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Hey, this is Sharon Trivatsa. Welcome back to the Business School podcast. And in this episode, I'm going to show you how to create a hometown media Machine. Well, what is a hometown Media Machine? It is how you can create a side hustle easily. A business. Its entire job is to promote you. Its entire job is to promote the things that you care about. Its entire job is to make your friends rich. It's the entire job is to bring the issues that are important to you to light. And the entire job is to make you more money without you ever being in the spotlight. This is the hometown Media Machine. I break it all down for you, step by step, starting right now.

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One thing is for certain, just because it's tried and true doesn't mean it's working right now. So the big question is this. Where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and.

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The exact how to.

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How to grow your business, how to blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth. That is the question and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharon Srivata and welcome to Business School.

A (1:12)

If you want to start a small project that makes you famous, makes you money, makes your friends money, promotes your ideas, creates your narrative, and then over time becomes such a staple for you that you could even sell something that you started as a side project, then this entire hometown media machine episode is for you. I will tell you, if I was starting to do something right now, I would start this. I think every single entrepreneur should start this. And the only reason you should not start this is if you live the gig economy lifestyle, meaning if you live in Medellin, Colombia, or you live in Puerto Rico, or you live in Aba, you know, Bora Bora, this is probably not for you. Otherwise, if you live in a community and you either have a business that is built around that community, say you're a real estate agent, a mortgage broker, a coach, or a consultant, so you operate a local store. Whether you sell that local community or whether you just live in that local community, this is for you. This is the hometown Media Machine. This idea that I came up with. And I want to talk about how you can take local fame into steady revenue and impact. And I want to give you an example of how all of this started for me. So I was reading an insane book called Benjamin Franklin by, written by Walter Isaacson, probably my top kind of, I don't know, five books ever, by the way. I read it multiple times. Ben Franklin is a total stud. And Ben Franklin started the Pennsylvania Gazette, which if you think about it, Ben Franklin started the Pennsylvania Gazette before either you and I knew him as Brent Franklin. It allowed him to promote his own printing business because he had a printing print shop. And he started a media company, which is essentially a newspaper in this case, to promote his print shop. Then it allowed him to promote other businesses. Then it allowed him to get ad revenue. Then it allowed him to control the narrative of the articles that he was printing, because it didn't really matter if people knew that it was his, it was his. But if people didn't know it was his, he was pushing a narrative. This small local newspaper turned into a powerful revenue stream and insanely solidified Brent Franklin's local influence with that one thing. He had a megaphone, a platform to do so much more. And this is the thing that I want to kind of broadly share with you, which is over the years we've been all taught, and heck, I've talked about it too, that you should build a personal brand. And most people think that building a personal brand is essentially saying, hey, look at me, I'm going to make videos, I'm going to tell you how much knowledge that I have. I'm going to tell you what I know. And the crazy part is that's not it at all. You don't need to do any of that. And the reason why most people don't want to build a personal brand is because they don't want to talk about themselves. They don't want to talk about random things that they know. They don't want to talk about a, the intricacies of real estate transaction or how a mortgage rate change changes or how a plumber fixes a toilet. Nobody wants to do that. Like, what is the point in doing that? Because it's not entertaining. No one woke up in the morning saying, hey, explain the nuances of real estate contract to me. But when you think about the power of a media company, you start to realize that the media company's job is not to be you. Like the personal brand's job, which this dream that we have been sold is to be you. Be like, oh yeah, people like to like your personal brand. No, you know what you want is you want to be the Ben Franklin to the Pennsylvania Gazette, right? You want to be the Rupert Murdoch to all the companies that he's bought. You want to be, I think Bezos bought like the Washington Post, or you. Or you want to be Elon that bought Twitter. Like all of us think that XYZ things are happening but don't really realize that there's a third party media company that shows a spotlight and attention on something else. Take for example, which is many of you know that I serve as the president of Real. We're the largest fastest growing publicly traded real estate brokerage in the world. When I started, we had roughly a 200ish million dollar public valuation. Today we have a $1.2 