviously very savvy in a lot of regards, but he consistently said, okay, here's a big cost for Amazon. Let's make it a profit center. I mean, that's how they got into the storage business. I mean, they're the most successful storage business company because he said, I don't want to spend money on it, I want to make money on it. So their whole data storage is huge. What I like about this Amazon Influencer thing is I'm already hooked on Amazon. I've bought $20,000 worth of product from Amazon in the last 10 days. The beauty of it is I can now at least turn a cost center. Maybe not every product's going to be a profit center, but I can make it. Some of the products I buy for my own bottom lines that have cost, cost can be a profit if I make a video for every product I make. I'm not planning on ever buying a product to make an Amazon influencer video. I just want to do the stuff I already bought from them and do videos on those. So I can take it from a hard cost to. I mean, if I could break even, that would be fantastic because I do spend a lot on Amazon. And for those of you watching this the first time, well aware that there are a lot of questions, antitrust questions to ask legitimately about Amazon. There's a lot of fair questions about what it's doing to communities and locally owned hardware stores. All fair questions. I'm not trying to sweep that under the rug, but that's not. Those policy questions are not the purview of this particular channel. And I realize that sounds like I'm dodging a little bit, but my goal here is to help as many individuals as possible become more successful in life by communicating more effectively. And last time I checked, my local hardware store, for that matter, my local Barnes and Noble didn't have any way for me to make more money by communicating on their behalf. Amazon has figured out a way. Now we should point out a lot of people see what Amazon's doing and they're following. Walmart has aggressively opened up an influencer program. Target's doing it. A lot of them are doing it. As far as I know, none of them have put that unique twist of Putting the influencers videos right on the product page. Without that, I don't really see how you make any money unless you just have some huge following. If you have a huge following, you already have a gazillion other ways of making money. So that's why I'm not rushing out to join the Walmart influencer program. I may at some point or the target program because in theory, once you make a video one time for a product, if it's sold on all these other platforms forms you can reuse that same video, it's not a violation of Amazon's rules. So it is something I'm trying to think about long term has, you know, make a video once, put it on 5, 10, 20 platforms. If you can do it efficiently and create little streams of revenue, it might be significant. The problem of course is before you realize it, you know, you can spend 14 hours putting things in all these little places and if it ends up with 14 cents over six months you've given yourself a horrible sweats sweatshop job that is not worth your time. So there's, there's going to be some balance issues in figuring out what's really worthwhile and what isn't. But we're going to try to monitor some of that. I'm going to be forthcoming with you and share to the extent I can with the Amazon rule rules what's working, what isn't working. Barb, on that light, in that vein, is it breaking any rule to say how much money we've made or is that considered.

Yeah, yes, it is.

But it's okay. Ballpark figures, right?

Check the rules.

I have. I mean I've read them 10 times. I don't see anything that references that specifically.

Well, I gave you groups to join on Facebook as well. And remember, as long as I'm in your story, I don't want you to get knocked off of a platform either. So I mean, let me just say.

I don't, I don't think that's a violation of any principle. I've made some money. Have I made a ton of money.

Six figures or whatever you can have.

I made more money than I made in my first month on Udemy. Yes, and that was with five courses 10 years ago.

So I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, you mentioned Udemy. So now that you're on Amazon, that's a big deal in relationship to your story on Udemy because again, as you recall from years ago when we started our relationship, Udemy is paying a great deal of money to be findable on the Internet. So and I know that you along with many of the other top selling instructors have said well what can we add to our course to refresh it to make it fresh for everyone? That's an opportunity for a video just saying you're there. Then when you do in that lesson, that extra one of saying where it's at and also putting on your socials, on your udemy courses, that will trigger it. So you just got to think of those things to it's. It all plays together. But everything on the Internet, if I can leave you with nothing else today it's all about findability and you've got to pay attention. You know, you say well can am I better off searching through edge? And now that we have AI to work with and we know the data that the AI has been pulling in and what's going to continue to be pulled in, it's even more critical. So you have to think in key words. And I mean that's, that's the way I've rolled in life. But that's really what it comes down to even, even generating prompts to find information with you.

