Owen: Hi, Everyone. My name is Owen McGab Enaohwo and welcome to The Coach Blueprint™, Episode 2. You’re watching this because you’re a coach looking to discover what’s currently working for coaches and what marketing ideas to implement in your business so that you can take the ideas that you learn from our show and go ahead to implement them in your business. Hopefully, you will come back and share your success stories with us as well. 
Assuming you’re currently marketing or promoting your business online by sending out many marketing messages to get new leads to your website and get them to eventually convert into paying coaching clients. The reality is that most people will not convert and become your clients after seeing your first message, so you will have to send sequential messages to them. So, you’re in a situation where if they don’t sign up the first time they come to your website or they don’t sign up for your e-mail list, then that means you’ve lost those particular website visitors. 
I want to share a new online technology with you, especially if you’re marketing your business online that will allow you to bring back those people who came to your website and did not take a desired action. It’s an online advertisement technology called “Retargeting.” And today my guest Alex Holmes is the founder of Hidden Audience, an online resource that teaches people how to go about setting up retargeting campaigns for their businesses. So Alex, welcome to The Coach Blueprint™.

 

Alex: Hello. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

 

Owen: Let me explain the big ideas that we will be sharing with the audience. The first big idea that we will be discussing is how to setup a retargeting campaign that brings past website visitors who did not take a desired action back to our website and get them to sign up to become coaching clients. And also the next big idea is how to setup retargeting campaigns wherein you reach out to owners of websites that currently have your target audience and get them to become your retargeting partners so you can actually end up marketing to people who visited their sites as well.

 

Alex: Yeah, totally.

 

Owen: Please can you mention what you did for a personal finance client of yours. Please highlight that story first of all.

 

Alex: Yeah. Cool. There’s a ton of steps to talk about there. I co-wrote the Hidden Audience with a colleague of mine who’s also a consultant down here. We basically saw the same thing happen over and over again with all the retargeting campaigns that we managed. And so I can explain how to set up on retargeting display ads to people who have been to your website who haven’t performed the action that you want yet. And so yeah, we saw the same kind of problems happen over and over again. So we built this whole info product just around our findings:
A.) How to setup it up really quickly and make it work. 
B.) A 5-minute checklist on things that you can do to optimize your retargeting campaign and make it work.
C.) We put together some really advanced retargeting tactics that no one else is doing such as retargeting off your e-mail list, Facebook, mobile and all kinds of stuff like that.

 
Owen: And so let’s talk about what you did for that personal finance client because I want you to share that story with people listening so they know that you really have retargeting experience. So please tell us the story of what you did?

 

Alex: Yeah, of course. Basically, with personal finance guy, this actually goes one step beyond retargeting. This is actually audience targeting so it’s retargeting traffic from other sites. It’s bringing new people to your site and kind of fills up the top of your sales funnel. I targeted this list of audiences, target all kinds of finance audiences, stock audiences, people interested in trading, house investing, all kinds of stuff. But then I was like, “What the heck. I’ll throw in some web developers and web designers…” and that ended up being the best performing audience list which creates all kinds of really interesting theories about why that worked. 
So basically, people who’ve already been reading about financial products, they’d already made up their minds so they’re not very interested in your product whereas you got this kind of really smart and relatively well-off web developers and web designers. They’re not actively thinking about your product or your competitors so that could actually be your best target audience.

 

Owen: Can you share any kind of information on the return on income or metrics of what you delivered or the personal finance client?

 

Alex: Yeah. It’s awesome. I mean, the conversion rate was massive. It was probably 10X higher than what their average conversion rate was and then also they’re getting conversions. They’re only paying per click and I actually saw people seeing the ad and then signing up. So I’m talking about giving a 10X conversion boost on the click-through traffic, they’re also getting free conversions through view-through traffic. So it was an awesome situation to build upon definitely.

 

Owen: And so, we’re going to dive into more details in this interview and really break down what some of the terms that you just mentioned are so that those listening who doesn’t know what retargeting is can really get to understand it. But let me just share a real quick story of how I discovered this technology. I would go on certain sites like Zappos.com and some other sites that I love like SEOMoz.org mostly to learn about SEO and I would notice that if I go to other sites like even CNN.com or Time.com just to check the news, I would see the ads of the website I had recently been to on these other sites and I’m like, “Man, these people have a lot of money for advertising and they seem to be everywhere”. It felt like their ads were just following me all around the internet. 
Being someone that is curious about technology, I thought, “There has to be something behind this” and I did my research only to find out that this is something that has been going on for quite some time but only now the technology is now available to the small guys like us. And that’s why I had to get you on a show to teach my audience who are coaches how they too can use retargeting in their business. So what is retargeting? I think I’ve given them an idea of what retargeting is but from your perspective, what is retargeting?

 

Alex: So retargeting is the process of showing ads to people who have been to your site before and that at the most basic level, that’s it. If someone goes to your site you then have the ability for the next year and a half to show an ad to them at any number of times that you want. And then within that, you can get super fancy and do lots of fancy stuff. You hit it on the head by saying, “Oh, they must be advertising everywhere!” 
I think that’s one of the best effects of retargeting that now many people talk about. It really makes you appear bigger than you are and it has a massive awareness impacts. If you think about it, people who have been to your site before are pretty much the best audience to advertise to. These are people that know your products, they’ve heard of you before. So in addition, to being like in that perfect audience, they also will recognize you. So, they’ll really likely to see your ad and when you start writing these campaigns, you’ll see it for yourself the increase in the numbers; both in terms of click-through traffic as well as people who see your ad and then a week later, do something.

 

Owen: And earlier you said click-through traffic and view-through traffic. Can you explain them because my audience might want to know what do you mean by those?

 

Alex: So click-through traffic is just the kind of traffic that you’d see in like Google Analytics report. Someone clicks on the ad, you can say definitely this person came from my retargeting campaign. The beauty of banner ads is that people just don’t click on ads for whatever reason. So often people see the ad and then rather than click on it, they go into their browser and type in your website and you can track all that with the retargeting companies and retargeting networks. So it’s really important to track that and that’s actually a whole other discussion, how to correctly assess, if you’ll see like a hundred sign ups come from view-through, I usually attribute about half of those to the actual retargeting plus other tactics.

 

Owen: So the click-through thing is where they actually clicked on your retargeting ad and they come back, so that’s click-through. And then the view-through is where the system tracks the fact that they just saw the retargeting ad but instead of clicking on it, they specifically went to the URL entry point of their browser and typed the URL of your website?

 

Alex: Yeah. It’s all tracked via cookies. We have browser cookies.

 

Owen: Okay. I think that’s where we try to figure out now. We understand the concept, the technologies but how does exactly retargeting work so we can explain the technology to coaches listening so far.

 

Alex: Of course. So yeah, like how to practically kind of set it up and make it work for them?

 

Owen: Yeah, the technology behind it. I mean it has to do with cookies but just explain and let us understand what it is.

 

Alex: Yeah. Cool. So from a technology perspective it all has to do with browser cookies. So basically every browser got hundreds of little data points in there and all kinds of people are kind of putting these anonymous little signals in there saying that someone has been to this website like he was interested in sports, music, that kind of thing. By dropping a retargeting tag on your site it basically adding another little signal on that person’s browser saying, “This person is interested in my product.” And then as an advertiser, who has a Google Adwords advertising account; you have the opportunity to bid to show an ad to that person. 
Basically, whenever you go to a website, say you go to The New York Times, there’s that leader board at the top, basically there’s thousands of advertisers all bidding to show an ad to that person on that placement in real time. And so it’s got like the contextual advertisers and the audience advertisers and they’re all bidding because that audience is super valuable to you. You can bid a lot more and basically make sure that you show up there every time for that person which is pretty cool and that’s kind of why retargeting is still powerful.

 

Owen: Yea why exactly does retargeting work? I mean, I have already given you example of my own situation. As in what got me to investigate the technology, but as the expert in this field, why does it work though?

 

Alex: Think about it, it’s the absolute perfect audience. These are people, I think it’s like only 2% of people actually buy something when they first go to websites so that’s 98% of people that you can just remind over and over again. If you think about it, they come back as the perfect audience. These are people that know who you are, they like you, and they’re ready to buy. They just need that little nudge to get them over the hump. 
Similarly for a lot of advertisers, banner advertising just doesn’t work if you’re targeting context. So if you’re armed doing this retargeting audience data, you can basically bid a lot more than everyone else and get better impressions and clicks for super cheap especially when you’re comparing it to search, I mean it’s much cheaper – pretty much everyone that does retargeting right, it’s the best performing marketing tactic.

 

Owen: In our pre-interview, just so the audience gets to understand that we actually spend some time researching and discussing what we’re going to talk about in order to make sure that we make the interviews are jam-packed with information that is actionable that you can take and apply. You mentioned something about the three rules to retargeting success. Can you explain what you mean by that?

 

Alex: Yeah, totally. So you should be creating multiple audience lists on your website and then you should be creating ads for each audience lists that really speaks to that audience. So typically, you have a website, you have an e-mail, you have a Facebook page, you have all these people that are showing different intents based on what they’re doing on your website and what you can do is create multiple audience lists where you should to do it with AdWords, create multiple audience lists, place these tags in different parts of your sites and based on how they’re acting on your site, you create ads that speak to each of their interests.

