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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 episode of the Travis Makes Money podcast where it's our mission to help you make more money. Today on the show, it's just me, you and the mic. It's just. Just the two of us. Just the two of us. Strangely, even though there's probably more than two people listening, this is a solo show. So if you're new to the show, basically what we do is every single day, at least for the month of February, we're going to see if we can keep this release schedule up. But we're doing three episodes every single day. Pretty unprecedented. What we're doing is basically we have a solo show that goes out every morning. We have a co host show that goes out with me and my producer Eric, and we also have an interview that goes out every day. So you get a little bit of inspiration, a little bit of motivation, a little bit of practicality sprinkled throughout your entire day. So these episodes, these solo shows are really just, just me and you and the mic talking about some things that I've learned over the years. Probably have read over 200 books in the last decade. I don't Countless, countless hours of podcast listening. And I'm just constantly, always learning something new. So it seems like, why not share some of the information that I'm learning? Because obviously the best way to learn something is to teach it. So this is sort of like personal project for me to do these solo shows just to kind of keep myself sharp and, and share some of the stuff that I've been learning a lot recently. So the topic of today's episode is how to gain influence. Now, when I first got started in the online space, I started reading as many books as I put as I possibly could about this topic. Really, it was more like the psychology of Persuasion. So all of Robert Cialdini's books He has one that's really underrated. The most well known is called influence, which is the topic of today's show. And then he has another one called pre suasion. And then he has another one that's I think it's called yes, like 50 scientifically proven ways to get the. Yes, all three of the books are fantastic books, but this was one of the first topics that I really started learning about, and it's come up again recently because it's been a long time since I did a deep dive into this topic, yet it remains as one of the most important things that any of us, especially as business owners and entrepreneurs, can learn. And if you're starting to get into business, whether you're, you know, trying to get your real estate license or you're starting some digital marketing course or something like that, and you're trying to figure out how to make more money, influence is something that you cannot avoid. You have to become a person of influence. So how do we do that? There's three things that I, that I've written down here. Three things that I've found to be extremely helpful for me in gaining my own, you know, level of influence that I've gained throughout the years. Number one is probably the thing that people leave out the most, and it is become a person of interest. So there's this, this saying that people threw around in networking. And the reason that I know that is because this show used to be called build your network. So I used to do basically talk about nothing other than networking and building relationships and things. We. We still talk about that a lot. I just moved away from the word networking. I don't know why. I just kind of sounds slimy. And I just think. I just think that once you start assigning the word networking to something, you start getting into this weird world of like, you know, quid pro quo type BS that only worked in this sort of like 1980 version of like, where networking became this huge buzzword and topic. And I found it to just not do very well on in today's culture. And so now it's, you know, it's travis makes money and then the other shows, Travis makes friends. But it's still a lot about friendship and relationships. And the, the phrase that somebody told me pretty early on when I started built to network was, I think it was the father of modern networking, Ivan Meisner. He said, be interested, not interesting. Because what happens in most quote unquote networking scenarios is people show up wanting to impress. They make everything about them, which is why they have a thousand hot off the press business cards, they have the name tag, they have their 30 second elevator pitch memorized, and they're going to go around to every single person that they can at that event and try to basically talk about themselves as much as they possibly can, try to convince somebody to do business with them. And then once they can't do business with them, once they've identified that they can't do business with them, then they move on to the next person. And so that, that advice is something that I used a lot. Be interested, not interesting. So, so be interested in the other person and, and have something, have, have questions you can fall, fall back on to initiate conversations so that you can figure out if you have any commonalities and then strike further on those commonalities and then use that as sort of a springboard into building a genuine relationship to last over a long period of time. So interested, not interesting. However, I found it to sort of be the not necessarily complete opposite, but it depends on the context, I suppose, where being interesting is actually still a really valuable piece of the equation. And the first time that we started doing this was when we built this podcast guest booking agency. So this was the, the business that started out of my software company, Guestio. We started an agency where basically we would go out, we'd get people booked on podcasts. That business did over a million dollars in eight months. And the reason for that, I think, is that people wanted influence. They wanted to gain status or influence, which is why they wanted to go be in other people's audiences. And when we would work on people's pitches, right, like, so that we, we, we'd get this whole intake form, this onboarding form of all this information about this person, you know, what have they done, what are the accomplishments that they've had in the past, et cetera, et cetera. And when we, when we got those things, we started making this list what we call badass Bullets. Because what we wanted to do is basically overwhelm whatever host that we were pitching with this particular guest. Overwhelm them with, overwhelm them with evidence that they are going to perform really well on the podcast. And so that's when I sort of started saying, like, yeah, it's not necessarily just be interested, not interesting. It's actually really a combination of the both of those things. Because the answer to the question that people pose all the time to me, which is, can you get me on fill in the blank in terms of like their dream podcast or media publication or outlet or Whatever. Most of the time it had to do with the factor of whether or not they were an interesting enough guest are like, have you done enough cool stuff? Have you actually. Do you have the accomplishments that back up the ideas that you're trying to get out into the world? And obviously the people with the most evidence, the highest, the highest degree of evidence are the people who end up landing those dream