How to Build a Loyal Online Community | Kevin King & Norm Farrar | MMP #012

How to Build a Loyal Online Community | Kevin King & Norm Farrar | MMP #012 Norm Farrar: People get to know you because of the value that you're adding to the community. And I think that's the key word, is that value. It's not promotion, promotion, promotion. Nobody's going to join your group. It's value. Unknown Speaker: You're watching Marketing Misfits with Norm Farrar and Kevin King. Speaker 2: Mr. Farrar, how are you doing, man? Good to see you. It's been a while. Norm Farrar: It's been a while, but in podcast time, it's every week you guys see us, but it's been a long time since we've actually gone in the studio and done anything. Speaker 2: I know, yeah, we record these sometimes in batches just because of our schedules. We got a lot going on, so we record in batches, but yeah, it's good to see you, man. You know, I was just thinking the other day, since BDSS, This is probably the longest period where I haven't actually traveled in a while. I've been here in Austin for over like seven weeks now. And that's unusual for me. Usually I'm bouncing somewhere to an event or whatever every single month. And I've been seven weeks here in Austin. Norm Farrar: I'm the same way. I just have sat. A lot of people don't know this, but we're working on a project together. And so after BDSS, I did the same thing. I have not gone anywhere, and I'm not planning to go anywhere except for our Collective Mind Society train trip. Unknown Speaker: But after that. Norm Farrar: Maybe your think tank that you're you're having and then I'm sticking around. I'm just I'm put my head down and doing work Well, we're going to the podcast show in DC too, right? I forgot about that. Speaker 2: Yeah, August Yeah, I've got a I've got quite a bit coming up I mean I've got I'm about to go to Colorado So by the time you're listening to this I'll probably have just gotten back from Colorado from the driven masterminds at $30,000 a year mastermind I'm in All marketing people. And then coming up to see you, coming up to the Great White, no, as you would say, I'm coming down to see you. Even though I'm actually going up from Austin, Toronto, because it's north on the map. But yeah, so I'm coming up to see you up north of Toronto. That's going to be cool. Have a few cigars out on the balcony there, overlooking the lake. Norm Farrar: And I've got one special cigar for you. Speaker 2: Oh, all right. All right. Norm Farrar: It's a pre-Castro Arthur Fuente cigar. Speaker 2: Oh, wow. Holy cow. I should see if the plane's leaving when the next flight is right now. Norm Farrar: That's the only reason why you're coming up because I told you I had one. Unknown Speaker: I'm not bringing cigars. Speaker 2: Norm's got them. I don't need to take any. I'll take my little bag of cigars. But no, that's going to be cool. Then we got the train trip, which is going to be cool. The Collective Mind Society is a little thing that Norm and I do. We did one about a year and a half ago at the F1 race in Austin, which was really cool, and we're doing the second one. We're taking a train across the Canadian Rockies, starting in Vancouver, and taking this kind of like sightseeing train, this fancy train. We're like in first class. It's got glass ceilings, and serve your breakfast and lunch on there, and you can see all this cool scenery, and then we ended up in Lake Louise. And which is over by Banff and the Icefields Parkway and it's got a group of us going. This is not some conference or something with presentations. This is just cool entrepreneurs hanging out, seeing some cool stuff and just chilling, getting to know each other, bonding. And a lot of times, you know, Norm, we always say that When these things happen at night, you know, you're sitting around having a drink or even if you don't drink, you know, a couple of people on this trip don't drink. They still just sitting around, cool stuff always comes out. Unknown Speaker: That's why we did it. Speaker 2: That's exactly why we did it. And so that's what we're doing. Good food, good people, good times. So keep your eyes out for next year. Whatever we decide to do next year, collectivemindsociety.com. What are you looking forward to most about this, Norm, on this trip? Norm Farrar: Probably the community. They're all like-minded individuals, and I think a lot of the things that we do, I like that. You remember when we were on the cruise? You didn't have to smoke cigars. Some people that listen to this actually have messaged me and said, I don't like cigars. I mean, I wish you wouldn't promote cigar smoking, and we're not. We like cigars. I think in one of our episodes, we went through the reasons why we smoke cigars. And it's just something that we could sit down with a group of people and again, like-minded people and just chat and have a good time. When we went on that cruise, How many people came out and heard that we were having cigars and sat there every single night of the cruise for hours upon hours and everybody was looking forward to it? Speaker 2: Norm and I were on this, it's called the seller's cruise back in January and every night after the talks and after dinner, some of the younger kids would go and hit the disco or hit the casino and Norm and I, we're going to be out on deck number four or whatever the deck was. Anybody who wants to join us can and we go out there with our cigars and just being me and Norm and oftentimes at first maybe one or two other people and by the end, by Two hours later, sometimes there's a group of 12, 14, 16 people all pulled up a chair, some of them smoking, some of them drinking, some of them just sitting there and just listening. Norm Farrar: It was 24 one night, Kev. Speaker 2: It was 24 one night? Norm Farrar: Yeah. Speaker 2: Oh, that's right. We took over that whole other section. Yeah, and that was, we'd stay out there sometimes till two, three in the morning until, I think, you always want to make sure that that pizza place hadn't closed. Norm Farrar: Right. Speaker 2: There's a pizza by the slice, it's like the last restaurant that stayed open on the ship till like three in the morning or something. So, if it was like 2.45 and we're still talking, Norm's like, all right, it's time to go everybody, or at least I'm leaving because the pizza place is about to close. Get you two Coke Zeros or no, one Coke Zero is Diamond Dews or Pepsis or whatever on that. Norm Farrar: Yeah, something like that. But you know, and I'm just thinking about this has nothing to do with marketing at all. But the time we went and to Alaska, Sitting out there in the back of the, watching icebergs flow by, having two or three cigars, having three blankets on top of us, shaking. Speaker 2: Yeah, that was commitment. Either that or we just want to get away from our wives. Unknown Speaker: That could be. Norm Farrar: Hope she's out of earshot. Speaker 2: You know my situation, so I want to get away. You are like, maybe not so much, but me, I need to get away. Norm Farrar: I'm not saying a word. All I know is I'm still suffering from, what do they call it, PTSD. Speaker 2: Oh, from watching a video. Norm Farrar: Yeah. But this is where events and community build friendships. and business, the ability to form businesses together. We've talked about it before where we met 2017, I believe it was. And we met at, it was called the Illuminati, now it's called Helium 10 Elite. And it was a great event that was put on. Kevin kind of expanded that into BDSS and built what I think is probably one of the best communities in the ecommerce or Amazon arena. And Kevin, why don't you talk a little bit about that? So, you know, forming it, and then what are the results of kind of grooming this community that you've built? Speaker 2: Yeah, sure. It's