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Spring is here, and there's a whole new way to chai at Starbucks that's made perfect for you. Choose your sweetness, dial it up or keep things light. Add a touch of pistachio, a hint of strawberry or vanilla, or make it a spring classic with lavender. Because this season, there's endless ways to chai at Starbucks.
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You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by GoHighLevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis. What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the show. This episode, it's just me, you and the mic. Like usual. We have two other episodes going out today. One of them is a solo show that's, that's this one. And then two other ones in addition to that one co hosted show with my producer, Eric. Those ones are a little bit more fun, a little bit more scattered all over the place, but I like them. They're fun. We talk about money, we talk about business, but then we sort of like venture off into other tangential areas. So we have the co episode. We also dropped an interview today with a successful entrepreneur. So no short, no shortage of content to be able to go check out these solo shows, though I try my best to put together lessons and things that I've learned along the way of creating my own content. Now, over 15, 1600 episodes, something like that, in the last eight and a half years, plus countless hours of podcast listening that I've done, plus the couple hundred books that I've read as well. And this is sort of just like my ability, my opportunity to share some of the things that I've learned and hopefully that's helpful for you. Today we're talking a little bit about the personal brand, how to, how to go about building a personal brand, and how to also go about building your network. And I think the two of them are sort of inextricably linked. And so this is my ACT method. All right, if you're, if you're an online marketer and you're not coming up with methods and cool acronyms, then you're not really a marketer. So this, this is the ACT method. This is what I have learned has helped me build my online brand, my online personality a little bit in the last few years. When I first came into the space, I saw that there were people who were doing something similar to what I was doing, but they had all these media features. They were featured in Forbes and they were featured in Entrepreneur, and they're featured here and there, and they're able to use these as credibility pieces to be able to go, you know, get on different stages or to get on different podcasts, or to use in their marketing to convince people that they actually knew what they were talking about. It's third party validation to say that you are somebody that's worth listening to. And I pretty soon, like, pretty soon after I was started, started to accomplish some of these things. I got featured on a top 10 podcast to listen to from Forbes a long time ago that got hundreds of thousands of views that was shared by some people that I really respected at the time. But what a lot of people don't know about that feature is that I was the one who actually got that feature to happen. So it was really cool because I worked with the author of that particular piece, who was also the author of a book, who I had on my show. Another way to network with people, get them on your podc. I was able to talk to him. I asked him for the advice. I was like, hey, how do I get featured in Forbes? Like, I know you're a Forbes writer. How do I get. How do I get featured in Forbes? That's something that'll be helpful for the brand. And so we started talking, throwing out a couple ideas, and he was like, I was actually thinking about writing a piece about some podcasts. He's like, what if I just wrote a top 10 podcasts and you tell me some of the people that you might also think should be on this list and I'll put you on the list? And I was like, okay, that's awesome. So not only was I able to
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get featured on the list of top
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10 podcasts according to Forbes, to listen to if you want to change your life or something like that, this is like 2018, 2019. But I also got to reach out to several of my friends who I wanted to be able to create value for as well. And so when the final list came out, it was cool because I was able to share that article in the context of being on the same level as a lot of the people who I looked up to in that space. That was probably the best feature I ever got. Beyond that, all the rest of the features, I realized, like, once they came out, it's like the, the. The. It was sort of a dead end in terms of what it actually did for the brand. And then I started realizing something else that was a little bit more difficult to land. And that was the law of association. The Credibility that I got from bringing on huge name guests on my show. And I realized that that was moving the needle a lot more than a Forbes mentioned or an entrepreneur mentioned. And probably because it is just, frankly just more difficult to be able to share, quote, unquote, share the stage with people like that. And so I started realizing that there's a lot of, of value in associating up with people who everybody already knows likes and trusts. And that really became the credibility piece of this ACT method. So the ACT method, what is it? A stands for attention. C stands for credibility. T stands for trust. Now the entire goal obviously when you have a business is to move people as quickly as you can down into the trust layer. Because trust is where transactions happen. Trust equals transactions. But it is very, very difficult, I found, to get people to trust you if they don't even know that you exist. So attention has to come first and then we have to have some credibility so that you people know that you can actually do the things that you say that you're doing and then they can move down into the trust stage of the, of the relationship. This is essentially the playbook for building relationships at scale. And that's why I kind of link it to a personal brand. Because that's really what personal brand is all about. It is, it is building a relationship with an individual person at scale. So the people who do this best, the people with the best personal brands, they a ton of attention, they bring in a bunch of credibility and now they have a large audience of people who actually trust them. And then once you move them down to the trust and they actually do transact with you, now it's up to you to have to fulfill at a really high level so that they continue to trust you and continue to want to buy, you know, more of your stuff. So attention, credibility and trust. Now it just happened to work out that the acronym spelled act, but it also was something I was really trying to do because ACT is the number one thing that's preventing you from start getting your personal brand well known to begin with, is that you are just not taking any action. You're spending way too much time in the strategy, spending way too much time in your own head thinking about, well, what if I did this and what if I did that? And the rewards are only going to come to the people who take action, who actually