I mean that's the whole reason my business was named Media Training Worldwide is because of keyword research. Because initially this was, you know, 25 years ago when I started my business seriously full time. I'd done it on the side for many years. I was TJ Walker Communications that I was trying to promote for public speaking and presentation skills and, and presentation delivery and public speaking workshops and media training. So I was working with all of these terms and started doing some keyword research and search engine optimization company and you know, Crisis Communications as one. So we did all this search and what I found was the people who typed in Media training who then found my website, called me. They were the ones to actually write a check and hire me. Now they might actually hire me for public speaking training, but they were searching Media Training because a lot of people confused those terms. Someone might have found me by typing in Crisis Communications and found my SEO for that and gone in the funnel and called me. But it turned out they wanted a 500 page manual for their school on how to handle that evacuations and a crash crisis. That's not my area of expertise. So I did all because I had advertised talking about advertising earlier. I'd advertised on PR week publications and trade letter magazines, trade publications. None of it worked. The only thing that worked was SEO for my website at the time, the only one was TJ Walker dot com. So in talking to my SEO company. I said, I want to double down on SEO because all of my advertising has failed. They said, okay. And I said, should I do more and more websites? They said, sure. The best thing is to find your most profitable keyword and then name your business and your website with those two words in it. And mediatraining.com was already taken. So the only reason I think mediatrainingworldwide.com is because it had media training in it. And that was the most lucrative keyword for me. So that's really what made my whole business, was kind of stumbling accidentally into this SEO world and narrowing the focus and not trying to be the communications guy for everything. Hey, Barb, I want to be respectful of people's time in your time. I need to get some feedback from people and I appreciate Karima and Santiago and, and so many others who have joined us and, and some of you have had to say goodbye. But I do need feedback because this is the very first time I've gone live with this setup. I think we're about 20% where we want to be. I only have one camera. We have. We're gonna have a three camera shoot here. I've got a whole switcher. We're going to be able to make things look a lot better. I'm certainly hoping this looks as good as any Sean Cannell production or Ali Abdel production with different camera angles. I need your feedback on a couple of things. The lights. I haven't even figured out how these lights work yet. They're different colors, changing. And here's my big concept. I wanted to stand out as sort of a bigger production, a little fancier than just the typical. Seeing someone like this and what you've seen me in the past where it just looks like a guy who could be in a home office or a basement or garage or something. I wanted to give the sense that this is sort of a bigger production, a more expensive feel, maybe a network feel. And I wanted to be able to move and walk around and trying it on for the first time here. I don't know how it looks and we may have messed up the autofocus. Much more comfortable for me to talk this way than sitting in a table, in a chair, sort of hunched over. So I personally like it more, but I want your feedback. The other reason we're doing it this way is for the last four months, as I've been experimenting with different formats on YouTube, the form format where I am standing giving a speech at the American Medical Association, I'm looking down at an audience And I'm moving around. Those videos have been far and away more successful than any other videos. So my thought is, as I really Double down on YouTube and try to master that art form that I try to do, what seems to resonate with people, which is me moving around. Now, what I don't know is should I actually ignore the camera for some of the short videos and long ones, but mostly the short, and actually look down to simulate like I'm speaking to an audience? Or does that seem fake or cheesy? I'd love to get your feedback. The other thing is clothing. We talked about this a little last week and the consensus of those of you who are nice enough to weigh in was, yeah, for a guy of my age, a suit and tie just seems more professional. And I've done that the last few weeks, but now I'm showing full length. So now I had, instead of wearing shorts and Crocs, I'm wearing a full suit, tie and dress shoes. Because it would look pretty odd if all of a sudden I step back and you see me wearing white tennis shoes. And my question is, does this work for you or is this going to seem annoying? Because what I did, like, a lot of people the last five years, haven't worn my suits very much, but I have a lot of suits and I have them all on a little rolling rack. I'll just show you right here. Because the set is so simple. Again, I'm just in one room, sort of a pentagon style shaped room and I just have. And these aren't all of them, but I just brought, you know, different suits from home because I don't really use suits that much anymore. Most people don't, but I figure I've got them. If that's kind of what makes people comfortable or makes me seem more legitimate, then why not? Now I have one other question that does take us back to Amazon Influencer. I want your feedback on Barb. Here's my concept. The conventional wisdom is Amazon Influencer videos are best when they seem like an average real person at home, comfortably dressed, just sharing what an average real person thinks of a product. And I get that and I respect that. My thought was as actually maybe the third hour or one of the hours of a show each day. I actually do my Amazon Influencer videos here, but I'm wearing a suit and I make the thing look. And I've got my table here. I'll move it over and it goes. This table now goes up and down so I can adjust it for the shows. My thought was And I may be completely off base. My thought is I'm going to wear a suit and tie and I'm going to talk about the products, electronic products, home products, maybe kitchen products here in a suit and try to make it look really professional. What I'll probably end up doing is have my wife here with two iPhones, one for vertical, vertical, one for horizontal. And we actually do maybe 100 videos now a day. And the idea is maybe I lose some sales because I look like the more of a traditional TV ad or a slick TV spokesperson. But here's why I'm interested in doing it. Number one, I'll already be like this to be coming to you live. The second reason is I'd rather lose some sales. But whether it's 1 out of 50 or 1 out of a hundred brands, they see it, they see one of the videos I do, they like it and they want to reach out to me for a more meaningful long term sponsor sponsorship. Someone who could be a sponsor for my YouTube channel and as we extend it more into the podcasting realm and others. And my thought is that there may be some brands that want to associate with someone who looks more professional and can be a brand ambassador for them. So that's my thought. I'm wondering if you think I'm off base and I really should go back to. Because you can see in my first videos for Amazon Influencer, I'm wearing wrinkled shirts and T shirts and shorts and just the average guy. Barbara, wondering if you have any thoughts on that.