funny you say that, Norm. I was just in this driven mastermind that I'm in, Perry Belcher, actually, who hopefully we'll have here on the show soon, one of the best copywriters and best marketers out there right now that's alive and still doing it. He was talking about how he believes that the power of community It's what's going to set you apart no matter what type of business that you're doing in your marketing and your branding and everything. I was agreeing with him and I was like, yeah, you know, and he was saying some things like, yeah, I've kind of been doing that. I've been doing that just almost naturally, not with the intent. And I said, I need to actually put more intent into actually building these communities based on some of what he was just kind of hitting me over the head like with in this talk that he was doing on a weekly call. And I was like, you know what, actually community building is kind of what we've been doing with Billion Dollar Seller Summit. And I've been doing it with the newsletter as well. And I agree. I think that's, you know, people are like, how are you going to get a leg up with this whole AI world where everything is, you know, all AI written and done? And it's people still have that need to feel they have that they need that human connection. Like you just said, that's why we do the CMS trip. There's a human connection. That's why we enjoy the cigar times on the ship, because there's a human connection there. And I think people If you can build that into your marketing, into your branding, a true community, I think you can leverage that and it doesn't have to be a big community. It can be 50 people, 100 people, it could be a thousand people. But those are more your raving fans. Those are the people that support you, that like you. Those are the people that are gonna spend money, you know, on your business and support the business and get the word out there. And so what with BDSS, the Billion Dollar Seller Summit I do for the Amazon space, in 2019 is when I started it, but it wasn't until 2021 that someone actually recommended, hey, why don't we set up a WhatsApp group for the For this event, so we can communicate with each other while we're here. And that WhatsApp group evolved when the event ended in Austin, we didn't kill the WhatsApp group, and it just kind of evolved into like this massive community. And the only way to get into there is to actually come to one of my events and pay, you know, these are $6,000 ticket events. So it's high level. And there's, I don't know what, 600 people or something in there? Norm Farrar: I think even more. Speaker 2: And somewhere around that number, and it's super active. I mean, it's super beneficial, super active. Some days you log in, there's a hundred posts. You know, if I did this, I tried doing it on Facebook and on Facebook, it was crickets. I mean, and one of the reasons I think of that is I hate Facebook groups. If you're doing Facebook groups, I would get away from those as fast as I could because Facebook groups, you don't control who sees the message. I had a billion-dollar seller summit group and we probably hit 300 people in there at one point and I could post something that was important for people to see to the group and it would show me three days later in this little stats when you're scrolling through, 54 people reach or with a little status on Facebook, 54 impressions. I didn't mean people saw but 54 impressions. Yeah, that scrolled, it went through their feed. They may not have even stopped and looked at it. But in a WhatsApp group, you know that most people are going to see it. They may not read it, they still may scroll on by, especially if they're trying to catch up on 200 messages or something. But they're going to probably, more people see it in the WhatsApp group because it's not controlled by the algorithm, it's controlled by you. If you go in and look, So, that's a big difference but that group has exploded. Now, I'm doing it for the newsletter too. I know you have one for Lunch with Norm. You're doing a little bit different though. You just let anybody in. Norm Farrar: No, I don't. Speaker 2: I thought you did at the beginning. Norm Farrar: No, we don't. At the beginning, we did and then what happened, this is really important, we went to WhatsApp Similar to what you were talking about, but we found that there was a lot of spammers, even when they got in the group, it was so. Speaker 2: That's because there was no barrier to entry, right? Norm Farrar: No, we had four questions that they had to answer. Speaker 2: Well, that's still not a barrier. That is a barrier, but people can just type in a bunch of characters on the keyboard. Norm Farrar: Typically, if they didn't answer, they never got in. There's four questions, and one specifically is about soliciting. If they didn't answer all four, they never got in. If they left one out, if they came in and they started to talk about their service, they got removed. However, in WhatsApp, I find that the group itself, we've been able to bring in monitors. We do screen everybody now. So, we've got about five people that screen people when they come in. And a lot of people reach out and they'll say, hey, I wasn't allowed into the group. Why? Well, they've been known to solicit. And that's it, we don't want that. We had one person the other day might be listening to the podcast right now. He reached out to me on Facebook and he said, hey, I'm, what was it? Oh, he's a content creator and he wanted to go in the group and he wanted to put this message into the group. I said, absolutely not, it's not me that's gonna kick you out, but there'll be about five moderators and probably, and you know our friend Abe, He's the first one to slam these guys, you know, and it's hilarious. They get The messaging that they get, they'll probably leave the group anyways, which is great, because WhatsApp seems to police itself, which is nice. But I want to talk to you about something else, about the community. Speaker 2: What I do on the WhatsApp, just real quick before you go into that, is I actually, to get into my WhatsApp group for the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, you have to have been to a Billion Dollar Seller Summit, so that eliminates a lot of it. People occasionally will say, hey Kevin, do you mind if I And people are very respectful. You barely ever see any spam at all in there. It's extremely rare. And it's usually, the only promotion is usually me promoting something. And then people that have something to say, they will usually message me first. And like, they'll say, hey, Kevin, is it okay if I post this? And I'll either say, yeah, you can, or no, you can't. But on the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter group, I require three referrals. Before you can get into the group. So you have to actually hit three referrals and you get sent an automatic, Beehive does this, you automatically get sent a QR code and a special link to go and join. You go join and it sits there in a pending status and I go match them up. And that way the people that are in there are actually avid readers of the newsletter. And they've referred, they're probably more passionate because you're not going to refer somebody unless you really like the newsletter. And you're not going to tell your friends to come sign up for this. So those are people that I actually want to be there and that's a big screen thing and that's something you could think about if you're setting up a group out there or setting up a community is you want the most passionate people in there and that does it and I've had zero problems with any kind of spam or problems. I haven't had to kick anybody out. You kicked me out. Well, you know, that's because we had a no beard policy. Norm Farrar: