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Power of Storytelling: Innovative Digital Marketing and Podcasting Strategies with Shaahin Cheyene
00:29:42
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- [00:17]
A
Howdy. Welcome to another fun filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt Bertram. We're doing a couple episodes on Amazon Growth. We've talked about podcasting, we've talked about a lot of different things. We've kind of really started to branch out from, from SEO because I think that you really need an integrated funnel. SEO is not the magic bullet that it used to be. And so thought it would be good to bring a world renowned guest on Shahid Shahan, how are you doing, buddy?
- [00:47]
B
I'm doing great, never better.
- [00:49]
A
Well, man, if y'all haven't heard his story, it is, it is phenomenal. He's got a crazy book out there that talks about like the, I guess the fast life and, and he was one of the founders of Herbal Ecstasy and grew a billion dollar company, sold all kinds of stuff on Amazon. He's now doing a lot of different things from this podcast booking agency that he reached out to us on, as well as, you know, some, some accelerator programs. He's got podcasts, he's got channels, he's all over the place. So, Chase, how are you doing, buddy? I know today was a little bit crazy. You got a lot of different things going on, so I'm glad that you made it here.
- [01:33]
B
Thanks, man. Yeah, we were just in studio actually shooting a podcast for one of our clients that's using it top of funnel. And oftentimes I tell people if you're not doing podcasts and using it as some component to your funnel, you're missing out. Because podcasts are evergreen, meaning they live forever and you're producing fresh content that AI can't produce. AI is still not good enough to produce that kind of content, and it lives forever. And not only that, it's a unique way to build authority and to present your brand and build out all areas of your funnel. So I tell people all the time, if you're doing a podcast to one person or to 100 people, remember, the game now is all about who can create content, original content. And then what you do with that content falls under the category of your marketing department, people like you that are SEO optimizers. And so I tell people, you know, create great content and then aggregate it. It doesn't matter what people are gonna have as an audience. They can have five people. They can have 5 million people. You take that content, you re aggregate it, you get the otter transcript, you put that on a, on a blog, you add pictures to it, you take clips, you put that throughout social, and the more you do that, the more success you're going to have. A lot of marketers now think they can do what they were doing two years ago, five years ago, and just build, you know, bullshit sites that, you know, bring people spammy sites and review sites and do all that spamming. It's just not working anymore. And AI is changing everything.
- [03:20]
A
Well, AI is getting a lot smarter and it's figuring out what those signals are. It's trying to kind of break. Break through the noise to find the spam with the spam filters for sure. You know, I totally agree with you. There's kind of a formula that we follow called the 7 11, 4 rule, where it's like seven hours of content, you know, seeing your brand 11 times on four different channels. And really I haven't found a better way to create that content for clients to create that content outside of a podcast. It's just like a great format. You can create different kind of sequences or topics that you want to go down a rabbit hole. You can create a ton of content and then like you said, you can absolutely repurpose that on different channels. And really that's what it's about. It's about people seeing your brand, understanding your message and connecting with you. And I 100% agree. We've been podcasting for, I think, 12 years. I actually PodFest, I just got back from PodFest and so met some great people on there. I think I'm gonna probably bring on John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneurs on Fire. He was talking about all the stuff that he was doing, and I can't find something better than podcasts. Certainly YouTube now, right, is kind of changing the name of podcasting. I know Spotify tried to do it, But I think YouTube as new growth and kind of utilizing the shorts and building that funnel is absolutely there.
- [04:58]
B
Yeah, YouTube is interesting. We started a company called Viral Mirage. We're the leading provider of YouTube acceleration services. And what we learned is pretty interesting. So YouTube actually used to be a lot easier to get ranked. Now people put their stuff on YouTube. This is great. I'm just like Joe Rogan. Me and my friends hang out, we talk. It's going to be awesome. And they put their content on YouTube and it's Tumbleweed City. They've got zero action because YouTube. Those guys are sitting around going, you know what if Matthew wants some action from YouTube, if they want us to push them up our algorithm, Matthew can buy ads. You got money, Matthew? Buy some ads, right? And if you want more traction, buy more ads. And that's what they're doing. So the workaround that we discovered is the live content. If you are producing a 24.7live, YouTube doesn't know. YouTube goes oh my God, Matthew's producing live content. I don't know if it's time. I don't know if he's talking about the elections, he's talking about Trump, he's talking about Bobby Kennedy, he's talking about some relevant issue. We don't know but we know he's doing it live. So we are going to give that extra SEO and push that to the optimization of YouTube to the top of the page of everybody's feed. So what we did with our company Viral Mirage if anyone's interested check out viral mirage.com is that what we did was we went in there and we figured out a way to create from. You got to have content from content that you already have. We and if you don't have that content you better start doing podcasts. So reach out to us a podcast cola. We take that content we created 24. 7 live and it explodes. You got to do a few things, you got to do some backlinks, you got to do some blog posting. We do all of that for you and basically within 90 days it blows up your YouTube as if you were one of these major influencers like Mr. Beast or Mark Robers or the Jake Paul's of the world without having to be that big. And it's a little known secret that people don't know about just yet. And we were taking a limited number of clients for this service. We don't know how long we're going to be able to do this but right now it's working like crazy.
