Entrepreneurship - The Social Media Professor

The Fire Funnel Process by John Lee Dumas at Youpreneur Summit

November 11, 2017 by Niklas Myhr 8 Comments

The opening keynote speaker at the inaugural Youpreneur Summit John Lee Dumas, founder of the popular Entrepreneur on Fire Podcast, shared his Fire Funnel process for digital entrepreneurs. John started out by suggesting that you start with a “Funnel Up Process” to understand who you are going to serve before you design your sales of your “Funnel Down Funnel”.

The Funnel Up process

The Idea. What is your big idea that you want to build upon.
The Niche. Get that initial momentum is key, not easy, but once you get it, you can get things going. Then you can expand your scope. Rather than being Mr or Mrs Social Media of London, you'd be better off helping female dentists in Soho get one new client via Facebook Ads.
The Avatar. Who is that perfect customer, the listener to your podcast, the reader of your blog. Get to know that person in and out and try to identify their struggles.
The Medium of Choice. Blogging, podcasting, video, etc. Which one should you focus on?
The Content Creation. You need a system to setup to make sure you have a process to create great content on a regular basis.
The Repurpose. Once you have a good platform you can find content that can be used on other platforms as well. John uses Repurpose.io to get his podcast episodes elsewhere.
The Growth. How can you help others discover you.
The Audience Engagement. He gets millions of listens of his podcast each month which is absolutely absurd to him but he doesn't want to forget about doing things that don't scale. Don't be scared of having a one-on-one conversation. Yes, they can be time-consuming but that is where the gold is. You can learn about what works and doesn't and develop relationships.
The Solution. How can you help solve their problem and serve them. If you keep this in mind from the start, you will focus on generating the right leads and nurture them from the start.

The Funnel Down Process

Once you have gone through the Funnel Up process, you better know how you can help your audience and then you can design your Funnel Down Process to serve them.

Your lead generation. Now you know who to target.
Your Call to Action. Have a specific thing you want them to do.
Your Audience's Email Exchange.
Your Solution Delivery.
Your Audience Consumes.
Your Next CTA.
Live Training. Here John Lee Dumas emphasized the power of live webinars which is where he has made millions.
Live Q&A. Perhaps there is just one remaining obstacle remaining for someone to buy and if you make yourself available live, you can have it resolved right then and there.
Offer. Provide an offer that is supremely valuable for your audience.
Monetize.

The Fire Funnel by EO Fire

Finally, John Lee Dumas shared how he built an empire around daily podcasts with interviews of entrepreneurs. Check out Entrepreneurs on Fire or EO Fire and enjoy the show! John's final perspective he shared that sums up much of his perspective was a quote by Albert Einstein: “Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.”

The Unsexy Entrepreneur Bares it all

November 28, 2016 by Niklas Myhr Leave a Comment

“Lauren, why aren't you on Twitter? You are missing the boat, it's amazing!” That is the question my friend Mitch Jackson asked his daughter's in-home ACT & SAT tutor Lauren Gaggioli. Lauren took action, became obsessed with digital entrepreneurship after finding the podcasts of the likes of Pat Flynn talking about developing passive income and Michael Hyatt on how to build your online platform.

She drove 7,000 miles a year and worked every day between 3 and 10 pm and never saw her husband. Even if she loved tutoring students and saw great results such as with Mitch's daughter A.J. she decided that this had to stop and she decided to move her business online. First, she developed a course teaching students how to prepare for the ACT & SAT tests. However, she had not primed the pump and found only crickets after launching her online course. If you build it, customers will not necessarily come was the hard lesson.

Then Lauren realized she had to build an audience and trust first and hence her first podcast, The College Admissions Checklist was born. This podcast served as a dual affinity builder by attracting both parents and college counsellors which helped her grow her clientele. Parents, usually moms, wanting to help their kids listened and wanted more of Lauren's help and then she could refer them to her online training. College counselors she developed relationships with by interviewing them on the podcast and in return they often refer business to Lauren as they learn that she knows her stuff.

She found it curious how the big companies in the test prep space had not gotten a handle on good content marketing to build trust and the podcasts they had tried, they had abandoned. This way, Lauren could fill a void in the marketplace and it was more important to get it going rather than making it perfect.

After podcasting for a while, she began networking more and more with other podcasters and famous Walt Disney World Radio show how Lou Mongello has become sort of a mentor for Lauren. Eventually, she was invited to the prestigious Social Media Marketing World to speak on a podcasting panel chaired by Lou Mongello and I personally had the pleasure of attending live when Lauren ruled the show flanked by Chris Ducker and Pat Flynn.

By moving her training to an online course, she freed up her brainspace to focus on digital entrepreneurship. Now she actually has found a new outlet for her thoughts in this arena as she has launched “The Unsexy Side Podcast” where she shares the behind the scenes perspectives of what entrepreneurial life is really like and it is not always a walk the park. This authenticity is key to the organic and successful growth of the brand of Lauren Gaggioli and I can now attest she is a great public speaker too as my social media marketing class at Chapman University stayed engaged for the full hour and were inspired by her genuine enthusiasm and I am too excited to stay connected and follow her next moves on and offline!

