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THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW
Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business
Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 1 of 22
EPISODE #33: RICH BROOKS
In this episode, Travis interviews Rich Brooks, the founder and president of Flyte New Media, a web
design and internet marketing company, and a contributor to successful social media and marketing
websites such FastCompany.com and SocialMediaExaminer.com. Rich is also the founder of The
Agents of Change Digital Marketing which is an event that focuses on search, social, and local, which
are the 3 biggest channels today.
Rich shares a lot of valuable information on how to grow your internet business through clever
advertising and ensure maximum exposure through strategies like SEO and patterning your website on
today’s technological trends. Through hard work and adapting with the ever-growing internet market,
Rich’s experience is very valuable for entrepreneurs who are determined to get big on their online
business and attracting potential customers through the use of clever marketing and effective means of
promoting your business.
Rich Brooks
– Search, Social & Mobile For Your Business
Travis: Hey, it's Travis Lane Jenkins, welcome to episode number 33 of Diamonds in your own
backyard, the entrepreneur's radio show. Conversations with successful business owners that grow
your business. Sandra my co-host is still in the center of Daytona International Raceway so it's just us
three today.
Today we're talking about marketing your business, which I know is a pretty broad topic, so between
myself and our guest, we're going to drill into some specifics that will give you some real value for
growing your business to that next level.
Now be sure to stay with us until the very end if you can because I have a couple of things that I want
to share with you, and I also want to reveal who I'm going to connect you within the next episode. So if
you enjoy these free podcasts that we create for you, we would really appreciate it if you'd go to iTunes
and post a comment and rate the show. This would help us reach, instruct, and inspire more great
entrepreneurs just like yourself.
Now for some quick perspective on the show for our new friends that just joined us. I want you to think
of this as a conversation between four friends, just us sitting at a table. Even though we're talking with
some of the brightest entrepreneurs and brilliant thought leaders, it's just a casual, private, up close
conversation. Now everyone that we're talking with has found success doing what they teach and they
want to help you by sharing what they've discovered.
Normally the only way to get this level of personal access to so many high level entrepreneurs beyond
having your own show is to join high level masterminds, go to the seminars, events and just build those
relationships over years. And now through this show, I'm super excited that we get to share these great
people with you to fast-forward your success.
THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW
Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business
Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 2 of 22
Today, our guest on our show is Rich Brooks. Now Rich is the founder and president of Flyte New
Media, which is a web design and internet marketing company. He is also a contributor to
FastCompany.com and SocialMediaExaminer.com, one of the most popular social media sites today.
Rich is also the founder of the Agents of Change Digital Marketing which is an event that focuses on
the 3 biggest channels today, which is search, social, and local.
Now, there's more that I can tell you about Rich, although I'm going to let him share his story with us
before we really drill into talking about some of these great strategies that we're going to apply to your
business. So without further ado, welcome to the show Rich.
Rich: Hey Travis, thank you very much for having me, man.
Travis: You bet, man I really appreciate you taking time out to visit with us. Do you mind sharing some
of the back-story of how you got started and what brought you to where you are today?
Rich: Sure, absolutely. Let's see, I've actually been doing this web design and internet marketing, I
think, for a long time like over 16 years, which in internet years is like a million six or something like that
so that I have been around for a while. I wasn't there when Al Gore actually created the internet but I
joined shortly thereafter. I have been working in sales for another company selling the equivalent of
widgets and at a Christmas party actually, they had hired a psychic to read you, and I was one of the
last to go. All my other co-workers went in and the woman with--she literally looked like that woman
from Poltergeist, this made of woman. So, it was kind of crazy because I hadn't seen her and I just went
downstairs after being--everybody else is coming up and they're like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to be
pregnant in the next 2 years." or "I'm going to get a new job." which I thought was kind of a weird thing
when you've been hired by a company to tell somebody that they're getting a new and better job
somewhere else, but anyway.
Travis: Right, right.
Rich: She was never hired again, so... But when I came downstairs it was a much different experience.
When I went downstairs, she looked at me and she just said, “You don't trust your gut. You don't have
enough faith in your own belief and you're always questioning yourself and you don't follow what you're
supposed to be doing. And the best advise", and she wasn't giving advice, "the best advise that I can
give you is start trusting your gut." And then she gave me a head massage, it was very strange.
But anyway, so that really, really resonated with me because it was something I was starting to realize
on my own and all of a sudden this woman takes one look at me and just immediately knows this about
me. And I'm not saying I believe in psychics or I don't believe in psychics, but whether I do or not it's not
important, I heard what she had to say and I said this is really true. And from that moment on I started
thinking about what do I really believe in, what am I excited about, what am I passionate about. And I'd
always been passionate about--we were selling medical supplies. I was always passionate about trying
to get people to tell me what their problems were and then figuring out the technology behind the
solution that would get there. And this was right around the time the internet started to bubble up to the
surface in terms of public awareness. I was reading articles in the printed newspaper about this thing
THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW
Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business
Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 3 of 22
called the internet and I'm like, "How come these reporters know more about computers than I do."
Because I kind of fancied myself as somebody who is comfortable on computers. So I just basically
started figuring HTML on my own. I just sat down and I started doing it, and I was enjoying it, and at
one point I just realized I was enjoying it more than I was working for this company. And basically at
that point I thanked them very much for all I had learned, because I learned a lot there, it was a very
great job for me at a very ethical boss in a questionable industry. And I also had learned how to sell,
which is I think one of the most critical skills any entrepreneur can have, is the ability to sell. And I had
gained a lot of confidence from this sales ability, so I was able to start my own company, I felt good
about it and that made all the difference.
And so basically that was the beginning of what became Flyte New Media. I started doing websites for
family members to start with and for myself and then I got my first real gig, and then I just started to get
more and more jobs from that and to the point where I ultimately move to Maine, which is where I live
now, I was down in Boston, to be with my now wife. And loved it up here and of course you can do the
internet anywhere. And then as time went on, people started saying hey--clients were like, "I need to
give you more work but you can't handle it so either you hire somebody or I have to let you go." So then
I started hiring people and that was kind of interesting. It was weird; I was out of my apartment, so it
was weird, like if I had to go to the doctor, we closed down for the day kind of a thing. And then
ultimately we got some space in the old port which is the hip, cool part of Portland, Maine, and it just
continued to explode.
I'm definitely a lifestyle entrepreneur. My goal is not to make insane amount of money. It's really to live
the life that I want which is the hours that I want, doing what I want, living near the ocean, being able to
drive up to the ski mountains during the winter, that sort of thing.
So we're at about, we have 8 people right now which is about the perfect equilibrium for the type of
business I want to run. We just continue to grow organically over time and that's really been the kind of
life and the kind of business I want to run, so I'm in a very good place right now.
Travis: Good deal. So this was, the transition, it sounds like, if my math's correct, what was the
transition--what did you say, 16 years ago, so was that '96?
Rich: '96-'97. '97 was the year I quit my job and decided that I was going to do this full-time. And I
definitely had some fits and starts at the beginning, it was tough to convince anybody to get a website
right at the beginning. But it's one of those things where I stuck with it and I had some support from my
family, and that got me to a place where I was able to then become self-sustaining.
Travis: You're a really early adapter because I was running a pretty successful business during that
period and I still, I didn't really start adopting the internet or a website until '99, so you were really early
on into it. People didn't even have a deep understanding of email and really how to login, and the whole
cloud thing at that time so you really recognized the trend early on, right?
Rich: Yeah, the tools are much more difficult to use so it wasn't like you have it now where you turn on
your computer and you have Wi-Fi without thinking about it. Even doing dial-up was a real challenge,
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Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business
Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 4 of 22
the technology wasn't there. So, but for me I've always been fascinated by technology. We had an
Apple 2E computer early on and I used to go down to my father's office where we had it and I would
just kind of hack away and I would do some really, for an X-loop type of computer programs but it made
me feel more comfortable around this technology. And these days actually with my daughters and they
both have iPad minis and they have our old iPhones and stuff like that. Although I still balance the
amount of screen time they get, I definitely encourage them to experiment and try new things using the
computers because I know full well that these are the tools of the future. So I try and balance the fact
that I don't want them to do all of their time on screen time, at the same time I look at my daughter
playing Minecraft and creating entire worlds, and I see the future architect. So I'm totally okay with that
as long as you balance it with other activities like my daughters do soccer, and this thing called gym
dandies and other things, and skiing and snowboarding as well. It's about finding that balance for the
kids.
Travis: Yeah, I agree with you. It's a little frustrating when we sit down to watch a show, my wife, and
my daughter, she has her face on her phone, constantly playing games and doing other things that--
they've got to be constantly stimulated by multiple things, texting, games, all that other stuff and it really
kind of is a struggle for balance.
But getting back to your journey as an entrepreneur, how long before you actually started finding
success in your business?
Rich: Well, I guess it all depends on how you define success. I would say that I was making a profit
including being able to pay all of my bills probably within a couple of years but my needs were pretty
low back then. I was a bachelor, I lived in a very inexpensive apartment, and actually it was basically, I
had a roommate who only stayed there 1 night in an entire year because he was living with his girlfriend
but didn't want to admit it to himself.
So I had some things that just happened to fall into place for me, I had this really sweet apartment in
JPL by myself, Jamaica Plain, for anybody from the Boston area.
So that to me, I had very low expenses. My only expenses were my time which I undervalued and a
Mac performer computer which was incredibly slow and a couple of pieces of software. There wasn't a
lot of expenses, I had a printed newsletter back in the day, but I would literally buy a stack of blue paper
at Staples, go over to my dad's house and just print up copies and then mail them out. So maybe a little
bit of postage was about my only expense back then.
Travis: Right. So what was the turning point? The name of the show is Diamonds in Your Own
Backyard, and it's really about, a lot of times in life we think this catastrophic failure is the end of us
when more often than not it's really the turning point of some of the most turning points in your life, I
know it was for me and many other people that I spoke to, whether it's catastrophic or not for you, what
was that turning point for you?
Rich: That's a great question. I definitely, there were number, I would say there were a number of small
ones along the way and one thing was, I thought everything was hunky dory and nothing would ever
THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW
Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business
Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 5 of 22
change in my business. We were doing websites using HTML and I'm like, "Okay, this is just the
building blocks, just like bricks they're never going to change. And I found very quickly that all of a
sudden, that we were losing business because other people coming along and able to do things quicker
and faster and cheaper than we were because we hadn't kept up with the times in a very fast moving
industry, and there were definitely struggles like that. Another thing that I just find still that I struggle
with is there are people who are much better with the financial part of the business where I've always
been like, I can market myself out of any situation.
Then came the big downturns and marketing was helpful but at the same time I found myself really
having to pay more attention to the numbers where money just wasn't coming in because businesses
were so scared to do any sort of business and any sort of expenses, spend any sort of money. So
those were definitely some challenges along the way. When I see those challenges, and luckily I have
been pretty adept at, when I see them making quick changes to fix those sorts of things, as soon as I
realize that we were getting under-priced by some of the competition out there, people who are like,
especially a lot of the times, in my business, it can be people working out of their garages, who had no
overhead, or out of another country entirely where the cost of living is so significantly less than it is in
America.
When that's happened then I've had to make a switch. For example I started seeing that, we used to
get a lot of business out of updates, just literally updating people's websites. But one of the things that I
started seeing is a lot more people where starting to use content management systems, Word press
was becoming more robust, some of these other things. And I saw people, we were losing business
because people want a content management systems and we didn't have them at the time. And I
remember thinking like, "God, we're making so much money off of our updates. Why would I want to tell
people that they can do their own updates?
Travis: Exactly right. Wreck your own business model, right?
Rich: Exactly, but then what I realized is someone's going to take my lunch, whether it's me or
someone else, that can only last for so long. It's time where we get paid a significant amount of our
business to do updates on websites. So what I decided is rather than do that, what I was going to do is
I would tell everybody, all of our clients that the smart thing for their business would be to change to a
content management system. We had an opportunity now and we actually gave discounts for them to
make that move even though it was killing off that part of the business.
And I also saw that the bottom line is there were services out there like I panicked, not panicked. I saw
the writing on the wall where the things like Into It was basically creating almost free products for
clients, and Network Solutions had basically a free product, and Go Daddy had a free product, and one
on ones of the world were starting to pop-up, and they have professional looking websites. In fact there
was one point where a guy called me up and we were talking and he says, "Well, I want to work with
you but I've got this company out of Russia that I'm working with, and showed me some of their designs
THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW
Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business
Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 6 of 22
and their designs were great." And I said, "What are they charging you?” he said, "$3 an hour." I said,
"Well, you know what, I can't compete with that, you know, so..."
Travis: That is enough to panic over by the way Rich, it is enough to panic about, right? When you...
Rich: I decided that I needed to take some steps and so one of the things that I looked at is, "Okay if
web design is becoming a commodity, which I don't believe by the way. I believe average web design
has become a commodity. I believe that high-end custom design is still something worth paying for. But
that web design is becoming a commodity and basically updates were becoming a commodity because
anybody could do their own through something like Word press or any of these other content
management systems.
