This is a transcript from the Business Secrets Podcast With Robert Kanaat. Click here to view and subscribe on iTunes.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Business Secrets. My name is Robert Kanaat – founder of wanderlustworker.com, the premier online destination for all things inspirational and transformational.
I really appreciate you being with me here today. This is a groggy day for me. I just got my wisdom tooth pulled out yesterday, and man it hurt. It was impacted, and oh the dentist really had to get in there and yank it out. I was all Novocaine’d up, or whatever it was. But yeah I still felt some pain as he was pushing down on the bottom of my lip. Then I woke up today, because it was such excruciating pain. I don’t take any kind of medication or anything like that, and I had to take something. I could just feel it today. I could just feel like the cloud.
I remember thinking, because the mind is so much more powerful than anybody else ever actually thinks. It’s the result of millions of years of evolution. It’s the most powerful thing that we know about in the universe, and it’s in our heads. What I was thinking was, was a foggy day. I was thinking of the fog clearing. It’s so funny because, as soon as I started thinking about the fog clearing – or you know like when you go to a beach in the morning and the sun burns off the clouds? When I started thinking about that, it just started feeling better. It’s crazy. It’s funny what you can do with your mind, when you put your mind to something.
Today I wanted to talk about something important. You always hear people say, “If you build it, they will come.” You’ve heard it before. That’s cool, you can go out there and build some cool stuff. I know I’ve built some cool stuff in the past. If you build it, they will not just come, unfortunately. You’ve got to get the word out. Everyone has this misconception that they’re going to build something, and then everyone will come to it.
Well, unless you have something that is so unique, so kind of out of this world – like nothing like it in the world, then yes – maybe people will come. But for the most part, for most of the world, for most of the seven billion souls on this planet – if you build it, they won’t just come. You’ve got to tell them about it. You do that with marketing.
One of the biggest secrets in business really is about marketing, about getting the word out. I think that a lot of people struggle with this. I know that I used to struggle with this a long, long time ago – before I really started geeking out about marketing and immersing myself in this world. I struggled, because I was just a writer – software engineer originally, turned writer. No pun intended there. That’s all I wanted to do. I just wanted to build cool stuff. I wanted to be creative.
Thankfully, I found an outlet to be able to build cool stuff, and people would come to it. That was on Amazon. But it’s not the type of thing most people will do, because it’s a lot of investment of time in the front end. What I’m talking about is really marketing your business. How do you get the word out there? How do you build it so people will come, by telling them about it?
When you are taking one approach, for example the approach of getting your things out there on a platform where there are so many people. For example, Amazon. When I started publishing books on Amazon, people bought them – because there was a mass audience there. I would use kind of some powerful SEO stuff on Amazon. Because nobody was really doing SEO on Amazon. I just went into the nitty gritty, and started analyzing the different listings to see what was coming up first.
Amazon’s algorithm is currently very geared towards the number of authentic reviews and the rating. There are other factors of course. But they look at how many downloads the book is getting per hour, per day. What percentage people are reading and stuff like that. They really now go in deep, especially for that like top 100 list. But back in 2013, 2014 it was like wild, Wild West. You could publish a book on Amazon, and it would just soar, and it would just make so much money.
I remember there wasn’t a lot of competition in SEO books, so I was just publishing SEO books, and it was crazy the amount of money those books were making. Then I went over to audio on Audible, and they started making a lot of money there too. Again, there was not a lot of quality there. I happened to penetrate platforms that were – there were a lot of people already using those platforms, so it wasn’t really like that much of a challenge to market there. It was very passive, on my behalf, extremely passive.
How do you build something so that people come? Like if you’re in business – obviously – maybe you’re not writing books or whatever. How do you actually build a business where people will come to it? How do you build a business where people will find out about it? There’s one way, and there’s one way only.
Organic SEO is terrific. It is absolutely terrific, it’s very long term. If you have a few years to invest of your time – of working every single day building great content, awesome. You could build a blog, or you could build a website. Some place where people come to consume content either on a daily or weekly or monthly basis – and you can have an audience – a very, very large, substantial audience. Yeah, you can do that.
But a lot of people just will not do that, and a lot of people refuse to do something like that. It’s just too all consuming. People are looking for ways they can actually get their stuff in front of people, without spending years and years. For me, the reason why I wanted to learn SEO was always because I was so sick and tired of trying to figure out that, that I just wanted to find a way that was cheap or free to get people to consume my content. Luckily I did figure that out.
SEO is a great approach, and I would definitely say you can do SEO at the same time as you do paid marketing. I’m going to talk about in-depth SEO in an upcoming podcast episode. Be sure to stay tuned and stay subscribed. But the way that you really get your – what you build out there, is to market it.
There are a few very, very powerful and potent ways to market. First of all, if you are in business today and you are not email marketing, you’re seriously shooting yourself in the foot. I cannot tell you how much money is being made by emails. Nor can I tell you how much money I’ve actually made on email, it’s a shocking amount of money. The coolest thing about this, is that people are used to buying from people that they like. A more intimate conversation is through email.
Chat bots and stuff, that’s another – total other subject and topic. Chat bots are expanding and growing. Yes it’s a more intimate way to approach prospects. But if you are first and foremost not doing the whole email marketing thing, I’d just start there, and then move into chat bots. If you’re already doing chat bots, great. If you don’t know what chat bots are, then don’t worry about it right now. Basically I would suggest that if you are not doing email marketing, to begin right now. If you have a website – if you don’t have a website, set one up. I hope that you do have a website if you’re in business.