My Vote for The Business Podcast of the Year: Smart Passive Income

March 12, 2015 by Niklas Myhr Leave a Comment

2015 is turning out to be yet another “Year of the Podcast” and while I am myself still procrastinating the launch of my own podcast (any week now…), I very much enjoy listening to the podcasts of others during my daily walks with our Goldendoodle Simona (pictured below!).

In addition to following podcasts on social media and digital marketing, I have also been “glued” to the Serial podcast (good luck with your appeal Adnan Syed!) and picked up the Swedish hit interview series “Värvet” now also available in an English-speaking version Varvet Intl.

What I have not done enough of to date, however, is to help spread the word about the podcasts that I recommend others tune into and today marks a particularly timely occasion to start doing more of that. The situation is that one of my favorite podcasters, Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income, is yet again up for a Business Podcast of the Year award. (Beyond the To-Do List by Eric Fisher is another great one amongst the finalists by the way!)

So, why do I think that Pat Flynn is most deserving of this award? For starters, he is generous and transparent with his audience about sharing both his successses (many!) and failures as he conducts a rather impressive series of experiments with his own online entrepreneurial ventures. He even calls himself the “crash test dummy of online business.”

In addition, he features an intriguing list of guests on his show that includes not only the “big names” but also people you've never heard of. Using this approach, Pat effectively illustrates how a varied set of small businesses, solopreneurs, and part-time entrepreneurs can achieve impressive results both cost-effectively and in relatively short order. Through his disarming charm and curious attitude, Pat manages to get guests to open up more than on the average podcast to the benefit of listeners such as me that stands to learn from their experiences.

Niklas Myhr & Pat Flynn at Social Media Marketing World 2014

Tips and tactics shared on Smart Passive Income revolve around how you can best leverage tools, time, and resources for maximum impact and value to the communities you serve. He shares his favorite tools, explains how he uses his time and experiments with his morning routine, and increasingly Pat also includes discussions about how you can scale up a small business through the use of outsourcing without losing the human touch. In this last respect, Pat has been inspired by his best buddy Chris Ducker, the Virtual CEO and author of the eye-opening and best-selling book Virtual Freedom.

There is no doubt that sales and marketing is undergoing a radical transformation fueled by increasingly powerful new technologies and platforms available at low cost and I think it is critical to stay up to date with what those opportunities are regardless of whether you are strive for a corporate life or enter into online entrepreneurship to some extent.

At least, I know that many of my students are looking at all the emerging technologies with a mixed sense of bewilderment and overwhelm and I don't hesitate to recommend they listen to Smart Passive Income for clarity and to get with the game. For corporate managers and executives, I also think it makes sense to learn what a new generation of online startups are up to as they and the companies they work for otherwise risk becoming obsolete unless they too become more responsive to the needs of clients and adopt some of the same tools, principles and strategies as those discussed on Smart Passive Income.

So, if you are not convinced yet that Smart Passive Income is a podcast deserving of your vote as Podcast of the Year, please give it a chance and listen to some episodes first and I think that you'll come around 🙂 Thanks Pat for all the good work that you do that also undoubtedly also helps me stay up-to-date and relevant as a Social Media Professor. I am also looking forward to seeing you and Chris Ducker and learning more about this exciting time of online business and entrepreneurship that we are living in at the 1-Day Business Breakthrough event in San Diego on April 24!

Simona at her lookout post.

A photo posted by Niklas Myhr (@niklasmyhr) on Mar 5, 2015 at 7:31am PST

Internet Marketing In Real Life

April 3, 2013 by Niklas Myhr 3 Comments

Niklas Myhr Melanie Duncan Devin Duncan — With Melanie and Devin

I very much enjoy having my former students visit my classes and today was definitely no exception as my Internet/Social Media Marketing class was visited by Melanie and Devin Duncan. Melanie Duncan graduated in 2008 and met her future husband Devin Duncan while he was also studying at Chapman University. As true serial entrepreneurs, they have worked on, and successfully launched, a number of businesses together including Custom Greek Threads, Luxury Monograms, as well as a business around the Melanie's personal brand. [Read more…]

Confessions of a Pure Play Publisher

January 10, 2013 by Niklas Myhr 6 Comments

Michael Stelzner is the CEO & Founder of Social Media Examiner, currently Technorati's #1 Small Business Blog and #4 blog in the general Business category. In the following video interview, I ask Michael Stelzner to share the “secrets” behind the extremely successful launch of his blog. He also shares these experiences in more detail in his book “Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition,” and please also refer to an interview transcript below.

The Elevation Principle

Stelzner structures his ideas around the so-called Elevation Principle which he describes as follows:

“If you think of your business as a rocket ship and the fuel for your rocket is content. In the elevation principle, I talk about a formula which is great content + other people – marketing messages = growth.”