billion public valuation. In under 24 months, we grew $1 billion in our equity value. How? Because I took my media platform and I just pointed the, shone the light and created the spotlight on Real. Now I didn't say I was real. I didn't promote my personal brand. I just took the media platform that I had, the media company that I had, and I shown the spotlight on something else. And that's what's really important. That's what you should really think about is in an era today where global reach is so glorified, everybody wants to say, oh yeah, you gotta get on the Internet so you can reach customers and clients in Australia or New Zealand or Tuscaloosa, Alabama or Juneau, Alaska. People are overlooking the power of local influence. Where you live, where you work is really important. Building a media company in your own community can create like the most insane loyal customer base and profitable partnerships and a reputation that you could build, grow and sell like there's no tomorrow. Now you may say, Sharon, what is this media company and like, what are the mechanics of me creating it and what do I do, etc. So I will tell you this. Essentially all you need is some kind of home base. And the home base is either a blog or it's a private Facebook group, or it's a podcast, or it's a YouTube channel, right? And it has to be one of those things because you need some way of disseminating information. And just having the, the idea of short form content and short form distribution is not. You can't just make a tweet and, or make an Instagram page and everything go away. You need to be able to control narrative, which is why Ben Franklin had the Pennsylvania Gazette, right? And that's why people want, they don't just want to buy an ad on a radio station. They want the entire Howard Stern show. So why am I telling you all of this? So like my friend in Chicago, Young Lee Young, started this podcast called the Chicago Business Review. And the main idea of the Chicago Business Review is to have this local media machine, the hometown media machine. And once you have it, powerful things start to happen because you can do a lot of things with it. So here's the first thing that I would do. Let's say you have some kind of platform, maybe a YouTube show or a podcast or a blog where you can create narrative, right? You're, in a lot of ways, you need some artifact that is like the Pennsylvania Gazette. And what you want to do is you want to get all the famous people connected in from the community connected to your platform in some way. So this may be the mayor, this may be the school superintendent, this may be the local police chief, this may be the local congressman. It doesn't matter who it is. Any single person that your local community knows, you want to be associated with them because that shows your power. And the best part is no local official will think twice about getting on a local show. Not one. Because they can. The local mayor cannot say, I can't. I won't get on the Chicago Business Review. And most of you are not trying to do a huge multi metro podcast or a metro show. You're doing it in a little bit of a smaller town. And that is really powerful because now you get to brand the media company, not yourself. I'm not branding it as, hey, the Sharon Gazette. I'm calling it the Laguna Beach Reporter. Right now, everybody wants to get on the Laguna Beach Reporter. Everyone wants to get on the Laguna Beach Reporter podcast. Everybody wants to get the Laguna Beach Reporter email. Everyone's going to quote saying, hey, did you see what they wrote in the Laguna Beach Reporter? That's what they want to see. Now this Laguna Beach Reporter is my media company. I get to shape narrative. I get to sell ads, I get to promote whatever I want without having to be a Charon thing. In fact, I can use the Laguna Beach Reporter and only promote, promote my stuff and no one will even know. And that's the best part. And so what you want to do is that every town has a king and you just want to make sure that they are your name. And I will tell you, in today's world, with so much of this, everything being global reach, being glorified, people have forgotten this local reach, all the local Craigslist and all the local Facebook groups and all the local patch.com and all the local newspapers that they would deliver for free, and the local radio stations, they're all dead. They're not doing well. And. But if you actually have a chance to build a local brand, you will be unbeatable. And so the first thing you want to do is to create a platform and then start having people connected to you on your, on your show in some way. Now, the best part about having people on your show is let's say I got the mayor of Laguna Beach. What I would do is I would make a YouTube thumbnail or something that has my face and the mayor of Laguna beach and right in the middle, I would say Laguna beach report right now. When I say, look, the Laguna beach reporter, they know that that mayor and me are the most important things. Then if I get the school superintendent, I literally would get her picture and my picture and say Laguna beach reporter. Now I want to get every single person that's coming through with their face and my face and Laguna beach reporter on it. Because when I do that now, it promotes all three brands. I'm associated with someone famous. Someone famous is associated with me in the local community. And they're connected to the Laguna beach reporter. You're not seeing them on anything else. They're trying to get on local Ko 03 4.2 TV. But you know that that