act. So let's break these down one by one. Number one is attention. One of the best phrases that I heard around this came from somebody in the online space. They said, best known Beats best. And I am sure there's no shortage of people listening to this right now who are in that boat. You're the best kept secret in your field. You're really good at what you do. You've been doing it for a really long time. But nobody knows that you exist. And if nobody knows you exist, they can't buy your products and services. I know this is really groundbreaking stuff here, but it's just the facts. If nobody knows you exist, then you have to get more people to know you exist. Because best known will be best 100% of the time. Because people are actively searching for solutions to their problems for the most part. But if they don't know that you exist as having a potential, potential solution to their problem, then they're not going to give you any sort of transaction to help solve that problem. It's probably going to go to the person who gets more attention because they actually know that that person exists. Even if they can't solve the problem for that person as well as you can solve the problem for that person, they're going to go to that person just because they know who that person is. So it is your responsibility as a business owner to be able to get out there and be seen to grab attention. And that comes from your marketing, your organic content, content, your advertising, the things that you're willing to do to get yourself to be well known, to get people to actually pay attention to what you have to say. This is where the, the term the attention economy comes from. Because attention is where the money flows a hundred percent of the time. Where there's attention, that's where money goes. Whether you agree or disagree, whether you think that's good or it's bad, doesn't matter. It just is where attention goes. Money flows. So you have to get well known. So why aren't you creating content again? I forgot. You know what I mean. Like I, I don't, I don't know how many times we can preach that message on the show before you'll finally just stop overthinking it and post something. Because the ability to have organic reach is one of the coolest, most underpriced attention grabbing methods of our time. Because every post you've heard me say this, once you've heard, you'll hear me say it a thousand more times. Every post is a lottery ticket. You never know what's going to be the thing that actually takes off and brings more attention into your brand. And this episode of the show is
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And I will say, I will say this about attention. There's right attention and there's wrong attention. But I feel even weird saying wrong attention. Attention is attention. And if you can create enough attention, then it doesn't really matter if it's the right attention or the wrong attention. Meaning that like I'm not necessarily talking about being hyper polarizing or, or, or you know, doing an only fans. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about, I'm talking about like you'll see people talk about, well, what good is it to have 5 million views if none of those people are going to become customers? It's like, well, there, there is good to that. There just, there just is there, there's good to having more people see your stuff. It just is a fact. It is only good. So it, it's not necessarily right attention, wrong attention. It's more like good attention and great attention. Because the people who get great attention are the people who are only getting attention about the things that they actually have products or services built around. And, and I guess it's, it's, it's more accurate to say not all attention is created equal. Meaning that, you know, all attention is good attention. But some of it is more effective and useful for marketing purposes and for actually getting an ROI on than other attention is all I mean by that. So somebody like somebody could make, you know, a million dollars off of 10,000 followers and somebody else could make a million dollars off of 3 million followers. But there's just a, there's a difference in, in how that attention translates into dollars and cents into the business. But it does not mean that the, you know, attention that you get from this video that went super viral is not going to bring you any business ever. Because maybe that might actually feed into the second piece, which is the credibility piece, maybe, maybe you you've gotten, you had a few clips or a few posts, go quote, unquote, viral, whatever that means for you, whether that's, you know, 10,000 views, 100,000 views, a million views, 5 million views, 10 million, whatever that looks like. Maybe you had a couple posts like that. It brought in a bunch of followers, but they didn't really do anything for your business. They didn't generate leads, they didn't generate sales. It was just sort of like a vanity metric that's like, oh, cool, that happened. But what might happen though, is that the next piece of content that you create that is specifically for your niche, that's the quote, unquote, right type of attention, the great attention that we're talking about. When you do get those, they might come into your brand, see that you had three videos that got 3 million views and 2 million views and 800,000 views. And then assign more trust into your brand because you have the credibility of having larger reach. Even though it is really at its core, vanity metric, meaning that it didn't really do anything for the business, but it makes you feel good because I got a bunch of likes and comments and shares and whatever else. However, that does not mean that it's not going to make you money ever. It just might be making you money without you realizing that it makes you money. That's the problem with, with like trying to have attribution for every single piece of your marketing that you put out is that you might be completely discounting some of the things that you're doing that are getting a lot of attention because you don't see that that lead came in from, you know, from, from SEO or that lead came in from, you bought some Google Ads. So that lead was technically marked as a Google Ad lead. Maybe that lead came in from Google and then they went to your Instagram and saw that you had 130,000 followers and that you have a bunch of views here and there. And that's the reason they up trying to work with you. So you don't really know which is the reason why you should just be putting out as much content as you can as long as you maintain quality along the way. So attention is the very first thing. And you can't do anything unless you get attention first because nobody will buy anything from you if they never know you exist. So attention is the first one. Second one is credibility. And this is where that initial story comes in is I started realizing that associating with people was A better form of credibility for my brand in particular than being featured in Forbes or being featured in TechCrunch or something like that. Now, is it more difficult to go, you know, share the stage with a bunch of really well known people? Yeah, of course it is, but that's also why it's more effective. Typically the thing that's more difficult is probably going