And we decided, "Well what is something that we can offer that other people can't, or that we can offer
at a higher quality than other people can." And so we took a look at our business model and we
decided one thing that--we didn't even realize we were good at until people started telling us this,
internet marketing side, I think.
People ask me questions, they're like, "Rich, how do I rank higher in Alta Vista?” which just goes to
show you how early they were asking these questions, or and now Google. And so we started figuring
that out and we would show people what to do, and then all of a sudden we realize that this is actually a
much more lucrative part of the business and a lot more growth. And so that's when we started saying,
"Well, what if we create gorgeous looking websites but we also come up with our own low-priced,
content management system for people who are like doing start-ups and just don't have the money, or
they want to dedicate more of their marketing dollars, not towards a website design, but rather towards
email marketing, or blogging, or social media, or webinars, or SEO, or whatever it is. Because really, at
the end of the day, it's not about having a website anymore, it's about having a web marketing strategy,
about something that's actually going to build your business, not just look pretty on the web.
So once we started focusing on that, and really talking about what are the end result
-------
Rich: Sorry about that, I just kicked out the microphone.
Travis: Hey hold on; let me pause you for a second because you were covering several great things.
Before we get into the things that you're brilliant at, let's go back a little bit with what you were talking
about, because there's--I'm always listening for a value. Because everybody listening is an
entrepreneur, right, and so, not only am I listening to your story but I'm listening to the important things
that we can unpack and go a little deeper on.
And so, I want to draw a parallel with what you said. So you said you didn't grow with the changes and
that was catching up with you, and I want to emphasize the importance of that because I did the same
thing. One of my companies, we were dominating with SEO and we had so many leads, we were taking
in 50 leads a day, insane. And so, I just put our SEO efforts away, this was several years ago, and quit
working on it, and just rode on it for a year and a half and saved a ton of money. And then what
happened is since I didn't grow with the changes, all my competition ended up catching up to me and
THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW
Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business
Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 7 of 22
eating our lunch, just like you were saying, and I live to regret that. And so I think that's super valuable
that you're either plugged in as a business owner, an entrepreneur, you're either plugged-in to people
that are keeping up with those changes and you're keeping up with the changes, so if your field of
specialty is a home improvement contractor, or a yoga, or whatever, well you need to stay on top of that
but you need to be plugged in with experts, they're supporting you, that are staying on top of the trends
whether be marketing or business metrics or whatever, do you agree with that?
Rich: I do agree with that, and it's interesting because it was only by listening to the Rand Fishkin’s
interview that I saw that you did, like here's the big failure thing, because I don't know if I knew that that
was going to--I didn't realize the structure of the show, so I apologize for that.
Travis: Oh no, that's okay; this is just an organic thing.
Rich: Okay, so do you want to talk more about, I mean, I never had the super failure. I never had that
moment where I went bankrupt or anything like that, I've had a series of close scares especially after
the first one where I realized that wow, I wasn't paying attention, I just assume it was always going to
be like this. So now I have a number of ways that I spend a little bit more time trying to pay attention to
what's going on around me so that I don't have those big scares anymore.
Travis: Well you know, and I think the big failure a lot of times have to do with how thick-headed the
leader is, at times I could be very hard-headed and one-wayed and I was much more like that when I
was young.
Now with the format of the show, this is really just kind of an organic thing and I know that you have a
lot of wisdom to share with your many years of experience, and at times people are just faster learners.
I've gotten to where I am, I'm a pretty fast learner but early on in my career I felt like I wasn't as fast of a
learner and it sounds to me like you maybe got caught off guard for a little while but you were paying
close enough attention that you caught it and got back on track, and you avoided those major disasters,
which is just all part of growing and being an entrepreneur, right?
Rich: I would say that that's pretty accurate, yes.
Travis: Yeah, so my job is just to help point out the nuggets of wisdom that you're sharing here
because you're saying a lot of brilliant things. And then I wanted to add one other thing. I think all
services are a commodity when they're not focused on quality, do you agree with that?
Rich: Yes.
Travis: Yeah. So I just wanted to clarify that other thing that you were talking about there. So before
you fell down there, I thought something happened on my end with the connection when you kicked
that plug loose.
You were about to segue us into, I think, some of what you teach in your business, am I right, or were
you going in an another direction?
Rich: Not sure to be honest, sometimes I get on a roll, I get so excited. That's what I feel most
comfortable often doing is like I want to make sure that people get value out of listening to anything I do
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Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business
Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 8 of 22
including this podcast. And so I want them to go away, going, "That's something I can really use today."
So I have been heading in that sort of direction.
Travis: Yeah, so let's--this is just an organic thing and you're on a roll so I don't want to get in the way.
So you teach 3 main pillars, I know that you teach more than that, but what do you say we go in the
direction of Social. I see a lot of people using Social in a way that I don't think is maybe the best
leverage, and I sure don't have everything figured out but would you mind going deeper on social?
Rich: Yeah, do you want me to ask me a question or do you want me to just kind of talk about how
businesses should be thinking about social media?
Travis: Let's talk about how businesses should think about because I feel like a lot of times, people
view Social as a building your platform, and I feel like Social is a way to support your platform, do you
agree with that?
Rich: I think that Social is part of the mix. I definitely have talked to people who have gone
wholeheartedly into social media and they think that this is going to save their business. My feeling with
social is it's an accelerant. So it's either going to explode your business or burn it to the ground. If
you're not doing anything worthwhile and you're out on Social, people are just going to see that faster
than they would've discovered otherwise.
So Social may not be the answer for every business, I think you first need to get your business in order
but then Social certainly can do a lot of things for you. And of course there's a lot of different aspects to
Social too.
I run a B to B business, a Business to Business company, but we also work with and do consulting with
a lot of B to C's, Business to Consumers, and just that right there is a big separator, even though I
always say B to B companies are just made up of people, you're still selling to people. When I start
thinking about like--and we did this kind of consults all the time. When I start thinking about a specific
business and how they might engage Social, the first thing I always think about is that what I call the
social platforms, and the social platforms are basically the soap boxes of the Social world, and I don't
know if you've ever been to London, but on Sundays in London at High Park they have something
called Speaker's Corner, where basically anybody can get on a literal, sometimes, soap box, and start
talking about whatever they think is important and people gather around and some of them will start
yelling stuff back. And that's kind of like what a blog is. So a blog is a very social platform and in my
opinion it is the hub of your social platform.
Travis: Right.
Rich: This is where you start, you create valuable content that's of interest and value to your core
audience and you start there but the comments make that a very social piece. So blogging is one,
podcasting is another, podcasting kind of fell out of favor for a couple of years but I think there's a
podcasting renaissance going on right now, when people and entrepreneurs realize the value of getting
subscribers who literally will subscribe to your podcast, listen what you have to say, and usually doing it
when they're doing something else, but something else, that they couldn't be doing anything else. So
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they're listening to your podcast when they're driving their car, or on the tread master, while they're
commuting, so they can really focus on the words and you are literally inside their heads, so podcasting
is a very powerful tool as well. And the third one is online video, specifically YouTube. Creating and I
look at YouTube the same way I look at blogging. I create YouTube videos that help my audience solve
a very specific problem. With all these, especially blogs and videos, I think a lot about the SEO, the
Search Engine Optimization angle of them as well. So that's one piece of social which a lot of people
don't think a lot about but it's a critical piece.
And then there's the social networking aspect of things and that's where you've got your Twitter, your
Facebook, your LinkedIn, possibly your Google+, and although there's some blurry lines, you might
include Pinterest there. Although that might be something that falls into another category called social
bookmarking.
So there's a lot of different ways to use these tools and Facebook for one--I talk actually about, I have a
presentation on Facebook marketing for small business, and we talk a lot about the 4 quadrants of that,
and that could be something along the lines of, there's the personal profile, the networking aspect of
Facebook. Then there's the marketing aspect which is all about your business page. Then there's the
advertising component. You really have to spend money these days for your business if you want to get
seen on Facebook. And then there's the insights component which is you need to look at your insights,
your analytics that Facebook provides and see what's working and what's not working so that you can
improve your marketing on Facebook.
Travis: So drilling into the insights, looking at the virality, if you will, of different post and dialing-in
what's working and what's not?
Rich: Absolutely, and sounds like you spend some time back there because virality is one of the
phrases they use back there. But you can kind of start to see what type of posts are most engaging in
and which ones aren't engaging in and then that tells you, that's free market research. That your
audience cares about this type of post at this type of day, but not this other type of post.
So that starts to give you some sense of, "Well, maybe I need to be posting more on the weekends, or
maybe I need to be posting more short questions, or maybe I need to be posting more photos of the
dog when he's in the office." Whatever it may be, but that gives you some sense of what's going to
engage your audience the most.
Travis: Right. And for me, now I use both personal and professional and I feel like, as far as Facebook
is concerned, and I feel like the lines have really blurred from the way that they use to be. And so I own
a B to C business and a B to B business, and I love using the Facebook fan page for my podcast
because it's just a great way for me to connect with other businesses, share great interviews like this,
and it really has a viral nature to it. And I'm really kind of surprised because very few people are using it
that way. There's a few people that produce a seminar type podcast, and when I go to their pages
they're not doing a lot of those things, I promote every post. When you and I get done and this episode
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is ready to go live, I'll promote that post to everybody, and it really engages people and I'm just
surprised that people aren't using that in a more profound way.
I also see people, when they do try to promote things like this, their message is more about themselves
rather that what they're doing to solve a problem or how they're helping someone, and I think that that
would be another important element that people need to understand when they're presenting
something that provides a solution to a problem, right?
Rich: Absolutely. It's an old saw but it’s everybody's tuned in to the same radio station, WII FM.
Travis: Right.
Rich: So I think if we--it's funny because all those little sales tapes that they used to listen to when I
was getting it to sales, a lot of those nuggets are still really good ones. So when I write content or when
I talk to somebody about creating content for themselves. I look at a lot of websites and the Homepage
reads like an About Us page, and that's the dullest information possible. You should be talking, whether
it's on your website, or YouTube channel, or you Facebook page, about your audience at all times, and
really, 80-20 create-o-principle is a great ratio to use, where 80% of the time you should be providing
valuable content, perhaps it has nothing to do with you. And then the other 20% you could be saying,
"By the way I've got this great podcast, by the way I've got this free eBook, by the way I've got a new
webinar coming out." The more you can provide value for people that seems to be unrelated to what
you can make money off of, the more they begin to trust you.
And then, they're going to be more ready to say, "You know what, I noticed you also have a podcast; I
noticed you also have an e-course, so tell me more about that."
It's just like going on a date, you go on that first date, and it's been awhile for me, been happily married
for a long time. But you go on that first date, and if that other person talks about themselves the whole
time they're a bore, you don't want to be bore. It's funny because, and this is a party trick that
everybody should try. Go to a party where you don't know a whole lot of people, don't reveal anything
about yourself unless under duress, and just ask people about what they do, you know, what they do,
who they're married to, what they like to do for fun, all that sort of stuff, and everybody there will be like,
"That person was the most interesting conversationalist in the world." And meanwhile you haven't said
anything; you're just asking people questions. Social media is very much the same way. So the more
you ask questions, and the more you let other people speak, and the more you put the spotlight on
other people regardless of the platform, the more engagement you're going to get.
Travis: Yeah, I think that's a lesson that everybody needs to think on when they're writing their copy
and when they're sharing their message is the conversation that is tuned in to WII FM, so that's just a
common problem across that I see virtually everywhere.
Let's shift gears here a little bit because I see with your 3 biggest channels, search and local, what
did..?
Rich: I just wanted to correct you, because it's actually search, social, and mobile.
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Travis: Oh mobile. okay, okay, because I was about to say, "What's the difference between search and
local?".
Rich: Small part of it, and local is critically important and actually--so the Agents of Change Digital
Marketing Conference, which you mentioned before, and also my new thing which is the marketing
agents. They both talk about search, social, and mobile because I think those are the 3 most important
channels, but it had a number of people say, "Why aren't there more agents? And that you should have
a local agent as well because I have characters for each one of these search, social, and mobile.
So local is critically important, It's not when I chose to talk about when I put on this conference.
Travis: Oh, okay. So let's go deeper on mobile. Mobile is obviously on the rise, it's something that
everybody's got within 2 feet from them at all times, let's go deeper on that.
Rich: Sure. From a business standpoint, we as a web design agency made a promise at the end of last
year, we would never build a website that wasn't mobile-friendly. There's more than one way to make a
website mobile friendly for sure, but by the force to research says that by 2014, more than half of the
web traffic will be delivered onto a mobile device. So another way of thinking that is by within a year,
most of the traffic coming to your website will be on a smartphone or a tablet.
So what are you doing to prepare for that? If you're building a website this year that is not mobile
friendly, then you are just spending money that shouldn't be spent. You should stop right now, take a
deep breath and figure out how you make it mobile friendly. And when I say mobile friendly, the bottom
line is with a Droid, or an iPhone, or the new Windows phone. The bottom line is you get a usable
version of any website, even if it's not been optimized. And I remember just a few years ago, before I
had my iPhone, and I saw a friend with an iPhone, I said, "Hey, do you mind if I take a look at Flyte's
website on it?", and I brought it up and I'm like, "Oh my God, it's so gorgeous" and I was able to double
click and enlarge things, and zoom, and pan, and do all these sort of stuff. But that same experience
these days leaves me completely frustrated.