Oh, yeah, yeah. Speaker 2: And you slipped by. But yeah, no, go ahead. What was your question? Norm Farrar: No, it wasn't a question. Well, actually, it is a question. These groups, especially the larger ones, so I don't have the billion dollar seller group, which I think is Probably the best group for Amazon. And you've turned that, you've blended the newsletter, you've got the BDSS, you've got these other events that go on, Elevate360, but it's all part of a massive group, you know. And isn't it, people say how hard it is, how arduous it is to get going And to maintain. Now, if you're a brand, or if you're a service provider, do you have the time? Like, how did you get this going without just spending all the time and a ton of money on forming this group? Or did you? Speaker 2: No, that's the key is that when you have a valuable community, When the leader doesn't have to be involved. So if you're the head, if you're the organizer, or you're the spokesperson for your company, or you're the leader, and you have to be involved to provoke the group to, you know, get people talking to do things, or you're always having to answer all the questions that someone asks, then that's a problem, exactly what you're just saying. But when it can kind of self maintain itself, and when they're helping each other, that's a true community. Otherwise, you just have followers. Followers are going to be following If it's the Norm Farrar marketing group, And you're having to always go in there and post, and the only fresh content is you, and you're leaving some new tip or strategy, and a couple of people comment, or they ask a question about it, and you answer back. That's just followers. That's not a community. And that's what a lot of Instagram is, and that's what a lot of Facebook and social media is. They're not communities. They're followers. But when you have a group, like on WhatsApp, and there's other places. School does this. GoHighLevel has places where you can do this. So you don't have to just use WhatsApp. When it can self-maintain without you, that's a true community. And where there's constant, like a billion dollar seller, some days there's a hundred posts in there. You know, I wake up in the morning and, or check it, check it in the morning, check it at night. And you know, they'll have that little circle with a little red circle with a number of those. Norm Farrar: You don't like those. Speaker 2: No, that bugs me. 72 or something like that. You know, my ADD or whatever it's called. It drives me crazy when I see those numbers, so I have to go in there and at least scroll. I don't read every single message, but I see people going back and forth, helping each other and that's valuable. And when you have that, then people don't want to leave that. They want to leave that, which means that they need to stay there and so if you have rules that you got to, you know, I know like Billion Dollar Sellers, not billion, I'm billion, but there's another group that was actually before me called Million Dollar Sellers. They have a rule, I think there's 600 members and they pay somewhere north of five grand a year to be in this group. They have their own private little community and they require everybody to contribute. They actually have a VA, I'm told, I'm not in the group, but they have a VA that actually matches up the register of people to who post. And if you don't post and contribute at least once a month, they kick you out and then refund the rest of your money. Norm Farrar: Yeah, so what good is it? And that's great. If you don't engage and you're just going to be there for the hell of it, get the hell out. Speaker 2: Yeah, if you just, yeah. Norm Farrar: You do that with your newsletter. If you don't, if you're not engaged, if you don't open and click through once a month, is that correct? Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. If you don't open and, it's both, it's not an or, it's both. If you don't open and click at least once a month, then I remove you. It's no warning, I just remove you. But there's no one-on-ones, that means you're You're not really paying attention and maybe you don't want it or maybe you do want it and it's something that you would enjoy getting but you're just too busy. It's not a priority for you. So if it's not a priority for you, I don't want you there because you're never going to buy anything from me because the newsletter is a lead magnet. It's part of a funnel to get you To come stair step up into things that I'm doing, like my events and stuff, things like that and provide information. But I want you to actually be enjoying the information. If you're not actively enjoying my work. And providing it, why leave you there? And the second reason is it hurts me to leave you there. So it's not just like, hey, asshole, get out of here. That's not my attitude. It's like, you're actually hurting me because Google and Yahoo and Hotmail and all these email providers, they look at these numbers are like, well, he's sending all these emails out and this guy, this guy, Steve, is never opening his emails and he's never clicking. This must be spam. And so, they start seeing enough of that, enough people start doing that, the people that actually want it, Norm, who actually wants to read the newsletter and get it, his starts going into his spam folder, his junk folder and he's missing them or he's having to go dig them out or whatever and that just hurts everybody. So, I kick them out and yeah, that's exactly and most people don't do that. They just leave, they just keep mowing Email and email, but there's a lot of other reasons on the backside of that too. Norm Farrar: But we do exactly the same thing with our newsletter. Numbers does not mean, just like you were saying, if you got 10,000 people subscribed or 100,000 people subscribed and they're not opening the bloody thing, yeah, it's no good for you. All it is is somebody, and this is especially for Facebook groups or WhatsApp groups, they're members. You'll see that there's people there that are just addicted to being a member of a group. You'll see that, oh, they have 25, 50 different groups in common, or they're joined 50 different groups, right? So all they're doing is just saying that they're, oh, here's another Amazon group, here's another ecommerce group. But if they don't participate, that sucks. I, you know, I had some problems over the last month and a half, where my Apple ID account Got, got hacked. And it was hell. Like I can tell you, Kevin knows it was hell. It took weeks to get my information back. If it wasn't for this one brilliant Apple guy, over, what was it four or five week period? Yeah, he was able to get my stuff back. But like you were saying, the group They didn't know what was going on. I wasn't communicating with them because I couldn't get onto WhatsApp. My authenticator app was down. Everything was gone. And I came back to the group. There was thousands of messages. It was cool. It was over a thousand messages, I should say. So just going back, it maintained itself. There's people that are on there regularly, like you'll have your loyal group. But also, I find this on my podcast, that that community that we've built, that kind of goes over to the WhatsApp group and to the newsletter. You've been on the podcast a bunch of times. There's some guys that are on there that's never missed a podcast. They're just, you know, anything I do. Speaker 2: It's part of their habits, part of their daily routine, or their routine. Norm Farrar: Right. Speaker 2: On this day, I know you're doing them now just on Wednesdays. Wednesdays at noon Eastern, it's lunch with Norm time. Norm Farrar: Yeah, and they're live. So it's not like they're pre-recorded. I know they're on there. And you know them by name. You know who they are. You