four second clip no one saw. But the thing that you have that your Laguna beach reporter story is going to get shared more because you built it that way. This is how you invite local influencers, build a visual connection and create social proof. If you did this and you did this alone and you did nothing else, the amount of eyeballs and notoriety that you get in your marketplace is insane. And the nice part is none of this costs money. You could do this in one hour a week and it's going to make you so famous. The crazy part about this is this is a two to three year play, but in two to three years after you do this, you will be unbeatable because no one else will put in the two to three years. Here's number two is like the second. The first one was how do you actually kind of do, do all of this and identify these local influencers? Right. Number two is to build a community around your brand. If you've heard of like Tom's shoes. Right, Tom, I don't know if you remember, but if every pair of shoes sold, they gave away a pair of shoes elsewhere. And essentially the idea was doing well while doing good, which is called the triple bottom line. It is, you do well, the company does well and your community does well. Right. Which is really cool. But the key part in all of this is as soon as you can start to create community, powerful things start to happen. So what does creating community mean? Creating community just means that one of the key places where there is community right now is they've Done a good job with it is nextdoor. And the crazy part is most people don't like selling on nextdoor, but what they don't mind is information you want to figure out. So most people are like, how can I hack this next door algorithm? As a real estate agent, how can I get in there and not get banned from it? As a mortgage broker, how can I get in there and have somebody post a testimonial about it? As a pool contractor or a general contractor, how can I get in there and have someone give me a shout out on nextdoor? And no matter how softly you do it, you're going to come across as sleazy, right? Instead, what you want to do is you don't want to do any of that. We all know that, like a next door or a local community Facebook group, we all know that they have good distribution, you know that they're getting good eyeballs, but they also don't like sales. So instead of trying to hack like a cute way of selling, oh, I'm going to show up and add more value instead of doing that, don't do that at all. Just build brand, right? And build brand for your media company. Because what you're trying to do is you're not trying to get business. You're just saying, hey, I've already hacked attention. Here's the attention of everybody in the community. They already have next door with every neighbor in the community. They already have a local Facebook group with thousands of residents in the community. Why should I try to be the. Ooh, let me pay and try to be the solo real estate agent in here. Why should I try to. Let me pay and try to be the. So get the solo steak place in here or pizza place in here or roofer or a solar company. You'd ever do any of that. Instead, if you had this local market media company, right, this hometown brand machine, what you do is after you've recorded an interview with the local mayor, you would take the clip about whatever the local mayor said with your thumbnail and you would post it in next door. They would have no problem with it. You can say, hey, I did an interview with the mayor. Here are the four things that we talked about. If you're interested in listening to this episode. Here it is. This is another Laguna beach reporter. No one says anything. You know why? Because it's based on information for the community. On the Laguna beach reporter, nobody will say anything because now you're hacking community. Most people, what they want to do is they want to try to build Community, you don't want to build community. You just want to build a media machine. Building community, if you want to do it, is hard, by the way, and it takes time to do that. But hacking and building a media machine is something completely different. You want to take all the attention, you want to wrap all the attention, you want to wrap every piece of attention that you can get and point it all back to your media machine. When you really understand and you take this hometown media machine brand and you can do something powerful with it. Everybody knows the Laguna beach reporter. Now, if I probably in two weeks I could create the only brand in Laguna beach if I just did this. Because now I start to put it in the Laguna Beach Facebook groups. I started to get it in the next door communities. I can even run media. And all I'm saying is, look, I talked to the mayor, look, I talked to the high school football coach, look, I talked to the local Tesla plant that's actually coming into town and here's what they're doing for the community. No one else has that information. So. So instead of actually building community, you can hack attention. So you can build a media machine, right? When you have the media machine, then you can build whatever community you want. What people think to think about doing is think about doing it wrong. They want to, like, work really hard to, like, serve their clients. Then they want to, you know, have somebody give them a testimonial. Then they want to try to build a community. Then they realize why no one wants to join their Facebook group of people that have pools in Laguna beach. You don't want 18 people in that group. You