It was amazing 3 or 4 years ago, it's completely frustrating now. Now I want big buttons for my big fat
fingers, I want it to be easy, I want it to be simplified, I want it to be designed for a mobile experience,
and that means different things for different types of businesses.
So one of the things we did are--we build everything on Word press, I'm a huge a fan of the platform.
So we decided to use a plug-in called WP touch, which created a mobile-friendly version right out of the
box of your website or your blog on Word press, and to be honest, we're a design firm and I looked at it
and I'm like that works great and it's completely ugly, so I had my designer work on it and he made a
really nice looking interface for it. And then I had my developer just create something we call the mobile
box which just allows me to put some content there that only appears on the mobile-friendly version. So
when somebody's on their phone and their looking at a flight, I'm like, "What do they really care about?”
well chances are their looking on their mobile phone when they're lost. So immediately a button pops-
up for contact directions which also leads them to the parking places, because there's not a lot of
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parking on the street around where we are, and then a phone number because people often forget. You
can click on a link and immediately be talking to somebody by phone.
Travis: Alright.
Rich: For us what it did, and for other types of businesses mobile becomes even more critical. But
there's also a new type of way of developing mobile-friendly websites, and right now everybody is
drinking the Cool Aid on this, it's called Responsive Web Design. And that's exactly how we built out the
Marketing Agents website, which was responsive. So it's kind of neat, and you just create a--it's almost
like digital origami. You look at the best way I can describe it, because it literally folds in upon itself. The
best example that I've seen out there, besides our own, is the Boston.com, it's phenomenal what
they've done with the responsive web design.
Responsive web design, despite what everybody tells you is not perfect, there are some shortcomings
as far as I'm concerned, and there are times to use responsive, and there are times to use another
option, and I don't know how new ones you want to get here but there are--responsive web design
doesn't have a way of showing you the desktop version if you want it. So that's one of the things that I
find frustrating, because sometimes I want to see what it looks like on a desktop even if I'm on my
phone.
That being aside, it does seem like responsive design is the way forward. People often ask me, in fact
just yesterday a client said, "Can you build me a mobile app?", and I said, "Yeah, we could, but you
don't have a mobile-friendly website, so let's walk before we run." The bottom line is if you’re build--the
only reason, in my opinion, to build a mobile app is if you need people to do something that they can't
do on a mobile-friendly version of your website. So when I talked to her I said, "Basically right now, we
would have to design something that works on the IOS, the Droid, the Windows, and now Blackberry
just came out with their brand new platforms, so now we're talking about 4 different versions of the
same software, for a very small community that she already has, or we create a mobile-friendly version
of her current website, that has all the functionality of the current website." And actually in this case I
recommended WP touch, and it has a feature where you can actually download the website as an app
to your phone so you have that app-like functionality to it at a fraction of the cost. And everything that
you can do on the website, you can now do through your phone that made more sense.
So when I tell people to think about a mobile strategy, it always, in my opinion, starts with a mobile-
friendly website, whatever, whether it's Responsive, WP touch, or separate website entirely that's
specially optimized to the phone.
Start with that, and then start thinking about how we're going to drive mobile users to the site if that's
important to us, like do we need to have a QR code campaign, do we want to do SMS or text
messaging, do we have an email template for our email newsletters that's mobile-friendly because
that's actually where people spend most of their time on or the majority of their time on when they're on
their phone it's actually through email. And yet you get these gorgeous looking email newsletters that
are unreadable on your phone. And there was a recent study that said 67% or something of people who
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get an email on their phone that's not mobile optimized, will not read it. So even if you've gotten past
those 3 levels of spam filters before it ends up in somebody's inbox, if they're on their phone which is
more and more likely, if your email is not optimized for their phone, there's a 2 out of 3 chance they're
not going to read it back. So it's something definitely to keep in mind that you want to create a mobile-
friendly template for your email newsletters too.
Travis: So is there businesses, do you need to be a brick and mortar type business to need this--
because like you were saying, the only reason people are traditionally looking you up is when they're
lost and they're trying to find you, right? Is it what you said?
Rich: ...more and more people are just using tablets instead of computers at their house. So they might
be doing some research and just have their tablet out and I see tablets everywhere, I'm sure you do
too. So I think, especially in the next couple of years, we're going to see people using tablets as their
main way of accessing traditional websites. So I would say that it's essential for every business, to have
a mobile friendly-website by the end of 2013. And I know from looking at some of my client's traffic
reports that many of them are already getting more than 50% of their traffic through a mobile-friendly
website.
And here's the thing, I see this all the time and it kills me. I see QR codes, and I'm curious about QR
codes so I scanned them, I may be the only person in America, I don't think so. So I scanned them to
see what the experience is going to be like and it takes me to a web page that's not optimized for
mobile.
I'm like, "Are you kidding me?"
Travis: No, that's ironic, right?
Rich: It's terrible. Where the other thing is, because at my conference last year I actually did a
presentation on how to get started with mobile marketing and one of the things that I looked into is
mobile advertising. Mobile advertising is really fascinating right now to me. And Facebook has the
opportunity where you can add advertise only to mobile users which is interesting too, and it turns out
right now it's really inexpensive.
So you can do some amazing things with mobile advertising where you show, for example let's say
you're a restaurant. You only show that mobile add to people within 15 miles of your restaurant and
then depending on the time of day it is, you can show them your breakfast, lunch, or dinner specials.
And then on top of that depending on the platform you advertise on, there may be additional information
like, if you're advertising on the Yahoo platform, they may know that this person has done a lot of
searching, or a lot of time spent on vegan websites. Well then maybe you could serve her up, an
advertising for your vegan frittata, as opposed to just your Bacon and Eggs breakfast. So there's a lot of
interesting things you can do there.
But I've seen people who go ahead and they spend a lot of money on mobile ads, but again same
problem, they send you to website that's not optimized for mobile. It just doesn't make any sense to me.
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So step 1 is getting a landing spot, a home page on mobile, that works for a mobile experience and
then driving traffic to that mobile-friendly site.
Travis: I think that's a bigger picture problem across the board because a lot of businesses have very
fragmented tactics and strategies all across their marketing sphere that are not connected together. So
I think you're shining the light on a common problem, not in just one area, in an area across the board.
Rich: Yeah, absolutely--well, a lot of people--you're right, it is fragmented or their not thinking about
things, or they've done some marketing, and it's out there on the web, and then they forget about it and
their message has changed but that old web page hasn't.
Travis: Right, right. So, the who--what type of businesses won't or less likely to need a mobile viewed--
hold on, let me back-up. So one of the things that you said is the iPad or tablets, you consider that a
mobile device rather than like a laptop because I've always, and I'm pretty up to date on this stuff but
I've always viewed a tablet as, really, just kind of an iteration of my laptop. And what I hear you saying
is, as you view it as an iteration of the phone.
Rich: Yeah, that's a great point, there are aspects of both. Usually, and I hesitate to use the word
traditionally with something about mobile marketing, but tablets and phones are considered to be
mobile devices. Now you can argue that a laptop is too but I think we're talking about user experience.
The reason why, I definitely think that the tablet is a slightly different experience, there's a few reasons.
One is the fact that--we build websites for thousand by 24 wide, and then they look great, and then all
of a sudden you put them on a tablet and things start wrapping weird. So now we really do think about,
and we do testing on how this is going to behave on a tablet and do we need to create an additional
style sheet specifically for tablets. I also think some of the ways that you interact with the webpage are
different. Obviously you're tapping on the page itself rather than using a mouse. But the mouse gives
you more flexibility and more power over how you're going to navigate that page where you don't get
the same control over a tablet.
I do agree that for a lot of people the tablet experience maybe closer to what they think of as a desktop
experience. But, think about this, a tablet--and I see people going on vacations now, I live in a very
tourist-friendly environment. I see people going around vacations carrying around their tablets like they
used to carry around their phones. So they're almost using it as like a walking tablet where they can
kind of check-in with things. If you're in a tablet, there's a very good chance that you've got GPS
enabled on that, and that you've got a camera phone enabled on that so you can do QR codes, that its
location-based so you can do a lot--checking on four square or things like that.
So from that aspect, I think tablets are very much fall into that mobile umbrella, where a typical laptop
computer would not.
Travis: Right. Well, I think I fall in to the category with the majority of people to where we associate or
I've associated, and I could be wrong on this. The size of the screen is close to the size of my laptop so
I really didn't consider that mobile. And then I thought for years and I'll relate this to my own personal
experiences.
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One of my businesses that is B to C is a home improvement company. Very large, successful company
and I never saw the value of going mobile on that because I'm thinking, "Now who is going to be doing
a research for home improvements on their phone?" Although what you're saying now shifts my
thinking of, "Well, there's a potential that people could be doing it on the phone because now phones
are larger." And also the fact that the tablets are viewed as mobile as well really kind of shifts my
thinking, so, I guess ultimately I'm answering my own question that there's really no company that
should be precluded from making their website mobile friendly.
Rich: No, I'm still amazed, I'll occasionally run into people who don't have a website at all, and I'm just
like, "Oh my god, how do you do business?" And their still faxing things. And they may be running very
successful businesses so I'm not making fun of them at all; it's just sometimes I forget that people aren't
living in my world.
But that being said, in the same way that in this day and age or in a few years ago everybody really
need to have some sort of website, I think by the end of this year everybody needs to have a mobile-
friendly website for the very reasons we're talking about. You mentioned that you had--and Millie, you
hadn't thought about tablets is under the mobile umbrella. But I can imagine that a lot of your potential
customers for this B to C company are sitting around on their couches, maybe with the T.V. going on in
the background, and they've got their tablet open and their doing searches for home improvement
ideas, or a local improvement companies. And so for that I definitely want to have a very--and I guess
here's where it really comes down to. You got to go look at your Google Analytics. Google Analytics will
tell you how many people or what percentage of people are coming on a tablet. And if you find that a
growing percentage, even a majority people are on a tablet, then I would say I would focus on creating
a website that looks best on the tablet, and then think about the phone, and then think about the
desktop version.
So your metrics that you're already creating and the trends that you see in there, that should be making
the decision for you, not anything I say, and not anything that you think. The raw numbers and the
direction of those numbers are what you should be paying attention to.
Travis: Yeah, great point. It's the best way to prioritize based on what's actually happening with your
numbers.
Rich: For sure.
Travis: So what do you think--we've talked about a lot of things and by the way, the value that you've
provided from several perspectives is just phenomenal, so I appreciate that.
Rich: Oh my pleasure.
Travis: What do you feel like some of the low hanging fruit for business owners is and of course I know
that I'm asking you some more very broad questions and brought questions are hard to answer, but
what is the most common problem you see with business owners, considering your extensive
background with marketing that most people could pay attention to and start getting some immediate
results, anything come to mind?
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Rich: Absolutely, I have a few things, I'm going to try and keep them limited. As part of the marketing
agents side project that I do, one of the things I do is I do a weekly giveaway for a 1 hour consult with
people, and I see the same things time in and time out, so I'll share some of those.
Probably the biggest thing is if you've never really focused on search engine optimization is--take a look
at your current website, and a lot of people who'd never done any SEO, search engine optimization and
don't know anything about it, but don't know why they rank well. It's because A they're not putting their
keywords into the page, and by keywords I just mean, what are the words that you think that people
would be searching for if they were looking for your company. And there's more to it than this but--or
that you want to rank well for. So for example, it's like if you go to our website, Flyte's website, we talk
about web design and internet marketing; we talk a lot about Maine because we want to get local
business. So, those are some of the keywords that we focus on at different parts of the website.
The most important thing, the thing that will move the needle to most if you've never done this before
are your page titles. So for example, when you go to website, up at the top bar, if you're in a Mac it's
the same level as the red, yellow, and green buttons, if you're on a PC, it's where the minimize and
maximize buttons are. That's your title bar, the words that appear there are the same words that appear
as the big blue links on Google that is the number 1 thing that you can do to improve your search
engine visibility. So if every single page of your website has the same title, that's a missed opportunity.
If your homepage says something like, "Welcome to ABC Corporation," that's a missed opportunity.
What you should be putting into your titles are the keywords that your audience is searching for so for
example. My company is called Flyte New Media, F-L-Y-T-E New Media. I'm not worried that people
can find Flyte new media if they're searching for us on the web. What I want is I want those unbranded
search terms. So the title tag of my homepage, which is usually the most important page on your
website, is something along line of main web design and internet marketing for small business, then I
mention my company's name, because search engines have the attention span of a 5 year old, to say
not much. So basically, they pay most attention to the words upfront, so I always try and put my best
keywords right at the front of every title tag that I use, and the most important word right there. And then
sometimes I'll use a Collin or a pipe, and then I'll repeat it in another way. Every page on my website
gets a unique title tag that's appropriate for the content on that page. And if you've never done that and
you go through and do that today after you listen to this podcast, within a week or two, I promise you
that you will see a surge in search engine visibility rankings and traffic. The only caviar is if you're in a
very competitive industry, chances are people have already done this before, you may find that to be a
little bit of a challenge, you may need to do a few more things but that's a great first step.