You need to create a lead magnet. What is a lead magnet? It’s just something that can be consumed literally in 10 to 15 minutes. It’s not something massive. I used to build lead magnets, you’ve probably maybe seen it? I built a lead magnet called Keystone Habits, and I’ve had it on Wanderlust Worker for a really long time, and it’s been terrific. But I put a lot of energy into that lead magnet. Whereas that lead magnet could’ve actually been a low ticket sale. I could’ve sold that for $37. But I chose to keep it as a free lead magnet, because I wanted to add value.
I started doing a lot of that before I really became very advanced in marketing. But a lead magnet really is something that can be consumed in 10 or 15 minutes. I’ve got this course called, “7 Figure Blog,” where I just did a cheat sheet. Another one called, “Discipline Secrets.” I did a cheat sheet for that as well. Those are lead magnets, really, really simple lead magnets. Those lead magnets lead into webinars.
For you, I would suggest sitting down, and just – let’s just say you wanted to build out some products that you could offer your customers. Now what I would suggest is to first focus on that lead magnet, and figure out what you want to teach. Make it like a cheat sheet or a check list, or really, really simple PDF download. It doesn’t have to be in depth. It could just be one point from like let’s say 10 you would cover in like a low ticket item.
You want to put that together, and basically set it up so that they can download that and become part of your list. When I say part of your list, you need to set up a list on a website like AWeber, Convertkit, Drip, Constant Contact – just one of those places. There’s a ton of different email providers. ClickFunnels also has a great built in one too. I would suggest doing that, and building out your list. Because there is a lot of money in the list. When I want to market something, I just hit my list.
It’s a great way to earn money, to sustain your business, to roll our anything really. Build the list. Send traffic to a page where you can get those people as subscribers. But then you have to create a relationship with them. If you don’t create relationship with them, then you’re totally wasting your time. I’m talking about a long email sequence. I’m in the process still of lengthening my email sequence.
But just so you know – I believe I’ve said it before, Brendon Burchard has 191 week email sequence. Russell’s got a really long one. A ton of marketers have extremely lengthy email lists. I’m talking about 40, 50, 60 weeks. Yeah, that long – it’s crazy. You’re developing a relationship, and so you just build out an email sequence that develops a relationship.
If you build it, they will not just come – you have to get them to come. You get them to come by giving them value. You have to give them value first. For me, a blog was a great place to deliver value. Because it’s a place where people can easily consume that, especially people who are used to long form, who really enjoy long form content. That’s my thing, I love long form content.
I just hate these really, really short truncated posts. I just feel like you can’t really relate the true emotion behind content, and really teach if it’s really short. So I never do anything less than 2000 words. It’s just really, you have to hit them with a lot of value. If you build it, they will not just come. You have to market to them. You have to market for them to come.
One great way that I recently started employing is – because I love building content so much, I’ve started pixeling my content – then sending people to that content. Then I know that they’re interested in it. For example, for my 7 Figure Blog course, I’ve got a blog post about how to start a blog and make money. I started sending traffic because it’s pixeled. I know that people who are clicking on that and consuming that content, I know they’re interested in starting a blog.
Then I start hitting them with – number one, ads for hosting – for hosting the blog, through an affiliate relationship. Then I start hitting them with my webinar, and so marketing the webinar, “The 7 Figure Blog.” These are great ways where you can get people to come. If you are like me and you like to build content, that’s a great approach. Just build content, send traffic to it, and then those people who consume that content are pixelled.
Plus people will find that content for example. I believe that content is linked to from Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine and everywhere else. They get there for free, and then I pixel them. I know that they’re interested, and I can serve them ads later. Pixeling is a huge thing. If you build it, they will not just come. You have to actually get them to come. You have to create valuable content, and you have to actually build an email list. Email marketing is the best way to get them to come.
Of course, if you’re spending money on ads, you’ve got to get them on your list. Even if you break even, the beautiful thing about free plus shipping offers is – even if you break even or lose money, you’ll still likely make money on the average order value. Plus those people are on your list, and you can market to them forever and ever. That’s why people love free plus shipping offers. That’s why you see so many free offers for books on Facebook. That’s why you see so many free offers for everything.
Perry Belcher, Ryan Deiss did this credit card knife thing that just like rocketed to the moon – into a continuity program. I believe they sold– It was for their Survival Life, and they gave away a free credit card knife, and it just crushed. They built the list, and they made money. That rolled into a continuity program. I think they generated some 20 million dollars or some crazy number from that.
Those are powerful. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to build that list. You’ve got to get people to the content. Whatever it is that you’re selling, it doesn’t really matter what you’re selling. You’ve got to get people to content. For me, I started with SEO but then expanded that out. If you do not understand ads, you have to understand ads. Go back and listen to – I did a podcast episode about Facebook ads. Go back and listen to that, because it’s powerful stuff. It was the result of a conversation with Brian Bowman, who – man he’s such a giver, he’s such a good guy. I’d go back and listen to that.
Really, you have to consider the audience. I know that there’s a lot more things in “if you will build it, they will come.” But focus on building your list, sincerely. If you don’t take away anything else from this, take that away. Focus on the list, build the list. Communicate with the list, segment the list. Figure out what they’re interested, segment them if they buy. Tag them as buyers, then market to those people differently or drop them into other funnels. There’s so many different things that you could do.
So this is what I have to say for you today. I’m pushing the time limit, and I hope that you enjoyed this episode. Don’t forget to like, share, subscribe on iTunes. If you have a comment, drop me a comment on Wanderlust Worker. Just go to the contact tab, my email address is there. Until next time, I will speak to you guys soon.