- [07:26]
A
I love. We were talking in the pre interview the Robert Cialdini kind of creating some scarcity there. I know you've done a lot of stuff on Amazon as well and you know, I know that might not be where your focus is but I know that you were really helping people sell a lot of products on Amazon and I'm just kind of wanting to wanted to hear kind of what your takeaways from that space are.
- [07:52]
B
Yeah, no, that's a great question. So I still teach people how to do Amazon by the way. Anyone's interested, just email me. It's going to be dark z E-S-S gmail.com or you can even reach me through Podcast Cola. I've got one of the lead Amazon courses and anybody listening to Internet marketing use Internet marketing in the subject heading and I'll give you the Amazon course for free. My goal this year is to empower 100 people to start Amazon businesses and create predictable recurring revenue streams. And I've talked to Professor Cialdini before, we've chatted several times. Those elements of influence are very important, right? So you've got to have likability, you've got to have social proof, you've got to have authority. But the thing that trumps all of it is social proof on Amazon. The way things have gotten, we don't have any trust anymore between the consumer and the company. That's gone, it's eroded. Nobody believes you because you want their money, Matthew. So the way around that is social proof. And Amazon figured this out. Now, funny enough, people look at Amazon and they're like, oh, okay, Amazon, I'm just leaving a review for free. You know, that's, that's cool. I get to, you know, have my voice heard. But the fact is Amazon has built one of the most active and prolific blog networks in the world, and they own the content that you are producing for them for free. You are doing work for Mr. Jeff Bezos as he is sailing by on his beautiful yacht because you are leaving those reviews. It is content that Amazon owns that you are producing for them.
- [09:39]
A
Isn't that the same with all the social media platforms, too, that we're creating content on?
- [09:44]
B
Say again?
- [09:45]
A
Isn't that the same for all the social media content that we're creating on all the different platforms?
- [09:50]
B
Yeah, I don't know how the rule is with, I don't know how the rule is with Facebook. Like, do they own your baby pictures if you post them? Do they own all that stuff?
- [10:02]
A
I think they do. At least, at least that was when I, when I was in college when, when Facebook kind of started up. And that was. I, I haven't looked at the bylines. I mean, really, the big thing right now is TikTok, right? Of, like, what Tik Tok's doing. But yeah, I'm, I'm pretty sure if you post it on their platform, it's all theirs. And they could, they could use it in kind of any way. And they give you, like, a perpetual license to do whatever you want with it, but they now own it and that's that. So they're, I think they're using it for, you know, face recognition software. And they have, you know, government as clients. And so there, there, there's a lot of craziness for sure, that that's happening with, like, information. I mean, I would tell you that the reviews I was Just talking to a guy that was the head. I'll probably bring him on the podcast as well. But he was the head of gmb, Google, my business, and how important the reviews are there and how the large language models really understand what you're putting in the review and how that impacts ranking. I can see it definitely happening across the board on any major platform. I mean, one of the things that I heard from you talk about in a previous interview was kind of those. Those concepts of. Of influence. And I've recently read Pre Fluence, which I thought was a fantastic book that he came out with the follow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so he. It was crazy, though, because, like, the first book that he wrote, he was trying to protect people against these big corporations from using these strategies. And what it turned into is he became a consultant for all those companies because they loved what he was doing. And so I agree with you that there's, like, a lack of trust and there's a trust layer that I think that that's the new currency in a lot because people are just aggregating what other people had said because they just don't have time to do the research like they used to. And there's information, all these different places.