know their family, like Steve Fillion. He came out to your event with his whole family. And his daughter always wanted to meet me. And it was really cool when his wife came up and introduced herself. So I got to meet their family. Steve's come out to a bunch of events, you know, with us. Luke is another guy that comes out to events when he knows that we're going. Yeah, so it's really interesting to have that form of community. Speaker 2: You know, something interesting I just did, you're talking about the newsletter, is I just took them in my beehive. And just the other day, I was curious, like, how many raving fans do I have? Raving fans is what matters. Like you said a minute ago, it's not about the numbers. If it's 100,000 people in the group, it's about how many people actually care. And sometimes a group with 500 people is much better than a group with 100,000 people. So you want to have the right people in there and the right mix. But I took a look at Beehive and there's a way to do filtering on your subscribers. And so I went in on Beehive. And I said, tell me who has gotten at least 8 emails, 8 newsletters, so that's basically 4 weeks because I send out 2 a week and has opened at least 80% and has clicked at least 20%. And eliminate the ones that have clicked a hundred percent and a hundred percent because if they've opened a hundred percent and clicked a hundred percent, those are bots because those are most likely, there's security software tools out there that some corporations use that will open every email and they will click every link just before they kind of pass it into your inbox or whatever. And so they do that but so I eliminate those. I might eliminate a few legit people that way but I don't want them in it. I have 10,000 active subscribers right now and this is not my whole, I don't send to my whole list. This is people that want it, they opt in and that's after I've already kicked out about 3,000 and out of those there was 1,026 I think the number was. That criteria that have opened at least 80% and clicked at least 20%. Those are the serious people. Those are the people who it's become like the Steve feeling like you just said that's become part of the routine. And that's my market. Those are the people that are going to be most likely. To follow me somewhere else or to buy something if I offer them something or those are the people that are really enjoying it and I need to profile those people. I need to go in and like see who are these people, maybe send them a survey. I haven't done this yet, but send them a questionnaire or a type form or whatever and say, ask them some questions and then tailor what I'm doing to them. The other 9,000, They're good people, I'm sure, but they're not my target that I need to focus it around. I need to focus it around when I'm writing the newsletter and I'm thinking of that avatar in my mind, it needs to be those people and not the rest of the people. And so that's something you can do too and that's what technology and AI and technology and everything can do now. If you don't know your customer avatar, if you don't know who you're selling to, you're selling to nobody. And communities are a great way if you don't know or you think you know but it's actually a little bit different. A community is a great way to actually find out and you may go in a different direction in your marketing or a different direction in your business because you want to serve people and give them what they want and communities are one of the best ways you can do that. Norm Farrar: You know, we've talked about this a few times on the podcast, Kev, and one of the guys that probably, you just talked about avatar, knowing your audience. It's so important. We've both talked about it on our other podcasts. It's the number one thing. If you're marketing to the wrong audience, you're throwing away your brand, you're throwing away, you're losing money. We've had a guest on here called Mark DeGrasse. He's got something called the AI Branding Academy. We do not get an affiliate fee for this, but Mark's AI Branding Academy is incredible. It shows you how to build an avatar, ask the right questions, how to build a brand so you know that you're marketing to the right audience. And you could check that out. I mean, it's markdegrass.com, I think. I'm sure we'll be able to put the link up here. I've taken his courses. That's how I got to know Mark. And I came out of there. I'm a branding guy from 30 years ago, 35 years ago. And It blew me away what I could see and how the quality and the definition of these audiences. So you can pinpoint it, and you can have an audience that is, it could be very broad, or it could drill down to a very specific audience. And sometimes, a lot of the times when you're branding or when you're building a brand, You might want to have a very specific audience when you're marketing to multiple audiences. You can have 10 different audiences. For example, I might have natural soap, and I'm just saying natural soap. I might have a natural soap bar that might be going out to mutters. This is a real example. Do you know what a mutter is? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's people that go out and ride motorbikes or something in the- Nope. No, no, no. Okay, something different. Norm Farrar: Mudders are these crazy individuals. Janelle Page would probably be a great mudder. But these are these crazy individuals that do these sort of like these military obstacle courses. Speaker 2: Oh, okay, okay. Norm Farrar: But it's filled with mud. And so we had this marketing campaign because we knew who these were. We charge more for the soap and we say the slogans that get clean with mud. We know who they are and they love this mud that is a soap and we can charge more for that. You can also do that for all sorts of different Some of the soap can actually be for pets. You know, if you have a pet owner, a dog specific, a cat specific. So we have dog and cat shampoos. We've actually discontinued the shampoos, but we did have dog cat shampoos. There's all sorts of markets. A matter of fact, with the dog beds that, you know, that we do these pet beds, we can do pet, you can do dog, you can do a specific breed and dog, you can do cat. And when I was using Datadive from Brandon Young, We found a keyword that changed a lot of things. We got a bunch of extra sales. Rabbit beds. Speaker 2: Really? Norm Farrar: So we could target that specific to rabbit owners now. So, but I, I, again, it's research, understanding the audience, targeting the audience, and who knows, like, if I was targeting hamsters, I'd probably lose a ton of money. Speaker 2: But you get that guy that the video there's, have you seen the TikTok video where there's a little monkey, and he has a rabbit that's a friend. That would be a great influencer for you. No, it's pretty cool. It's this little monkey and it's somebody's house somewhere. I don't even know where it is and they publish all these videos of this little monkey that goes around the house and it'll go pick up the rabbit and then it'll bring it to the bed and put the blanket over it and then sometimes there'll be other videos where they're eating carrots together or something like that or eating watermelon together or they're just walking around the house. It's the rabbit and the monkey and there's a name for the channel. I forget the name of the channel but that would be a good influencer to get for your beds. Send them a bed and have that bed featured in there with the logo or something on it. That could be cool. Norm Farrar: I'd like to see that with Zoe. That's Kevin's dog. Speaker 2: Yeah, little Zozo. She's right over here, passed out right now, sleeping. But yeah, so yeah, not knowing your customer is a problem and a lot of people unfortunately