I have got. I'm going to have to leave the stream because I have other appointments.

Okay.

I personally think that, you know, going beyond that, even the two hour time frame is too long at one stint. I think that you should break it up. If you go live multiple times in the day, you have viewers from different parts of the world and it will also, once you stop and start it triggers. Triggers the. The algorithm again. So on YouTube it's saying, oh, it's new, it's new. And you need to keep that in mind when you're doing that. It's like, well, I'll be back in 10 minutes on this channel. Don't go anywhere, I'll be right back kind of thing is one now you want me to critique your office as it is today. I'm going to share with you that there is no. When you watch the replay on this video, you're going to see right away that the floor is fighting for attention. And that is that pattern on the floor is very disruptive and I mean, you can get a throw. You know, you can get a throw rug to go over top of that. So it. It doesn't. Where you are standing, you've got a solid color so that there is direct contrast, but it is definitely fighting. Plus, there's no contrast between the bookcase and the floor. So it's melding into that. It's coming back and, you know, those kinds of things in.

Oh, my light went out. I could put a. Put a light down there for it. But.

Yeah, yeah, but that right away is something that I would see.

I mean, one thing I could do. I appreciate the feedback. I could, in theory, lower the camera. Camera. So you don't really see the floor, because right now the camera is about an inch or two below my eye. And yet it's. It's a very. It's a. It's a very fancy lens that really widens things out. But in theory, I could lower the camera so that you don't really see anything, I guess, above here, and you might not see deeper than right here. So it's something I need to experiment with because you're right, the most dominant thing is the carpet.

Most assuredly, that's the case.

Again, tj, I'm gonna have to leave. Okay.

I need to be respectful of your time. Barb, thanks so much for your time today, as always, and we'll see you next time. And I want to thank everyone for joining me today. Again, I'm TJ Walker. This is the TJ Walker Success Success Channel. And if you want to become more effective in every aspect of your professional life and your personal life, too, it helps to communicate more effectively. That's what this channel is all about. So please subscribe. Please hit the like button, sign up for notifications, and come back regularly. Thanks a lot. See you next time.