- [12:14]
B
Yeah, it's. It's true. And I think that puts us, as Internet marketers, in a very unique position. So you've got to imagine with all that's happening now, with all this AI, like, what's going to set you apart as a storyteller? What's going to set your products, your brands, your clients apart? And the key, I think, to a large part is something that maybe is not in his wheelhouse or, you know, as part of his five elements of influence. But I think it plays to all of them. And that's authenticity. You can't fake authenticity. There's a great saying that drum machines don't have souls. And there's just something about hearing live music, for example, that just can't be duplicated. It's the errors, it's the mistake. It's the look on the guy's face, it's the sweat dripping from his head as he hits a beat that's never been created. And drum machines can't do that. They can become technically accurate. And the same thing with the work that we do with storytelling, because Internet marketing, at the end of the day, I truly believe, comes down to storytelling and who's the best storyteller otherwise. Just doing stuff that, you know, anybody can do. And you're manipulating this algorithm and that algorithm, and you know, might work for a minute, you might make a little bit of quick cash, but in the long term, those aren't the people who make them the big money. The big money comes from the storytellers.
- [13:47]
A
Yeah, no, I, I agree. I mean, tell, tell me, tell me in kind of your. I, which we jumped into this. I love it like, because we don't have a lot of time. But like, how did you discover that? Like, how did you discover the storytelling component of, of how powerful it is through all? Because you've dealt with like, like from your book and stuff, like just crazy people coming at you every different direction. And from 16 or something it was, I mean, you, you've done just so much in so little amount of time. Like, how did you filter out the noise to figure out, you know, what was working, what wasn't working, and like, where, where you settled on that messaging.
- [14:33]
B
Yeah, I think, look, I think a lot of the stuff, you know, again, I fall back to us as digital marketers, right? And I feel like a lot of the stuff that we do is really based on trial and error. So you've got to do, you know, the, the people I see who fail and who can fail quickly and get back up and keep running are the ones who actually long term are the successes. I tell people this all the time. If the total aggregate of your successes far outweighs the aggregate of your failures, you're fine. You can have a ton of failures. You know, if you lose, don't lose the lesson. I, I tell people this all the time. And so a lot of the times we don't know what exactly is going to work. So it's a little bit of trial and error, of like, hey, is this going to work? Is that going to work? Right? And sometimes we do things even if we know they're going to fail, so that we can be like, hey, you know what? That failed. But here's, here's how we're going to tweak it for it to succeed. And it's always been the people who think that way win. So at the end of the day, you can go into something, and we're speaking in pretty broad generalities, but you can try a new tactic knowing that it may fail, it may succeed, but if it fails, you already have the backup plan. It gives you an opening to something else that you might not have had before. And that I think is a win.
- [16:15]
A
Man. I think the data is so powerful. If you look at, from digital marketing, from traditional marketing, like you would have to run an ad Put, post a billboard, put in a magazine, whatever. And you're just going to like, you can't make any changes, you can't pivot, you can't optimize it. And with social media or paid ads or whatever, you're getting that real time data. And so you're able to test that really quickly. And one of the things that I found early was like, whatever I think we should do or whatever I think should be is not necessarily what's right. Right. Because I'm not everybody. I'm speaking to me as, I guess, the avatar or the target audience. But there's other people that reflect differently. The thing that blows my mind is this is not, I don't know exactly how old this study is, but it talked about Google Ads. 20% of people roughly click on Google Ads. Okay. 80% of people don't. And there's very little overlap. Right. So a lot of people, if you talk to you do like, quick test. I don't, I skip the ads. I skipped ads. And that's why they try to make the ads look like organic. Right. But Google's built a huge business, one of the biggest businesses in the world based on that, 20% of people that click on the ads. And so you got to understand, hey, these people are not, you know, or, or these people that are not like you are still buying stuff or still doing stuff, you, you might want to communicate your message to them. And, and so these people reach them in a different way. And so I love the aspect of testing, like when we do email drips and stuff like that. I like to just do all the letters of the Alphabet on the, on the freaking title. And then you figure out what quickly works and then you just kind of start leaning into the data and optimize that direction. But you start with like, okay, this is my best guess, and then let's just see what happens. But I like that point of like, okay, we're going to try this. It's probably going to fail, but it's going to help us set a baseline or it's going to help us kind of get some data in this area. And then sometimes I've been just blown away by the results. Like you were talking about selling on Amazon. I had a guy a long time ago that was wanting to sell Play DOH for kids. Like monthly shipments of Play doh. Okay. Because, you know, I have two young boys now and you know, the Play DOH gets bad pretty quick. And I didn't have kids at the time. He came to me, built a Shopify site. He was like, I want to sell this on a recurring model. And I was like, I just, I don't know about this. And that thing blew up so fast, so quickly that it humbled me to the point that I said, I'm not going to go out and say this is not going to work or this is going to work. I'm going to say, here's what I know. We're going to test the data and we're going to do whatever the data tells us to do. But there's just so many different things that you don't think will work that certain people respond to. And I think that you, you, I think that you want to do business with like minded people, right? And so if you put yourself out there like we were talking about in that authentic way, you're going to attract people that want to do business with you and, and you're going to have a much better relationship. Because the worst thing in the world is to do business with somebody that you're not on the same page with. Right?
