Kyle Gray is an entrepreneur, the founder of ConversionCake, and a bestselling author who helps startups and small businesses grow their businesses with content marketing. He has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs create scalable content marketing strategies while also creating step-by-step processes and templates to automate and delegate tasks. Kyle’s book The Story Engine outlines his process for making content marketing and brand storytelling easy and effective.
In today’s conversation with Kyle, we’re talking about how to use storytelling to become an authority in your niche while boosting sales and winning the hearts and minds of your audience. In other words, we’re exploring how you can start selling with story. My biggest takeaway from this conversation is that using story in your marketing really does sell and it is what cuts through the noise and nonstop interruption based marketing techniques that you see all over social media.
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Anne Janzer is an award-winning author on a mission to help writers communicate more effectively. She has worked with over a hundred technology businesses, from industry giants to innovative start-ups, helping them articulate positioning and messaging in crowded markets. Anne also coaches business leaders on communicating their ideas with impact, clarity and marketing teams on telling brand stories that strengthen customer relationships.
During this podcast, I explore why so many businesses are moving to subscription based business models with Anne. We also dive into the how’s and why’s behind whether or not you should consider integrating a subscription model into your business.
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If entrepreneurship is the process by which value is created where less (or none) existed before, then the entrepreneur is the person who initiates and leads this value-creation process.
Here's how it works:
When new value is created, the customer receives some portion of this value. It could be faster speeds. More storage. An improved or refined UI/UX. You get the point.
At the same time, the entrepreneur typically captures a small piece of this newly created value. This is called profit.
This profit allows the operation to support itself while it continues to grow (so it can continue to provide more value to more people).
What this boils down to is this:
Entrepreneurship is an extraction process.
For instance, the extraction of physical commodities like oil and natural gas, or the cultivation and extraction of food, water, and shelter. These things, once extracted, can then be distributed to people who need or want them.
Most people think of these sorts of activities when they contemplate entrepreneurship because these are obvious areas where entrepreneurs can make a positive impact.
However, if you stop here, you miss the full scope and power of the "entrepreneurial approach."
The extraction process also applies to non-tangibles, such as information. Because systems and processes are critical for growth, the success of any venture depends on the person who can extract and implement the best ideas.
Here's why this is important:
It means you don't have to be a founder or CEO to be an entrepreneur. Thinking otherwise is a short-sighted, and self-defeating worldview (which is as true for the employee as it is for the employer).
Everyone, from the newest higher to the 20 year veteran, can think and act like an entrepreneur for his company, team, or project. These are the type of people you might call linchpins.
Cultivating the entrepreneurial mindset, then, is a critical task for all organizations, big and small.
And that's exactly why GE invited me to their premiere leadership event of the year to help teach their most promising executives and managers how to cultivate entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial mindset in their employees.
We did this by assembling a panel of proven entrepreneurs who have succeeded across a wide range of domains and industries. I then extracted their best insights on business, marketing, creativity, and leadership during a live panel interview.
The full training is below.
Megan Reamer is the co-founder and CEO of Jackson's Honest, a healthy foods company. Jackson's Honest makes potato chips, tortilla chips and grain free puffs all cooked in organic coconut oil.
Megan and her husband Scott started Jackson's Honest as a way to share their son Jackson's story and the delicious snack foods they made for him.
They've since had their products featured on the the shelves of Whole Foods all around the country and have impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the globe.
Patrick Vlaskovits is an entrepreneur and 2 time New York Times bestselling author. His writing has been featured in the Harvard Business Review and the Wall Street Journal, and he speaks at technology conferences worldwide.
Patrick is founder and CEO of Superpowered Inc, a TechStars funded startup that is the leading interactive audio development platform for desktop, mobile, IoT and embedded devices.
Bret Boyd is the CEO of Knoema, a software platform for data access and discovery. At Knoema, Bret and his team build tools to help public and private-sector organizations make better decisions with data.
Bret began his career as an infantry officer in the US Army. Bret has published numerous articles on technology, strategy, and change management and is the coauthor of "Catalyst: Leadership and Strategy in a Changing World."
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Joshua Zloof is the CEO of Sudden Coffee, a premium instant coffee brand. He has 10 years of combined experience in Mobile App Product Management, Lean Operations, Supply Chain, and Logistics.
I brought Joshua onto In The Trenches to discuss his startup journey and what it was really like for him to develop his idea and actually launch it. To many, Joshua’s idea of founding a premium instant coffee company might sound bizarre, because we equate “instant coffee” with “cheap”. However, during today’s episode you will learn that the two are not mutually exclusive. I think what Joshua has done to build his business with various marketing techniques and experiments is really quite fascinating, and so my biggest takeaway is just that... It’s okay to do something different and to go against what everyone else is doing because it might just pay off - in real life and online.
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Connie Ward is career coach and counselor. After crashing and burning as a broker working in financial services, she decided to help people in a new way. This lead her to creating the "Passion And Purpose Mastermind" for people who are confused about their career path, wanting to start a business or those who are in business and want to help more people.
In particular, she is using Meetup as a marketing channel to help people grow their client-based businesses.