appearances. We're talking, you know, the, the, the life, the, the, the game changing ones, the diary of a CEO or you know, the Joe Rogans or whatever. But when you look at the, the common denominators between the guests on those shows, all that really, really they have in common is that they're really, really good at something or they've done something super unique or interesting. And that's what is, that's what makes them a draw. That's what makes them, makes those hosts want to interview those guests. Because in this world in particular, those hosts get thousands and thousands of pitches every single month and they only have a few spots to fill. So you have to have done something very, very interesting. So the very first thing that I wrote down is become a person of interest. Because that I think is really under. Is a way to gain influence without even really trying to gain influence. Like a lot of people are trying to gain influence and you can tell because they're constantly just playing this game of positioning and posturing and they're frankly just kind of annoying. But the people who do it really well are people who've done really interesting cool things and then they have a network of people who are around them that can't shut up about those things. Like those people become the evangelists for them. Just be, just by very nature of the fact that they've done some epic stuff in life. So if you are looking at your resume and you're looking at the opportunities that you want to attract and you see some sort of a discrepancy, there's delta between the people who have gained these opportunities and you, then your goal is then to fill that gap and fill it not only with just more, you know, rungs on the ladder in the, in the field or whatever that you're really good at, right? So like to, to bring some practicality to this. Let's say you're a, a business consultant. I'm not necessarily saying like, go accomplish more things in the business consultant space, although that is a path. I'm saying like, how can you wr. Round out your whole life story to make you seem like a more interesting person? To be around an interesting person, to connect with an interesting person to have done stuff with. How can you, how can you further that story? So whether it's, you know, really, really hard and difficult stuff like running an ultra marathon or climbing Mount Everest or doing four Ironmans this year, or it's way less than that. Like I, I've been to all the NFL football stadiums or you know, like, my point is to say that like, if you have interesting things and you gain influence by the very nature of the interesting things that you've done, because you have become a person of interest and a person of interest can gain influence through that path. So I mentioned that one first because of the one I think that most people don't ever talk about. The second one, this is the more obvious one, and the one that's inescapable is become a person of value. The if, if there's, if there's one thing that you can do to gain influence, it's to give value. Value equals influence. The more value that you give, the more influence that you have. And this is true from a creator persp. If you look at somebody like a Gary Vaynerchuk, dude's given away a ton of value over the years. He's somebody who consistently adds value all the time and that value translates directly to influence. But it's also true of somebody who has a much smaller audience than that. Whether we're talking about somebody who's got a, you know, a thousand followers, ten thousand followers, somebody just getting started in the space, if you, or even, even if, if it's in like a one on one mentorship capacity, you just have somebody who has asked you some questions from time to time. Well, if you've actually given value or information or advice or, or something, some piece of knowledge that you've passed on to this person and they've taken that and done something with it and it's, and it's provided some sort of value in their life, that person is somebody who you have, quote, unquote, influence over. Because they're much, much, much more likely now to do the next thing that you asked them to do, because the first thing that you asked them to do ended up working out really well for them. So if you, if you don't have any value to offer and you're not actually actively offering value to other people, you're going to find building influence to be really difficult. And you're probably just going to start doing all these like backdoor channels that you're trying to it through, which is how most this is, this is like the path to scam. Artistry to me is, is like there's no actual substance. You're just looking for the effect of the influence that you can gain rather than the substance of the influence which is gained through the value. Now that value does not necessarily have to mean like life changing career advice. It could just be entertainment, right? The A list celebrities would be a great example of this. Somebody who has, you know, an athlete or an actor. Somebody who has not necessarily taught you the keys to life, but somebod who's added a lot of value to your life in forms of the entertainment that they provide to you. That is also a piece of value, which is obviously like when you have the Mr. Beasts of the World and the Rock and people like that, they have tremendous influence over hundreds of millions of people because they have, quote, unquote added value to those audiences. They have earned the trust of those audiences over time. And that value gets exchanged for influence along the way. Which is why the Rock can launch a tequila brand and have it be the single most successful launch of any spirits company in the history of the world. Because of the influence that he had over the large audience that, that he was able to build over enough time of adding value through entertainment. So become a person of interest, become a person of value and then become a person of consistency. So the, this last piece just has a little bit more to do with trust. It's not necessarily, it's not necessarily the volume of time that somebody spends with you as much as it is the frequency of the time that they do spend with you. Meaning the longer that you do this, the longer that you stay in the game, the longer you're a person of interest, the longer you're a person of value, the more influence you're going to have as like a, as sort of this like long tail effect. Just because you continually add value over time and that's why, that's why you can't sleep on short form content creation. Because you know, it might be a tweet that somebody reads in three and a half seconds, but if they do that a hundred times over the course of three months or a thousand times over the course of five years, then you still gain a tremendous amount of influence because of the value that you're continuing to offer over a long period of time. Not to mention the consistency piece in and of itself makes you a more trustworthy person because you continue to show up every single day way and put in the work. And that by itself is going to earn trust and influence over time. So become a person of interest, become a person of value, and become a person of consistency. Three quick ways to gain more influence this year. That's it for today's episode. Thanks for tuning in. We'll catch you guys on the next one. Peace.