Make Money Online

What do you do for a living? Oh, gosh. Bomb? Who is this? Who’s asking this question?

Well, I actually was asked this question in a very interesting situation recently. I was attempting to leave France and Enter the United Kingdom by train and was stopped by the United Kingdom equivalent of a TSA agent who said Something at me, and I was like, bonjour. And they went, hello. And I was like, okay, I fucked up step number one here. And then they were like, why are you visiting the UK? And I was like, travel. And they’re like, okay, we don’t really believe you. What do you do? And I’m like, digital public relations. What does that mean? And I was like, huh, okay. We aren’t winning any points. And I was like, well, okay. So, digital public relations comes down to this. I help people get on blogs with guest posts. I help people. Get placed on podcasts or help set up joint venture opportunities or joint venture webinars. But that’s really describing the object that comes out of it. And I don’t think that’s the real. Outcome that a client is hiring me for. Really, I help a client achieve two things. I help a client grow their audience by building relationships with people who are already reaching the same or similar audience, and I help a client Will claim their time because they don’t have to worry about doing outreach themselves, building these relationships, managing these relationships, setting up these opportunities themselves. They can know that somebody’s handling it in the background and helping their business move forward. It’s, I describe it as digital public relations or outreach consulting because those have been the easiest terms for people to graft. But in reality, it’s a mixture of business development. I’m finding opportunities to help your business grow. Digital public relations, I’m finding new media opportunities, blogs. webinars, podcasts to get your message out there. And it’s an outreach opportunity because I’m going out there and saying like, well, we’ve identified these people. Now we need to build a relationship with them. And I see outreach marketing really as the Process of building a relationship with a stranger and it’s a non-skeezy, salesy way, more like, how could we help you? How could we provide value? How could we do something that your audience would enjoy. And as a side effect of that, myself, my client, my colleague, whoever, gain some benefit either in reach, in audience, in spreading their message, in building their business and attracting new customers. But in a nutshell, I help people build and manage their most valuable relationships and gain exposure to new audiences.

And I am holding about 15 pounds of bread in one bag.

Now, the response was: they come up with new names for those things all the time. Oh my gosh, that’s fascinating. Instant flip of the switch from why are you coming into my country to hey, welcome. That’s exciting and interesting.

Oh, it was great.