 

Owen: So if I could dive into that a little because you mentioned something on audience list. So you’re saying that based on what the person does or the pages where the person visits on my website and I created a separate audience list so that way I can tell the retargeting tool that I’m using that this person for instance, in my own scenario they went to the “How we work” page. So they are trying to find out about the process of how we do our work. So if I will create an ad for that person who visited that page, it has to be in context of with what they saw on that page. Then if I created audience list of people who went to my sign up page, obviously this person now is really trying to take the next step to becoming a client and then the ad I’m creating for them to see when you go around the internet has to be something in line with what they were doing on my website. Is that what you’re saying?

 

Alex: Totally. Yeah. That’s a great way of thinking about it too. So based on what pages they go to, you can figure out if this person is like more interested in your product or not and if the person is more interested, you can show them more ads that are kind of this nudge awareness retargeting. Another kind of using your product as an example, you could have pages that show different features that you offer and then you drop a tag on one of those pages and you’re like, “All right, this person is interested in this feature specifically” and then when you show that person an ad, you mention that this feature kind of before the other ones. 
So if you really speak to those interests or if say you add a new feature that’s related and you kind of make that reference. They’re super powerful stuff like that if you often do that, basically no one does and the beauty with retargeting is if you get more specific with the audience list and the ad creative then click-through rates just go through the roof. I’ve seen like 1 or 2% of click-through rates which on banner ads is unheard of and super super cheap. I mean you can get clicks for like 10 to 15 cents in the U.S. if you’re doing it right. So yes, it’s pretty cool stuff.

 

Owen: And so how can we get with the audience list, we’re trying to break down this into the three parts you mentioned. You said the audience, the creative and the context, right?

 

Alex: Yeah. The context is important too. That’s probably not quite important but in our ebook we really kind of show Venn diagram to illustrate it. I’d say, the audience and the ads are the most important but context is very important too. Basically, when you run the campaign it’s important to block all kinds of spammy sites. There are lots of like in game and video stuff that tends to not perform as well; it depends on your product because sometimes it works. And then the other thing is you can overlay a context you want and white list of sites on top of the audience and ad that you already have. That’s totally better once you have kind of a bigger audience list and you’ve been doing it for awhile. But yeah, you can do really cool stuff like one thing we talked about in it is video retargeting. So basically, if you have a video, you can promote that video to your past visitors only when they’re on YouTube or only when they’re already viewing another video. That’s pretty powerful stuff. So you have the perfect audience and the perfect ad for that audience and you have an ad that has content that someone is already viewing and wants to view. I mean, it’s like the perfect, it’s the three…

 

Owen: I pay attention to several notable internet markets and they always say, “Try to get people onto your website and get onto an e-mail list” but it seems that with retargeting, you probably don’t even need an e-mail list. I mean, am I wrong to assume that?

 

Alex: Yeah. I kind of think of retargeting as an e-mail list. I think your audience list is kind of like the new e-mail list and e-mail is always going to be super powerful. I don’t think email is going out of fashion. But that’s what retargeting is, you’re building this audience list and it’s important if nothing else to at least drop this tag on your site. So if two months from now you can retarget to these people and you can retarget off e-mail list, if you want to or you can build e-mail subscribers from your retargeting tag as well to create call of action so there are lots of ways to do it.

 

Owen: And so you mentioned like there are 5 tips and tricks that in a way any coach thinking about making use of retargeting as part of their online marketing strategy can get started with. Can you mention some of those during this interview?

 

Alex: Yeah, totally. So yeah, we actually also got the Cheat Sheet for the audience. So you just download that, in 5 minutes you can kind of get your campaigns optimized. But yeah everyone’s site is different but just kind of taking a quick look at some examples. I started out, I created two audience lists, they’d be all visitors and then there would be subscribers or people who’ve already contacted you and you’d basically setup two retargeting campaigns. 
One would be for basically everyone that’s been to your site that hasn’t performed an action yet. So, another list could be negative audiences; people who’ve already performed that action or already subscribed and I’d created 6 or 7 different banner ads with different messages and cycle those through. Then show them banners ads across the internet, about a couple impressions per week kind of thing and then you’d have your second audience list which are people that already know you and already subscribed to you and were just only called “drip” for every retargeting which is showing them an ad once a week or once a month. It just kind of like a little reminder that you exist and doing something like that is super cheap as well.

 

Owen: I’m trying to make sure that every word or term you say, we break it down. You mentioned “impressions.” Just so that someone who doesn’t know what that is, explain that please a little bit.

 

Alex: Yeah. It’s just an ad showing up on a website. So your ad shows up a thousand times, that’s a thousand impressions. And if you do, the numbers of impressions are super cheap. I mean work it out, often like a dollar per thousand. So that’s pretty good like you’re serving ads to the perfect person for pretty much cheaper and better placements than anyone else. So, it’s pretty cool.

 

Owen: So let me see if I can make it more concrete. In the sense of different people, they are listening to this right now, a coach who has a website where maybe two things you can really do. Either you go on the website and buy the coaches’ time in terms of group coaches. So, you’re signing up a group coaching, you’re paying for that or signing up. For those people who don’t want the group coaching right now, sign up to receive kind of an e-mail information so they can get like a free info or whatever. So there’s really two call to action that they want people to do, either you’re going on that sign up for the group coaching and pay for that service or you sign up for an e-mail to receive a free content. So, in the context of retargeting and just that example, how can we break it down for the coaches on what they would do just based on that example I just gave?

 

Alex: Yeah. Cool. So phase one would be just getting more people to subscribe. So I’d create two lists. One list would be all visitors and then one list would be people that have already subscribed. So you’d create, setup an ad. Once you get those two tags live, you setup an ad, you say, “I want to reach all visitors on my site” and then you setup a negative audience for people subscribed. So you’re always showing ads to people who haven’t subscribed yet. The way you do with people on that.

 

Owen: Negative audience to me based on what I understand about it is that okay, now in this example we have the people who viewed your sign up page to sign up for your coaching services and then people who viewed the other page where they are signing up to receive a free information from you via e-mail. So anyone who goes to any of those two pages, you basically create two retargeting audience list, right? One for each of those two examples and then a negative audience would be someone who actually completes that action. Any of those two actions, right?

 

Alex: Right. Yeah. So this basically sounds like there’s three points in the sales flow. It’s visitors, there are subscribers and there are people who’ve already contacted you. And basically, you can run two campaigns. One is to get visitors to subscribers and then one to get people to actually contact you and then just run those separately.

 

Owen: So anyone listening to this right now knows what retargeting is what is the easiest way to get started with it?

 

Alex: Yeah, totally. So I would log into the AdWords and I’d create two audience lists – one for visitors, one for subscribers. Make sure you have conversion tag setup for those actions you want people to do and then you build the audience list off those conversion tags which you can do automatically in AdWords and then set those. When you create a new audience list off the conversion tag, then you turn that audience into the negative audience when you setup the campaign. Sounds kind of complicated, once you’ve done it a few times, it’s pretty quick.

 

Owen: Let me see if I can break it down for my audience as well. So you have these two actions we want to achieve. People who go to the sign up page and become group coaching client and the people who go and look at the page where they opt-in to receive your e-mail. So those two people now become two separate audience list and then there’s obviously going to be a page when if someone completes any of those actions, there’d probably be “Thank You” page that they would see on the next page. “Hello. Thank you for signing up to receive my free info” or “Thank you for becoming a coaching client, we’ll get back to you ASAP.” So once they do any of those two actions, they’d go to the “Thank You” page. Now you put in another retargeting tag on those “Thank You” pages and that will kind of be like the conversion, a negative audience.

 

Alex: Yeah, totally. That’s exactly it and then you can do all kinds of cool stuff if you want. You could also thank them with a banner ad like for the next 7 days after they sign up. Like that’d be a pretty cool thing like no one does stuff like that. But as a marketer, it costs next to nothing to setup a campaign like that and I think it’s a really cool kind of awareness builder. It’s a great way to add another touch point between you and your customer. It’s a great opportunity.

 

Owen: It’s really beautiful because in Marketing 101 where in order for someone to buy your product, you need… For instance if someone was sending out direct mail, you don’t just send out one direct mail and say “Okay. I’m going to get clients” you’d send a one direct mail and then you’d send out multiple direct mails in the sequence at different time intervals. Just trying to get there to a point where they’re comfortable with you and they want to work with you, at this point they will actually pick up the phone or whatever and do something with you, the whole idea with retargeting now makes this thing more automatic and even you can get multiple touch points with your clients a lot faster or potential clients a lot faster because you will be everywhere and around the internet wherever they are and they will see your ads everywhere. It’s remarkable!

 

Alex: Yeah. And Owen, I’m glad you brought that up because the thing is from a pure click-through basis, retargeting does really well. For a performance marketing tactic I think it is great. It’s definitely performance but there’s also a massive opportunity to build brand awareness as well and if you just keep those regular touch points between you and your customer then when they’re actually ready to buy or remember you or know you and I think that should be the goal pretty much any marketing campaign. You want customers to know about you when they’re ready to buy or ready to tell a friend about you. I mean, with retargeting, you can do that incredibly easily to the perfect group of people.

 

Owen: Definitely. I just use Google AdWords to place ads based on search, people searching for keywords, in my case “virtual assistant” or whatever. And now Google AdWords, I guess last year or 2 years ago that came out with their own retargeting platform so that you can retarget your ads on their network. I am sure though that there are other retargeting platforms, so what are the names of the top three retargeting platforms out there besides Google AdWords so that my audience can give them a try.