want to hack attention. You want media. You want the ability to point your media attention cannon at anyone, at anything that you want. Because if you did that, you could point it to yourself, you could point it to your friends, you could point it to a narrative that you want. You could point it to a storytelling ability. Why do you think some people get irritated by CNN and some people get irritated by Fox? Because the owners of those companies, right, are pushing a narrative and you have a chance to do the same thing without anybody's knowledge. Now, I'm not talking about manipulation. I'm not saying you're going to do this for a really manipulative cause. No, I really hope you don't do that. I hope you're a good person. But instead of trying to spend 40 years trying to build a community and do good work in your marketplace and earn a great brand, which is like the most ridiculous, idiotic things that people Tell me is that you want to hack attention. Then we all get mad that someone came in and ran a bunch of Facebook ads and took your clients, right? Instead, if you hack attention by building this hometown media machine brand, no one can beat you. The second piece of advice is instead of building community, hack attention. Because when you hack attention, you get to build more brand for your media empire. Here's the number three. Nobody loves anything more than perks and giveaways, right? But the only way you can get perks and giveaways is if you have a media machine. If I was running the Laguna beach reporter, I would go to a local pizza store and say, hey, this month, this week, all I want to feature in. Everything that I talk about is I just want to say, if you reference this ad, if you reference the Laguna beach reporter, when you go to, you know, Laguna Beach Pizza company, you will get a kid's pizza on the house or whatever, right? And I can tell each of these guys in the pizza company in the pizza place, listen, I don't. You don't have to give me any money. I just want to promote you because I love your pizza. Can you give me something that I can tell my audience about you? Right? And so for a week, you're just running media about a local business. Then you turn around and do it another local business. Then you turn around and do it to another local business. And now what happens is a lot more people tune into your ad, a lot more people tune into your message, a lot more people tune into your story because you're giving them perks. Perks comes because it allows you to grow your audience. Perks comes because everyone likes perks. Perks come because they're like, oh, I have to show up at this restaurant and say, the Laguna beach reporter sent me. Now it gets really fun because the restaurant loves you, the people love you. You love you because you've grown your audience overall, right? Which is really, really powerful. I don't know if you know this. Even in the olden days, local merchants would often give small gifts or discount to the residents of the town because this created this reciprocal relationship where the townspeople will now prioritize those merchants and those shops and those vendors, boosting their reputation, their royalty. This could be like something super easy. So you could say, hey, every week, I send out five deals so you could go to the marketplace and say, hey, I To any stores, restaurants, physical therapists, chiropractic shops, and say, listen, I do five deals every single week. My email is opened by X number of People, are you open to giving me a deal? I don't need anything in return for it. I just want to promote. So you get five deals a week, maybe one food, one service, one restaurant, whatever. And then you just send out your five deals every single week. Now, you could take those five deals and post it next door. You can take those five deals and send it on email. You can take those five days, put it on social. You can take those five deals and put it in the local Facebook group. It doesn't matter because you're not selling anything of your own. No one can say, wait a minute, Sharon's selling something. No, I'm not. These are just Laguna beach reporters. Five deals, right? So now something pretty amazing starts to happen. Anytime you talk to somebody and someone says yes to working with your brand, maybe they come on your show, maybe they want to give you a discount, maybe they say something nice about you, all you tell them is, hey, listen, can I, can you do me a favor? I'd love to send you a T shirt. I'd love to send you a hat. You send them a T shirt or a hat, and then when they get it, they're going to say, thank you for sending me the T shirt or the hat. And then in the sticky note, all you just tell them is, hey, do you mind taking a selfie so that I can feature you on my page? So now all these people, after getting the T shirt or the hat, whether they like it or not, they're going to take a selfie because they feel reciprocity to send you this. People will send me stuff all the time and very few people will ask me, hey, can you send me a selfie with the, with the shirt that you're wearing? I take, I put the shirt on, I take a selfie, I send it to them. Now they are able to use that as social proof in all of this, right? The crazy part is people don't realize that you could do these things. It still builds your media company. Last but not least, when you have a local media company, you can run drives, you can create events, right? When I say run local drive, you can run a community drive, you can run a, a Thanksgiving drive, canned food drive, you can run a candy for