Travis: Excellent advice.
Rich: And if I could say one other thing, you should be blogging. I say that to people and some people
roll their eyes, and other people say, "You know I tried blogging it didn't work for me." I've never found a
tool that's better at increasing your search engine visibility and improving your social media marketing
than a blog when it's done right.
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One of the things I tell people is, "A blog will not improve your business, blogging will." It's the same
thing like you buy a nice pair of Nike running shoes, you put it in the closet, you are not going to lose
weight.
Travis: Right.
Rich: You got to fill the blog but then you've got to regularly create content that answers your ideal
customer’s biggest problems, week in and week out, day in and day out if you've got the time. But you
build up a critical mass of articles, blog posts. And here's something else to keep in mind, every blog
post is another web page, and as we talked about before every web page is another opportunity to rank
well at the search engines.
You got a question from a--I'm sure this happens to you all the time. You get a question from a client, or
a customer, or a prospect in an email, and the following response is you hit Reply and you answer.
What if you didn't hit reply? What if you took that question, maybe you had it generalize a little bit, and
you turn it into a Dear Abby style blog post. You post it up and you sent an email to that client or that
prospect and said, "That was such a great question, I'm sure a lot of other people struggle with it. So it
actually--your question was so good it caused me to write a blog post, and here's the link." You send
that off.
Not only did you make this person feel good because their question wasn't a dumb question, it was
actually a great question. You've also introduced them to your blog, so now you've got possibly a new
reader and a new subscriber. But on top of that, that one person was savvy enough to know that you
might have the answer. How many other hundreds or thousands over the next 6 months or a year, are
going to have the same question but they won't know who to turn to so they'll ask Google.
If your blog post directly answers the very question they're asking, you have a very good chance of
driving traffic to your blog and then over to your website. And that happens to me all the time.
I have a blog post that I wrote back in 2008, called "How to Use Twitter for Business", and it pulls in on
average, 3,000 unique visitors every single year who have never heard of Flyte New Media, and a
certain percentage of them sign-up for an email newsletter and a certain percentage of them start doing
business with us. That is a great investment.
Travis: Yeah, not to mention you're not having to answer that question again, you're leveraging your
time, much less the impact that you're doing with that post, right?
Rich: Right. For some people who are going to do it themselves anyway, I have given them the tools
so they can go on and succeed; a lot of people actually link to that article which increases my search
engine visibility. But a lot of people would be like, "These guys seem smart, I'm just going to hire them
to do this instead of figuring it out on my own.", and that's how we get a lot of business. And when I do
presentations it's the same thing, I don't hold back, I give out all the information I can think of to share
with people, because I know that a certain percentage of them would never do business with them but
at least I'm helping them out. And a certain percentage of them are going to be like, "You know what, I
actually am better at cutting hair, or selling tires, or walking dogs. I'm going to hire this guy or this
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company to do this other thing for me." We all have areas of expertise and the more we share it, the
more we establish our credibility, that's how we get new business.
Travis: Wow, lots and lots of great information. We're getting close to time Rich, do you have anything
else you want to add there before I segue you into the lightning round, I don't want to cut you off.
Rich: Let's segue; I'm ready for some lightning.
Travis: Okay, outstanding. Now, I sent you three questions and then I've snuck a fourth in here that I'm
going to throw you a curve.
Rich: Alright, ask away.
Travis: Alright, the first question is what book or program made an impact on you, related to business
that you'd recommend and why?
Rich: There are a lot of books that I read because when I went to college I was planning on being an
English professor, I basically didn't take any business classes at all. So I've always felt, now that I'm
running my own business, that I wish I had, I wish I had learned more about regardless, so, I read a lot
of different business book.
But the business book that's probably made the biggest impact on how I am, and how I market my
business and how I act as a business person is by Dr. Robert--hope I pronounce it right, Cialdini, and
the book is called Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion. And in the book he identifies 6, what he
calls, Weapons of Influence. Ways that we have undo persuasion or influence over other people, and
also how to protect ourselves when we recognize that somebody is using one of those techniques on
us. But it's amazing, powerful tool that can be used either for good or evil, I hopefully am using it for
good, but that book in my mind is a must read for every business owner out there and every marketer
out there.
Travis: Excellent suggestion. I think that's probably one of the most common books that people
recommend a testament to how important and powerful that book is.
Rich: Absolutely.
Travis: What is one of your favorite tools or pieces of technology that you've recently discovered, if
any, that you'd recommend to other business owners?
Rich: You know there's a lot of different stuff that I use and this is certainly not a--well actually, okay,
I've got a new tool. I just started recently using this one and I just mentioned I love to blog, I use Word
press and I've had a number of different SEO plug-ins that I've used, but I recently tried a new one
based on a recommendation by a friend and I will never use another one again. It's called the SEO
plug-in by Yoast. I don't know if that's how you pronounce the guy's name but it's Y-O-A-S-T, and this
plug-in, if you're interested in ranking higher at the search engines is a critical tool. It's a Freemium
product, you can download it for free and make a donation, which I did, and I strongly recommend if
you tried and like it that you do that. But it's a phenomenal tool. It will give you immediate feedback on
you blog post, or article, or webpage in terms of, "Have you written the page title the right way, have
you written the metadata description the right away." It will compare and contrast, and it will make
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recommendations, it will give you a score on it and tell you what could be improved before you even
publish it.
So it's the SEO plug-in from Yoast, and that's specifically for Word press users.
Travis: Excellent. What famous quote would best summarize your belief or attitude in business?
Rich: I first heard this quote in the movie The Incredibles, and it is, "Luck favors the prepared.", and I
really, honestly, believe that that is so true because I've definitely have people say, "Oh you're..." Here
up in Maine I do the text segments on a local T.V. evening news program about once a month, and
they're like, "Oh you're so lucky that you got that." Well yeah, I am lucky, and I've been lucky a lot in my
life and I've had a lot of good things happen to me but I feel that everybody who's lucky, it's because
they work so hard at getting out there to that point.
So opportunity knocks but you got to be ready for. So luck favors the prepared, it's definitely true. We
all have these moments where luck is either for us or against us, but the more prepared you are, the
more resilient you are against bad luck, and the more ready you are to take opportunities of good luck,
so that's definitely one of my favorite quotes.
Travis: Excellent quote, I agree with you. Luck is kind of like a window of opportunity, it opens for a
little while and it closes, and it seems to me that you only have the wisdom or the perspective to jump
through it or take it, when you spent the time in training and you have that wisdom to recognize what's
happening.
I even had that conversation with Rand and he misunderstood me at first because a lot of times people
view even my success, your success, Rand's success as overnight success, when really they don't
know that there were years and years of heartache and turmoil or just struggle in constant work and
effort put into this overnight success, which really is perceived as luck to many people.
Rich: Exactly, and it's funny because I was on the way to work today, I was listening to that interview
you did with Rand, I was thinking the same thing. It's like, the reason, why people think you're an
overnight success is because you toiled in obscurity for 2 years before the press or mainstream media
or some famous blogger recognized you and pulled you out of obscurity, but it's really the fact that you
were doing all the right things leading up to it. So that when that window of opportunity opened, you are
ready to take advantage of it.
Travis: Right. Excellent answers to all of those. So here comes my curve.
Rich: Alright.
Travis: Now that you found success, what do you dream of?
Rich: Well, as I mentioned, I kind of launched a side project. I've been running Flyte, more or less
successfully for 16 years. We've had our ups and downs like any business, but we're still in business
for 16 years, that makes me very proud. I've got a great team around me. But a couple of years ago I
started saying, "Was I just lucky?", and that's actually when I decided to, first with some friends and
now on my own, create my own event. And this was up here in Maine and we had about 400 people
show up, the Agents of Change Digital Marketing Conference. So for me, first, it was about creating a
THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW
Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business
Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 20 of 22
new event that would bring people all over but really focus on getting a nationally recognized
conference to me. That was a big thing and I was successful there, and then more recently, I realized
how much I love presenting, I love sharing information, I love educating. And that's why I launched the
side project, the marketing agents.
So I guess if I, what I dream about is getting Flyte to the point where it can continue to sustain itself. But
I get to do more or less what I want, which is--and not that I'm not doing it at Flyte but really with a little
bit more freedom where Rich Brooks gets to write about, present on, and practice web marketing and
social media. And that may sound like the lamest dream to other people but for me I find technology,
and how it affects people, endlessly fascinating. That's what I do what I do. It's not the technology, it's
how it impacts people's lives and businesses, and the more I can help any small business, but
especially those in my adopted home state of Maine, the better I feel. So I just want to be doing this and
make a living at it and really kind of share this education so that small businesses can grow to whatever
that means for them.
So just to be able to do what I'm doing but with as much freedom as I want and be able to create
content, and share that content, and make a living at it. That's my own personal dream.
Travis: I completely get that, I'm the same way, I have this wonderful B to C business that's a very
large business and I only spend 5 hours a week in that business, because I'm really not passionate, I
care about it but I'm not passionate about it. I'm passionate about helping entrepreneurs. And so I can
draw that parallel with you there, and I'm of the same mind-set, so I appreciate you sharing that with us.
Rich: Sure thing.
Travis: How did people connect with you?
Rich: There's 2 things I'd like to have them check out if they have the time. The first is Flyte New Media
because we've been around for so long, and that's Flyte.bizF-L-Y-T-E.biz, and that's my web agency,
that's the web design and internet marketing. But the thing that I'm super passionate about this
particular week is the marketing agents, and that's at TheMarketingAgents.com. It's a brand new
website, it's just been out for a couple of weeks, I'm trying to create insanely valuable content
specifically for small businesses and non-profits that are looking to grow, and generate revenue on the
web. Love to get people's feedback on it. I've got thick skin and I've got a therapist start retainer so
please let me have like--but I really would like people to tell me if it's valuable to them and sign-up and
that would be great. So that's where they can find me.
Travis: Cool. And any other links that you have I'll get from you and then we'll just post them up so that
everybody can go to you directly. By the way I've come to Maine, Kennebunkport, Maine and spend a
little time there, so I love your state.
Rich: Well, thanks. And next time you come up, just come a little bit further north, and you and I will go
out for lunch, or a beer, or tequila, whatever you happen to like.
THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW
Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business
Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 21 of 22
Portland, Maine, was last year or the year before, it was rated the number 1 foodie small town in
America. And although our does go to bed a little early, it's got some of the best food per capital in the
world.
Travis: Yeah, I'll definitely stop by and see you. Listen, I appreciate you being on the show, can you
hang out with us for a couple more minutes?
Rich: Be happy to.
End of Interview
Travis: Alright. So listen, now I want to remind you that there’s a show note at the bottom of the post
here that we create for the show and in that way you can directly connect with Rich through--I'll put his
Twitter and everything else, information up there and you can just directly connect with him. Remember
to go to DIYOB which is an abbreviation of Diamonds in Your Own Backyard, so it's DIYOB.com, enter
your name and we'll send you the 2013 Business Owner's Guide, From Frustration to $70 million. It's a
behind the scene look at what you need to know to grow your business to incredible levels of success.
And it really doesn't matter where you’re adding business; all of these discoveries are things that I
found that most people aren't willing to talk about. So it's really important, it's a 15-page document so
it's something to read, but it's essential to your journey as an entrepreneur. Also when you opt in, you
become a member of the Authentic Entrepreneur Nation, which is really a network of people, tools, and
resources that you can refer to grow your business. Again this is our personal roll-a-decks that we use
and recommend. And we'll have this up for you in a matter of weeks.
I know one of the biggest challenges in growing your business is finding people that you can trust,
people that can actually follow through on their promises. And so now you'll have access to a group of
credible people that you can connect with, they're highly competent through our network that will help
you with whatever you may need.
Today I want to close the show with reminding you how important entrepreneurs our to our community.
Entrepreneurs are a living, breathing model of what it looks like to go after your dream and take action
no matter what, even in the face of fear and uncertainty. So whether you know it or not, you're an
inspiration to those around you, and I want to encourage you to keep it up, no matter what size your
business is, what you’re doing matters. You're a piece of the bigger picture puzzle of entrepreneurship
as a whole.
So in the next episode, I'm going to connect you with lifestyle entrepreneur, Scott Fox. And when I say
lifestyle entrepreneur, that means you design your business around what makes you happy regardless
of the who, what, or where conditions of your life, so you definitely don't want to miss that next episode.
This is Travis Lane Jenkins, signing off for now. To your success, may you inspire those around you to
go after their dreams just like you. Talk to you in the next episode.
THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW
Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business
Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 22 of 22
How We Can Help You
We know that finding someone that you can trust online today is hard and that so many “so called
gurus” are self-‐appointed and have never really even done what they teach you to do. That’s exactly
why we created the Double Your Profits Business Accelerator. This is an exclusive offer for our fans at
a fraction of its normal cost.