that are doing marketing really don't know their customer. They don't know who they're selling to. Like when I'm writing, like In my calendar business, for example, I've known my customer. We've done events and conferences or we've even had, used to have a guy who collected all of our calendars and he worked on the road. He was a truck driver and he would, whenever he would pass through Austin, he would call me. Yeah, call me. This was back in the days when internet was just getting started and this is like the 90s and say, I'm passing through Austin. You want to go to lunch? I'm like, sure. He's like, where do you want to go? He's like, well, let's go to Hooters. He had this thing that he wanted to hit every Hooters restaurant in the United States. So I ended up going to Hooters with this guy and sitting there and having a lunch with him, just a customer. And I would chat or whatever, we're not going to be buddies or best friends or anything, but just by doing that from time to time with different people, I got to know my customer. So when I sat down to write an email or to write a marketing pitch, I need an avatar in mind and like, who am I writing this to? I'm not just writing this to try to sell you the latest calendar. I'm writing this to a person. I'm writing this to, you know, if I'm writing to Norm, I'm gonna say something different to you, Norm, than I would, you know, use different words or different way of saying it than I would if I'm just writing to a mom or something. And so I would write to him and I'd have him picture, you know, close my eyes and picture him in my mind sitting at lunch. How am I going to sell him on this calendar? What words do I need to use? What phrases do I need to use? And that's my avatar and that's my customer. And that type of technique works really well. And that's what some of these AI tools like Benson and stuff that we've had on the AI summit that we did and do, you know, help you refine that. And that's so important. Most people miss that. Norm Farrar: Yeah, absolutely. Matter of fact, when you were talking about your calendars and the truck driver, I remember that crazy guy that you had some women that you were shooting for your calendars. I don't know how to describe them. They're just pretty women calendars, correct? Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've had Mark on the show. We talked about it. If you go back and listen to the episode with Mark Dahn. Norm Farrar: It's great. That's a great episode, by the way. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we do pretty girls on calendars. That's what we do. And yeah, this is a different truck driver than the one you're talking about. Norm Farrar: Yeah, but you're just why don't we get this is crazy. It's just a crazy story. But tell everybody what happened. Speaker 2: We had we had this truck driver, I think is based in Missouri, that would pass through going to San Austin going to San Antonio. And he became a huge fan of this one girl brandy that we had. Young girl, she was a college student, probably 20, 21 years old or so. And he just became a huge fan. You know, this girl never did any kind of nudity or anything. This is not like some naked calendars. It's just pretty girls, you know, maybe in lingerie or maybe just sexy. Mark is always about sexiest in the mind, not in the eyes. So it's always like, you know, the sexiest stuff. And this still rings true for me. You know, some guys are all very visual and they like, Show me the goods. I want to see it. But a lot of times when you step back out of that general macho attitude and you actually think about it, When is a woman more sexy to you? Some people like heels, or they like sundresses, or they like halter tops, or whatever it may be. That sexy is in the mind, so you create the illusions of it. And if you stop back and think about that, you should do that in your marketing too, for your products, whether you're selling sex appeal, or you're selling dog beds. How can you actually implement that into Selling a dog bed. I mean, that would be an interesting case study is like what can you do? That would make the buyer of that dog bed, imagine his dog sleeping in that bed. That's not gonna reveal everything. It's not gonna like go into all the details of, here's the foam is two inches at the top and we use this special fiber the next quarter inch and the next thing is this. That's all technical stuff that nobody cares about. But what is the sexiness that, oh, here's the dog. Norm Farrar: Lingerie for dogs. Speaker 2: No, there you go, lingerie for dogs. There you go. We're going to dress them up instead of dressing them down. Norm Farrar: Yeah, put them in heels, we'll get it. Speaker 2: But yeah, so this one guy was a fan of Brandy back at our truck store and he knew that occasionally she came into our office to sign autographs or to do something and so one time when he was passing through Austin, he stopped, it was probably three in the morning or something, you know, he's just passing through as a truck driver and he knew our address because that's where all of our orders got shipped to, our corporate address and stuff, all the mail stuff got shipped to. So, he stopped in front of the door. We'll put up like a shrine of flowers and all kinds of stuff like at the front of the door with a note to her. So the next day when someone came in like eight o'clock in the morning to open up the office, there's this huge thing in the front of the door. You know, they take that in and we call her and we say, hey, we got this thing and she's a little bit weirded out by it. And then another thing that we used to do is like when we would do a photo shoot, We figure these are loyal fans. How can we maximize the money that we're making off our customers? That's something a lot of people don't think about. They're always looking. I just did a podcast recently with Josh Hadley. We were talking about this where people are always just looking for the next customer. Amazon sellers are really bad about this. They don't maximize what they have and maximize The current customer list, you should be going back to them over and over and over, not always trying to get the next guy and the next sale and the next sale. Maximize what you have. So we would maximize what we had and one of the ways we did that was we would sell The outfits the models wore in their photo shoot. So, if they were wearing a piece of lingerie in a photo shoot, this is back in the days before digital cameras and stuff, we had Polaroids. So, back in the day, in the 90s and early 2000s, you would actually change the back of your 35 millimeter Camera or whatever you're shooting, your professional camera, you would change out the back to what's called a Polaroid back and Polaroids are those instant, for those of you don't know what a Polaroid was, it was a hot thing, it's instant photography because back in the, you know, 20-30 years ago, it wasn't digital, you had to shoot on film, you had to take it down to your local drugstore, send it away in the mail and A few days later, you would get these prints back. It was not an instant process to see the pictures, but Polaroid was an instant process. It wasn't as good a quality, but you would use this special film that costs more, and it would take the picture, and it would expose it on this piece of paper, plastic, and you would have to like You take it out and you flap it around in the air a little bit to dry it off and like a minute later, all of a sudden, the picture would slowly appear and you would see it. So, we would take those pictures because we had to do that. We want to check the lighting on the set and check everything. Unknown Speaker: So, Mark would take these Polaroid pictures just to make sure all the lighting is right before you lay down the