Hugh Culver's SOS Service for Experts and Speakers - by @todmaffin

So hi, I'm with my friend Hugh Culver in Kelowna, BC. Hi Hugh.

Hey Todd, how are you?

Very well. So Hugh is a longtime resident of the speaking circuit, author of several books, pretty much one of the pros in North America when it comes to managing your life, managing your time, managing your business. He's right up there with the Brogans of the world. So it's always great to be able to get a couple minutes to pick his brain. And so before we talk about SOS, which is this really interesting content project you've got, what are the kind of things that you're working on that you're excited about these days?

Sure, so thanks. Well, first, it's great to be here with you again, Tod, because I know we're both on the road, so it's kind of fun to be at least Skyping together. So we've got— there's a lot of different facets. One of the things I put a real focus on in the last 4 years is creating multiple streams of income. I came from a very traditional background of getting into the speaking business and then just going after those speaking engagements. So right now Of course I have my speaking career. I have my own events which are designed for people that are speakers that want to grow their business and develop multiple streams of income. So I have live events happening coming up 2 this month alone. We also coach. So both I coach in terms of business development for people that sometimes they're speakers but not always. Usually what they want to do is they want to grow what I would call expert enterprise. So I have people who are retired executives from not-for-profit organizations. I have people who have come into this from the financial industry and they want to grow their business. And then we have Sarah in my office, she also coaches. So she coaches people on webinars. And then we have book sales, we have online product sales, and then we have SOS.

And how do you bring all this stuff together? I understand you're using Infusionsoft. Can you talk a bit about that? Not a lot of people understand sort of the difference between a big all-in-one system like Infusionsoft, what it can do for you. And I think the way a lot of people do it, which is sort of piecemeal, you know, they got MailChimp here and they got PayPal here and they got kind of all the components. But you found a way to kind of group them all together. And without sounding like an Infusionsoft ad, can you talk just briefly about sort of how you've made that product work for you?

Yeah, great. And it's a great question because people do struggle with this. I'm going to write a blog post next week and I think the title is going to be something like "Tools Won't Save You" or something like that. People do think that if they go and get the bigger tool, the bigger product, and two of the big ones in the actual community right now are Omniport, which used to be called Office Autopilot, and Infusionsoft. But then at one small level down, there's all sorts of other tools like Salesforce and AWeber and MailChimp. And all sorts of other products. Well, what we've done is, and this is only after many years of experimenting with all of the separate products, is the way we use Infusionsoft is it does 3 main things for us. So obviously it's our CRM, customer relations management program. So it has all of the content for our clients, but not only does it have all of our client content, it really easily tracks everything the client has done. So it's kind of actually a bit spooky because I can go in at any moment and I can actually see who is opening my emails or who is clicking on a video. So it keeps track of all that, which is actually really great data for us. It also is our sales cart, so that's really great because then that allows us to create sequences. So when someone comes into our world, comes into our funnel, follows me at an event, or signs up online we can lead them right down to a sales funnel, so we can lead them right to the cart. And the third thing it does is it manages all of our emails going out. So I have really— it has the output, emails going out, which it tracks, and then it has the content, which is all the client data, and then it has the sales process, which is— so for example, with the SOS, which we're going to talk about, we automatically bill people every month. Well, they all are came in at different days of the month. So that typically would be a really laborious process, especially when you start getting hundreds of clients. So Infusionsoft manages all that automatically. However, having said that, the bigger the program, the bigger the problems. So I usually caution people, even though we love Infusionsoft, I usually caution people unless you really have one staff who's dedicated to that onboarding of that program. I don't advise it because sure, you're going to get some advantages, absolutely it's efficient, and it's quite amazing to go and build a sequence and then to know forevermore people could come in from that point of entry and they will be led down this path and there's a decision tree. But for most people, that's just going to bury them, and what's going to end up happening is they're going to start to resent the fact that they're paying the subscription for this big program. And I always advise people to start off and understand how it works first. Use building blocks. A lot of these are free. You know, you can be on MailChimp, what is it, less than 2,000 people on your list?

It's free.

Experiment. Just learn how it works, link things together. But that's how we use Infusionsoft, those 3 parts.

Well, it makes sense for, you know, what you're talking about to experts and people who want to be speakers and coaches and things like that. And one of the other challenges that you've kind of figured out a way to solve is maintaining content in the channel. So, you know, if you are an expert in, let's say, I don't know, parenting an ADHD child or something, and that's your kind of your lane, your focus, obviously product like Infusionsoft are going to help bring the revenue in if you've got products you can sell, but it doesn't handle the other side of things which is content. You know, I mean, maybe you're writing a blog and you're putting this content out, but are you getting it all into the different channels and things like that? When you and I had our sort of our monthly touch base, how are you chat, you mentioned that you developed this system called SOS. So what is SOS?