 

Alex: Yeah. So I’ve worked with Google AdWords for retargeting because it has all these extra layers of filters. So you can do all kinds of optimization and really make it work the best. The two probably other really big ones are AdRoll and ReTargeter. Well, those guys do serve your ads on multiple networks so you get a lot more reach than if you only used Google AdWords. Generally, they also add a margin on top so you pay extra 20% or 30% on top of what the actual cost them to display you retargeting ads. 
So, it kind of depends on everyone. I usually suggest starting with AdWords and just try to make it work for you and keep it simple because most people already run campaigns in there anyways. And this is me, kind of as a marketer talking, that’s my background. It’s good to kind of have everything in one place. Keep it organized. You already have the conversion tags setup. Make sure it works and then if it works, figure out ways to expand from there.

 

Owen: Definitely. We’ve been talking about how someone can setup a retargeting campaign, where you put the retargeting tag codes on our sites to build your audience list and then also build a list of people who have converted. So you build your negative audience so that you’re only showing retargeting ads to people who have taken a specific action on your site. In this case, sign up for free e-mail info or becoming a group coaching client. But there are other advanced retargeting tactics that you might be willing to share with the audience. One of which I think partner retargeting. Can you explain what that is?

 

Alex: Yeah. Alright, I love partner retargeting, that what I spend all day doing actually. So if you have a smaller site, there’s only so many people coming to your site in the first place and hence only so many people who can view your retargeting ads. What I found is that if you already shown these people 10 ads a month, it’s not always better to show them 20 ads a month. If you think about it, you’re interrupting these people in their daily lives. I mean, if they don’t click after 10 impressions, after 20 and there’s kind of bigger problems to solve there.

 

Owen: Sorry for interrupting but you just made a very good point about how to set up a frequency cap to control the number of times your audience sees your ad impressions. From your perspective, how many times should this be?

 

Alex: Good question. It’s different for everyone. Generally speaking, the more ads you show them, the lower the click-through rate. On the other hand, if you only show one ad per person per month, your volume is going to be really small and you’re not going to get much out of it. I usually started about 6 per week. But yeah, everyone is different. I’ve seen people go as high as 20. I have some clients which are running at like 1 or 2 a week just because they haven’t big enough audience list and can only afford to do that.

 

Owen: So I guess maybe the best thing too if you’re going to actually show them more impressions of your ad, it might also mean that you add alternative versions of that ad so that they don’t experience ad fatigue I guess?

 

Alex: Totally. That’s absolutely it. Yeah, I recommend anyone just crank out lots of that creative in their tools. I use a tool called bannersnack.com and it’s free. It does flash ads as well as static ads.

 

Owen: Bannersnack is free? Okay. I’m going to write it out. Go ahead.

 

Alex: Yes, it’s a great tool. And then actually, my colleague Mick, he uses PowerPoint. He created templates that have like the banner size is already built-in so we can just crank them out that way and there are all kinds of other tools. If you’re not much the designer, you can go to 99designs.com, fivver.com. We actually have a list of banner makers in our free ebook as well so make sure you get that. But I mean, once you’ve done it few times, you can crank out ads pretty quickly and I think it’s really important to create ads, refresh it every 3 months because don’t forget, I mean these are your customers, these are the people who are going to build your brand and your product for you. Like you don’t want to piss them off and you want to show they understand with the thinking and just give them new messages to think about.

 

Owen: Definitely. And just to bring you back on track of where we’re talking about Partner Retargeting. Explain that.

 

Alex: Yeah. Cool. So partner retargeting is basically the process of putting retargeting tags on your partner’s websites. So often, what you might find is that “Hey, this blogger or this friend of mine has a product that’s like very similar to mine.” It’s not competitive but it’s the same type of person would be going to this site. That would go to my site, be interested in my product and so you can actually build a retargeting list off someone else’s website. So obviously, you have to be friends with that person to let him put your own code on there. They have to trust you but it can be an incredibly effective way to build your audience list and basically gives you a lot more volume for your retargeting tags. Actually, I started my business a little over a year ago doing just that because my last company, retargeting was our best performing tactic but I wanted a bigger audience list and I couldn’t do that. So I went out and started contacting all kinds of blogs and built these niche audience lists for advertisers. That’s why I spend most of my time doing.

 

Owen: That tactic is really beautiful and I want to even explain it more to the coach listening to this right now. You understand that you have a target market that you go after, right? In my case, I go after coaches to provide them with virtual assistance services but then I realized that I’m not the only person or only type of service going off after coaches. There are marketers who are trying to teach coaches how to find more clients. There are people that make tools, online tools that coaches could use. There are people who have magazines for coaches and they have an association that represents coaches. In my case, potential retargeting partners that I can go to and put my retargeting code on their sites so that when their audience who’s never been on my site before but they are my target audience get tagged by my retargeting code, now I have more people to see my ads as they go around the internet.

 

Alex: Totally. Yeah. And actually brings up another interesting point too. What is your target audience exactly? Like no one really knows and with retargeting, you can define that in about 20 minutes. So basically, what you do is you create 10 to 20 audience lists so you target third party audience through me or through someone else and we can say “All right. We’ll target people who want to work more efficiently. We’ll target people that have been to the business coaching websites. Well target these 10 groups and within a week we’ll know. All right, this group had the highest click-through rate, this group had the highest conversion rate, this group has the most view-through conversions” and so, rather than doing this like big survey, you’d actually be able to say “All right. This site, this audience is my target audience”. I don’t know any online tool in the history of the internet that works like this.

 

Owen: Well, the power of technology these days is just wonderful because at the end of the day, if you’re doing all these different marketing tactics, in this case we’ve been talking about retargeting specifically as an online advertising tactic, you’ll have to be able to track the data to know how is your marketing spend? How is it working to get you some return on income? So in the case of retargeting, what can of ways can one kind of track the data and make sure that there’s positive ROI?

 

Alex: Yeah. So there are more things to make sure your conversion tags are setup and like any other advertising campaign, you can track everything. There’s no minimum spends. So you can kind of bring it up and down as it works. Again, we have this Cheat Sheets that just gives you a couple of things to watch out for and check off the list. If you do those things, retargeting is basically going to work. If not, send me an e-mail. Set up the negative audiences so that if someone has already done your desired action, they don’t see your ads. Set up a reasonable frequency cap. Block of certain categories of sites. We made the checklist for you so that you can get started with retargeting right away. And the next step is how do you get more volume? How do you make it work even better? And we’d give you some tips for that as well. Often you’ll find that your audience plus these four sites really perform the best. So then you could actually bid or show your ads more frequently on certain types of sites. Also you should start to segmenting your audiences, you’ll find that “Hey, Someone that’s been to my sign up page is much more likely to convert than just general site visitors.” Another really interesting retargeting tactic I’ve played with in the past is the latency window.

 

Owen: What is that?

 

Alex: Within the AdWords, you can actually create audience lists within audience lists. So say you have an audience, so you can say, all right there’s 10,000 people have been to my site in the last month. If you want pretty quickly, you can say, “All right. I want to create audience with people who have only been to my site in the last day.” And then what you do is you say, “All right. I’ll pay a dollar per click for anyone that’s been to my site in the last month, okay, $2 per click for anyone that’s been to my site the last day.” So then anyone that’s been to your site just in the last 24 hours they’re much more likely to see more of your ads and that can bring up your ROI.

 

Owen: I like that because it’s kind of like they just had been on your site and you have created a separate list within all your list of visitors. But then you’d say, “Okay. Now, we want to create a list of people that just recently been to my site and I don’t even mind paying even more.” So that when they go on other sites, they see my ads much quicker because we still kind of top of mind in their mind at that point.

 

Alex: Yeah. And you want to get them before they go to your competitors. Well, a lot of people, they type in a service and they’d Google and they’d go to 5 or 6 websites, if you can get people before they go to competitor, that’s super powerful in all pretty much every case. Advertising to someone within a day of them going to your site is always going to perform the best. Interestingly though, I’ve seen this with a couple of clients often like after 30 days can be a really nice window as well. So, if you target people that have been to your site 30 days or later, it can actually convert better than some that’s been to your site in the last 30 days which actually goes against the logic I was thinking of before. But then it just goes the show.

 

Owen: Test, test, test.

 

Alex: Okay. Test, test, test. Yeah.

 

Owen: Well, I love that. Well, Alex I mean you’ve been very helpful sharing all these retargeting information and I always way to leave my audience listening with a means to take the next step regarding what they just learned. So it’s not just an interview where you just listen for fun but an actionable interview. So in order for them to take all this information they just learned about retargeting as an online advertisement technique, what’s the very next step that they should take in order to get started with retargeting?

 

Alex: Yeah. We got the Cheat Sheet on there on hiddenaudience.com. It’s free, anyone can download it. We also have a blog, we talk about a lot of interesting retargeting tactics on there too. And then if you want to try some audience targeting stuff, some partner retargeting, that’s what I do all day every day. So just find me at Yaudience.com. There’s a contact box there.

 

Owen: Yeah. But I was thinking maybe if it’s Google. Where do they go? What’s the first thing they need to do to get started with retargeting?