film because we had no way digitally to see it. And we would have the model sign those, so they would sign that and then we would take their outfit and we would make an 8x10 print and have them sign that and we set up a little auction site, some little piece of PHP software or something and we would, about once a month, we would auction to our guys and we had one guy and Hawaii spent $48,000 buying like 12 different models stuff. I don't know what the heck he was doing with it, but I didn't care. It's $48,000 of free money. But this one trucker bought Brandy's one of her outfits and it got weird from there. I don't know if you want me to go into that, but it got really weird from there. Then he started sending letters of saying that he put the outfit on his table at home on his dining room table and his 14-year-old daughter found it and thought it looked pretty and thought it was for her and she put it on and he wrote a letter about that. That was just pretty weird. Norm Farrar: Yeah, that's where it gets a little weird, but then just how he tracked her down. Speaker 2: And then he went, he got so infatuated that he, she had said somewhere in her bio or in an interview that she was a student at, then it was called Southwest Texas University, now it's changed its name, it's a school about 30 minutes south of Austin, San Marcos, their student directory was public or was on Early days of the internet, you know, you could go and you could type in a student's name and for some reason it was not locked down and so he was able to figure out from her bio that, oh, she's a student at this university. He went online and found her address, her apartment address and ended up showing up at her apartment. Like sitting outside and you know she walked out to get in her car to go run an errand or go to school or something and there's this guy getting out of his truck across the street coming walking up yelling her name and it spooked the heck out of her. She quit modeling that was she never modeled again and we took everything down and you know that that's a customer that we actually banned. We actually kicked him out because that's not cool. Norm Farrar: No, not cool at all. Speaker 2: But yeah, that was a crazy time. There's an interesting story for you and that's just one crazy story like when we're on these trips and we're smoking our cigars and hanging around at night, we all have crazy stories like this from business, from life, there's always a lesson or a moral or a wow, that's pretty cool, I can't believe and you get to know people deeper and you get to relate to people on a different level like because I'm saying that Norm's probably in his mind like yeah, I went through something, it wasn't quite the same, but I did this and he, you know, then what does that do? It builds community, it builds friends, it builds camaraderie, it builds stuff because when you have things in common, that's when you like somebody. You can't like somebody if you don't have something in common with them. Think about anybody you follow on social media that you're just a fan of or you either want to be them Or, you want to be with them and you admire what they're doing or there's something where you have something in common. You know, in webinars, there's something called the perfect webinar. That's from Russell Brunson. If you ask Jason Flatland, he's one of the best. He kind of invented that and then Russell Brunson kind of changed it up a little bit. But Jason is probably Probably, not probably, he is the number one webinar guy in the world as far as the psychology of building a webinar and if you want to sell something on webinars, we should do a whole episode on webinars. If you want to sell something on webinars, there's a psychological way you have to do it and you have to, there's this proven methodology that the way you build it, the way you teach it, the way you sell it, That just flat out works if you do it that way. It could bomb. He's taken people that try to do webinars and had 200 people on the webinar and sold two things at the end of it, their course or whatever it is. He changes it up to his system and the next time they do it, they sell 26. And so one of the things that he does though in these webinars, to make my point of reliability, is there's always some sort of sob story. I was broke and living on the couch or stuck at my parents' house. I didn't have two nickels to rub together or something that relates to the audience. So you're on the other side going, yeah, that's kind of me right now. That's me right now. I'm living in my parents' home. I only have two nickels to rub together. This guy is like me. Look, look, and then he goes through this whole psychological process of building you up. If he can do it, I can do it. Heck yeah, here's my credit card. I don't have the money, but I'll figure it out. Here's my credit card to buy your course or whatever. That's just a proof of all, if you like somebody or can relate to them, you trust them. And so, it's the same thing when you're building communities is those are people that are like-minded and you build trust and you can, as a business person, you can leverage that immensely. Norm Farrar: Yeah, Jason, by the way, not only for webinar, but for affiliate marketing. Wasn't, didn't he make $15 million off of ASMAmazing.com selling the ASM programs? Speaker 2: Yeah, that was on, just on one of them, on I think ASM4. It was, I think it was $12 or $13 million. Norm Farrar: Yeah. That was crazy. And, you know, I think that's what he made. Speaker 2: I think that was the total sales he generated. Norm Farrar: Was that what he made? That's what he made. They made $30 million off of that. OK, so from what I understand, that's right. Speaker 2: That's right. Because Dave was number two. Norm Farrar: Yeah. Speaker 2: You know, buddy Dave. Norm Farrar: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. Norm Farrar: Yeah. With Robert Kiyosaki, they were they teamed up together. So. What I'm going to say about that, even with that community, what did Jason do? Why was he so successful? He was able to build a community through what was called Rapid Crush, offer a ton of bonuses, so people were getting the value, like double or triple what other groups were giving. And all of a sudden, this group, Rapid Crush, emerged. It seemed like overnight. And it went on for quite some time. So anything Rapid Crush did, people were buying. Very successful. So if you ever get a chance to either watch one of his courses, Jason's got a course, I forget what it's called, about his webinars. Speaker 2: Genius webinars. Norm Farrar: Genius webinars and the psychology of putting together a webinar. Awesome guy. Speaker 2: That's a good example that Norm just gave there. Listen carefully to what Norm just said. He's an affiliate. So an affiliate, if you don't know what an affiliate is, hopefully if you're listening to this, you better. If you're a marketing person, you should know what an affiliate is. But affiliate is someone who drives traffic to another person's product or service and gets a commission for doing it. Basically, you're a Paid commission based salesperson and a lot of times that affiliate commission can be 50%. So if someone's selling a course for a thousand bucks, the guy who markets you and runs the Facebook ads and sends you the email that you clicked on might get 50% of that thousand dollars. So it's a win-win for both people. So what Jason did to generate this 13 million dollars in profit that he made off of 30 million in sales is Say, hey, I can't just be another affiliate. What can I do to differentiate myself? What can I do to actually stand out and make my offer, my email better than a thousand other people that are sending similar emails to you? And he built this community that