At the moment, I’m making a hazelnut blueberry waffle, but inside the metaphor. I’m actually making. No, you’re absolutely right. Like, there’s so many different aspects of a business that digital public relations or outreach can touch. And it’s interesting to be continually discovering. Areas of opportunity or areas of research. Now, when I come into an engagement, I tell my clients, month one is the research month, and they’re like, Why do we need to do research? We just need to contact people. I’m like, You’re absolutely right. Who? And then they get a really blank look on their face. And they’re like, well, maybe outreach is necessary. So, or research is necessary. So we did, we’ve done multiple episodes on research, but there’s a heavy research phase. There’s a heavy, I need to get inside your business and understand your business phase. There’s a heavy customer development phase. If I’m working with a client who has a large email list or a large existing audience, there’s a lot of going out to those people in either Through one-on-one phone calls, through an email survey, or through another means, saying, What do you do? How do you identify? What words describe who you are? Where do you hang out online? What type of media do you consume? Because all of those answers. Help inform what our strategic plan is. And we could go out and do outreach without a strategic plan, but it’s going to be so much less effective because we won’t really know. Who we’re trying to reach and how to properly assess an opportunity? Would this particular blogger or this particular content creator be a good person to work with? Well, We don’t have any metrics to gauge them against or any metrics to say this will be a successful campaign. So, how would we know? So, that’s one area where I often find myself where clients don’t expect. Another area is actually what I think of as post-outreach work. So let’s say I’m doing outreach for you, Nick, and I get you on a podcast and you do the great podcast. Oh, you’re welcome. You got me on a podcast. I have a couple times. And what happens after that? And we talked about this in our Make Money Offline episode with Kurt Elster when it comes to marketing automation. But that’s really another area where I find myself working with clients. So much in a tactical, hands-on role, but more in a strategic role, saying, Okay, somebody shows up, where do they sign up? And they’re like, I don’t know. What do they get? I don’t know. What happens after this? I don’t know. And I’m like, okay, let’s answer these questions. And I’ll help the client define a lead magnet or a freebie offering based off of the service they’re trying to sell in the back end. I’ll help the client answer that question: what do we want to sell these people on the back end after they sign up, after they’ve heard you speak or saw you on a webinar and decided to opt into your list? Do we need a custom one-off landing page for each appearance? Do we need a reusable landing page? Do we need something else? What do the marketing tactics look like? To make sure this is an effective engagement. And even before we think about what I think of as like 301 level things as A-B testing these different offers and getting multiple lead magnets up, how do we get the minimal Framework up so when somebody hears you on a thing and says, I’d love to learn more, there’s an easy spot for them to go to. A third area I often find myself working in is I will get on a call with some clients and say, Let’s do a practice podcast recording right now. They’ll be like, raw, and I’ll be like, it’s okay. Listen, it’s fine. Nobody’s going to hear this except us. This is just an opportunity for us to practice going through the motions of what it is like to be on a podcast or be interviewed. So, when you are on a podcast, it feels less scary. You feel more prepared. Maybe we’ve defined a specific story or a set of talking points that are new for the client. So, it’s an opportunity for us to walk through them and say, okay. When I ask this type of question, you respond with this type of answer. When I ask this type of question, you want to make sure you mention this type of thing. Oh, I’m doing coaching now, and you could learn more about da da da. Oh, uh, uh. I wouldn’t really call this as a large area I work in, but I’m very often thinking about either contextual calls to action or I can’t remember what my other term for them is. Contextual calls to action or like end of episode, end of event calls to action. A contextual call to action would be in the middle of the episode if I said, oh, go to this thing and go to this URL and get this thing. Within the context of the question or the context of the conversation, we’re providing a call to action to the listener or the reader or whatever it may be.

Uh I critique to a level that feels comfortable and appropriate. My goal isn’t to necessarily make my client the best Podcaster or the best interviewee ever. My goal is to make sure they’re comfortable with the experience because there’s a huge delta between Or a huge range between that was a terrible interview, and that was 10 out of 10 the best interview ever. I want to get my client solidly in like the C or the B minus range because that is good enough. And so it’s often Let’s run just like a job interview or a negotiation. Let’s run through it three or four times. Let’s make sure you aren’t afraid. Let’s answer the questions you have. Let’s make sure your equipment works. Okay, great. Now we’re ready to do this for real. And it takes some of the fear off. It doesn’t make them an expert overnight, but I will provide feedback like. You aren’t directly answering the questions, or you aren’t coming up for air, or you aren’t asking the host any questions, and things of that nature. So they’re able to see opportunities to better structure the form and format of Their interview.

Aaron Ross Powell, and I’m very focused on almost an 80-20 rule when it comes to the type of projects I work on or the actions I’m taking as part of those projects. I’ll quarterly, maybe less frequently than quarterly, look over the type of deliverables I’m producing, the types of outcomes I’m producing, and the results those outcomes are producing for the client and say, Which of these generated the biggest return? Which of these did not? How could I use that to influence my standard operating procedures, my processes, and make sure that we’re focusing on the right things? And that’s led to a lot of trimming the fat when it comes to SOPs or processes and procedures. Procedures and figuring out, like, okay, we were looking at these 10 different signals before to figure out if, let’s say, a podcast was a good fit. And that took a lot of time. And really, these three cover 90% of the situations we could think of. If we trim down to just looking at those three, it’s going to be a lot easier for us to qualify high-quality podcasts to reach out to and contact them and start that conversation. So There’s a lot of looking at it and saying, what’s really important here? And what’s not actually that necessary? Because like you pointed out, neither of us want to run big agencies with a lot of people under us. It’s me and my part time assistant. So any opportunities we could find to Become more efficient in getting a client on a podcast or getting a guest article placed or setting up a joint venture webinar are opportunities for us to produce that same result for our client, but with less time invested. And Any opportunity to produce a great outcome with less time invested, I think, is a win for both the client and for the consultant.

