Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

Business Success Begins by DOING

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 213

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If you're listening to this podcast, you're doing so in hopes of implementing my advice or that from my guests in your company or own business.

As a content creator, the greatest respect you can pay me is in implementing what I teach.

In launching my group coaching membership community Digital First, I realize that many people get stuck with their digital marketing and simply don't execute. You can listen to as many podcasts and read as many blog posts and watch as many YouTube videos as you like - the information you need is all there, but if you don't begin on the journey of execution you can't be on your way to business success.

Yes, this is a topic you've probably heard before, but I wanted to send you all a reminder based on recent conversations and executions I have seen in my own community. You don't have to join my community to become successful at digital marketing, but if you don't have a network of "doers" to surround yourself with and be inspired by, go find one - TODAY!

Key Highlights

[2:20] Neal's Group Coaching, Digital First
A community of mentors that provides education about Digital Marketing through training videos.

[3:43] Importance of Taking Action

[6:43] You Learn by Taking Action and Doing It

[8:05] How Neal Launched His Podcast From Scratch
Neal created a 26-minute video where he shared how he started his podcast from scratch. He aims to inspire beginners to do it and try something new. There is no excuse in starting and creating content whether it be a podcast, blog, YouTube, or an Instagram channel.

[12:11] Leveraging Relationships, Internet, and Social Media When Creating a Business
There's so much information you can get from the internet, social media, and your network that can actually help you build your business from scratch

[14:08] Leveraging Digital and Social Media in Various Ways

[16:48] Skyrocket Your Business By Having The Right Tools and Mindset

Notable Quotes

  • I'm trying to motivate people to pursue whatever they want to do to help them utilize digital marketing as their engine of growth.
  • If you've been thinking about it, stop thinking about it, stop reading the blog post, do it.
  • Doer's win. You're not going to succeed every time, especially in digital and social media marketing. But with every piece of content that you publish, with every product that you promote, you get closer to figuring out a lot of things because it's digital. We can get the data, and we can learn from the data. And we can continue to build and build and build assets through these experiences.
  • With the Internet, and with digital and social media, anything is possible. You can create a business from scratch, and get it up there tomorrow. And there's just so much information out there.
  • Today, there is a service for everythin

Learn More:

Neal Schaffer:

What is stopping you from taking action? This is either going to be my shortest episode ever, or my longest episode ever. But this is a special message to all of my listeners of the maximize your social influence podcast. Stay tuned for the details. Welcome to the maximize your social influence podcast with Neal Schaffer, where I help marketers, entrepreneurs, and business owners grow their businesses using innovative marketing techniques, leveraging the concept of digital influence throughout digital and social media. Hey, everybody, welcome to episode number 213. That's 213. When I grew up in Los Angeles, county, two and three was actually our area code, which over the years, because we've had so many people moving to California, we've gone through new area codes after new area codes. But anyway, the two and three, at least where I used to live in grew up no longer exists. But that number still has a special place in my heart has nothing to do with today's episode. But hey, welcome to the maximize your social influence podcast. If you're new here, I both through solo episodes, and by bringing in intriguing, informative, and really cool people that I consider to be nice and friendly as guests. And we uncover a lot of what's going down in digital and social media marketing. And it's really to help you build your business, grow your business, all through the unique lens of influence. Now, since starting this podcast, and I started this back in 2013, it's gone through a lot of different changes. And I think starting in July, right now I'm recording this, well, this will be published in June of 2020. Once on July, it's going to go through a further change. And I'm going to tweak it a little bit. Now my episodes where I broadcast. So I'm going to keep doing those. I think that's important for me as a speaker, it's also important for me to have a direct touch with you and to share what I'm learning. Because I know some of you obviously tune in because you not only want to learn from my guests, but you want to learn from me as well. But as far as my guests go, I'm going to be starting to drink a little bit of my own medicine. Now some of you may remember, some of you might not remember, but back on April 1 is two months ago, I launched a new group coaching membership community called Digital first. And it's really a combination of my group coaching, which I do an hour a week. But it's also a combination of education through training videos that I'm also creating on a weekly basis. But more than that a community of mentors. And what's really interesting is a community is an organic entity. And it can go in a lot of different directions. I feel like I'm like the cheerleader, right, I'm trying to motivate people to pursue whatever they want to do to help them utilize digital marketing as their engine of growth. And what I've noticed is since starting a lot of people coming in, have seeked out this community, and we're almost starting to create a great little niche here of people that want to do. So there are people that want to learn. And that's why it's not a course, right? It's a community. So some people take courses, but they never implemented. Or some people don't take a course and they try to figure out how to implement it. And they read blog posts, listen to podcasts, they don't know if they're going the right direction, they're wasting time. And often the end result isn't what they thought it might be. So I take in all these people into the digital first community and help them in whatever pursuit it is. And the number one thing is to take action. So what's really encouraging just over it's been less than two months since I launched this with my founding members. We already have people that have launched podcasts, we have people that are building agencies, they're gonna launch free courses to bring people into their funnel, we have people that are creating courses, we have people that are creating communities, like the community I created, we have people that are doing and creating. And in the midst of it, we're also working together to create business models. I have a video editor in the community. And he's trying to figure out a way to create sort of a service that can help him shift from corporate employee to entrepreneur. And I'm thinking you know what, when I've worked with companies in the past, I worked with a lot of technology companies and I had my social tool summit this conference back a few years ago. And I was always giving them the advice so that they would create the tool that would best meet my needs. On I'm not going to name names, but there are a few social media tools that existed on a shuffle button to shuffle the content in a queue. Some of those actually came from me, constantly telling them that I have this evergreen content in queue, but I want to shuffle up when it goes out there. I don't want To go out like the same day of the month, every month. So in a similar way, I am doing the same thing with people and their skill sets, and trying to figure out how they can create a business model that would actually serve me. And it would actually serve my clients. And in doing so, I know that they're going to be able to expand that to a larger number of people doing this video added right now, we have a course creator who wants to teach other course creators how to create courses. And once again, we're going to go above and beyond just learning about digital marketing, but really leveraging leveraging it as your engine of business growth, very business focused. And I'm mentioning all this not to promote my membership community, which obviously, I'm naturally doing. But it's the art of doing. If I did not launch the membership community, I would have never known if there was a demand for it. Now there's something to be said for surveying people. And you know, in the words of Pat Flynn, will it fly, there's something to be said for doing your homework and doing your research. But until you launch, you don't know. until you actually create a podcast, you don't know what goes into it. You don't know how actually, it doesn't have to take as much time as you might think. In fact, I think podcasting might be the most effective type of content creation, when we compare a sort of podcast, blog, YouTube video, and then you know, photos slash stories, slash reels, and that whole Instagram, tik tok world. But you don't know until you get into the groove of doing it. And what I've learned is that I got to do it to learn