 

Alex: Yeah. Go to Google and then there’s a little link. I think there’s a Get Starting Guide. I don’t know if that’s in their community or not. If it’s not on their main website, in our free ebook we basically walk through exactly how you can get started with Google Adwords retargeting, how to create an audience list and how to create a negative audience for people who have already signed up.

 

Owen: That’s why you’re talking about how to get started, making use of Google AdWords. That’s what you mean, right?

 

Alex: Yeah.

 

Owen: Okay. So, I guess what you are saying to the listener is that they can immediate get started with retargeting by making use of Google Adwords and then later later try the other retargeting platforms once they know what’s work best.

 

Alex: Yeah. I mean, you can just contact any of them. They’d be glad to talk to you. So yeah, there’s an opportunity with any of them.

 

Owen: Definitely. And so, Alex what is the best way for anyone who’s been listening to this to connect with you and thank you for doing the interview, I guess?

 

Alex: Yeah. So you could drop me an e-mail, alex@yaudience.com or there’s a contact box on yaudience.com. Just drop me a note there, always happy to talk to people about retargeting. I’m glad to kind of point them in the right directions for what’s right for them.

 

Owen: Definitely. And anyone, listening to this interview so far, if you have any additional retargeting questions for Alex, please feel free to use the commenting form below and let’s get this conversation started because I want as many coaches out there to understand that you don’t have to get the people on your website and then just loose the bulk of them because they did not convert into clients or did not sign up for you email list. You can get them on your website. If they don’t take the action you want, you can actually get them to come back to your website and retargeting is one of those online techniques out there that allows you to be able to do that. Thank you very much everyone for watching the interview.

Alex: Cool. Thanks.

 

Owen: So we’re done. So what do you think?

 

Alex: That was cool. That was great.

 

Owen: If you enjoyed watching this video, I bet you want to discover everything you need to know about hiring, training and working with a virtual assistant tips and strategies that you can immediately put to use in your business. Go now to virtualassistantblueprint.com and get my free 5-day video training course and you will instantly discover how to avoid the 5 most costly outsourcing mistakes and how to make working with virtual assistant more profitable and fun. I can’t wait to give you access to the video, so go now to the free training course and the site again is VirtualAssistantBlueprint.com. I’ll see you soon.

Owen: Hi, everyone. My name is Owen McGab Enaohwo and welcome to H.Y.V.A.™, the show where we bring you successful coaches to come on here to talk about why they are successful in their business and we ask questions so that you can take the information on here and implement in your business. This is the very first episode of the “The Coach Blueprint™.” And today, my guest is going to share with you how exactly you can go out there and get PR for your business.

So, my guest today is Jason Womack, he is the CEO and Founder of the Jason Womack Company. He is an Executive Coach and the author of “Your Best Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More.” So Jason, thanks for being the first guest on The Coach Blueprint™. The three big main ideas that we want to learn during this interview is “How you go ahead and identify the media outlets and the bloggers that you want to go after?”

And the second main idea we want to learn is “What is the right bait to give to them to get them to be interested in interviewing you?” And then since most people don’t think they want coaches, what are you bringing to the news media and the bloggers; the bait that makes them say “Hey, let’s get Jason on here to do an interview with.” And then one of the big questions I want to also have answered is during the interview, how do you deliver the goods to them that makes them that “Hey. This guy, we just brought on here the right person” and not only that, “How do you connect it back to your bottom line so that you, as a result doing the interview can get to build your list or sell your products?” and that’s it. So, let’s get started.

Jason: We have a little bit of time Owen because that’s a tall order with a lot of background behind it and as what I promised you in the pre-interview I’ll be as transparent as possible, I’ll share everything that I’ve done. I do need to say from the onset everything I’m going to tell you, I learned from somebody else. So, you’re going to hear me reference names, those of you watching right now get a pen, get a piece of paper because we’re going to go pretty fast and furious. I’ll give you some names; some other advisers, some tactics and we’ll probably share some stories along the way as well.

Owen: And I know just when I was doing my research on you that you’ve been on CBS, you’ve been on Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine and recently you’re on Fox News talking about your new book. How did that feel?

Jason: Awesome. I mean, every single one of us has a book inside of us and a book is just a noun. Everyone has a story, everyone has an experience. If any of you watched the Ted Talks of Ted.com, what they’re doing is they’re curating the world experts in different areas who have something inside to share. And so, the very fact that I have gotten to sit in that chair across from a video camera that’s going out to 60, 120 or 300,000 people at one time, it’s pretty awesome. And then obviously, the benefit to the organization is huge. It adds credibility to our company, it adds credibility to me, it puts me in new markets that I may not have gotten into or may have taken me a different tactic or longer time to get into those markets.

Owen: Definitely. And not only have we established that you’ve been on the news media and Inc Magazine. You’ve been on Fox News talking about your book, we also want to give the audience, fellow coaches, business and executive coaches listening to this some context as to the success you’ve been having. So, how many coaching clients you have?

Jason: So, I do a lot of work with organizations, one of the banks that I work with has 60,000 employees. I don’t coach all 60,000 but what I’ve done is I’ve kind of niche myself into three different industries. Investment banking, I do a lot of work with them. Aerospace, I do quite a bit of work with them. And education, I’m a former high school teacher. I taught 5 years between 7th grade and high school here in the State of California.

After that, I went and worked with the “Getting Things Done” material. I did that for about 5 years and then in 2007, my wife and I started the Womack Company. And since then, I positioned myself as a “performance coach.” And I’m not doing time management, I’m rarely doing systems. I don’t coach anymore in how you setup an organizer, how you print documents and file those off to the side of your desk. What I’m looking at is what are the behaviors? What are the habits that people have put into place that have gotten them to where they are? And what are the decisions that they need to be making to change how they’re working for the better?

Now, I know I took a little tangent but I wanted to give you some of the context behind that answer of how many coaching clients do I have. So, I’ve got four investment banks that hire me almost monthly and that’s between New York, London, Zurich. I’ve got an Aerospace company in Washington D.C. and in France who I do quite a bit of work with and that’s all the executive coaching, that’s pretty high level stuff. And then in education, I’m working with the New York City Department of Education actually this year.

Owen: Okay. So you actually answered some of the questions that I was going to ask you, what are the names of some of your most notable clients? Do you have other ones that you want to mention too so that the audience will know?

Jason: You know it’s one of those things Owen and I know you know this but it’s that client privilege or something. So, just know that if you walk down any street in New York, you’re probably going to find one the banks that I work with.

Owen: Definitely, I’m always trying to give a context as where you at in your business so that the audience can aspire to be like you.

Jason: Yes.

Owen: What kind of revenue did you generate last year? Feel free to answer.

Jason: Great question. So there are three different revenue streams that we have. We’ve got the live presentations that I do with lots of conferences, a keynote or an in-house seminar. I’ve got the executive coaching, that’s the one-on-one. And then I also have other kinds of the products; from the book to the online programs to the downloadable stuff that we provide. So, I charge $10,000 a day for a speech. I charge $5,000 a day for coaching and we have a PDF that’s $14.95 and then I have an online coaching program that takes 5 weeks and that’s why I work pretty in-depth with one person and that’s $1,500.

Owen: So which ones do you have most of your clients buying? Which of your products do they buy the most?

Jason: So, great question. For those of you who are getting into coaching, all three. And what you want to do, what I wanted to do is I wanted to cross-sell, up sell, oversell. I wanted everything to come at once. So for example, there’s a client that they started me doing in-house seminars. They gave me 4 hours and they gave me three topics. They said “We want the psychology, sociology and technology of a productive day.”
So, I built the seminar, just kind of created and collected and I said “Well, here are some ways to think and that’s the psychology. Here’s some way to communicate, that’s the sociology and then here are some ways to organize your digital systems, the technology.” Now, what I did was on most of those seminars that I presented, every now and then I get a request for coaching. Perfect.

So, the next month I would go out, I would do a seminar on Tuesday and then I would follow that up with 2 or 4 days of coaching and they would just have me bounce around from the office to office to office and then, and you can see where this is going. I started writing documentation so that I could either drip that out. So for example, on my website there is a PDF that you can download and this is the printed version but this is the “7 Keys to a More Productive Day.” This is what I’m using as the freebie.

Owen: Yeah.

Jason: Give me your e-mail address and I want to send you this. I also printed this up. It’s nice, it’s full-color, and you can see it here. And then what I’m doing is I’m sending this in the mail with a little note, “Hey. It was great to work with you in a seminar. If you like to apply that information one-on-one, have me come in for a day and we’ll go through the 7 keys to a more productive day.” And so, my goal in it was to mix it all together so that they almost have to buy it all.

Owen: Before we will go to the main meat of this interview which is PR.

Jason: Yes.

Owen: Just give people some context to your background. Share with us the story as to how you became a coach and what was that primary motivation that made you want to become a coach?

Jason: I’ve always been fascinated by the educational process and then I’ve also been driven by this question “Why do people do what they do? Why?” I mean, if you ask my mom, she’ll tell you that I came out asking why and my original path was the most logical. And the only thing that I understood for that kind of propensity or that strength if you are using the strength finder stuff, it was “education.” So, I went and got a master degree in education, I specialized in assessment. Then, what I did is I went beyond that. I started asking, “Well, wait a minute. How do we teach so that kids start asking the question of why and how not just what?”