Here's what to expect. We'll Schedule a 'One on One' private session, where we'll take the time to dive
deep into your business and tell you what is missing, so that you can have your best year ever!
We'll do this by performing a S.W.O.T. Analysis. This tells us your Strengths, Weaknesses,
Opportunities and Threats within your business.
This will be an eye opener for YOU, for several reasons, however some of the most common reasons
are.
As the 'Business Owner' it’s difficult to see the big picture of your own business because you’re in the
middle of a daily management.
And you are too emotionally involved to completely impartial.
This is a common problem for EVERY business owner. It doesn’t matter if you are a one-man army, or
an army of 150, the problem is still the same.
Travis Lane Jenkins
Business Mentor-Turn Around Specialist
Radio Host of The Entrepreneurs Radio Show
“Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs That Grow Your Business"

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The Entrepreneurs Radio Show 033 Rich Brooks

  • 1. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 1 of 22 EPISODE #33: RICH BROOKS In this episode, Travis interviews Rich Brooks, the founder and president of Flyte New Media, a web design and internet marketing company, and a contributor to successful social media and marketing websites such FastCompany.com and SocialMediaExaminer.com. Rich is also the founder of The Agents of Change Digital Marketing which is an event that focuses on search, social, and local, which are the 3 biggest channels today. Rich shares a lot of valuable information on how to grow your internet business through clever advertising and ensure maximum exposure through strategies like SEO and patterning your website on today’s technological trends. Through hard work and adapting with the ever-growing internet market, Rich’s experience is very valuable for entrepreneurs who are determined to get big on their online business and attracting potential customers through the use of clever marketing and effective means of promoting your business. Rich Brooks – Search, Social & Mobile For Your Business Travis: Hey, it's Travis Lane Jenkins, welcome to episode number 33 of Diamonds in your own backyard, the entrepreneur's radio show. Conversations with successful business owners that grow your business. Sandra my co-host is still in the center of Daytona International Raceway so it's just us three today. Today we're talking about marketing your business, which I know is a pretty broad topic, so between myself and our guest, we're going to drill into some specifics that will give you some real value for growing your business to that next level. Now be sure to stay with us until the very end if you can because I have a couple of things that I want to share with you, and I also want to reveal who I'm going to connect you within the next episode. So if you enjoy these free podcasts that we create for you, we would really appreciate it if you'd go to iTunes and post a comment and rate the show. This would help us reach, instruct, and inspire more great entrepreneurs just like yourself. Now for some quick perspective on the show for our new friends that just joined us. I want you to think of this as a conversation between four friends, just us sitting at a table. Even though we're talking with some of the brightest entrepreneurs and brilliant thought leaders, it's just a casual, private, up close conversation. Now everyone that we're talking with has found success doing what they teach and they want to help you by sharing what they've discovered. Normally the only way to get this level of personal access to so many high level entrepreneurs beyond having your own show is to join high level masterminds, go to the seminars, events and just build those relationships over years. And now through this show, I'm super excited that we get to share these great people with you to fast-forward your success.
  • 2. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 2 of 22 Today, our guest on our show is Rich Brooks. Now Rich is the founder and president of Flyte New Media, which is a web design and internet marketing company. He is also a contributor to FastCompany.com and SocialMediaExaminer.com, one of the most popular social media sites today. Rich is also the founder of the Agents of Change Digital Marketing which is an event that focuses on the 3 biggest channels today, which is search, social, and local. Now, there's more that I can tell you about Rich, although I'm going to let him share his story with us before we really drill into talking about some of these great strategies that we're going to apply to your business. So without further ado, welcome to the show Rich. Rich: Hey Travis, thank you very much for having me, man. Travis: You bet, man I really appreciate you taking time out to visit with us. Do you mind sharing some of the back-story of how you got started and what brought you to where you are today? Rich: Sure, absolutely. Let's see, I've actually been doing this web design and internet marketing, I think, for a long time like over 16 years, which in internet years is like a million six or something like that so that I have been around for a while. I wasn't there when Al Gore actually created the internet but I joined shortly thereafter. I have been working in sales for another company selling the equivalent of widgets and at a Christmas party actually, they had hired a psychic to read you, and I was one of the last to go. All my other co-workers went in and the woman with--she literally looked like that woman from Poltergeist, this made of woman. So, it was kind of crazy because I hadn't seen her and I just went downstairs after being--everybody else is coming up and they're like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to be pregnant in the next 2 years." or "I'm going to get a new job." which I thought was kind of a weird thing when you've been hired by a company to tell somebody that they're getting a new and better job somewhere else, but anyway. Travis: Right, right. Rich: She was never hired again, so... But when I came downstairs it was a much different experience. When I went downstairs, she looked at me and she just said, “You don't trust your gut. You don't have enough faith in your own belief and you're always questioning yourself and you don't follow what you're supposed to be doing. And the best advise", and she wasn't giving advice, "the best advise that I can give you is start trusting your gut." And then she gave me a head massage, it was very strange. But anyway, so that really, really resonated with me because it was something I was starting to realize on my own and all of a sudden this woman takes one look at me and just immediately knows this about me. And I'm not saying I believe in psychics or I don't believe in psychics, but whether I do or not it's not important, I heard what she had to say and I said this is really true. And from that moment on I started thinking about what do I really believe in, what am I excited about, what am I passionate about. And I'd always been passionate about--we were selling medical supplies. I was always passionate about trying to get people to tell me what their problems were and then figuring out the technology behind the solution that would get there. And this was right around the time the internet started to bubble up to the surface in terms of public awareness. I was reading articles in the printed newspaper about this thing
  • 3. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 3 of 22 called the internet and I'm like, "How come these reporters know more about computers than I do." Because I kind of fancied myself as somebody who is comfortable on computers. So I just basically started figuring HTML on my own. I just sat down and I started doing it, and I was enjoying it, and at one point I just realized I was enjoying it more than I was working for this company. And basically at that point I thanked them very much for all I had learned, because I learned a lot there, it was a very great job for me at a very ethical boss in a questionable industry. And I also had learned how to sell, which is I think one of the most critical skills any entrepreneur can have, is the ability to sell. And I had gained a lot of confidence from this sales ability, so I was able to start my own company, I felt good about it and that made all the difference. And so basically that was the beginning of what became Flyte New Media. I started doing websites for family members to start with and for myself and then I got my first real gig, and then I just started to get more and more jobs from that and to the point where I ultimately move to Maine, which is where I live now, I was down in Boston, to be with my now wife. And loved it up here and of course you can do the internet anywhere. And then as time went on, people started saying hey--clients were like, "I need to give you more work but you can't handle it so either you hire somebody or I have to let you go." So then I started hiring people and that was kind of interesting. It was weird; I was out of my apartment, so it was weird, like if I had to go to the doctor, we closed down for the day kind of a thing. And then ultimately we got some space in the old port which is the hip, cool part of Portland, Maine, and it just continued to explode. I'm definitely a lifestyle entrepreneur. My goal is not to make insane amount of money. It's really to live the life that I want which is the hours that I want, doing what I want, living near the ocean, being able to drive up to the ski mountains during the winter, that sort of thing. So we're at about, we have 8 people right now which is about the perfect equilibrium for the type of business I want to run. We just continue to grow organically over time and that's really been the kind of life and the kind of business I want to run, so I'm in a very good place right now. Travis: Good deal. So this was, the transition, it sounds like, if my math's correct, what was the transition--what did you say, 16 years ago, so was that '96? Rich: '96-'97. '97 was the year I quit my job and decided that I was going to do this full-time. And I definitely had some fits and starts at the beginning, it was tough to convince anybody to get a website right at the beginning. But it's one of those things where I stuck with it and I had some support from my family, and that got me to a place where I was able to then become self-sustaining. Travis: You're a really early adapter because I was running a pretty successful business during that period and I still, I didn't really start adopting the internet or a website until '99, so you were really early on into it. People didn't even have a deep understanding of email and really how to login, and the whole cloud thing at that time so you really recognized the trend early on, right? Rich: Yeah, the tools are much more difficult to use so it wasn't like you have it now where you turn on your computer and you have Wi-Fi without thinking about it. Even doing dial-up was a real challenge,
  • 4. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 4 of 22 the technology wasn't there. So, but for me I've always been fascinated by technology. We had an Apple 2E computer early on and I used to go down to my father's office where we had it and I would just kind of hack away and I would do some really, for an X-loop type of computer programs but it made me feel more comfortable around this technology. And these days actually with my daughters and they both have iPad minis and they have our old iPhones and stuff like that. Although I still balance the amount of screen time they get, I definitely encourage them to experiment and try new things using the computers because I know full well that these are the tools of the future. So I try and balance the fact that I don't want them to do all of their time on screen time, at the same time I look at my daughter playing Minecraft and creating entire worlds, and I see the future architect. So I'm totally okay with that as long as you balance it with other activities like my daughters do soccer, and this thing called gym dandies and other things, and skiing and snowboarding as well. It's about finding that balance for the kids. Travis: Yeah, I agree with you. It's a little frustrating when we sit down to watch a show, my wife, and my daughter, she has her face on her phone, constantly playing games and doing other things that-- they've got to be constantly stimulated by multiple things, texting, games, all that other stuff and it really kind of is a struggle for balance. But getting back to your journey as an entrepreneur, how long before you actually started finding success in your business? Rich: Well, I guess it all depends on how you define success. I would say that I was making a profit including being able to pay all of my bills probably within a couple of years but my needs were pretty low back then. I was a bachelor, I lived in a very inexpensive apartment, and actually it was basically, I had a roommate who only stayed there 1 night in an entire year because he was living with his girlfriend but didn't want to admit it to himself. So I had some things that just happened to fall into place for me, I had this really sweet apartment in JPL by myself, Jamaica Plain, for anybody from the Boston area. So that to me, I had very low expenses. My only expenses were my time which I undervalued and a Mac performer computer which was incredibly slow and a couple of pieces of software. There wasn't a lot of expenses, I had a printed newsletter back in the day, but I would literally buy a stack of blue paper at Staples, go over to my dad's house and just print up copies and then mail them out. So maybe a little bit of postage was about my only expense back then. Travis: Right. So what was the turning point? The name of the show is Diamonds in Your Own Backyard, and it's really about, a lot of times in life we think this catastrophic failure is the end of us when more often than not it's really the turning point of some of the most turning points in your life, I know it was for me and many other people that I spoke to, whether it's catastrophic or not for you, what was that turning point for you? Rich: That's a great question. I definitely, there were number, I would say there were a number of small ones along the way and one thing was, I thought everything was hunky dory and nothing would ever
  • 5. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 5 of 22 change in my business. We were doing websites using HTML and I'm like, "Okay, this is just the building blocks, just like bricks they're never going to change. And I found very quickly that all of a sudden, that we were losing business because other people coming along and able to do things quicker and faster and cheaper than we were because we hadn't kept up with the times in a very fast moving industry, and there were definitely struggles like that. Another thing that I just find still that I struggle with is there are people who are much better with the financial part of the business where I've always been like, I can market myself out of any situation. Then came the big downturns and marketing was helpful but at the same time I found myself really having to pay more attention to the numbers where money just wasn't coming in because businesses were so scared to do any sort of business and any sort of expenses, spend any sort of money. So those were definitely some challenges along the way. When I see those challenges, and luckily I have been pretty adept at, when I see them making quick changes to fix those sorts of things, as soon as I realize that we were getting under-priced by some of the competition out there, people who are like, especially a lot of the times, in my business, it can be people working out of their garages, who had no overhead, or out of another country entirely where the cost of living is so significantly less than it is in America. When that's happened then I've had to make a switch. For example I started seeing that, we used to get a lot of business out of updates, just literally updating people's websites. But one of the things that I started seeing is a lot more people where starting to use content management systems, Word press was becoming more robust, some of these other things. And I saw people, we were losing business because people want a content management systems and we didn't have them at the time. And I remember thinking like, "God, we're making so much money off of our updates. Why would I want to tell people that they can do their own updates? Travis: Exactly right. Wreck your own business model, right? Rich: Exactly, but then what I realized is someone's going to take my lunch, whether it's me or someone else, that can only last for so long. It's time where we get paid a significant amount of our business to do updates on websites. So what I decided is rather than do that, what I was going to do is I would tell everybody, all of our clients that the smart thing for their business would be to change to a content management system. We had an opportunity now and we actually gave discounts for them to make that move even though it was killing off that part of the business. And I also saw that the bottom line is there were services out there like I panicked, not panicked. I saw the writing on the wall where the things like Into It was basically creating almost free products for clients, and Network Solutions had basically a free product, and Go Daddy had a free product, and one on ones of the world were starting to pop-up, and they have professional looking websites. In fact there was one point where a guy called me up and we were talking and he says, "Well, I want to work with you but I've got this company out of Russia that I'm working with, and showed me some of their designs