it. Now. I live to help others to serve others with their digital marketing and raising their influence in the world and growing their business. So to me, I have to do a lot of this stuff for r&d. So for instance, I have a web host. And I realized that I signed up for this web host a few years ago, and there's much more inexpensive solutions that are out there. And because I never set up the first web host myself, I don't know how to do it. I should know as a digital entrepreneur, how to move a WordPress site from one site to another, so that I'm in control. And I have that knowledge, I'm not afraid to do it again. And so I did it, I actually not only moved to one site, but after I moved, they put me on such poor architecture that I ended up moving to another site. And if you're curious, I ended up moving from siteground to a site called ACU web hosting, where my site crashed every day. And then I moved it now to dreamhost, where so far I'm really happy with. But here's the thing you got to do, you got to do to learn. And even if it's your own r&d, you're not sure if a podcast is right for your organization. But you've been thinking about it, stop thinking about it, stop reading the blog post, do it. Set up a calendar record. If you need editing services, go to Fiverr and Upwork. That's how I found my editor. I can't recommend these services enough. And just do it and get it out there. It's not hard. I have a video on YouTube youtube.com slash Neal Schaffer, how to launch a podcast from scratch to 26 minute video. It shows you actually using a platform I use wish ca which are my partners for my school of influence podcasts actually show you how I launched the School of influence in that video. And there's other content like that like that out there as well. There is no excuse for not creating, whether it's you want to launch a blog, launch a podcast, launch a YouTube channel, launched an Instagram channel, start doing reels, or you just want to completely revamp what you're doing. You're not sure if it's right. You want to revise it, you want to try something new. You want to try to sell a new product. You don't know if your list is going to react to it. What you got to get it out there first. And you'll never know regardless of how much survey data you can take in advance. And that's the main message here. Dewar's win. Okay, you're not going to succeed every time, especially in digital and social media marketing. But here's the thing, with every piece of content that you publish, with every product that you promote, you get closer to figuring out a lot of things because it's digital, we can get the data, and we can learn from the data. And we can continue to build and build and build asset through these experiences. I love I mean, I really love digital and social media marketing, because it is this experimental playground you've probably heard me talk about, you know, we all need to be doing more experimenting in social media. And I want to repeat that again. Just do it. I'm not like an Instagram real creator. But it wasn't hard to just take something I was going to post as a story, add a song to it, and put it up on reels to get a few 1000 impressions rather than a few 100 impressions. It didn't take me long to realize, well, if I want my blog to rank higher for influencer marketing content, which my book the age of influence is about, I got to start blogging about influencer marketing. And as a result, I now rank pretty high for a lot of influencer marketing related keywords. If I want my YouTube videos to perform better, I can't just repurpose and take what I did elsewhere and just plop it on YouTube, I have to make a video for that audience. So I'm going to find an editor for vid for YouTube, just like I find an editor for my podcasts. Or if I want to launch a product, if I want to do drop shipping or find someone in China to create a big product for me. I am currently working you know, my daughter, who is a sophomore in high school is actually interning for my company, right. So I'm trying to teach her some of this entrepreneurial things, her high school offers a business cohort. So she's actually taking part in that. And the hours that she works with me are part of like the internship hours that she needs to graduate from that cohort. So she introduced me to one of her friends, and he's Chinese. Now if you go to Neal schaffer.com, and you do a search for like WeChat, or Chinese social media, I have had a few writers over the years that have contributed some great content that still ranks well. And immediately, he said, he doesn't have any business experience. He's a sophomore in high school, but he wants to learn and get internship experience. So great. Let's work on creating new blog content about China. But because you're Chinese, you can actually do the research in Chinese find the statistics and case studies. And you can write some pretty compelling content. But after that, he's like, when do where does that fit in your business. I'm like, it generates website traffic. And I have gotten interest from some Chinese companies that want to do business in the US and need help with their marketing or American companies, or like American schools that are trying to attract Chinese students. I've had some of that, you know, business in the pipeline. But it's like, you know what, we can create our own business here. If we get enough people at the end of each blog post, hey, you want to learn more how to market your company in China, join our webinar, and I can have him like create a one hour webinar, evergreen webinar. And on the back end, he has relationships in China, he can find like a marketing agency. And maybe it's just we funnel business over to them, I don't know, right? But with the Internet, and with digital and social media, anything is possible. You can create a business from scratch, and get it up there tomorrow. And there's just so much information out there. I tell people how lucky they are. When I published windmill networking, understanding, leveraging and maximizing LinkedIn for business. Yes, I'm bringing my I'm not even banging my palm. But it sounds like I'm being mean. But anyway, that was in 2009, there weren't resources to help me. format it. I had to actually hire my nephew, to do the book formatting, and to do the cover, and then his girlfriend's good friend, I hired to be the editor. It was more like who in my network might be able to help me with this. But today, there is a service for everything. There