Norm said, Rapid Crush. And out of that, you got some, he offered some hands-on stuff and some personal training stuff and some extra software and he kind of Built on top of what the original guys were doing and did value ads. And then out of it, a community developed, like Norm said, that then he was able to sell all kinds of other stuff too. So that's just a really good example that Norm brought up there of communities and how you can Get creative in the way you do them. It doesn't always have to be just the people that are on your newsletter or whatever or in your little local town. You can do all kinds of cool things and then leverage that into other stuff. Norm Farrar: I just want to emphasize that a community does not have to be huge. You have to start somewhere. Let's target a lot of, I find that, and we've talked about this on my podcast, but a lot of brands don't think about building a community. They think of it more for people like us or service providers, but they don't think brand. And if you're doing dog beds, You have a perfect opportunity to create a newsletter or a WhatsApp group targeting dog owners or specific dog breeds if you like. You could have a group that, you know, you have different groups within a group, but you can start Nobody else is doing it and build your brand from there. People get to know you because of the value that you're adding to the community. And I think that's the key word is that value. It's not promotion, promotion, promotion. Nobody's going to join your group. It's value. I don't know if you have anything to add to that, Kev. Speaker 2: No, it is. It needs to be, it has to be valued. That's where people in newsletters or communities, they just use them as marketing, just straight up marketing promotional tools. And those will never work. You see lots and lots of dead groups out there. Back to what you asked a while back, Norm, how do you get this going? How did you get this going? Let's say you don't have a big list, you don't have a lot of customers already, you're listening to this or you want to go into a new area, you can buy communities, you can go online, there's people that started one that Either got too busy or they didn't know what to do or just kind of died off, but you can go and buy Facebook communities, you can go and buy Facebook groups actually, you can buy, there's people that sell those websites out there, just Google. Norm Farrar: Yeah, Flip is one, right? Speaker 2: Flippa will do it, but there's not just Flippa, but there's others that just specialize in like social media communities. And so I know, you know, a fellow that started a newsletter for fast food. He's in my newsletter training course. I brought him on and had him talk about it. He started a newsletter for fast food. He didn't know anybody. He's like, how am I going to start a newsletter around McDonald's and Burger King and Taco Bell and stuff. He went and found a community of fast food people that were talking about all the cool stuff in fast food of secrets like, you know, if you go to In-N-Out Burger, here's the secret menu. It's not on the menu, but if you say you want this, they'll make it for you. Or here, if you go to McDonald's and you say, These magic words, you know, you get this special apple pie or I don't know what it is, but all this kind of stuff where here's what's going on. And so what he did to get that started, he went and bought a community with like 2000 people that are just sharing stuff about fast food, you know, little hacks or McDonald's is doing, buy one, get one free or it's taco day, go here, whatever. He bought it for not a lot of money and then he used that to start his newsletter and got out of those 2,000 people, I don't know, 100, 200 of them, 300 of them to get on his newsletter list and then he started working on building the community and create this flywheel and so he started doing a lot of social media and he was going on talking about, you know, today's National Taco Day, here's the 26 places around the U.S. that you can go to get a free taco, you know, whatever and it just started snowballing and he grew it into It's been a few months since I talked to him, it's like 30,000 people in the group now. Norm Farrar: It's a great newsletter. Speaker 2: And then moved into, moving a lot of them into the newsletter, so he owns the customer. But yeah, there's all kinds of ways to get the ball rolling and you create this flywheel effect, especially a community plus newsletter combo can be super powerful. Norm Farrar: Well, beyond just sending out that newsletter, one of the things that you've mentioned in the past is this is the main type of marketing campaign that is driving leads for you. Speaker 2: The newsletter? Norm Farrar: Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, the newsletter is probably of everything, you know, I've, I say this to people, I've had over 200,000 people go through my Freedom Ticket course on how to sell on Amazon, literally over 200,000 people have gone through it. Not everybody finishes it, but a lot of them, a lot of them have gone to great success. I've had, I've spoken on stages on, I think five of the seven continents, uh, only haven't done Africa and Argentina. I'm sorry, Africa and Antarctica. Um, and I've, I've done a lot of podcasts. I've done a lot of been guests on podcasts, a lot of events, but nothing has been better for building, uh, Building the brand and building connection, then the newsletter plus community that I'm doing. Those two things are a powerful one-two punch. And a newsletter, when I say newsletter, some of you roll your eyes, and a lot of newsletters are just marketing emails like Norm said a minute ago, that all, probably 90% are just marketing emails. It's all about us. You know, whenever I see the first line or the subject lines, the July newsletter is here! Exclamation point. I'm like, come on. Unknown Speaker: That's someone that just, that's some employee that just was assigned to do the newsletter and they spent two days writing it and they're so happy it's done and they're so excited to share their cool little graphics and their cool little story about their blog to you and the new feature that they just came out with. That's crap. This goes back to what Norm said, you got to provide value. A newsletter has to provide value within the words of the newsletter, not click out. We could go into a whole, we should probably do a whole another, that's another episode just on newsletters. I'm just talking about newsletters, but The value there is immense. And it's top of funnel for me. So now when people say, Kevin, if I'm on a podcast, and they say, how can I, I don't want to sell them a billion dollar solar summit. If I'm on a pod, if I'm a guest of Lunch with Norm, and at the end, there's always a little plug, and Norm said, almost all podcasts do this. Norm will say, hey, people want to reach out or find out more, what do they do? Or Norm might say, hey, if you haven't, you know, you should go check out the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. I actually don't want people doing that anymore because the chance of me selling somebody on a $6,000, billion dollar seller summit off of An hour we just spent together where we talked about it for a couple minutes maybe and it is very low. But what I just did by having a talk on Lunch with Norm with you is I hopefully warmed up the audience a little bit. They're like, okay, this Kevin guy sounds cool. He sounds kind of like me. I can relate. Got some good information from it. Speaker 2: I want to know more. And so I say, go to my newsletter. You go to my newsletter and you start getting my newsletter. Now I know who you are versus you just go to my billion dollar seller. Summit website, I have no idea unless I'm using one of these