  • 6. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 6 of 22 and their designs were great." And I said, "What are they charging you?” he said, "$3 an hour." I said, "Well, you know what, I can't compete with that, you know, so..." Travis: That is enough to panic over by the way Rich, it is enough to panic about, right? When you... Rich: I decided that I needed to take some steps and so one of the things that I looked at is, "Okay if web design is becoming a commodity, which I don't believe by the way. I believe average web design has become a commodity. I believe that high-end custom design is still something worth paying for. But that web design is becoming a commodity and basically updates were becoming a commodity because anybody could do their own through something like Word press or any of these other content management systems. And we decided, "Well what is something that we can offer that other people can't, or that we can offer at a higher quality than other people can." And so we took a look at our business model and we decided one thing that--we didn't even realize we were good at until people started telling us this, internet marketing side, I think. People ask me questions, they're like, "Rich, how do I rank higher in Alta Vista?” which just goes to show you how early they were asking these questions, or and now Google. And so we started figuring that out and we would show people what to do, and then all of a sudden we realize that this is actually a much more lucrative part of the business and a lot more growth. And so that's when we started saying, "Well, what if we create gorgeous looking websites but we also come up with our own low-priced, content management system for people who are like doing start-ups and just don't have the money, or they want to dedicate more of their marketing dollars, not towards a website design, but rather towards email marketing, or blogging, or social media, or webinars, or SEO, or whatever it is. Because really, at the end of the day, it's not about having a website anymore, it's about having a web marketing strategy, about something that's actually going to build your business, not just look pretty on the web. So once we started focusing on that, and really talking about what are the end result ------- Rich: Sorry about that, I just kicked out the microphone. Travis: Hey hold on; let me pause you for a second because you were covering several great things. Before we get into the things that you're brilliant at, let's go back a little bit with what you were talking about, because there's--I'm always listening for a value. Because everybody listening is an entrepreneur, right, and so, not only am I listening to your story but I'm listening to the important things that we can unpack and go a little deeper on. And so, I want to draw a parallel with what you said. So you said you didn't grow with the changes and that was catching up with you, and I want to emphasize the importance of that because I did the same thing. One of my companies, we were dominating with SEO and we had so many leads, we were taking in 50 leads a day, insane. And so, I just put our SEO efforts away, this was several years ago, and quit working on it, and just rode on it for a year and a half and saved a ton of money. And then what happened is since I didn't grow with the changes, all my competition ended up catching up to me and
  • 7. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 7 of 22 eating our lunch, just like you were saying, and I live to regret that. And so I think that's super valuable that you're either plugged in as a business owner, an entrepreneur, you're either plugged-in to people that are keeping up with those changes and you're keeping up with the changes, so if your field of specialty is a home improvement contractor, or a yoga, or whatever, well you need to stay on top of that but you need to be plugged in with experts, they're supporting you, that are staying on top of the trends whether be marketing or business metrics or whatever, do you agree with that? Rich: I do agree with that, and it's interesting because it was only by listening to the Rand Fishkin’s interview that I saw that you did, like here's the big failure thing, because I don't know if I knew that that was going to--I didn't realize the structure of the show, so I apologize for that. Travis: Oh no, that's okay; this is just an organic thing. Rich: Okay, so do you want to talk more about, I mean, I never had the super failure. I never had that moment where I went bankrupt or anything like that, I've had a series of close scares especially after the first one where I realized that wow, I wasn't paying attention, I just assume it was always going to be like this. So now I have a number of ways that I spend a little bit more time trying to pay attention to what's going on around me so that I don't have those big scares anymore. Travis: Well you know, and I think the big failure a lot of times have to do with how thick-headed the leader is, at times I could be very hard-headed and one-wayed and I was much more like that when I was young. Now with the format of the show, this is really just kind of an organic thing and I know that you have a lot of wisdom to share with your many years of experience, and at times people are just faster learners. I've gotten to where I am, I'm a pretty fast learner but early on in my career I felt like I wasn't as fast of a learner and it sounds to me like you maybe got caught off guard for a little while but you were paying close enough attention that you caught it and got back on track, and you avoided those major disasters, which is just all part of growing and being an entrepreneur, right? Rich: I would say that that's pretty accurate, yes. Travis: Yeah, so my job is just to help point out the nuggets of wisdom that you're sharing here because you're saying a lot of brilliant things. And then I wanted to add one other thing. I think all services are a commodity when they're not focused on quality, do you agree with that? Rich: Yes. Travis: Yeah. So I just wanted to clarify that other thing that you were talking about there. So before you fell down there, I thought something happened on my end with the connection when you kicked that plug loose. You were about to segue us into, I think, some of what you teach in your business, am I right, or were you going in an another direction? Rich: Not sure to be honest, sometimes I get on a roll, I get so excited. That's what I feel most comfortable often doing is like I want to make sure that people get value out of listening to anything I do
  • 8. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 8 of 22 including this podcast. And so I want them to go away, going, "That's something I can really use today." So I have been heading in that sort of direction. Travis: Yeah, so let's--this is just an organic thing and you're on a roll so I don't want to get in the way. So you teach 3 main pillars, I know that you teach more than that, but what do you say we go in the direction of Social. I see a lot of people using Social in a way that I don't think is maybe the best leverage, and I sure don't have everything figured out but would you mind going deeper on social? Rich: Yeah, do you want me to ask me a question or do you want me to just kind of talk about how businesses should be thinking about social media? Travis: Let's talk about how businesses should think about because I feel like a lot of times, people view Social as a building your platform, and I feel like Social is a way to support your platform, do you agree with that? Rich: I think that Social is part of the mix. I definitely have talked to people who have gone wholeheartedly into social media and they think that this is going to save their business. My feeling with social is it's an accelerant. So it's either going to explode your business or burn it to the ground. If you're not doing anything worthwhile and you're out on Social, people are just going to see that faster than they would've discovered otherwise. So Social may not be the answer for every business, I think you first need to get your business in order but then Social certainly can do a lot of things for you. And of course there's a lot of different aspects to Social too. I run a B to B business, a Business to Business company, but we also work with and do consulting with a lot of B to C's, Business to Consumers, and just that right there is a big separator, even though I always say B to B companies are just made up of people, you're still selling to people. When I start thinking about like--and we did this kind of consults all the time. When I start thinking about a specific business and how they might engage Social, the first thing I always think about is that what I call the social platforms, and the social platforms are basically the soap boxes of the Social world, and I don't know if you've ever been to London, but on Sundays in London at High Park they have something called Speaker's Corner, where basically anybody can get on a literal, sometimes, soap box, and start talking about whatever they think is important and people gather around and some of them will start yelling stuff back. And that's kind of like what a blog is. So a blog is a very social platform and in my opinion it is the hub of your social platform. Travis: Right. Rich: This is where you start, you create valuable content that's of interest and value to your core audience and you start there but the comments make that a very social piece. So blogging is one, podcasting is another, podcasting kind of fell out of favor for a couple of years but I think there's a podcasting renaissance going on right now, when people and entrepreneurs realize the value of getting subscribers who literally will subscribe to your podcast, listen what you have to say, and usually doing it when they're doing something else, but something else, that they couldn't be doing anything else. So
  • 9. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 9 of 22 they're listening to your podcast when they're driving their car, or on the tread master, while they're commuting, so they can really focus on the words and you are literally inside their heads, so podcasting is a very powerful tool as well. And the third one is online video, specifically YouTube. Creating and I look at YouTube the same way I look at blogging. I create YouTube videos that help my audience solve a very specific problem. With all these, especially blogs and videos, I think a lot about the SEO, the Search Engine Optimization angle of them as well. So that's one piece of social which a lot of people don't think a lot about but it's a critical piece. And then there's the social networking aspect of things and that's where you've got your Twitter, your Facebook, your LinkedIn, possibly your Google+, and although there's some blurry lines, you might include Pinterest there. Although that might be something that falls into another category called social bookmarking. So there's a lot of different ways to use these tools and Facebook for one--I talk actually about, I have a presentation on Facebook marketing for small business, and we talk a lot about the 4 quadrants of that, and that could be something along the lines of, there's the personal profile, the networking aspect of Facebook. Then there's the marketing aspect which is all about your business page. Then there's the advertising component. You really have to spend money these days for your business if you want to get seen on Facebook. And then there's the insights component which is you need to look at your insights, your analytics that Facebook provides and see what's working and what's not working so that you can improve your marketing on Facebook. Travis: So drilling into the insights, looking at the virality, if you will, of different post and dialing-in what's working and what's not? Rich: Absolutely, and sounds like you spend some time back there because virality is one of the phrases they use back there. But you can kind of start to see what type of posts are most engaging in and which ones aren't engaging in and then that tells you, that's free market research. That your audience cares about this type of post at this type of day, but not this other type of post. So that starts to give you some sense of, "Well, maybe I need to be posting more on the weekends, or maybe I need to be posting more short questions, or maybe I need to be posting more photos of the dog when he's in the office." Whatever it may be, but that gives you some sense of what's going to engage your audience the most. Travis: Right. And for me, now I use both personal and professional and I feel like, as far as Facebook is concerned, and I feel like the lines have really blurred from the way that they use to be. And so I own a B to C business and a B to B business, and I love using the Facebook fan page for my podcast because it's just a great way for me to connect with other businesses, share great interviews like this, and it really has a viral nature to it. And I'm really kind of surprised because very few people are using it that way. There's a few people that produce a seminar type podcast, and when I go to their pages they're not doing a lot of those things, I promote every post. When you and I get done and this episode
  • 10. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 10 of 22 is ready to go live, I'll promote that post to everybody, and it really engages people and I'm just surprised that people aren't using that in a more profound way. I also see people, when they do try to promote things like this, their message is more about themselves rather that what they're doing to solve a problem or how they're helping someone, and I think that that would be another important element that people need to understand when they're presenting something that provides a solution to a problem, right? Rich: Absolutely. It's an old saw but it’s everybody's tuned in to the same radio station, WII FM. Travis: Right. Rich: So I think if we--it's funny because all those little sales tapes that they used to listen to when I was getting it to sales, a lot of those nuggets are still really good ones. So when I write content or when I talk to somebody about creating content for themselves. I look at a lot of websites and the Homepage reads like an About Us page, and that's the dullest information possible. You should be talking, whether it's on your website, or YouTube channel, or you Facebook page, about your audience at all times, and really, 80-20 create-o-principle is a great ratio to use, where 80% of the time you should be providing valuable content, perhaps it has nothing to do with you. And then the other 20% you could be saying, "By the way I've got this great podcast, by the way I've got this free eBook, by the way I've got a new webinar coming out." The more you can provide value for people that seems to be unrelated to what you can make money off of, the more they begin to trust you. And then, they're going to be more ready to say, "You know what, I noticed you also have a podcast; I noticed you also have an e-course, so tell me more about that." It's just like going on a date, you go on that first date, and it's been awhile for me, been happily married for a long time. But you go on that first date, and if that other person talks about themselves the whole time they're a bore, you don't want to be bore. It's funny because, and this is a party trick that everybody should try. Go to a party where you don't know a whole lot of people, don't reveal anything about yourself unless under duress, and just ask people about what they do, you know, what they do, who they're married to, what they like to do for fun, all that sort of stuff, and everybody there will be like, "That person was the most interesting conversationalist in the world." And meanwhile you haven't said anything; you're just asking people questions. Social media is very much the same way. So the more you ask questions, and the more you let other people speak, and the more you put the spotlight on other people regardless of the platform, the more engagement you're going to get. Travis: Yeah, I think that's a lesson that everybody needs to think on when they're writing their copy and when they're sharing their message is the conversation that is tuned in to WII FM, so that's just a common problem across that I see virtually everywhere. Let's shift gears here a little bit because I see with your 3 biggest channels, search and local, what did..? Rich: I just wanted to correct you, because it's actually search, social, and mobile.