So, I started running these Saturday classes, Owen, when I was a high school teacher once a month. On a Saturday, I would do a learning class. How to take a test? How to organize workspace at home? How to organize your backpack? How to talk to adults who will listen? And I believe that was really my first foray into non-traditional but much leveraged, high level coaching. Even though I was coaching 16 and 17 year olds, I can probably go on and on and on. I got an assignment for one of the presidential libraries, they we’re building a leadership program, curriculum for teachers and that was my first experience where I started teaching my peers. So, that was kind of interesting in a way I was putting together classes and I was helping other teachers learn how to teach leadership, learn how to learn about those things.

And then, I guess when I started my company in 2007, my real focus was I wanted to work with a few and generally I work just below the C-Level executives. So, I’m working with partners, I’m working with managing directors, I’m working with VP’s because by the time they work with me, the directions are already been set. I’m not a CEO Coach but what I am is once the CEO, COO and the board has decided that the organization is moving in this direction, now that level of leadership, the people who are going to manage, the people who are doing the work, they are the ones who are about to get overloaded and overwhelmed. Those are the ones that might need to change the way they think.

Owen: Okay, was this the transition that got you to that point where you figured out the specific target audience to go after, their needs and the value you provided to them? How did you come up all that?

Jason: And this is going to lead us right into the meat of this discussion. “Listening to what was hurting.” Listening to the pain points, listening to what people complain about. A complaint is just a hidden project. As soon as someone starts saying “I wish… It should… Why doesn’t…” and those are the things that I listen. When I’m in a conversation with someone and they say something like “Why doesn’t my iPhone just …” or “How come I can’t get my staff to …” Those two things for me, that is where the gold is hidden. If I can figure out how the technology does that and if I can figure out how the sociology does that, I’m now a leveraged asset not a liability. I’m not another coach, I’m not another author.

Owen: Definitely and so, you say you are listening to people and I’m trying to figure out like okay but then every coach comes in trying to figure who their target audience is and you are listening to people but how did you figure out that it was the financial and the aerospace industry that was the right people for you? I’m curious.

Jason: That was completely by accident. Now looking in hindsight, kind of like what Steve Jobs said, “Looking in hindsight, all the dots lined up.” But while I was in it, I didn’t have a plan, here’s what happened. The people who are intricately tied to performance, very interested in working with us. The people who as long as they just show up, sit in their desk and use that space and then go home at 5 or 5:30, we generally don’t get called by them. So, that’s why for me like a conference is, there’s so much interest in what I have if I’m talking in an industry conference like I’ll talk at a mortgage industry conference, I’ll talk with the sales industry conference, I’ll talk at the technology industry conference and those groups know, the better they do, the better they’ll do and there’s a direct correlation to that.

Owen: Okay. And so, it seem at this point now you figured out what niche you’re going to go into but we told the audience we’re going to talk about PR.

Jason: Yes.

Owen: Why did you find that there was a need for you to get involved with PR? I’m trying to get to the beginning, to the point where you made up your mind to actively seek PR and reach out to journalist and reporters in news media. So, when was that point where you realized that you needed to do PR?

Jason: I was standing in my garage and I was putting something away and I looked over and I race triathlon and I bicycle a lot and I mountain bike a lot. Anyways, I looked over, Owen, and I have four bicycles and they’re all from the same brand – Specialized. And I realized, I said, “You know what? I support this company with my wallet. I’ve bought probably another two or three bikes besides those over my lifetime. Right?

Owen: Yes.

Jason: It’s like, “I get that company. I trust that company” and that to me was a huge turning point. I’d buy what I trust. By the way, you’ll never see a Specialized advertisement on television. You’ll never see a Specialized advertisement in the Wallstreet Journal of the New York Times. But what is it that this culture had done to engender trust in me over the years? And there’s probably we could come up with things. But for the point of this discussion, people will do business with you when they trust. You have their best interest in mind and that’s why this whole whether it’s Gary Veynerchuk talking about the Thank You Economy. Whether it’s Karen Pryor talking about the Positive Reinforcement Effect in her book “Don’t Shoot the Dog” or maybe it’s even Napoleon Hill, “If you believe it, you’ll achieve it.” We want to be around people. Here’s what my wife says at Owen, she says, “People do business with people they like.”

Owen: So, know, like and trust and they will eventually buy from you kind of transition. You thought that was what you needed to do and PR would play a role in it.

Jason: Absolutely.

Owen: Go ahead.

Jason: Absolutely, because what are public relations other than letting people know how to get in relationship with you, right? Letting the public know, here’s how to get in relationship with me, I mean when I go to the coffee and I always have a copy of book with me. But when I got to the coffee shop, I actually put the book on the table facing away from me. It’s right there and I could be sitting around four or five people. That’s public relations because the public is looking and they say “If I was in relationship with him. If I was in a discussion with him, he’s probably going to talk about that thing.” So now we take a look at what are the main modes. What are the main models? And this is where Seth Goden really helps out a ton of people but he talks about the TV environment that we’re in. Is it bombarding you?

I was watching last night and of course we have TV, right? And so, I’m watching and it goes from the program to the commercial break and I would love the piece of technology that could test this but I want to know the decibel change in volume that they pre-program because it’s louder, it fascinates me. I’m waiting for my show and then the commercial has come on and it goes back to my show and I was like “Wow. They’re playing us” and again they’re playing us because that’s their job of public relations.

Owen: And so, the thing is you decided you want to go and seek PR but then where did you start from? I want to go back to the beginning. Where did you start from? How did you figure out what to do?

Jason: This is a book by a friend of mine here in Ohio. His name is Larry Chambers and it’s called “Credibility Marketing” and what he does is he says “If you want to be known as the expert. If you want to be known as the go-to person, you need to become the go-to person.” In fact I’ve got a website, one of my pages on my website gives people the third question that I strongly encourage. There’s three questions to ask every Sunday night. But the third question to me is the most important question of all three questions. The first two are really important but the third question is “What do I want to be acknowledged for next week?” If that’s my filter, if I’m sitting there Sunday night and Monday night and I’m thinking to myself what do I want to be acknowledged for this week?

Owen: Yeah.

Jason: And I want to be acknowledged as a domain expert in the field of productivity and performance. I also want to be acknowledged as a great husband. I also want to be acknowledged as a decent tri-athlete. I can just go down that list. How does that become? What needs to go into that? And in the book “Credibility Marketing,” what Larry Chambers says is there’s a continuum of developing expertise. He says, “The first thing that you start doing, writing authors of the articles that you read.” Owen, I would bet I write five to ten journalist a day between newspaper articles, blog post, magazine articles, journals that I subscribe to, letters to the editor. Some of those are handwriting and some of those are e-mail and what happens is in a week, let’s go on the low side. Let’s say in a week I reached out with 25, that’s a hundred. In a year, I’m reaching out the 1200 journalist.

Owen: Wow.

Jason: Now, if you have a pen and paper, if you’re watching this or I’ll tell you this again later but there’s a series of things that I do when I write to this journalist. The first one, “Thank you.” Thank you.

Owen: Why just “thank you?”

Jason: I mean, let’s just start there. You have dedicated your life to what I’m not going to do, you go out and get stories, you go out and interview people. “Thank you.” The second thing, here’s “Why?” And I pick up piece of that article that was specifically very interesting to me. The third that I do is “I reference somebody out in the space who I know is doing something along those lines.”

Owen: Another journalist in the space is that what you’re referencing?

Jason: Say again?

Owen: Another journalist in the space, is that who you’re referencing?

Jason: Journalist, another author, a speaker, a company, anything because what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to become a hub. I’m trying to become in the middle of that wheel voices. This is exciting, Owen. This is fun. In the middle of that wheel, I want to connect this person to this person. They may or may not know each other yet but my goodness, if I’m the reason that they meet, I’m a matchmaker now. So, the first thing is “Thank you.” The second one is here’s “Why?” The third one is “And by the way, here’s somebody out who I read recently about that” and then the fourth one and I believe and then we’ll dive into the Fox and the CBS and the ABC and the things. The fourth one is “And here’s what I would like to add.” Based on my experience, based on my research, based on my profession, based on my – whatever that is. Now, what’s interesting about this is for all the coaches out there, you can be in any coaching industry. You can be a parenting coach, you can be an energy coach.

Owen: A life coach.

Jason: A life coach and what you do is you read through that article and you thank them, you tell them why you’re thankful, you connect them to somebody else in the space of what they’re writing about and then from your perspective and here’s what I could add if you’re ever writing something like that again.

Owen: Okay, when I do interviews besides those getting the concept, I want to back it up with a concrete example. So based on what we just said, looking back at your experience, tell us a story of how you applied that, I guess.

Jason: I was in a conference in New York City, actually just got invited. It’s next weekend.

Owen: Wow, recent.

Jason: It’s called the ASJA, American Society of Journalist and Authors. Join. I mean, here’s the American Society of Journalist and Authors and based on how they found out about me and this was maybe 18 months ago was I was leaving comments on LinkedIn posts. I mean, everyone in the world is saying comment on blogs, comment on Facebook post, comment on LinkedIn. Do it and even if it’s just setting a goal of one a day, do it. Anyway, I started leaving comments around and I got contacted by someone via LinkedIn. “Jason, would you present a panel at this ASJA conference?” and then they gave the details. “We don’t have any money, we can’t pay you, we don’t have a budget” all of those things. Folks, here’s my advice. If you can take a stage, get there. 30, 40, 50, 300, 3,000 people in the audience, what would it take for me to generate 3,000 leads via my website?