tools, you know, to track some of the people, which I do, but mostly, for the vast majority, I don't know who you are, but if you go on my newsletter, now I know who you are. Now I know that you're someone interested. I've got, I've captured you, and then I start a relationship with you, but every Monday and Thursday, I'm sending you out a newsletter. And some of you are gonna be like, eh, this is not for me. Good, it's no problem. Some people are being, this looks pretty cool, I just don't have time for it right now or I can't, whatever. Then there's others, like I just mentioned, those 1,026, that this is freaking cool. I really like this and if it doesn't come in my mailbox, my day is ruined on that day because I love to sit on Thursday mornings with my coffee and my dog at my side and spend 15 minutes going through this newsletter reading every word. And those are the people that I want. And now I've cultivated you and I've built you, I've warmed you up. And when I come to sell you something, you're like, yeah, I want to go to that. And it's working. You know, my last two events, digital, virtual sold out. And you're like, how can a virtual sell out? And you can sell unlimited. I'm limited by a contract with another company of how many I can sell. And then my in-person one in Hawaii came within four people of selling out, hitting the max that I can go under contract. So it works and I'm seeing it on all sides. It's a long-term play. It's not an instant thing. August will be a year since I started. I haven't missed a single beat and it's paying off big time. And now I'm about to wrap it up with a lot of outside advertising and reach some new audiences. Norm Farrar: So I guess it's important, going back to numbers, a lot of people will go, you know, I got to build this list. How do I do it? They'll see somebody from Fiverr, you'll get somebody in your email. And they'll be talking about guaranteeing you so many followers. Now, this could be for a podcast, newsletter, social media, anything like that. You see it all the time. A lot of fake followers, a lot of fake creators. Same thing with newsletters, podcasts. These people that you're going to get that are very inexpensive, they might even charge a fair price. But a lot of the times what they're doing is they're going out and they're getting, where can I find the cheapest click? Where can I find the cheapest audience? And you'll get tons of followers, you'll get tons of emails, but you'll get no engagement on any of those, on your podcast, on your newsletter, on your social media. So, don't go and try to fake it. You know, fake it till you make it. Nope, not going to work. You have to have real people going back to building that audience. By doing that, you can reap these benefits. If you hear the success that Kevin's having, he's doing it because there's not a lot of fake followers on there. These are real people that want to hear from him. Uh, you wouldn't have got anything if you just would have paid out. Let's pay, you know, $5,000, go out and get a million followers. Speaker 2: There's, there's, there's something like Beehive and some of the news have, there's a, there's a thing where you can actually pay for, for, uh, subscribers from other news. Norm Farrar: Those are real subscribers. Unknown Speaker: I don't, I don't do it. Speaker 2: I don't do it. So, there's a thing like on, if you come, you go sign up for BillionDollarSellers.com, my newsletter, After you signed up and giving your email, the next screen, the next two screens will actually, there'll be a pop-up that says, oh, you might be also interested in this newsletter and this newsletter and this newsletter. Click here and it will automatically subscribe you. I do that for my customers to get other newsletters because a guy is selling on Amazon, he might be interested in investments advice or he might be interested in, you know, something else and I get paid for that. between $1 and $3 per lead off of that. And so that ends up covering some of my costs, like I'm getting ready to spend $10,000 a month on Facebook ads for my newsletter. And that will cover that cost of that, it should be a net zero cost per lead off these Facebook ads that I'm about to start doing to ramp up the newsletter. But on the flip side of that, when people are sending to me, I don't want them. I don't want the flip side because I've noticed that unless it's another Amazon newsletter. Unless it's Norm. You know, if Norm is saying, Kevin, I'll send you some traffic from Lunch with Norm newsletter, I'm like, do it all day long because that's the right audience. But there's so many people that come to me that are doing a financial newsletter, they're doing a pickleball newsletter, they're doing a dog newsletter and they're like, we want to send you signups and I don't want them because those are not qualified people. I'm very careful there. Like Norm just said, I'm not looking for numbers. So, I see sometimes A couple of my competitors in the space have bigger numbers than me. We're the largest newsletter. There's one guy that's a good friend of both of us and another guy that we both know that both of them have 20,000 plus subscribers on their newsletter. And I'm like, I'll put mine up against yours any day on value of per subscriber and value per click and anything. I mean, I just had it happen with someone in our space. They were doing a five-day challenge and they did this five-day challenge and they said, Kevin, we want to advertise, but we want, can you do a solo email? And I'm willing to do one solo email to my list a week and you pay for it because if I do an email promoting just a single product in that email rather than putting it as one of the things in the newsletter, the response is going to be higher. It's just you're the focus of it. You're not lost in the shuffle. And so I did that and they paid me good money for that. And then three days later, they messaged me back and say, hey, we've been doing this with a lot of people. Not all newsletters, but you know, getting everybody to promote and I said, I've never seen conversion rates like what you're having. You know, it's over 50% off of all the leads that you're getting. Can we pay you some more to do a follow-up email? And so they paid me some more money to do a follow-up email. That's the value of having a strong community. And where you can leverage that, that's just one little tiny example of how you got to control who's in that community and don't just let anybody in and make sure they're all like-minded people and they all are on the same mission or goal or mindset of what you're trying to achieve. Norm Farrar: All right. So communities, we talked about communities today. And I think that probably wraps it up unless there's anything else. Speaker 2: No, I think that's good. We've chatted for a while. So thanks, everybody, for joining us. We'll be back again next week with another guest. We've got a pretty cool guest. We'll make sure that we're back and give you reports on me and Norm's time smoking cigars together in the Great White North and the train trip and everything else. Make sure you hit that follow button if you're watching this on YouTube so you can join the channel. Actually, it's join the subscribe. I think it is on YouTube. Norm Farrar: And ring the bell. Yeah, I'm old, but I'm on top of this stuff. Speaker 2: And then on, if you're listening on Apple, on iTunes or whatever, Spotify or whatever, make sure you hit that follow button and follow us. You can always go to marketingmisfits.co. It's not .com, right, Norm? Norm Farrar: Nope. .co. Speaker 2: .co. marketingmisfits.co and follow us there and see what's up. Norm Farrar: All right. So that'll do it for today. We look forward to seeing you on the next podcast. Speaker 2: Thanks, everybody.