  • 11. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 11 of 22 Travis: Oh mobile. okay, okay, because I was about to say, "What's the difference between search and local?". Rich: Small part of it, and local is critically important and actually--so the Agents of Change Digital Marketing Conference, which you mentioned before, and also my new thing which is the marketing agents. They both talk about search, social, and mobile because I think those are the 3 most important channels, but it had a number of people say, "Why aren't there more agents? And that you should have a local agent as well because I have characters for each one of these search, social, and mobile. So local is critically important, It's not when I chose to talk about when I put on this conference. Travis: Oh, okay. So let's go deeper on mobile. Mobile is obviously on the rise, it's something that everybody's got within 2 feet from them at all times, let's go deeper on that. Rich: Sure. From a business standpoint, we as a web design agency made a promise at the end of last year, we would never build a website that wasn't mobile-friendly. There's more than one way to make a website mobile friendly for sure, but by the force to research says that by 2014, more than half of the web traffic will be delivered onto a mobile device. So another way of thinking that is by within a year, most of the traffic coming to your website will be on a smartphone or a tablet. So what are you doing to prepare for that? If you're building a website this year that is not mobile friendly, then you are just spending money that shouldn't be spent. You should stop right now, take a deep breath and figure out how you make it mobile friendly. And when I say mobile friendly, the bottom line is with a Droid, or an iPhone, or the new Windows phone. The bottom line is you get a usable version of any website, even if it's not been optimized. And I remember just a few years ago, before I had my iPhone, and I saw a friend with an iPhone, I said, "Hey, do you mind if I take a look at Flyte's website on it?", and I brought it up and I'm like, "Oh my God, it's so gorgeous" and I was able to double click and enlarge things, and zoom, and pan, and do all these sort of stuff. But that same experience these days leaves me completely frustrated. It was amazing 3 or 4 years ago, it's completely frustrating now. Now I want big buttons for my big fat fingers, I want it to be easy, I want it to be simplified, I want it to be designed for a mobile experience, and that means different things for different types of businesses. So one of the things we did are--we build everything on Word press, I'm a huge a fan of the platform. So we decided to use a plug-in called WP touch, which created a mobile-friendly version right out of the box of your website or your blog on Word press, and to be honest, we're a design firm and I looked at it and I'm like that works great and it's completely ugly, so I had my designer work on it and he made a really nice looking interface for it. And then I had my developer just create something we call the mobile box which just allows me to put some content there that only appears on the mobile-friendly version. So when somebody's on their phone and their looking at a flight, I'm like, "What do they really care about?” well chances are their looking on their mobile phone when they're lost. So immediately a button pops- up for contact directions which also leads them to the parking places, because there's not a lot of
  • 12. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 12 of 22 parking on the street around where we are, and then a phone number because people often forget. You can click on a link and immediately be talking to somebody by phone. Travis: Alright. Rich: For us what it did, and for other types of businesses mobile becomes even more critical. But there's also a new type of way of developing mobile-friendly websites, and right now everybody is drinking the Cool Aid on this, it's called Responsive Web Design. And that's exactly how we built out the Marketing Agents website, which was responsive. So it's kind of neat, and you just create a--it's almost like digital origami. You look at the best way I can describe it, because it literally folds in upon itself. The best example that I've seen out there, besides our own, is the Boston.com, it's phenomenal what they've done with the responsive web design. Responsive web design, despite what everybody tells you is not perfect, there are some shortcomings as far as I'm concerned, and there are times to use responsive, and there are times to use another option, and I don't know how new ones you want to get here but there are--responsive web design doesn't have a way of showing you the desktop version if you want it. So that's one of the things that I find frustrating, because sometimes I want to see what it looks like on a desktop even if I'm on my phone. That being aside, it does seem like responsive design is the way forward. People often ask me, in fact just yesterday a client said, "Can you build me a mobile app?", and I said, "Yeah, we could, but you don't have a mobile-friendly website, so let's walk before we run." The bottom line is if you’re build--the only reason, in my opinion, to build a mobile app is if you need people to do something that they can't do on a mobile-friendly version of your website. So when I talked to her I said, "Basically right now, we would have to design something that works on the IOS, the Droid, the Windows, and now Blackberry just came out with their brand new platforms, so now we're talking about 4 different versions of the same software, for a very small community that she already has, or we create a mobile-friendly version of her current website, that has all the functionality of the current website." And actually in this case I recommended WP touch, and it has a feature where you can actually download the website as an app to your phone so you have that app-like functionality to it at a fraction of the cost. And everything that you can do on the website, you can now do through your phone that made more sense. So when I tell people to think about a mobile strategy, it always, in my opinion, starts with a mobile- friendly website, whatever, whether it's Responsive, WP touch, or separate website entirely that's specially optimized to the phone. Start with that, and then start thinking about how we're going to drive mobile users to the site if that's important to us, like do we need to have a QR code campaign, do we want to do SMS or text messaging, do we have an email template for our email newsletters that's mobile-friendly because that's actually where people spend most of their time on or the majority of their time on when they're on their phone it's actually through email. And yet you get these gorgeous looking email newsletters that are unreadable on your phone. And there was a recent study that said 67% or something of people who
  • 13. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 13 of 22 get an email on their phone that's not mobile optimized, will not read it. So even if you've gotten past those 3 levels of spam filters before it ends up in somebody's inbox, if they're on their phone which is more and more likely, if your email is not optimized for their phone, there's a 2 out of 3 chance they're not going to read it back. So it's something definitely to keep in mind that you want to create a mobile- friendly template for your email newsletters too. Travis: So is there businesses, do you need to be a brick and mortar type business to need this-- because like you were saying, the only reason people are traditionally looking you up is when they're lost and they're trying to find you, right? Is it what you said? Rich: ...more and more people are just using tablets instead of computers at their house. So they might be doing some research and just have their tablet out and I see tablets everywhere, I'm sure you do too. So I think, especially in the next couple of years, we're going to see people using tablets as their main way of accessing traditional websites. So I would say that it's essential for every business, to have a mobile friendly-website by the end of 2013. And I know from looking at some of my client's traffic reports that many of them are already getting more than 50% of their traffic through a mobile-friendly website. And here's the thing, I see this all the time and it kills me. I see QR codes, and I'm curious about QR codes so I scanned them, I may be the only person in America, I don't think so. So I scanned them to see what the experience is going to be like and it takes me to a web page that's not optimized for mobile. I'm like, "Are you kidding me?" Travis: No, that's ironic, right? Rich: It's terrible. Where the other thing is, because at my conference last year I actually did a presentation on how to get started with mobile marketing and one of the things that I looked into is mobile advertising. Mobile advertising is really fascinating right now to me. And Facebook has the opportunity where you can add advertise only to mobile users which is interesting too, and it turns out right now it's really inexpensive. So you can do some amazing things with mobile advertising where you show, for example let's say you're a restaurant. You only show that mobile add to people within 15 miles of your restaurant and then depending on the time of day it is, you can show them your breakfast, lunch, or dinner specials. And then on top of that depending on the platform you advertise on, there may be additional information like, if you're advertising on the Yahoo platform, they may know that this person has done a lot of searching, or a lot of time spent on vegan websites. Well then maybe you could serve her up, an advertising for your vegan frittata, as opposed to just your Bacon and Eggs breakfast. So there's a lot of interesting things you can do there. But I've seen people who go ahead and they spend a lot of money on mobile ads, but again same problem, they send you to website that's not optimized for mobile. It just doesn't make any sense to me.
  • 14. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 14 of 22 So step 1 is getting a landing spot, a home page on mobile, that works for a mobile experience and then driving traffic to that mobile-friendly site. Travis: I think that's a bigger picture problem across the board because a lot of businesses have very fragmented tactics and strategies all across their marketing sphere that are not connected together. So I think you're shining the light on a common problem, not in just one area, in an area across the board. Rich: Yeah, absolutely--well, a lot of people--you're right, it is fragmented or their not thinking about things, or they've done some marketing, and it's out there on the web, and then they forget about it and their message has changed but that old web page hasn't. Travis: Right, right. So, the who--what type of businesses won't or less likely to need a mobile viewed-- hold on, let me back-up. So one of the things that you said is the iPad or tablets, you consider that a mobile device rather than like a laptop because I've always, and I'm pretty up to date on this stuff but I've always viewed a tablet as, really, just kind of an iteration of my laptop. And what I hear you saying is, as you view it as an iteration of the phone. Rich: Yeah, that's a great point, there are aspects of both. Usually, and I hesitate to use the word traditionally with something about mobile marketing, but tablets and phones are considered to be mobile devices. Now you can argue that a laptop is too but I think we're talking about user experience. The reason why, I definitely think that the tablet is a slightly different experience, there's a few reasons. One is the fact that--we build websites for thousand by 24 wide, and then they look great, and then all of a sudden you put them on a tablet and things start wrapping weird. So now we really do think about, and we do testing on how this is going to behave on a tablet and do we need to create an additional style sheet specifically for tablets. I also think some of the ways that you interact with the webpage are different. Obviously you're tapping on the page itself rather than using a mouse. But the mouse gives you more flexibility and more power over how you're going to navigate that page where you don't get the same control over a tablet. I do agree that for a lot of people the tablet experience maybe closer to what they think of as a desktop experience. But, think about this, a tablet--and I see people going on vacations now, I live in a very tourist-friendly environment. I see people going around vacations carrying around their tablets like they used to carry around their phones. So they're almost using it as like a walking tablet where they can kind of check-in with things. If you're in a tablet, there's a very good chance that you've got GPS enabled on that, and that you've got a camera phone enabled on that so you can do QR codes, that its location-based so you can do a lot--checking on four square or things like that. So from that aspect, I think tablets are very much fall into that mobile umbrella, where a typical laptop computer would not. Travis: Right. Well, I think I fall in to the category with the majority of people to where we associate or I've associated, and I could be wrong on this. The size of the screen is close to the size of my laptop so I really didn't consider that mobile. And then I thought for years and I'll relate this to my own personal experiences.
  • 15. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 15 of 22 One of my businesses that is B to C is a home improvement company. Very large, successful company and I never saw the value of going mobile on that because I'm thinking, "Now who is going to be doing a research for home improvements on their phone?" Although what you're saying now shifts my thinking of, "Well, there's a potential that people could be doing it on the phone because now phones are larger." And also the fact that the tablets are viewed as mobile as well really kind of shifts my thinking, so, I guess ultimately I'm answering my own question that there's really no company that should be precluded from making their website mobile friendly. Rich: No, I'm still amazed, I'll occasionally run into people who don't have a website at all, and I'm just like, "Oh my god, how do you do business?" And their still faxing things. And they may be running very successful businesses so I'm not making fun of them at all; it's just sometimes I forget that people aren't living in my world. But that being said, in the same way that in this day and age or in a few years ago everybody really need to have some sort of website, I think by the end of this year everybody needs to have a mobile- friendly website for the very reasons we're talking about. You mentioned that you had--and Millie, you hadn't thought about tablets is under the mobile umbrella. But I can imagine that a lot of your potential customers for this B to C company are sitting around on their couches, maybe with the T.V. going on in the background, and they've got their tablet open and their doing searches for home improvement ideas, or a local improvement companies. And so for that I definitely want to have a very--and I guess here's where it really comes down to. You got to go look at your Google Analytics. Google Analytics will tell you how many people or what percentage of people are coming on a tablet. And if you find that a growing percentage, even a majority people are on a tablet, then I would say I would focus on creating a website that looks best on the tablet, and then think about the phone, and then think about the desktop version. So your metrics that you're already creating and the trends that you see in there, that should be making the decision for you, not anything I say, and not anything that you think. The raw numbers and the direction of those numbers are what you should be paying attention to. Travis: Yeah, great point. It's the best way to prioritize based on what's actually happening with your numbers. Rich: For sure. Travis: So what do you think--we've talked about a lot of things and by the way, the value that you've provided from several perspectives is just phenomenal, so I appreciate that. Rich: Oh my pleasure. Travis: What do you feel like some of the low hanging fruit for business owners is and of course I know that I'm asking you some more very broad questions and brought questions are hard to answer, but what is the most common problem you see with business owners, considering your extensive background with marketing that most people could pay attention to and start getting some immediate results, anything come to mind?
  • 16. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 16 of 22 Rich: Absolutely, I have a few things, I'm going to try and keep them limited. As part of the marketing agents side project that I do, one of the things I do is I do a weekly giveaway for a 1 hour consult with people, and I see the same things time in and time out, so I'll share some of those. Probably the biggest thing is if you've never really focused on search engine optimization is--take a look at your current website, and a lot of people who'd never done any SEO, search engine optimization and don't know anything about it, but don't know why they rank well. It's because A they're not putting their keywords into the page, and by keywords I just mean, what are the words that you think that people would be searching for if they were looking for your company. And there's more to it than this but--or that you want to rank well for. So for example, it's like if you go to our website, Flyte's website, we talk about web design and internet marketing; we talk a lot about Maine because we want to get local business. So, those are some of the keywords that we focus on at different parts of the website. The most important thing, the thing that will move the needle to most if you've never done this before are your page titles. So for example, when you go to website, up at the top bar, if you're in a Mac it's the same level as the red, yellow, and green buttons, if you're on a PC, it's where the minimize and maximize buttons are. That's your title bar, the words that appear there are the same words that appear as the big blue links on Google that is the number 1 thing that you can do to improve your search engine visibility. So if every single page of your website has the same title, that's a missed opportunity. If your homepage says something like, "Welcome to ABC Corporation," that's a missed opportunity. What you should be putting into your titles are the keywords that your audience is searching for so for example. My company is called Flyte New Media, F-L-Y-T-E New Media. I'm not worried that people can find Flyte new media if they're searching for us on the web. What I want is I want those unbranded search terms. So the title tag of my homepage, which is usually the most important page on your website, is something along line of main web design and internet marketing for small business, then I mention my company's name, because search engines have the attention span of a 5 year old, to say not much. So basically, they pay most attention to the words upfront, so I always try and put my best keywords right at the front of every title tag that I use, and the most important word right there. And then sometimes I'll use a Collin or a pipe, and then I'll repeat it in another way. Every page on my website gets a unique title tag that's appropriate for the content on that page. And if you've never done that and you go through and do that today after you listen to this podcast, within a week or two, I promise you that you will see a surge in search engine visibility rankings and traffic. The only caviar is if you're in a very competitive industry, chances are people have already done this before, you may find that to be a little bit of a challenge, you may need to do a few more things but that's a great first step. Travis: Excellent advice. Rich: And if I could say one other thing, you should be blogging. I say that to people and some people roll their eyes, and other people say, "You know I tried blogging it didn't work for me." I've never found a tool that's better at increasing your search engine visibility and improving your social media marketing than a blog when it's done right.