veterans drive, you can run a recycling drive. When you do things like that, you can say, hey, the Laguna beach reporters recycling drive in partnership with goodwill or whatever. Right? Now, when you start doing that, the goodwill will, every time when they want to do something, will say, hey, let's just call the Laguna beach reporter first. Now you start to maximize email capture. You get, you take a bunch of pictures. You can now go back to nextdoor. You can now go back to your Facebook group and still re promote and repromote your brand. Remember, why did Ben Franklin start the Pennsylvania Gazette? He could have done whatever he wanted, but he started the Pennsylvania Gazette so he can have this amazing media company, right? This media company to promote more things, this media company to spin his narrative, this media company that can shine the spotlight of the things that he wants to shine the spotlight on, as opposed to just hoping that someone with good word of mouth will tell more people about him. This is why this is super important. And that's why I really, really want you to think about a two to three year investment in creating this hometown media machine. You want to create a blog, a podcast or a YouTube show that is really tied to this idea of like creating a narrative associated with all of this. And when you do that, really good things happen. You're now able to hack attention. You're not able to promote your narrative. You're now able to showcase yourself. You're now able to promote things, your friends and your own businesses. You're now able to do all of those things. Because when you do all of those things, you get this brand media company, this lift that you can never get before, and you get famous in the neighborhood. And at the end of two to three years, here's what's going to happen. Someone who wants something locally is going to come in and say, hey, Sharon, can I just buy the Laguna Beach Reporter? Because I want to start a magazine around this. And you know what I would do? I'd say, no, I'll license you the name so I can sell something out of it. They license me the name. And the crazy part is I get to do all of this because I just started this as a side hustle. If I can build the Laguna Beach Reporter brand and I can actually add value, tell people about it, showcase other people, et cetera, I have created this media company that shines the spotlight on other things. I have hacked attention. And once I've hacked attention by giving away coupons, once I've hacked attention by local news, once I've hacked attention by knowing the local participants in the community, I can then promote whatever I want. And the best part of it, in the meantime, I get famous. The best part of it is my friends, I get better business. The best part of it is the community loves me. And whatever I end up doing, at the end of the day, I have built an insane asset that no one can ever take away from me. And that is how you build a hometown media machine. Now, I know that it is easier said than done, but I will tell you this. Most people are trying to hack leads. Most people are trying to hack existing communities. Most people are trying to hack existing platforms. Instead of that, just think about this. Just think about building a hometown media machine. Think about building a little media company that no one will ever take from you. Think about building this media company that is not you. You are not the brand. Because as soon as you become the brand, you get hate. As soon as you become the brand, you're the area of focus. As soon as you become the brand, you have to now take the you being the brand and take the pressure of you. Which is why you always say, well, should I have a separate business page and a separate personal page? You don't know how to separate and the brand. In a lot of ways you could do that. But yes, you are the brand and yes, you need a personal brand and yes, all of that. But it is very hard for most people to promote themselves because they're promoting themselves, and that feels aggressive. Instead, when you have someone else who can promote you, powerful things start to happen. So think about this idea of the hometown media machine. If you like it or you're doing some version of it, take a minute, supercharge it. Use the plan that I'm giving you today because you want to hack attention, go where the attention already is. Use that to get more attention for your media company. And that way, when you have your media company, just like Ben Franklin had the Pennsylvania Gazette, just like Real has me, right? If Real didn't have me, Real is going to have to spend tens of millions of dollars taking a spotlight and pointing it towards them. Now, it's not a good or bad thing. It's just we're fortunate that White can do that. So Elon wanted, you know, to put spotlight on his causes. He now has Twitter for it. Right. People use their media machines, their media empires, to shine spotlights on their issues, to promote their products and services, to help their friends, and to build their own personal brand. So think about how you can build a hometown media machine for yourself. By the way, I don't know if this is interesting to you, but I'd offer two things. One, if you know that this could be helpful to somebody, can you just flip this to them? And second, if you think you like this, just take a screenshot and tag me and I can make more like this for you. Remember, Harvey, sliced greatness is a choice. And please, if you like this, take a screenshot. Tag me and so I can make more like this for you.