- [19:36]
B
And yeah, I, I tell people this about podcasting all the time too. So to your point, you probably gonna suck the first few that you do. That's why when we book clients at Podcast Cola, we book people on shows. I'm like, dude, get ready to do a show a week. Like a show a week, that's a lot. I'm like, no, get ready to do a show a week. And the first few you're gonna do, you're gonna suck. And it might be terrible and you might stutter and you might get it wrong and you know, you might have bad lighting or bad sound. Hopefully you don't if you're our client, because we show everybody exactly what they need to do to look at, but you might not be perfect. And the next one you're going to suck a little less. And by the time we get to month two and month three, you're going to be knocking these things out like me and you are doing right now. And there's going to be no preparation needed. You're going to have your call to action, you're going to have your talking points, you're going to have everything you need ready to go. And most people don't realize that. Most people don't realize everything is an effort. And that's one of the things with Joe Rogan. I love Joe Rogan. He's one of the, the top podcast hosts in the world, if not the top podcast host. But the problem with him is he just Makes it look too easy and everybody thinks they can do it. And the fact is, like anything else, it's gonna take practice.
- [20:49]
A
Well, he went for I don't know how many, how long he did. I remember when he was doing podcasts in like storage closets, you know, I mean, he's been podcasting and doing stand up comedy for forever, you know what I mean? And I do think that that format. Now, what do you say? Because you're in the podcasting space, I have found that I'm looking at maybe modifying the way we do interviews to lengthen them. Right. And I've been trying to, when I'm interviewing people, try to pull out, let them get all the promotion out up front so we can get into the meat. Because until you get somebody in that storytelling environment, you know, like by the time you get in there, if that takes 20 minutes, right, and you have a 40 minute podcast, it really gets good. I think when I end, the best conversations I have are after we end the podcast when we're waiting for it to upload. Like, I have so many great conversations that I think could, could, could lengthen the, the time it. To really get to know somebody, to really get those stories shared and to really get some of the real quality value from the podcast. Because I find many times I'm interviewing somebody and right about the time we end is like the time when I think it's getting the best from a story standpoint, maybe. I don't know.
- [22:12]
B
Yeah, no, it's usually the case. It's usually the case. And look, you got to be warmed up when you're doing a podcast. But honestly, you know, Matthew, I feel it's all about the long form. I know you're limited on time today, so maybe we'll get on again in the future. But at the end of the day, it's all about long form.
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A
So, I mean, what, what do you think the perfect length is for a podcast?
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B
I think between one to three hours. You know, I think the sweet spot is an hour. It depends on who you've got, man. Like, I would hate to be on with somebody who's an amateur, who's like never done shows and be on a more than an hour. And most people, I find the way I do podcasts like an hour in. People are pretty tired and they're pretty exhausted. So I actually even like, you know, there's a few different ways to do it. You know, top of funnel, you could have a 10 minute podcast. And I've seen those go really great. You don't really want to go shorter than that. But 10 minute rapid response, you know, wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. Done is really good. And then the maximum I would say is about an hour long for when you're starting out. Once you get good, once you get Joe Rogan cred, then let's kill it. Let's get in a big studio. He'll open up a bottle of something and you know, you'll sit around and you can talk for two, three, four hours. I think his, his interview with Trump was like three and a half hours.