Content

Stelzner: “The content is made up of two different kinds of fuel. You've got primary fuel and nucleur fuel. Primary fuel has got about a 72 hour shelf life so you need to produce new content regularly of things like how-to articles, case studies, and interviews. Nucleur fuel, harder to create, you do it when you're starting your business or when you have key moments in your business, when you need to really attract a lot of attention. These are things like reports based on surveys or contests.”

Other People

Stelzner: “The other people component has to do with looking outside of your company and tapping the knowledge of experts, people that have written books, people that are experts inside of corporations, and bringing the knowledge that's in their minds to your audience doing a couple of things. First of all, providing great knowledge to your audience but at the same time building potential relationships that can help bring more people to you.”

No Marketing Messages

Stelzner: “The last thing is: no marketing messages. Nobody likes to be sold. So the idea is put those in storage and stop selling, stop putting advertising all around your content. Then your content can be received as a true gift instead of as some sort of a lure that's designed to draw people in. Most businesses haven't quite figured this out, it's a new model but it makes sense because people are tuning out, they don't trust businesses anymore because they are just being marketed to constantly.

So if you can figure out how to use other channels to market, just don't taint your content with marketing messages, save it for a back channel like email. Then you can draw people to you and bring them back, they'll receive it for what it truly should be, which is a gift. If businesses start experimenting with it, they'll begin to see that it is something that really works. They'll get over this ‘why isn't anyone reading my content?' and they'll actually begin having raving fans that want to share that content.”

You Can Join a Crowded Marketplace

I asked Michael to elaborate on “the Internet Paralysis,” the notion that many entrepreneurial initiatives get thwarted when a quick Internet search reveals that someone else already is doing the same thing. This is his response:

“Look, I launched Social Media Examiner in 2009, well into the craze of social media, with no social media experience, and Social Media Examiner is the number 1 Small Business Blog in the world. So, if I can do it, anybody can really do it. There is this ‘oh, it's already been done, I'm not going to do it mentality' but the fact is, there are so many people right now that are involved in social media, yet I was able to do it. I'm the perfect proof that a nobody from nowhere can actually do something quite dramatic.”

A Second Season for Journalists

Stelzner continues: “I believe that content is going to become the magic way to attract people and I know there's a lot of journalists that are out of work. It's great news for writers. Businesses who don't know how to write can reach out for these writers and also they can train up people in their organization that know how to write, how to create that kind of content that is commercial-free.”

Ignore Metcalfe's Law

Metcalfe's Law holds that the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of members in a network and this speaks to the benefits of being a first mover quickly gaining a large market share. Michael Stelzner ignored this law as there were already strong, entrenched players in the social media sector such as Mashable. This is how he describes his situation:

Stelzner: “I don't think that's such a big deal because if you think about it, people are always going to be interested in solving specific problems and even though I'm a big blog, it doesn't mean that everybody gets all their social media knowledge from my blog. It's a big world. What you need to do is figure out what it is that your audience is interested in, whether you're a real estate agent, or someone who makes cooking products. The fact is, any business could do well with this but the idea of being the biggest in the world maybe is a little bit of a stretch. But you could get people to rethink the way that they look at you and really become very loyal to your brand, which is what everybody really wants.”

Coopetition is the name of the game

Michael Stelzner had not yet mentioned the word competitor so I asked him about whether he ever thought of other companies as such. Here he goes:

“I don't think of anyone as competition, I think of coopetition. Cooperate even if you are a competitor, I have always had that model. When I was ‘The King of White Papers', I went to every single person that was high profile in that industry and I gave them my platform. I gave them exposure, I helped them. What happens is when the tide rises, all the ships rise. I believe that if you give gifts to people, whether they be competitors or not, it's gonna help you and it's gonna help really in a major way bring people to you.”

How Students Can Be Prepared

Michael Stelzner continued with the following recommendations for how students can be better prepared for the workplace:

“I think students need to figure out how to build the relationships and they need to figure out how to design content. If they can figure out how to create great, great content, and they can advise businesses on how to actually establish relationships with the experts, they'll become invaluable. They could be just one or the other. They could just create content or they can work on relationships. It's just business development in a new form if you think about it.”

A Pure Play Publisher

I concluded the interview by asking Michael Stelzner to share how he manages his time as interest in him has grown with the success of Social Media Examiner:

“Actually, what is great about me is that I tell everybody I'm not a consultant, I'm a publisher. I have friends who do that stuff so I just point those opportunities to those friends and I'm a pure play publisher. Social Media Examiner is my magazine and it's great when they come in, I'm able to send those leads out to my friends, and they love me even more so it's a total win-win!”

On Stage with Gary Vaynerchuk

May 11, 2012 by Niklas Myhr 4 Comments

At the Nordic eCommerce Summit 2012 in Stockholm, Sweden, I served on a panel interviewing Gary Vaynerchuk on his take on the value of social media for ecommerce with subtopics such as social commerce, the dying middleman, and personal branding. Please check out the video!