Owen: Quite a lot.

Jason: During that program, by the way, so here’s my negotiation. When someone ask me to speak in a conference and they don’t have money, I ask them for something because they have to have an in. So I’ll either ask them to buy books. I’ll ask them if I can have a conference pass. One conference, they had no money, no money, no money so I worked out a deal where I get to go to their conference for free for the next five years.

Owen: Wow.

Jason: I may or may not speak but I have a ticket for the next five years for that conference. Now, who knows if I’ll go, but they had to give me something because I was going to give them something and if you have not read anything by Robert Cialdini yet, please, please, please go read about the Psychology of Persuasion. He talks about the six influencers about how we influence one another. And one of the biggest influencers is if you give me something and I give you something back, we’ll continue to play together. If I just start giving and I don’t get anything in return, there’s going to be a disparity. So, I went to the ASJA conference and I did my panel, the next day I attended classes and in the class was a woman from entrepreneur.com.

Owen: Wow.

Jason: During the class and by the way, at these conferences they always put up on the short sheet their e-mail address, their Twitter handle, their whatever. During the session, Owen, I drafted out a 6-month article series. I walked up, there was a line, right? Because after every panel there’s always a line to talk to them. Thank you so much, can I have your card? And what I did is I handed her a piece of paper. I said “Hey, Laura. My name is Jason. Great panel. I’ve drafted a 6-month series that I’d love you to take a look at when you have time. I’ll e-mail this to you later on but I want you to take it right now” and she looked at me and I know every now and then I get a little bit, people are a little overwhelmed by how energetic I am at times. I got a call the next week.

Owen: And I’m curious, which part of the fourth steps you just mentioned was that process?

Jason: It was all 4.

Owen: You did all 4 at once?

Jason: I walked up, I said “Thank you very much. Here’s what I like about the panel. I attended up” and you know what I did with her is I said “I spoke on a panel yesterday.” By the way, the panel that I spoke on that day was called the “Post Project Hangover.”

Owen: Okay.

Jason: Right? Think about when you get to the end of a coaching assignment and you’re done with that client and you’re like “Now what?” How do you get back into the game and so those are the things and then, what I did was I said and here’s what I would like to add.

Owen: And that was the sheet of paper that you gave that showed all the different articles that you plan on contributing I guess.

Jason: I then I need to say because I want to be completely transparent with you and your audience, Owen, she didn’t like any of the six. In her e-mail to me the next week, she didn’t like any of the six and you know what? She didn’t hire me to write for anything that I wrote down. She hired me to write because she saw the drive, she saw the interest, she saw the dedication and I think she did Google my name.

Owen: And that’s great too because at the end of the day, it’s really just to get that conversation started with them because they have editors that they have to answer to and you have to write according to what they are looking for but based on your own perspective on the story, I guess.

Jason: Public relations.

Owen: Definitely.

Jason: Let me say one more thing and then we’re going to go to that. I think most people treat their marketing, their advertising as what I call, “PT” or Public Transaction. What you and are talking about is a public relationship.

Owen: It’s a good distinction to make. And you see in this example you mentioned how you actually got PR based on you going physically to a conference.

Jason: Yes.

Owen: But there are also different ways in which you do it that doesn’t involve you physically being there to get it, right? Can you show with us some ways in which you target the people you want to go after and what kind of baits or things you get them to get interested to even talk to you in the first place?

Jason: Well-written copy will get a lot of people’s interest. Split A/B testing is absolutely critical, more and more and more. If you can subscribe in iTunes, there’s a podcast called “I Love Marketing.”

Owen: I love them too, Joe Polish and Dean Jackson.

Jason: Yes, Joe Polish and Dean. Yeah. Just I listen to them, I mean, their podcast comes out and I’m listening to what they’re talking about.

Owen: Yeah.

Jason: So, the bait or what Dean Jackson calls the cheese, right?

Owen: The cheese. The Cat & The Cheese.

Jason: The Cat. The cheese. How much cheese can I give away? And for those of you who aren’t familiar with this analogy, how much of the good stuff can you give? I made this PDF and quite frankly, it’s another eBook. Well, what I did is in my marketing system, if you go to my website, you can sign up for that PDF, you drop in your name and your e-mail address and you go into my e-mail system. Some of those form. What do you call them, the forms?

Owen: Yeah.

Jason: I’ve actually added a physical address. Now, why would I do that? Because there are some people who I send that landing page to that are more qualified than the general public.

Owen: Okay.

Jason: Okay. So if I do a seminar for an investment bank, for one of my aerospace companies. If I want to test something with a higher level manager set. What I’ll do is I’ll set them up. They type in their name, their address, their phone number, their e-mail address. They’d get the PDF and then 3 days later, this comes in the mail. 5 days after that, I send them a DVD. A week after that, I send them an audio CD and a week after that, I send them a postcard and I say “If you’ve watched the DVD and listened to the CD, tell me and I’ll send you a copy of my book.”

By the way, see what I’m doing with that last one, I’m going for reciprocity. If you’ve watched the DVD and CD, let me know and I’ll send you a copy of the book because there comes a point where I can’t just keep on giving stuff away for free because then they just look at it as more free stuff. So there’s no value to it. What am I asking in exchange, not the $125 for the DVD, not the $30 for the CD, I’m asking for two hours of their time. But here’s what I know, if I can get a potential client to invest two hours of their time and then a week later this shows up in the mail, the chances just increased that they might be interested in my online coaching program. They might want to download the DVD series that is all asynchronously delivered.

Owen: But I’m curious though, is this the same process you use when you’re going after PR now, the traditional media bloggers? And if so, explain how it relates to it?

Jason: No, the thing about bloggers and journalists and people in the news, they are so busy, they don’t even have time to filter. Their filter is “What just came in, can I use it?” So, what I thought I would Owen and I can share this with anybody who wants. We should probably make a landing page after this for people to get more information. But what I did is I brought for you just and I’ll explain this because I know you can’t see it. This is about an 8-page press release. It’s only 2 pages because I have a lot of stuff to fill in right here. Let me back up. Let me give you the formula for our press release. Problem, significance, statistics, solution, case study.

Owen: Okay.

Jason: So that’s what I did right here. The problem is in May. By the way, we’re recording this in April just so people have a time frame. In May, thousands of college graduates will leave university. They’ll have gotten their degree and they’re going to be ready to enter the workplace – problem.

Owen: Yes.

Jason: They need now need to enter the workplace. What’s the significance of that? Well, right now in America, we’re facing between an 8 and a 16% depending on where you are unemployment rate. People are fighting for jobs. People who used to be retiring at 55, 62, 67 are not retiring. What are the statistics? Those are easy to come by. What’s the solution? Well, the solution and here’s what I’ve done is I’ve come up with sixteen possible solutions to what college graduate could do as they enter the workplace. But you see anyone of those sixteen, that’s a bullet point of the ticker that goes down on a TV show. That’s a paragraph that I can place into a LinkedIn comment and I’ll send that whole 7-page press release, I’ll send that directly to any of those journalist who have replied that I’ve been writing to by the day for the past 10 years.

Owen: Okay. But I was curious that you mentioned that data was so much stuff and you mentioned something about giving the cheese up from. So, I’m trying to relate it to because if I just came in, I just give them a whole press release and a bunch of big page with all the information, they’d probably just going to throw it away. So, I’m trying to figure out how.

Jason: And you know what? I’ll challenge you on that only based on my experience. When we do one of these a month, we figure out something to do with one of these a month and I’ve set Google alerts for my name. I’m sure you have too, right?

Owen: Yeah.

Jason: The week that we start submitting this to journalist and authors, dozens and I’m not kidding. I have it on my website, dozens of websites will copy and paste.

Owen: Wow. Just copy and paste the stuff itself exactly as you gave it.

Jason: If you go to my media page on my website and you scroll down below the videos, most of those articles are copied and pasted press releases.

Owen: It makes sense because you give them exactly what they’re looking for and you use your step. But then I’m also looking at it from a perspective of because they have so much stuff coming to them, how do you breakdown that barrier so they say “Okay. This guy. Let me take a look at what he had and copy and paste.”

Jason: Perfect. If you go back to the example that I gave you, my bicycles, if you’d go back to why will I always buy Specialized, If you go back to what I do every day in reaching out to journalists, there are people I’ve never talked, most of these people I’ve never talked to voice-to-voice.

Owen: Okay.

Jason: But because the first e-mail that I even send was a thank you, here’s why, do you know this person, here’s what I would like to add. Anybody who’s ever replied back to me, they go into a special database.

Owen: I see. I’m hitting you to get the goods now. Go ahead.

Jason: We’ve developed a relationship, not a transaction and I can give you the two reasons that most journalists will delete what they receive. Number one, most people will send a half-thought idea. Number two, they’re sending an email cold.

Owen: Yeah, I see the point. You’ve already created a relationship with the first 4 steps and you’ve been building relationship with them over time. Am I getting this correctly?

Jason: I want to give you something that I picked up from Joe Polish. Actually, Joe and I attended Singularity University last December and we’ve been hanging out since about 1999, 2000 but do you remember the 9-word e-mail?

Owen: Yeah. I actually use it too though. Like coaches for instance? My own case now is do you want more time to focus on coaching your clients? That’s one e-mail. You want more time to focus on marketing for new clients or the other e-mail if you want clients? That’s it.