Typically, the outcomes I see from so the outcomes I see from this are increased authority within a niche. Oh, let me jump back for a second. One thing that I absolutely do with every single client that they have no clue is coming is I do what I call the positioning slap in the face. And I’m like, it basically comes down to me saying, like, who are we trying to reach? And they’re like, we’re trying to reach people. And I’m like, we need to be a little more specific than that. Nice people. People with money. Ah, Jinx. Jinx. I honestly got once got on a call with a client and we’re going through a kickoff workshop and I’m and I have 20 questions that I ask them before any when we’re starting the engagement on the workshop call. And one of them is like, Describe who our ideal customer is, describe who we’re trying to reach. And the client rattled off a list of 10 or so different personas, target markets that include Included stoners, stay-at-home mothers, entrepreneurs, digital nomads. And I just was like, whoa.

Flag, red flag, gigantic red flag. We could reach one of these. Which one do we want to reach? I’m not sure. Okay, great. So before we have a week outreach, we have to figure this out entirely. It’s so important to understand before any of the outreach happens, who are we trying to reach? But yeah.

What’s the expensive problem you’re solving? How do you make money? Why do your customers buy from you? They’re higher level questions than a lot of consultants are asking, even in an initial kickoff call, in a workshop, on a standard call. If I can’t understand the answer to those questions, I’m not going to be able to effectively represent the company. And so it all starts for me understanding: well, why is this a business? What value are we providing to people? Who are we providing that value to? And until we answer those questions, we can’t go out to the marketplace and say, We provide value to people like your audience. Can we please provide some value to your audience? Because then it’s just us showing up and saying, You want a link to our thing? Please. And nobody enjoys that. Nobody wants to get a spammy outreach email like that. I did the numbers once. I found some 2014 research report that said, like, for outreach placement, like, The industry average is 7 to 14 percent. I’m like 17 to 14 percent. Okay, and then I ran the numbers and I was like, huh, I’m getting a 25 to 45 placement percent error placement rate across all my clients. Why this huge delta? And I keep coming back to the fact that I spend so much time with the client on research, on understanding their target market, on understanding what we’re offering, on understanding what our messaging and story needs to be. All these things that surround the actual event of I’m on a website. I’m writing a guest article. I’m on a podcast. But until we understand those things, until we’ve defined, like, well, what’s the narrative for your company? Okay. Which webinar? Yeah, which webinar? Uh what happens here?

Yeah, entirely, entirely. So, there’s a lot of ancillary questions that are really, really valuable to ask and answer. It’s interesting diving into a new business. On the topic of positioning, I’ve been going through a positioning audit for myself and a positioning refinement, and I’m sort of doing the same thing you are, where I realize there’s two audiences I’m focusing on. But I’d been incorrectly selling the wrong service to one of the audiences. So I recently refined down how I’m positioning my my my I don’t know what to call it, my flagship service, audience power-up, traffic power-up, where I do this outreach for a client and get them on these podcasts, joyfully, or webinars, and guest articles, and all these magical things. And I said, well, who’s the person who actually, or the type of company that actually benefits from this? And I realized the best way to describe them was educational product creators. And so. I just did a real, and positioning is hard and positioning is challenging. And actually, doubling down on a niche is a scary thing. But I, you know, updated some copy on my website, changed a few headlines, started referring to myself as helping educational product creators do this. And you know what? The quality of leads in my inbox has dramatically gone up. Well, I was on vacation in Europe recently, and four leads came in, and every single one of them runs a large business selling educational products to a well-defined audience. And my assistant keeps forwarding them to me, and they’re like, Passes the smell test, passes the smell test again. This is a good one, and that was great validation for me because it suddenly let me see that. Yeah, okay, nicely done. Thank you. Yeah, this is an audience that responds well to it.