- [23:37]
A
Yeah, yeah. So Cheyenne, so how did you go from, okay, selling herbal ecstasy, Billion dollar company, right? You're doing anthem, Amazon stuff. You know, you've written, you've written a book like Crazy Life and then like, I don't know what happened between that and podcast company, you know, YouTube, accelerated Instagram, all that kind of company. Like what happened in between there? Because you know, once, I mean like roughly how old are you now? And then 16. We got, we got a pretty length of time of the transformation. I'm really interested in hearing kind of like life lessons and what you learned through that and why you settle here now. I certainly agree. Podcasting is where it's at, I believe, from content creation and connecting with people one to many. Like there's so many things that I keep preaching it as well. I'm just wondering kind of what did that journey look like for you? I'm really interested in your backstory. So yeah.
- [24:41]
B
So you know, I think, well, anyone that's interested, you can read more about me, how I created over a billion dollars in revenue in my teenage years. The book is called Billion How I Became King of the Thrill Pill Cult. That's on Amazon, Stitcher, Spotify, wherever you get your books. But you can get the audiobook on Amazon on what is audible. That's an easy way to do it. So I always, always believe that it doesn't matter what you're selling. The key is the story that you tell around what you sell and the value that you can provide. So I've always believed in having excellent products, you know, that go that are on brand and having service based businesses is, is the same thing. If you've got something that other people don't and you can tell a better story, you're going to be well ahead of the game. And so I started my journey in podcasting to promote my book, which is now being turned into a film. Paris Hilton's company, 1110 is producing it. Another Academy Award winning studios involved in the production of that film in the next couple years. It's going to be pretty awesome. And I got that deal through doing podcasts. So podcasting has been everything. And then people started coming to me being like, hey, man, can you do this for.
- [25:57]
A
For.
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B
For us? We would love to do this. And I said, yeah. And that's. That's how we arrived to where we're at.
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A
Very cool. Very cool. So I do have to go here in a minute. Why don't. Why don't you tell me what is kind of like some maybe what's an unknown secret of Internet marketing? You quickly shared the. Running the YouTube live. Maybe, you know, you can schedule out podcasts where they continuously get pushed out live. I don't know if you're using, like, what is it obob, Oob what it's called, but, like, what are some other secrets, I guess, of Internet marketing that you think are kind of maybe underutilized today?
- [26:47]
B
Yeah, at the end of the day, I think you need to be making content. You need to. So one of the biggest secrets that I teach my clients is you should have a podcast, but most people don't have the time, the wherewithal, all that stuff. So back to Cialdini's principle. If you're vouching for yourself, that's great, buddy. Pat on the back. You're really nice. No one believes you. If somebody else is vouching for you, way better. You have authority and social proof. So how do we get that? We do that by getting booked on other people's podcasts. And you do something really simple, Matthew, if you want to get booked on those podcasts, first, you call Podcast Cola, get on the site and book a session, and we've got a free strategy call. You can get on with me or one of my customer growth consultants and talk to them. But once you get booked on these podcasts, you just say one simple thing. You say, hey, buddy, Matt, do you mind if I aggregate this content? If I download this, you send me the video after you're done, and I'm going to put it on my channel. I've got 100,000 subscribers and I'm going to help promote matthewbertram.com Are you cool with that, man? We might be sending you some new subscribers. Is that okay?
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A
Yeah.
- [27:59]
B
What are you going to say? Of course you're not a dick. You're going to be like, yeah, yeah, let's do it. Right. So by doing that now, I've got your permission. I take that content that's going to Become a blog on the back end of my site with pictures, videos, clips. I'm going to make clips of this. I'm going to put it out all over social media. It's going to help you because we're going to help promote your show as well. Right. And now I'm going to take this feed and I'm going to put it on my podcast feed as well. To my entire audience. I just produced a show. If I do four shows a week, I've produced four shows a week. And then if I produce any extra ones myself, great. If I don't, I never have to produce a show and I have a podcast. That podcast is going to rank in the top 10 for any anything that you do. Now you have a YouTube channel. I'm going to put this up on my YouTube channel and again, this is going to rank top for my name, for what I'm offering for my services for Podcast Cola. And at the end of the day, that's the best way to go. Anybody interested, reach out to me. We work with agencies all the time. Podcast cola.com and I'm happy to talk to anybody about Amazon acceleration. You want to talk about YouTube? It's our viral mirage service, Instagram or just being booked on podcast. Thanks for having me on, Matthew. I appreciate you, man.
- [29:17]
A
All right, well, everybody, Cheyenne, Cheyenne, thanks for coming on. Until the next time, if you want to grow your business with the largest, strongest, most powerful tool on the planet, reach out to EWR for more revenue in your business. Until the next time, bye bye for now.