Jason: Here’s what I’m doing. For journalist, I’ll read, I’ll read, I’ll read, I’ll pick up, okay, they’re talking about road warriors, traveling executives, people who spend time in different continents during the month and I’ll send them an e-mail and it will be something like the subject line is their name. “Susan,” that’s it. In the body, it’s “Are you still looking for ideas on road warrior productivity?”

Owen: Great. Go ahead.

Jason: And that’s it, like I don’t give her the ideas. Are you still looking? I’m going to get one of three answers, right? Yes, no, leave me alone. But now we know. So whatever your industry is, you can come up with these ways of the bait is giving. It’s giving.

Owen: The cheese. Yes.

Jason: It’s the cheese. And you know what Robert Cialdini says is we do business with people we trust and there’s this Law of Reciprocity. Let me give you something and I’ll accept whatever you give me in return.

Owen: Okay. And because we were breaking this into steps, I want to dive into that a little bit more. So, the first e-mail was just their name and asking them a question about the cheese, what will be the next step in that? Is there series of steps with these e-mails that you’re doing with them? The next one is the…

Jason: Here you go. Here you go, right? Because the first one was every short and the next one is and here’s everything I have right now. I’ll tell you right now, the one that we’re doing for the graduates, I’m going to find journalists and authors who have written about education, parenting, new hire orientation, the Gen-Z or whatever we’re calling on these days and I’m going to say something like “Terry. Are you still looking for ideas on what graduates can do with their career?” If she comes back and says “yes,” I’ll go “Great. Here are 16 ideas. Use any ones you want or I would love to come on a show and talk about that with you.”

Owen: Wow. But this people now, they’re not just cold contacts. Are they cold or I remember you mentioning four different steps initially while you build that relationship.

Jason: Right.

Owen: Are these people cold or are they part of those people you already contacted using your initial 4 steps?
Jason: And again, look at this as a 9-month or maybe even an 18-month strategy everyone. And if you have any doubts about that, go read Chris Brogan. Go read Seth Godin. Go read Ali Brown, Pam Slim. All of these people will transparently tell you that their road to overnight success took a decade.

Owen: Definitely.

Jason: And for us, for anyone Owen who I’m going to share this interview with my community. For a lot of them it’s going to be their first time seeing you. For your community it will be their first time seeing me, what’s the easy thing to think? “Oh, he just popped out of the blue.” There are miles on these tires, right?

Owen: Definitely. Definitely and one of the things that we promised the audience is that how to do the list or figure out which PR audience to go. I mean, which journalist, which bloggers that are relevant to them to go after. In your case, how do you figure out what list to go after? Is there a process to use?

Jason: I live on Twitter search and right here in my iPhone, I’ve got one of those little blocks where you open it up and all of these are saved searches inside Twitter. So, I have one where I have saved a search for the words “Need to be Productive,” I have another saved search, “Best Better” I have another saved search, “Meeting Productive” etcetera, etcetera. And what I’ll do if I was bored right now or you suddenly got distracted, I was just checking and I would scroll through who has written the words “Meeting Productive” in the same sentence.

And then, what I’ll do is I’ll start jumping into the conversation if in when appropriate. I’ll follow that person and then, if I can, I’ll tweet at them. I’ll add something to them and tag them and then where it gets really interesting is if I jump over to the journalist side, what journalist are Tweeting, Facebook-ing, LinkedIn-ing, blogging and then what can I do to join the conversation? What can I give to the conversation? So that if and when I do make an ask, it’s like “That Jason guy, I’ve seen him before.”

Owen: Is there an example that can help to back this point you just made?

Jason: Inc. Magazine. So, we just got a great article on inc.com. So, I’m working on the magazine because pages are very valuable to them.

Owen: Yes.

Jason: But this was I went to South by Southwest, the conference in Austin. I know you’ve heard about it.

Owen: Yup.

Jason: And I’ve gone every year and every year, something amazing happens. Three years ago, I met a journalist for Inc.com. He does some other things but he does a weekly column at Inc. Two years ago, we saw each other again. By the way, 12 months gone by, we hadn’t seen each other. Saw each other again at South by Southwest. “Hey, Howard.” “Hey, Jason.” Once I went to New York and I gave him an e-mail. I said, “Hey, I would love to hang out with you in your city. You name the place and the first round is on me.” He took me to a peanut butter and jelly restaurant.

Owen: Wow, never heard of that.

Jason: So, I bought us a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Fast forward, a month, 2 months ago we are South by Southwest. He saw me from across the way. He said, “Hey, Jason. Come here.” 45 minutes later, he walked away, 3 weeks after that, I got an article in Inc. Magazine.

Owen: And this is based on the relationship that you’ve built.

Jason: Absolutely.

Owen: You identify the list of people you want to go after because he’s a journalist, he’s a blogger, talking about stuff that you want to do.

Jason: Yeah.

Owen: Did you establish the relationship with him based on those 4 steps you mentioned and then it turned into this? I am also curious about the in-between point where you’re building that relationship and giving them the cheese. What do you do to build the relationship?

Jason: Perfect question and by the way, I really appreciate you bringing me back to this because I forgot to mention something. Make the list. Go to your white board, open your Moleskine or open up Evernote. Make the list by magazines where you want to be. Newspaper, where you want to be? Bloggers you want to mention you. Radio shows, television shows. Make the list. There’s something about telling this universe what it is that we’d like. Where it is? Which Sandbox we want to play in, then things can happen to move in that direction. So, I made the list, I wanted to be in Fast Company, Forbes, I wanted to be in Entrepreneur, in Inc. I wanted to be in USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and I could go on. But you get the point?

Owen: Yeah.

Jason: What I did then was I set Google Alerts for all of the journalists who write in my domain. Every day if Sue Shellenbarger for the Wall Street Journal, if Gary Stoller for USA Today, if Martin Wolf for the Financial Times. If they write something, I get a note. There was one woman who I was driving to Los Angeles Airport, Lucy Kellaway. She writes for the Financial Times.

Owen: Yeah.

Jason: She was on NPR. We’re driving to the airport. I’m listening to NPR and there’s Lucy Kellaway. I opened up my phone, I sent her an e-mail. “Lucy, just heard you on NPR. Good job.” Mind you, I’m in California, she’s in London. She e-mailed me back 5 minutes after the show ended “Thanks for listening.”

Owen: Wow.

Jason: That’s all. By the way, I’ve never made any ask of her. Not yet, right? Because she’s up here and I want to make sure that I got the relationship that’s been going back and forth and I still haven’t totally figured out that play. My next thing with her will probably be “Can I send you a copy of my book?”

Owen: I’m glad you mentioned that because it seems that depending on who the journalist is, you have the creative way to keep building that relationship with them. So that they’re here, you keep building and giving and giving and giving them until it get to the point where you provide them an additional cheese that will get you on the show, I guess.

Jason: And although there are going to be buckets of strategies, you’re absolutely right. This is not a one size fits all.

Owen: Great. Go ahead. And so the next now that I was thinking about is there might be a challenge what coaches say in all that and some people will say it’s hard to even get clients to understand. Some clients don’t even think they want coaches, right?

Jason: Right.

Owen: So that’s one thing. So think of now that PR, a person or journalist or blogger, how do you convince them that a coach is the right person to come on there to speak to the audience? How do you make that transitions that I’m trying to get?

Jason: It’s a great prompt. Drop the word “coach.”

Owen: Drop the word coach, okay.

Jason: Expert, researcher, author. That’s always a good one because what happens is we lend credibility to people who have written, spoken, studied something for their 10,000 hours. Malcolm Gladwell, thank you very much. But what happens is and I don’t know how it is in the community or the part of the world that you’re in on the East Coast, but here on the West Coast, I don’t use the word “coach.” Adviser, that’s the one that I use the most. “Jason, what are you doing for a living?” “I’m an adviser. I’m a strategic adviser. I’m an executive adviser.” “And what do you do?” “Well, I work with people who want to upgrade their level of performance, I help them with the psychology of productivity, I help them understand the different ways that sociology works within an organization where there’s multi, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.” So, with that in mind, I would make it a study and I’m just looking around, it’s just too far away. Study magazine headlines on the front of the magazine cover.

Owen: Okay.

Jason: Because generally what they get is between 3 and 7 words. There’s the magic saying and advertising 4 words or less.

Owen: Okay.

Jason: Four words or less and if I can share what it is that I do in 4 words or less, then suddenly people are able to grab on and this where Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen I think really broke the mold in promoting this. I don’t know if they came up with it. But their whole thing, if someone asks you what do you do for a living, you might reply with something like “Well, do you know how many coaches or so busy working on their business?” They were so busy working in their business, they never get to expand?

Owen: Yeah.

Jason: Yeah. Well, what hire your own virtual assistant does is we… You’ve heard that before.

Owen: I like that. You’re even giving me some words to use in my marketing and I like that.

Jason: I mean, my whole thing is I can say something “Jason, what do you do?” “Well, do you know how a recently promoted manager thinks that if she gets into the office earlier in the morning, she can get a lot of work done and then maybe she’ll stay at work later in the afternoon and she’ll get more work done? Have you ever heard of people doing that? Well, what I do is I work with recently promoted managers to find new ways of working that are smarter, more effective, more efficient so they can get everything done during their day that they have to do and be able to get home with the family.”