A client who has a good business, a client who has a business that actually helps people or provides value. There’s no reason why more people shouldn’t know about that. If i if you, dear listener, provide a service that saves somebody thirty minutes of their life or saves somebody, you know, a day of research or time spent doing something. or anything else. Well, people need to know about that. So I’m so excited and motivated to help get that story out there, to understand what’s unique about your company. What story can we tell here? What drives you as the founder? And how could we get that story out to more people and get them excited to hear about this and get them excited to hear about this product or this service and how it could help them become the best version of themselves? So it’s really, really me. Being excited about helping other people tell their stories through these different mediums. And that’s really what drives me more than anything else: figuring out how do we help more people know about what you’re creating. Sometimes that’s led to interesting scenarios where a prospect contacts me and we have a call, and I’m like, this isn’t an interesting product. This isn’t something that people really want to hear more about. This isn’t something that’s going to help the world. And I mean, that has honestly become a major red flag for me. If it’s a product that I don’t believe in, if it’s a product that I feel is crappy or scammy or not going to help the end buyer and it’s just a cash play. It’s not gonna, it’s not gonna provide value to the people we’re going to reach. It’s not going to help them improve their lives. So, why are we investing money on this? Why not create a better thing or find a better way to help the universe than promote this? Spammy offer type thing.

That’s a great way to put it.

Yeah, they’re going to throw AdWords money at it and then move on to the next thing. But I’m focused on helping clients who have. A long-term vision for their business grow to the next level and tell people that, hey, this is a really interesting thing. You should come check it out and figuring out what that infrastructure needs to be surrounding it to both. Get us placements and then convert readers into visitors to the website, into subscribers, and then down the line into paying customers because it’s really this long game. Like if we think about it, A podcast placement might result in a you know somebody making money online nine months down the road and The most difficult part of my job, I think, is it’s very, very qualitative and squishy. I unfortunately don’t have the strongest analytics to share with clients. I could say, like, We’ve got you on these podcasts. We have, you know, these conversations in progress, and these podcast placements have generated this many subscribers and this many visitors. It often ends there. Sometimes we’re able to immediately say, and that has resulted in this much money. But often we’re just able to say, we know more people know about you. We could see your traffic is increasing. We could see that people are listening to and engaging in these episodes. We could see that people are subscribing. So we know that it’s producing a positive effect. And unfortunately, that’s where the metrics or the quantitative aspect of it ends because There’s such a time lag between, oh, I was on, you know, Mixergy, and, oh, the people who listened to me on Mixergy now have gone through my funnel far enough. That they’re ready to buy, that during the scope of engagement, we’re so far down the road. We aren’t necessarily looking for that because we’ve moved on to other opportunities, or an engagement ends and The outcome produced from that placement just hasn’t hit yet. So, the one thing as I look at 2016 and 2017 for my business Is how do I better communicate that to clients? Like, it’s going to be a little squishy, it’s going to be a little qualitative. It might be a little like we got on these podcasts and it’s good because we’re saying it’s good. And at the same time, well, how do I better define quantitative measurements to come back to the client with? So the client could say, things are going well. This answers my questions. And I’m. Investing a little more into how I do research, how I set up those metrics, how I communicate that to a client. And it’ll be interesting to see what comes out of it. But I’m not really sure what the answer is, but I know there’s a Shape of a problem in front of me. And I really want to understand: like, okay, what exactly is the problem here? It might honestly be a problem I’m imagining. Like, I’ve not heard from a client. The reports aren’t good enough, or we’re not getting the metrics we want to see. And this could entirely be a Kay imagined thing. But it’s something I want to spend a little time exploring and figuring out the shape of, just so I can better understand if it’s something I need to solve or not.