is help for everything you want to achieve. So if you don't have time to do it, there are others who can help you do it. And that's the message. Like I said, My podcasts are very much freeform. This podcast originally launched. If you go back to the first episode, it was originally called Social Business unplugged, it's unplugged. I'm not going to like read a blog post to you over podcast. It's the spoken word. And yes, I have bullet points. I actually for this episode, I don't have bullet points. But often I will have bullet points and things I want to cover. But it's really just coming from the heart as if we were on a zoom call together or better in person at Starbucks, this is the message I would be telling you stop waiting, start implementing, stop researching, start executing. You have all the information you need. And you know what, if you don't think you're have the information you need, you go to the information when you need it. But there's a lot of things you can do now, without having to go to the information. And that's the message now, if you want I mean if you really enjoy the tone, and you want to be together with people that think like this, that are doers. And we're all sort of helping each other out along the way as we conquer our own industries and our own world, leveraging digital and social and in these various ways. It's an open invitation to join my community, it is a paid community. The current price is $49 a month that make up my founding members obviously got in at the lowest price possible. I think for $49 a month it's it's not a lot of money for the support in the community that you're buying into. And that price will go up because there's just an incredible amount of value that's been given. But that's it right? It's It's not a big investment. And if this meshes with you, and it's like yes, I want to do more. I'm sick of doing the research. I want to be able to go Neil, I'm thinking of creating course, what are the leading platforms? What are the ways in which people are automating it? Those are things that for me is bread and butter. Those are the types of questions I respond, Neil, how do I optimize my blog post for SEO? Boom, I'll create a training video and show you how what tools I use for that. Boom here are the tools and by the I have some tools vendors that I work with from an affiliate perspective. They give my community discounts, right, extended free trials or discounted prices here, use the link and then use this coupon code. And you'll get that. It's funny because when I wrote that first book, back in 2000, I wound mill networking, I consider myself very much the open networker, and what I love about the community, and I guess as an extension of this podcast, is my ability once again to network, but not network, with connections, but network with ideas, and network with information with the sole goal of just serving others, and helping them launch grow or truly scale their business. So a different episode, I know. But sometimes, there's something holding us back from doing things. I'm the same way. my new ebook that I promised you, it's been delayed, I wanted to get the cover real perfect. And now I'm working on the interior design. At some point, I just got to get it out there. And I will. So I'm drinking my own medicine. I want you to do the same with Coronavirus. And I know in other parts of the world, it's taken a little bit longer. But here in the United States clearly, you know, in a county of 3.3 million people that is Orange County, California, at the peak, we had daily infections, new infections of COVID 5000 6000 7000. Yesterday, it was 11. It has been consistently under 100. For the last three weeks, I believe every day and even though people are clearly more open about not wearing masks and what have you. So clearly, we're coming to the tail end, and things are going to explode. And I want to make sure that you as a listener, and as part of my general community, have the tools and the mindset to be able to leverage that and skyrocket your business together with the explosion that we're gonna see. So that's my challenge to you. And I hope you'll accept that challenge. And if you need a little bit of accountability, a little bit of hand holding, and you want to be together with people like I described, it will be in the show notes, if you go to Neal Schaffer comm slash membership. But that is where my digital first community sits. I also want to let you know by the time you hear this, I would have already spoken on two different events, one on leveraging video for social media marketing with my friends over at zoom, and play play. And then I'm being I'm speaking part of the SM x growth summit on how to launch your first influencer marketing campaign as a small business, I do lots of events, make sure if you want to be in the know, I'm really bad at self promotion. I know it sounds hard to believe. And you may not believe me, but I'm not like bombarding you on this podcast every time I do an event, but I will send that out once to my list. So make sure you go to Neal Schaffer calm, you'll be able to find widgets to sign up on I mean, if you can't let me know, and I'll sign you up, but but sign up. And I'll be in touch and I'll let you know. And you'll be able to take advantage of all these events. And I plan on doing a lot more of these actually, with with technology partners, as well as with other people I know from the industry. So that's it for another episode of The maximize your social influence podcast. As always, I really appreciate your feedback. I know that leaving a comment might not be the easiest thing to do, if you are listening to this podcast while you're driving. But I'd really appreciate it. If you had a moment to just leave a sentence. At some point. I'm going to be reaching out to all those that commented, and at some point, I might start to offer some exclusive benefits for being part of my extended community. So I don't want to incentivize you with anything specific. I want you to comment from the heart If you like the podcast or if you don't like the podcast, I'd like the feedback as well. But I just want to throw that out there. But anyway, let's end the episode. I think you get the message. Stop waiting. You don't need to ask for permission. You just need to do it. Alright everybody. That's it for another episode of The maximize your social influence podcast. Until we meet again, have a great virtual social day. Bye bye everybody and SEO nada