Owen: And this is how you translate that, what you do to the PR and the bloggers so they understand using this kind of information?

Jason: Because the other thing is they don’t want to have to figure it out. By the way, if I’m on television in the morning in Minneapolis, they had me on its 7:15 in the morning. In Los Angeles, they had me on a 12:45 in the afternoon. I said different things, right? Who’s watching the news at 7:45 in the morning? Who’s watching the news at 12:45? Those are different audiences.

Owen: Yeah.

Jason: So, to the audience at noon, I was putting things in terms of and I didn’t say this out loud but this was my hidden agenda. I was saying things like if your spouse is at work right now and you’re at home right now, here are some things that they could be doing to be able to get home tonight and have dinner with your family.

Owen: I like that.

Jason: So what we’re trying to do is meet them where they are and grow from there. By the way, can I give you the worst question to ask at a networking event?

Owen: Go ahead. Go ahead!

Jason: “So, what do you do?”

Owen: That’s the worst question to ask somebody?

Jason: Worst question. Why?

Owen: Why?

Jason: It immediately causes dissonance and distance and comparison. If I walk up to you and I say, “What do you do?” You have to come up with an answer and the possibility that the answer is going to be indirect alignment with what I’m interested in. It’s so small that suddenly you start talking about what you do and I start disinteresting myself.

Owen: So, what would be the best question in a meeting like that then?

Jason: Well, I talk about it in the book.

Owen: And audience, you will have to go and buy the book to get that kind of information, you need that.

Jason: Right. I mean there’s four questions to ask in a networking event, right? So, you walk up to someone, what is your name? Where are you from? What do you do?

Owen: I lost you into that.

Jason: Get to that fourth question.

Owen: Can you repeat the fourth question because I lost you. What was it?

Jason: No, it’s totally different for everybody.

Owen: Okay.

Jason: By the way, you know the name tags that they have for conferences? The name tags? The name tags handle the three questions. Here’s my name, here’s where I’m from, here’s what I do, what’s the fourth question? And the reason that I can’t say it out loud Owen is the fourth question is different for everybody.

Owen: So, it changes for everybody. Great. And so, I’m curious because you have so much experience in going on securing shoves and also going on having journalists, magazines and all that interview you.

Jason: Thank you.

Owen: But how do you define success of any kind of PR event that you’re at?

Jason: It’s a great question. How, like the success mean to that person? I’ve been in the game for a couple of decades now and so my definitions of success obviously have changed from before until now. But I’ll get e-mails, I got an e-mail recently from someone who read the first 2 pages of the book. Actually, he read the prologue. So, they weren’t even numbered pages. He read the prologue of the book, he handed that to his wife. She read the prologue of the book, they put the book down, they sat in their living of their house and for the next 4 hours, they had a discussion they’ve never had before.

Owen: What was that discussion about? Did he tell you?

Jason: About where they were going? What was important to them? In the first 2 pages of the book which you can download for free by the way from my website. You can get the first 38 pages and the first 2 pages of that prologue describe to the reader the concept to what I called, “The ideal day.” And so success to me means that I’m living right now in what I would deem elements of an “ideal day.” So, let’s go very specific. When I’m on a news station, a TV station at 7:15 in the morning, can I get an e-mail or a phone call or any response from somebody who says something like, “Jason I was on my way to work, I heard you talking, I used one of your techniques, I save some time today.”

Owen: And so that’s how you relate your fact that you’re getting, being quoted in news media and having interviews back to use you in the day. Success and you’re doing this stuff.

Jason: And it’s a great arbiter Owen, right? It’s a great filter. So, if I do something, if I do a media play, if I do an article or a blog post, if I don’t hear from anybody, I don’t blame them. I look at what did I not do, what did I not give, what did I hold too close to my chest so that they were not able to listen or read and do.

Owen: And so I’m curious because I’m sure depending on the media outlet, the interview, the way which you will frame that question that what do you have to do for you to make this PR events you go into or this blog post you’re writing or this new article being successful that you can get that response is going to be different, right? But you have a formula in which you create that angle. You understand what I’m saying?

Jason: And what it is building content beyond that instance. So for example, from this interview, after we’re done you’re going to go back and do some editing, you’ll do some writing up. I’m going to go back and I’m going to make a special landing page for your community. I want to be able to offer them the PDF. I want to be able to give them the bibliography of the books that I mentioned. But on that landing page, there’s going to be a little form and that form is going to say, “To stay in touch with Jason Womack, give me your e-mail address” and hopefully and I’m saying this live so that everybody can hear me, hopefully I’ve given you enough where you’ll share your address with me so that I can continue to develop the relationship.

Owen: And you know what I like about what you’ve been doing so far, you’ve been planting the seeds, at this point, someone is listening to the interview out to this point will definitely take you on your offer.

Jason: I hope so because there’s a lot more there. We can only do so much in 45 or 60 minutes and there’s a lot more behind that and if I can share anything with you that I learned that has helped me with my overnight success, if that can help you with your overnight success, then let’s do this thing.

Owen: And so, audience, you’ve been listening so far and one of the thing I always want to ask every guest is what is that one thing that the audience, the coach who has been listening to this so far trying to specifically get some gems in how to’s and how to build and be successful with PR just like you had. What’s that one step they need to take after listening to this interview in order to move forward to as getting that success with PR?

Jason: I’m going to give you an easy one and a hard one. Okay?

Owen: Yeah.

Jason: So there’s two, which one should I do first? I’m going to the easy one. The easy one is set an intention and set yourself up once per day for the next 5 days. Write to a journalist, write to an author, write to somebody. Now, in 5 days I’m just asking for 5. And by the way, this is as easy as all I’m going to do is I’m going to go through the magazine. I’m going to the section of the Letter from the Editor which is always right down here in this magazine and I know that William Folk wrote this. I know that the address of the magazine is right over here. Over on the side of my desk on this side, I have cards and stamps. That’s it. “Dear, William. I read a couple of articles in the week. Really like that section on… Have you ever thought about running an article on this? I know somebody and if you ever want to add something on productivity…” Here you go.

Owen: Back to your formula. I like that.

Jason: And just do that one time per day. Now, when you start to amp this up, what I have over here on my iPhone, are you on an iPhone or Blackberry or Droid, what do you want?

Owen: I’m an iPhone guy, can you see me?

Jason: There you go. Cheers! Do you know you can do the keyboard shortcuts, the snippets?

Owen: I haven’t even tried that yet. Go ahead.

Jason: Perfect. So, watch this and you can do this in Blackberry and you can do this in e-mail on your PC or your Mac. But what I’ve done is okay, you know when you misspell a word and the iPhone fixes it?

Owen: Yeah. It gives you a suggestion. Yes.

Jason: Perfect. You can go in and you can tell the iPhone what misspelled words should become.

Owen: Okay.

Jason: So, I actually have full paragraph blocks pre-written that only take me two characters to start.

Owen: Okay. So like shortcuts.

Jason: So, that formula that I gave you, on the iPhone I generally got that down to. If the give me their e-mail address which a lot of magazines are doing these days, I read the article and their e-mail address is there, it takes me about 3 minutes to do what I just told you.

Owen: Nice. I like that.

Jason: I travel with my cards. So, I always have those with me. So, I’m going to hit the road on Saturday. I’ll be gone for 9 nights. I’ll bring about 15 note cards with me. Okay. That was the easy one. Can I give you the hard one?

Owen: The easy one. The hard one now.

Jason: The hard one is spend more time thinking. Whatever that means to you but spend more time thinking. There’s a reason that you’re coaching. There’s a reason that you’re here. There’s a purpose beyond getting another client and getting another form and getting another lead gen. What is that core purpose? I write about it in chapter 7 of my book, Owen where I talk about your “So that” and if you want an activity on this, you go to a white board or you pull out a piece of paper and up on top you write down the words “So that” and then you’d give yourself a gift of your own attention. You write. I am coaching so that… I am writing articles so that… I’m getting home in time for dinner with my family so that… And once you give yourself this gift, I’ve seen it start to shift a little bit what people stop allowing into their lives. What e-mails they stop collecting? What conferences they start signing up for? What clients they start attracting?

Owen: Definitely. Hey, Jason. I really appreciate you doing this interview and giving us your secrets on how you’ve been scoring PR and been successful with it. And hey, just so that the audience can thank you, how best can they reach you?

Jason: Google. Jason Womack or you can go to my website womackcompany.com and of course the book is yourbestjustgotbetter.com. But at Twitter @jasonwomack. I’m abundantly findable.

Owen: Definitely. As to audience, get in contact with Jason and if you have questions about this interview specifically, make use of the comment forms and I’m sure Jason will see it and would like to join conversation.

Jason: Yeah. Add some comments down below because Owen and I can jump back in and we can keep that dialog going. So everyone, scroll down the page, leave a comment.

Owen: Thank you very much, Jason. I really appreciate it. Thanks. And if you enjoyed watching this video, I bet you want to discover everything you need to know about hiring, training and working with a virtual assistant, tips and strategies that you can immediately put use in your business. Go now to virtualassistantblueprint.com and get my free 5-day future training course and you will instantly discover how to avoid the five most costly outsourcing mistakes and how to make working with virtual assistants more profitable and fun. I can’t wait to give you access to the video, so go now to the free training course and the site again is virtualassistantblueprint.com. I’ll see you soon.