And we missed a ship turning phase in there. So we start off with the research. Okay, nothing’s happening, but there’s a lot of research going on. Okay, research done. Now we can contact people. Okay, I’ve contacted a lot of people. We’re hearing back, but no placements have happened yet. But everything’s going well, I promise you. Okay, finally, we have a placement. So it could be. Four to six weeks before we get that first placement, depending on how quickly the research phase goes, how well the outreach phase goes, and Unless a client is properly primed to expect, this is what the timeline looks like, and this is why the timeline looks like that. It’s not been negative reactions from clients, but it’s been questions like: what type of work is going on? And I’m like, well, you know, we went through this research phase to define all of these things. And now we’re doing the outreach phase to get in touch with these things. And we’re in. 40 conversations right now, and it looks like we’re going to get eight placements out of those 40 conversations. So things are going well. But when I sit myself on the other side of the table in the client’s chair, There are the optics of what exactly is going on, what am I paying for here? And if we hit a stumbling block in month one, I’ve had engagements before where we go through the research phase. We define the target market, we define our stories, we define what the narrative is, we define what our offering is and who we’re trying to reach. We build that list and then we start contacting the people, and nothing happens. We’re wrong offer, wrong market, whatever. And it’s like, okay, like we did a good attempt here.

Exactly. We’re very disappointed. I’m like, well, listen, like, sure, be disappointed in me if you want. But here’s the situation. We were trying to sell the wrong thing to the wrong people here. And this is actually really good because we could cross it off the list. It sucks that we lost a month here or a few weeks here, but If we, it’s all an experiment and it’s all putting a hypothesis on the table and seeing what happens. And in my business, the hypothesis is. Target market will care about our story if these conditions are met.

What I’m starting to do, and what my assistants and I are plotting out in August and September is. What are easy placements sort of generic placements that we know we could get for people? And not that these are lower quality placements, but These are placements that we could easily line up in month one and month two. So while we’re going through the research phase, while we’re starting the really targeted outreach phase. Client feels like, oh, I was on, you know, three podcasts and we got a guest article placed and I’m working on it. So it feels like there’s work coming out of the machine. There are things happening. There are podcasts being generated. And even if they aren’t our ideal podcasts, and it’s like, Like a generic or not very niche podcast, it still feels like we got placed on a podcast, things are going well. And on our side, It’s building that alliance of podcasts and people who do webinars and people who write articles or post articles online. Who wants to work with me and my clients? And we could start those relationships week one, week two, while we’re doing that research phase. So Client feels like stuff’s getting done, and it doesn’t distract too much from the research that’s necessary for the success in the project.

But getting into it, much different business than I imagined. On an earlier episode, we talked about how we got to where we are today. What sort of businesses we went through. I came to this from a search engine optimization background when clients were like, Can you help us build links? And I realized The act of building a link was the act of outreach. And I cared a lot more about outreach than I did about building links. And over about two years, I transitioned my business to focus on public relations and outreach. It’s been a fascinating journey, and it’s a really, really interesting industry to work in. And everybody I talked to is like, this is really, really valuable and really helpful. I have colleagues who are IMing me every other day and are like, Got on another podcast using your template, got on another podcast using your script, got a great guy friend who has an 80% placement rate. The 80% of people he’s emailed have said, yes, write a guest article for me. Using the templates that we’ve put together. And that’s fabulous. Like, I’m so happy that people are able to use these tactics to promote their services and promote their businesses and grow. It’s a great industry to work in, and I absolutely love it. I’m excited to see how it continues to evolve. Awesome. So, if any of the listeners are interested in learning more about the services I provide or how I work or what I do, there’s a couple different ways. DoubleYourAudience. com is my main website and it’s where I post my articles about content promotion and digital outreach and digital public relations. I have two flagship services right now. I split them into two tiers. One is Traffic Power Up. One is Audience Power Up. You could view both of those and see the differences at waudience. com/slash pricing. And I’ve also written a few books about the process of outreach and the process of digital public relations. You could find my book on how to get on podcasts at Podcastoutreach. com. And you could find my book on outreach itself and the process and methodology at outreachblueprint. com. But the best way to learn more, to stay in touch, go to waudience. com/slash newsletter. Drop your email address in there, and you’ll get a series of emails from me on outreach and digital public relations and information to help you be a better marketer or business owner or consultant. Practice this skill within your own business. So go ahead, waudience. com/slash newsletter and check it out. We will have all this in the show notes as well. Carry on.