to be a little bit more effective. Not all the time, but, but typically that's how it works. Because if everybody would do it, everybody would do it. They are not doing it because it's really difficult to go interview Shaq or whatever. You know, the, the scenario is. So you bring in people with attention and then the next thing is to give them a bunch of reasons to do business with you, which is the credibility piece. Because if you only bring in attention and you have no credibility, then you're also going to lose a lot of people out of that funnel anyway. So if you can build credibility inside of the brand, which is associating up with people, which is getting featured in publications, which is showcasing client results, testimonials, case studies, you know, people who've actually gotten results doing the things that you talk about or buying your products or services, if you get the attention and then you have the credibility already built in, then that attention is much more likely to, to engage and continue to follow you from there. Which is sort of what I mean by this whole like, you know, by, by the, the thing that we were just talking about, which is, which is that if you bring in people and they don't see any of that because you, you, you, you were told something by some social media manager, they're like, well, it doesn't matter if you get a bunch of views if it doesn't translate into sales. So you just abandon that entire, you know, section of content creation. Because you're like, yeah, we talked about whatever this movie, or we talked about golf, or we talked about this thing that I'm passionate about that has nothing to do with my business. And it got a crazy amount of views, but it didn't bring in any leads or sales. So we're just never going to do that again. It's like, I think that you're probably going to lose some money. I actually talked to somebody recently who, who said this. They were working with a client of theirs and they were doing a bunch of organic content and then they started looking at the attribution of their sales. They realized the majority of it was coming from their advertising, so they stopped spending on organic content. But what happened was over the course of a 12 month period, their revenue started seeing significant drops and they basically the realization they came to was that the reason that their revenue was dropping significantly like that was that they stopped putting all the money into organic content. Because in their mind that wasn't the thing that was getting them the sales, it was the ads that they were doing. When in reality it was a combination of those two things. It was that people, they were getting the attention from the ads, they were making people aware of their existence from the advertising campaigns that they were doing. And then when they would come into their brand, then they saw all these other pieces of credibility, all this other organic content, this blog post and that social media post and this podcast episode. And so when they stopped spending on the organic content piece, people came into the brand from the marketing side, from the paid advertising, but they weren't able to get indoctrinated into all of the other pieces of content that they were posting before. And so they started losing revenues dramatically in that sense. So, so that's why organic content should still be on the list. And that's why regardless of where you're getting the views or if they're, if that particular post that got 3 million views translated into any sales, I still believe it's a hundred percent worth it to put that content out there. Because you never know who's watching, you never know who might be interested in the brand because they come over to the brand and see that like, oh, this person's gotten millions of views. They must know what they're doing to some extent. So attention. And then once you get the attention, you have the credibility and then you have the last one, which is trust. And trust is where the transaction starts to happen. And this is once the, the biggest thing about this one is that once you have earned trust, that does not mean you have it forever. Okay? Trust is something that comes and goes, it ebbs and flows, it's up, it's down. And so the really the focus here is to make sure that once you get somebody to trust you enough to actually take money out of their wallet and give it to you for something, you need to make sure that you over deliver as much as you possibly can on that thing so they will to trust you and continue to transact with you along the way. Because if they have one bad experience, it's really difficult to bring them back from the dead after they trusted you with some money. Even if it's a small amount of money, by the way, it doesn't matter if they spent 10 grand or they spent 10 bucks. Whatever you're delivering to them at that dollar amount should over deliver for them so that they are willing to. When they see another thing that you're putting out, they go, ah, well that last thing I did ended up working out really well for me. So why don't I go ahead and do this thing? And I kind of learned this the hard way because when I was one of the funnels that I was for a podcast profit academy back in the day, we had a order bump on the sales page and it was like, I don't, I don't remember what it was. I was like 27 bucks or something. And I had, I had a few people that reached out for a refund because they were like, oh, this is a, you know, this 30 minute training could have been a podcast episode. It wasn't worth the 27 bucks. Can I get the 27 bucks back? And it was on a product that was like a hundred bucks. And then we even put it on the checkout page of a thousand dollar product and it was like, well, why wouldn't we do it? People take it all, you know, 30, 40% of the time. Why wouldn't we throw that there? Because it's going to make us extra money. Money. And then when I looked at it, it was like, well, the extra money that we were making on that was not worth the brand reputation that we were losing because the training was not worth the 27 bucks that we put it at and assigned a dollar amount to. So it was sort of a lesson for me to say, just because you can sell something for a certain price does not mean that you should continue to sell. It is like the, the, the, the question you should be asking yourself is not does this convert but does this continue to earn me trust? Does this continue to build brand reputation in a positive way? Potentially hurt my brand over time? Because if you're making those short term decisions, you might be able to back out of your, your numbers a little bit better. But long term you're going to suffer and you're going to be on this constant flywheel of super razor thin margins because you're not continually earning trust with the people who've come into your world and increasing the lifetime value of each potential customer, which is how you build the business to be successful long term. So the act, method, attention, credibility, trust. This is how we build relationships at scale online. If you have any questions, as usual, hit me up on Instagram. Travis Chappell, shoot me a email. Travis.travischapple,.com Be happy to chat with you a little bit over there. Thanks so much for tuning this episode. Catch you in the next one. Peace.