In today’s call, we focus on Connie's 10 step strategy for client generation and precisely how to use Meetup.com to get clients consistently. I think this is a particularly interesting conversation because I've not seen anyone use Meetup.com the way Connie uses for lead generation.
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Nick Usborne is an online copywriter and site optimization expert with over 20 years of experience online. During a career spanning 40 years in the marketing industry – offline and then online – he has worked with dozens of major companies. Since 1997, he has been working exclusively on marketing online and internationally recognized as a leading expert on the subject of writing for the Web.
He attributes his success to “conversational copywriting,”.
In today's conversation, we talk about, why is conversational copywriting the future of not just copywriting in general, but also for all interactions online? How do we write to engage with our customers and clients? Because if you can engage the readers, and if you write copy that gets responses, that gets people replying, sharing, and taking action, that's the purpose of copywriting right?!
You are probably implementing this idea of conversational copywriting into your email sequences, your social media strategy or your sales page strategy, even if you don't know it. I think the most effective operators are already writing this way and the chances are that your favorite newsletter or something like that, is written in a very conversational style.
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AJ Wilcox is an online marketer since 2007 and founder of B2Linked which is a LinkedIn Ads performance agency.
Extremely active in the online marketing community, he is a LinkedIn Certified Ads Partner, and he manages the official LinkedIn Ads group forum, and he is a board member of SLC | SEM among other things. An exotic car nut and a triathlete. He lives in Utah with his wife and four kids.
In today's call, AJ and I discuss: How he got his start growing this agency? How he was leaving from his company as an employee and then decided to start this company from scratch and what that process was like, and also how quickly he got it up and running to a point where it replaced his day job income, and then somebody has grown substantially since then?
All right. Let's go ahead and dive into today's conversation.
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Subscribe to In The Trenches on iTunes
Did you enjoy today's broadcast of In The Trenches? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.
Travis Ketchum is the founder & CEO of the contest-optimizing service Contest Domination. Since 2012, Travis’s software has helped businesses grow their email lists and create new customers through online contests and giveaways.
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Antonio Centeno, originally a US marine, worked for Google writing over 100 men’s style and fashion articles that have over 800,000 views. Today, with over 11 years of experience in men’s style, Antonio is CEO of Real Men Real Style where he creates videos, podcasts, and articles on Men’s Style. With a focus on dressing men to impact others and make more money, Antonio has turned his content platform into a million dollar business.
Today, I sit down with Antonio to better understand what it takes to monetize content (to the tune of 7-figures), reframe failure, and create meaningful relationships.
https://www.realmenrealstyle.com
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I watched the new Steve Jobs movie last week.
Spoiler: he invents the iMac.
The point of the flick: paint a portrait of the guy that created the iPod, the round, partially-translucent, magenta colored desktop computer, and giant smartphones called iPads.
It seems the writer-director combo decided the best way to do this would be to time-travel the viewer to three (maybe four, I lost count) separate moments right before Jobs was about to go on stage to share his latest brain-melting gadget.
Without fail, each pre-stage moment is full of last minute technical issues, conversations with the mother of his child whom he denied for years was his own, and employee/coworker-Jobs conflict (the same employees and coworkers each time...before every major launch...launches that are years apart from one another...).
While the story structure was admirable, I couldn’t help but feel like sometimes I was watching a Birdman-esque comedy, not a memoir-drama (I mean, there had to be a better time to discuss paternity tests, or challenge the CEO's leadership style than right before he goes on stage every year, right?).
Anyway, this got me thinking about the concept of "target audience" - the people for whom you make your product, art, or writing.
Two questions came to mind:
The answer to the first question is die-hard Apple fans, as far as I can tell
The answer to the second question? Steve Jobs built the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad for people who:
1. want to be seen with the product in their hands (they want the status symbol)
2. who can afford to buy the product (they have wealth)
3. who do buy the product (they take action)
The third point here is key.
You see, it doesn't matter if Jobs only accomplished 1 and 2 above. That's all well and good, but that just puts it in the same category as every other high-end consumer product that doesn't sell and fails (like Apple's own Newton).
Where Jobs excelled was getting people to do number 3: buy his product.
He was a master salesman for the upper and middle-upper-class (and their kids).
As a result, Apple is now the most profitable company in the world.
And according to the movie, that's not an accident. It was by design.
Steve knew who he wanted to be known by: the people who would put money in his hands for the work he did.
And just as crucially: he never catered to anyone else.
(there's a reason the company is the most profitable...and it has everything to do with why most of the world operates on hardware and operating systems not produced by Apple)
Who do you want to be known by?
This is not a rhetorical question. And if the answer is everyone, you're off to a bad start.
Defining, finding, and getting in front of a specific group of people who are willing to pay for your products and services is the only way to get traction in business; it's the only way to develop systems and processes that can scale; it's the only way to build profitability.
Who do you want to be known by?
This is the question that will help you define your target audience; this is the question that will help you find your first 1,000 true fans in a specific, well-paying niche; this is the question that will help you become the best in the world at what you do.
Who do you want to be known by?
This is the most important question - everything else is secondary.