  • 17. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 17 of 22 One of the things I tell people is, "A blog will not improve your business, blogging will." It's the same thing like you buy a nice pair of Nike running shoes, you put it in the closet, you are not going to lose weight. Travis: Right. Rich: You got to fill the blog but then you've got to regularly create content that answers your ideal customer’s biggest problems, week in and week out, day in and day out if you've got the time. But you build up a critical mass of articles, blog posts. And here's something else to keep in mind, every blog post is another web page, and as we talked about before every web page is another opportunity to rank well at the search engines. You got a question from a--I'm sure this happens to you all the time. You get a question from a client, or a customer, or a prospect in an email, and the following response is you hit Reply and you answer. What if you didn't hit reply? What if you took that question, maybe you had it generalize a little bit, and you turn it into a Dear Abby style blog post. You post it up and you sent an email to that client or that prospect and said, "That was such a great question, I'm sure a lot of other people struggle with it. So it actually--your question was so good it caused me to write a blog post, and here's the link." You send that off. Not only did you make this person feel good because their question wasn't a dumb question, it was actually a great question. You've also introduced them to your blog, so now you've got possibly a new reader and a new subscriber. But on top of that, that one person was savvy enough to know that you might have the answer. How many other hundreds or thousands over the next 6 months or a year, are going to have the same question but they won't know who to turn to so they'll ask Google. If your blog post directly answers the very question they're asking, you have a very good chance of driving traffic to your blog and then over to your website. And that happens to me all the time. I have a blog post that I wrote back in 2008, called "How to Use Twitter for Business", and it pulls in on average, 3,000 unique visitors every single year who have never heard of Flyte New Media, and a certain percentage of them sign-up for an email newsletter and a certain percentage of them start doing business with us. That is a great investment. Travis: Yeah, not to mention you're not having to answer that question again, you're leveraging your time, much less the impact that you're doing with that post, right? Rich: Right. For some people who are going to do it themselves anyway, I have given them the tools so they can go on and succeed; a lot of people actually link to that article which increases my search engine visibility. But a lot of people would be like, "These guys seem smart, I'm just going to hire them to do this instead of figuring it out on my own.", and that's how we get a lot of business. And when I do presentations it's the same thing, I don't hold back, I give out all the information I can think of to share with people, because I know that a certain percentage of them would never do business with them but at least I'm helping them out. And a certain percentage of them are going to be like, "You know what, I actually am better at cutting hair, or selling tires, or walking dogs. I'm going to hire this guy or this
  • 18. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 18 of 22 company to do this other thing for me." We all have areas of expertise and the more we share it, the more we establish our credibility, that's how we get new business. Travis: Wow, lots and lots of great information. We're getting close to time Rich, do you have anything else you want to add there before I segue you into the lightning round, I don't want to cut you off. Rich: Let's segue; I'm ready for some lightning. Travis: Okay, outstanding. Now, I sent you three questions and then I've snuck a fourth in here that I'm going to throw you a curve. Rich: Alright, ask away. Travis: Alright, the first question is what book or program made an impact on you, related to business that you'd recommend and why? Rich: There are a lot of books that I read because when I went to college I was planning on being an English professor, I basically didn't take any business classes at all. So I've always felt, now that I'm running my own business, that I wish I had, I wish I had learned more about regardless, so, I read a lot of different business book. But the business book that's probably made the biggest impact on how I am, and how I market my business and how I act as a business person is by Dr. Robert--hope I pronounce it right, Cialdini, and the book is called Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion. And in the book he identifies 6, what he calls, Weapons of Influence. Ways that we have undo persuasion or influence over other people, and also how to protect ourselves when we recognize that somebody is using one of those techniques on us. But it's amazing, powerful tool that can be used either for good or evil, I hopefully am using it for good, but that book in my mind is a must read for every business owner out there and every marketer out there. Travis: Excellent suggestion. I think that's probably one of the most common books that people recommend a testament to how important and powerful that book is. Rich: Absolutely. Travis: What is one of your favorite tools or pieces of technology that you've recently discovered, if any, that you'd recommend to other business owners? Rich: You know there's a lot of different stuff that I use and this is certainly not a--well actually, okay, I've got a new tool. I just started recently using this one and I just mentioned I love to blog, I use Word press and I've had a number of different SEO plug-ins that I've used, but I recently tried a new one based on a recommendation by a friend and I will never use another one again. It's called the SEO plug-in by Yoast. I don't know if that's how you pronounce the guy's name but it's Y-O-A-S-T, and this plug-in, if you're interested in ranking higher at the search engines is a critical tool. It's a Freemium product, you can download it for free and make a donation, which I did, and I strongly recommend if you tried and like it that you do that. But it's a phenomenal tool. It will give you immediate feedback on you blog post, or article, or webpage in terms of, "Have you written the page title the right way, have you written the metadata description the right away." It will compare and contrast, and it will make
  • 19. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 19 of 22 recommendations, it will give you a score on it and tell you what could be improved before you even publish it. So it's the SEO plug-in from Yoast, and that's specifically for Word press users. Travis: Excellent. What famous quote would best summarize your belief or attitude in business? Rich: I first heard this quote in the movie The Incredibles, and it is, "Luck favors the prepared.", and I really, honestly, believe that that is so true because I've definitely have people say, "Oh you're..." Here up in Maine I do the text segments on a local T.V. evening news program about once a month, and they're like, "Oh you're so lucky that you got that." Well yeah, I am lucky, and I've been lucky a lot in my life and I've had a lot of good things happen to me but I feel that everybody who's lucky, it's because they work so hard at getting out there to that point. So opportunity knocks but you got to be ready for. So luck favors the prepared, it's definitely true. We all have these moments where luck is either for us or against us, but the more prepared you are, the more resilient you are against bad luck, and the more ready you are to take opportunities of good luck, so that's definitely one of my favorite quotes. Travis: Excellent quote, I agree with you. Luck is kind of like a window of opportunity, it opens for a little while and it closes, and it seems to me that you only have the wisdom or the perspective to jump through it or take it, when you spent the time in training and you have that wisdom to recognize what's happening. I even had that conversation with Rand and he misunderstood me at first because a lot of times people view even my success, your success, Rand's success as overnight success, when really they don't know that there were years and years of heartache and turmoil or just struggle in constant work and effort put into this overnight success, which really is perceived as luck to many people. Rich: Exactly, and it's funny because I was on the way to work today, I was listening to that interview you did with Rand, I was thinking the same thing. It's like, the reason, why people think you're an overnight success is because you toiled in obscurity for 2 years before the press or mainstream media or some famous blogger recognized you and pulled you out of obscurity, but it's really the fact that you were doing all the right things leading up to it. So that when that window of opportunity opened, you are ready to take advantage of it. Travis: Right. Excellent answers to all of those. So here comes my curve. Rich: Alright. Travis: Now that you found success, what do you dream of? Rich: Well, as I mentioned, I kind of launched a side project. I've been running Flyte, more or less successfully for 16 years. We've had our ups and downs like any business, but we're still in business for 16 years, that makes me very proud. I've got a great team around me. But a couple of years ago I started saying, "Was I just lucky?", and that's actually when I decided to, first with some friends and now on my own, create my own event. And this was up here in Maine and we had about 400 people show up, the Agents of Change Digital Marketing Conference. So for me, first, it was about creating a
  • 20. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 20 of 22 new event that would bring people all over but really focus on getting a nationally recognized conference to me. That was a big thing and I was successful there, and then more recently, I realized how much I love presenting, I love sharing information, I love educating. And that's why I launched the side project, the marketing agents. So I guess if I, what I dream about is getting Flyte to the point where it can continue to sustain itself. But I get to do more or less what I want, which is--and not that I'm not doing it at Flyte but really with a little bit more freedom where Rich Brooks gets to write about, present on, and practice web marketing and social media. And that may sound like the lamest dream to other people but for me I find technology, and how it affects people, endlessly fascinating. That's what I do what I do. It's not the technology, it's how it impacts people's lives and businesses, and the more I can help any small business, but especially those in my adopted home state of Maine, the better I feel. So I just want to be doing this and make a living at it and really kind of share this education so that small businesses can grow to whatever that means for them. So just to be able to do what I'm doing but with as much freedom as I want and be able to create content, and share that content, and make a living at it. That's my own personal dream. Travis: I completely get that, I'm the same way, I have this wonderful B to C business that's a very large business and I only spend 5 hours a week in that business, because I'm really not passionate, I care about it but I'm not passionate about it. I'm passionate about helping entrepreneurs. And so I can draw that parallel with you there, and I'm of the same mind-set, so I appreciate you sharing that with us. Rich: Sure thing. Travis: How did people connect with you? Rich: There's 2 things I'd like to have them check out if they have the time. The first is Flyte New Media because we've been around for so long, and that's Flyte.bizF-L-Y-T-E.biz, and that's my web agency, that's the web design and internet marketing. But the thing that I'm super passionate about this particular week is the marketing agents, and that's at TheMarketingAgents.com. It's a brand new website, it's just been out for a couple of weeks, I'm trying to create insanely valuable content specifically for small businesses and non-profits that are looking to grow, and generate revenue on the web. Love to get people's feedback on it. I've got thick skin and I've got a therapist start retainer so please let me have like--but I really would like people to tell me if it's valuable to them and sign-up and that would be great. So that's where they can find me. Travis: Cool. And any other links that you have I'll get from you and then we'll just post them up so that everybody can go to you directly. By the way I've come to Maine, Kennebunkport, Maine and spend a little time there, so I love your state. Rich: Well, thanks. And next time you come up, just come a little bit further north, and you and I will go out for lunch, or a beer, or tequila, whatever you happen to like.
  • 21. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 21 of 22 Portland, Maine, was last year or the year before, it was rated the number 1 foodie small town in America. And although our does go to bed a little early, it's got some of the best food per capital in the world. Travis: Yeah, I'll definitely stop by and see you. Listen, I appreciate you being on the show, can you hang out with us for a couple more minutes? Rich: Be happy to. End of Interview Travis: Alright. So listen, now I want to remind you that there’s a show note at the bottom of the post here that we create for the show and in that way you can directly connect with Rich through--I'll put his Twitter and everything else, information up there and you can just directly connect with him. Remember to go to DIYOB which is an abbreviation of Diamonds in Your Own Backyard, so it's DIYOB.com, enter your name and we'll send you the 2013 Business Owner's Guide, From Frustration to $70 million. It's a behind the scene look at what you need to know to grow your business to incredible levels of success. And it really doesn't matter where you’re adding business; all of these discoveries are things that I found that most people aren't willing to talk about. So it's really important, it's a 15-page document so it's something to read, but it's essential to your journey as an entrepreneur. Also when you opt in, you become a member of the Authentic Entrepreneur Nation, which is really a network of people, tools, and resources that you can refer to grow your business. Again this is our personal roll-a-decks that we use and recommend. And we'll have this up for you in a matter of weeks. I know one of the biggest challenges in growing your business is finding people that you can trust, people that can actually follow through on their promises. And so now you'll have access to a group of credible people that you can connect with, they're highly competent through our network that will help you with whatever you may need. Today I want to close the show with reminding you how important entrepreneurs our to our community. Entrepreneurs are a living, breathing model of what it looks like to go after your dream and take action no matter what, even in the face of fear and uncertainty. So whether you know it or not, you're an inspiration to those around you, and I want to encourage you to keep it up, no matter what size your business is, what you’re doing matters. You're a piece of the bigger picture puzzle of entrepreneurship as a whole. So in the next episode, I'm going to connect you with lifestyle entrepreneur, Scott Fox. And when I say lifestyle entrepreneur, that means you design your business around what makes you happy regardless of the who, what, or where conditions of your life, so you definitely don't want to miss that next episode. This is Travis Lane Jenkins, signing off for now. To your success, may you inspire those around you to go after their dreams just like you. Talk to you in the next episode.
  • 22. THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show Page 22 of 22 How We Can Help You We know that finding someone that you can trust online today is hard and that so many “so called gurus” are self-‐appointed and have never really even done what they teach you to do. That’s exactly why we created the Double Your Profits Business Accelerator. This is an exclusive offer for our fans at a fraction of its normal cost. Here's what to expect. We'll Schedule a 'One on One' private session, where we'll take the time to dive deep into your business and tell you what is missing, so that you can have your best year ever! We'll do this by performing a S.W.O.T. Analysis. This tells us your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats within your business. This will be an eye opener for YOU, for several reasons, however some of the most common reasons are. As the 'Business Owner' it’s difficult to see the big picture of your own business because you’re in the middle of a daily management. And you are too emotionally involved to completely impartial. This is a common problem for EVERY business owner. It doesn’t matter if you are a one-man army, or an army of 150, the problem is still the same. Travis Lane Jenkins Business Mentor-Turn Around Specialist Radio Host of The Entrepreneurs Radio Show “Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs That Grow Your Business"