Sure, so let's take a step back first. So when I got into the world of marketing way back when, when I was actually teaching entrepreneurs and marketing my adventure travel businesses back in the '70s and '80s, we advertised. So what we would do is we would buy advertising. Advertising, or we would mail advertisements in the form of a brochure to people. But what we were doing was we were basically saying, buy me. We were saying, buy me, like a billboard. It was maybe a little bit slightly more sophisticated, but we were saying, buy me. What's happened obviously over the last, really even just probably less than 10 years, has been a big shift to content marketing. So now it's pretty clear that people don't respond as well, in particular for service products. So they may respond well for a washing machine or a car, but when it comes to a service product where they really want to have a trust relationship with that provider, they, they want to kind of test drive you first, and that's called content marketing. And so what we do is we help people to get that content onto the social media platforms. And it really started about 4 years ago. I started to realize I got a lot of things on I'm also a dad, a husband, and I really can't and don't want to be on Twitter all day telling people that I just wrote something. So I started to experiment by outsourcing that myself. So we hired somebody, and we actually started in the Philippines because we already had Filipino staff working for us. And so that became really cool, and that started to work, but we started to realize it was kind of glitchy, and there was a lot of management there, and it didn't always sound like me. So what we've done is we've perfected it now, and the way that SOS works is we actually take the content that the person's actually written. We don't try to mimic who they are, we don't try to write for them. We take the content they've written. So in particular, we look at their blog. And so let's say they are a family expert. We'll go look at their blog, and then we're going to promote them by taking parts of that blog and then putting it on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter on a regular basis based on the metrics that we're watching. So we pay attention to how are their readers responding, when do the readers come to their page, and then what we do is provide regular content which they can't do on their own. So it means that any day they can open up Facebook or LinkedIn and they're going to see that they've been active, they're getting more followers,. And a certain percentage of those posts are going to be about their blog, pointing people back to their blog, but a bigger percent is actually about what we call authority posts. So we try to balance— this is social media— we try to balance between, hey, here's a great related article on family planning from Forbes magazine or even Inc. magazine or Huffington Post. And so that's what our team does. Now the team actually all works in North America, so we've really evolved the process as we've been growing our list.

It's critically important, you know. I mean, there are a lot of sort of all these outsourced overseas systems, and the English is 80% there, but boy, that 20%, you sure notice, and it can really affect the brand negatively. So very interesting.

Yeah. And it's always, it's very seductive, right? You think, oh, $5 an hour, it's amazing. Fair. We still have some people that, you know, for example, when I record one of my podcasts on Experts Enterprise, I have a guy in the Philippines and he does an amazing job of doing the sound editing. But when it comes to taking content and actually preparing it for our audience or the audience of our members, we're working now with, you know, a lot of the women that we're working with are stay-at-home moms and they just love this. They get a little extra income, they get to use their brain, they get to really understand our members. They really do learn who our members are, and it's really fun to see how they can start to help our members to grow their business in a kind of an automatic way to free up the members so they can do other stuff.

So this is a content, content play essentially with SOS, right? So you're not moderating, you're not responding on behalf of these people. Contests, that kind of stuff, you know, and specific requests for content. So this is a service where people can basically not have to worry about keeping the channel full of content, which is a big deal. Which is a big deal.

Huge deal. That's exactly right. So we really are putting content out there, and what we coach our members on is this is foundational. So every day with SOS, right now we're at 7 posts posts a day mostly on Twitter but there's going to be one on Google, one on LinkedIn, one on Facebook. So every day you're going to get that foundational content and it's going to be a really nice balance between the latest thing that you wrote, the top ranking articles that you've written, blog posts that you've written, past articles and then mixed with authority posts. So we're doing all that for you but now you need to go on top of that. You need to respond to people, thank people, you need to find out why they followed you, like ask them a question. And if you have a book launch or a special event, you need to add that on top of it. Yeah. But what this means is you could be off doing 3 days on the road, you could be off at your cabin writing your book, you could be with the family, and you're— this kind of, we call it the grunt work.

Yes, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So what is the investment for it?

It's $197 a month. So what we try to position ourselves, because is software, which basically— there's a number of software programs out there that, you know, some are even free, that basically will kind of organize your content, but you still have to put all the content in there. And at the other end of the spectrum, it may be more like yourself, Todd. There's people that offer really full service. Well, we're not pretending to be either one of those. We're definitely not a hopper service, and we're definitely not a full-service company, but The magic for us is that at $197 a month, it's pretty affordable. Most of our clients need maybe one sale in the year to pay for this investment, if that. And what I like about it is that, especially now, quite frankly, because we've moved to North American people, is that we have this really neat team. In fact, two weeks ago we all went for dinner because it turns out that Now our team actually lives here where I live in Kelowna, British Columbia. We actually went for a typhoon and we all talked about how to improve the quality of this. It's really become this really neat little team that's really keen on learning, okay, what can we do with this little part that we're going to play in this person's life? We're not writing the blog for them and we're not trying to pretend like we are driving their strategies, but we're going to solve this one little problem so it frees them up. So like in my case, Todd, by the time I've written the blog, man, I'm done. I'll spend like 6 hours thinking through this blog and researching it and rewriting it and getting the images, or at the very minimum it takes me 90 minutes. Well, I don't want to then go and write a bunch of tweets and posts, all that sort of stuff. So it solves a big problem.

Very cool. And people can do it for 3 or 4 months and bail out if they want.

They could do it for a day and bail out. Yeah. That would be a bit irritating.

Yeah. Well, yeah, and it's important to give these things a shot. I mean, at least 3 months to kind of see. And you will notice it with the consistent posting. You'll notice an increase in visibility on the newsfeed with Facebook through its EdgeRank system, just that, especially if the if you're encouraging people to comment and you're responding to them in the feed and everything. So very cool.

Yeah, thanks. Just on that point, what we also do, which most people cannot do, and this of course is where you're the expert, is that we're paying attention to what's actually working in the market. So we're also adjusting how we post on Facebook and how we go to Twitter and LinkedIn because we're looking at, okay, what is trending right now, what actually works. Most people can't pick pay attention to that. So they really can't be thinking in terms of all the social media strategies and how things are changing. It's enough for them to be thinking about, okay, how am I serving my market, how am I delivering the goods, what kind of content am I writing? So we can keep on doing that for them and so they can kind of rest assured knowing that they got a team behind them that's doing this for them now and they can go off and do other projects and not have to worry about this Cool, very cool.

Well, there's a link in this post or video where you can get more information on SOS, and it's right on Hugh's site as well, so you can find it there. And Hugh, great to chat with you as always, and we'll connect again soon.

Bye.