Today’s episode of the podcast is an interview with Dennis Yu who built the analytics at Yahoo Search Engine 27 years ago! Dennis has gone from being a search engine engineer to a sales and marketing guru, bringing a data driven approach to the industry. We talk all about using social media analytics to understand what is performing well, what you should post on social media, where you rank and how to build a personal brand.
KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST
- You need to separate your content into 4 components – Strategy brief, asset production, distribution and amplification.
- Amplify what is already working and make it better – be good at market research and listening.
- Think about what people are coming to you for – what do they know you for?
- Ask your audience what they want to see – this will give you an idea of what to talk about.
- Look at your analytics to see what is performing best.
- Don’t try to do everything on social media, focus on the areas you want to amplify.
- The algorithm wants to put good content in front of users so they spend more time on each platform.
- The algorithm on every platform is exactly the same!
- Give advice/tips on social media when you are selling and give sneak peeks/free samples.
- Add links to comments rather than in posts.
- 3 How, 3 Why and 3 What – ads.
THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…
Amplify the stuff that already works!
HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN’T MISS
- An introduction to Dennis 02:29
- How marketing has changed 03:49
- Building a personal brand 08:28
- How to analyse your content 13:47
- How the algorithm works 21:03
- How to sell on social media 29:15
- Paid traffic 37:06
CHECK DENNIS OUT:
RESOURCES MENTIONED:
Steps you need to create a personal brand
Transcript
Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. How's things? So this week I'm jumping straight in with the interview. Now I interviewed the lovely Dennis Yu on the podcast, and it was a great interview. We talked all about using sort of the analytics and your social media, what to look at, how to know what's a good post, what you should post, where you rank, how to build a personal brand.
There was so much good stuff. Now during the interview Dennis shared his screen with me and I'm laughing cause obviously it's podcast, uh, which was lovely and brilliant because it really helped me understand. So what I've done in the show notes is I've put a screenshot of one of the things he's talking about, which is actually really, really useful.
So he talks about the kind of steps that you need in order to create a personal brand. And one thing that was really interesting, and I think this would work generally with business. But one thing that was really interesting is he has content first. And the third thing he has is distribution, where often, I don't know about you.
But often we think of the distribution before the content. So we think about, ‘oh, I need to do an Instagram story. What am I going to do?' Rather than thinking, ‘I need to create some content, where am I going to put it?' So I thought that was really, really fascinating. He also did a critique of some of my stuff, which obviously, you know, it was really good for me on the, on the interview.
But he gave so much value and I know you're totally going to get so much good stuff out of this. So I don't want to delay anymore. I'm going to hand you over to the interview.
So I am really excited that today I get to bring to the podcast, the very lovely Dennis Yu. Dennis, how are you doing?
Dennis: Good, Teresa.
Teresa: My honor, honestly, I'm really, really excited to have you on.
So Dennis I'm sure my audience know who you are, but just in case they haven't heard of you before, would you mind telling them who you are and how you got to doing what you do today?
Dennis: I'm happy too Teresa. I'm Dennis Yu and I built the analytics at Yahoo search engine. 20 some years ago. And you know, from our friends, Michael Stelzner, Social Media Examiner, Amy Porterfield, we've done a lot of stuff in the world of social.
So I've gone from being a search engine engineer to being kind of a sales and marketing ish sort of person. And I bring a data-driven approach into driving relationships and sales and conversion and data and traffic and all that kind of stuff. So I'm like your friendly math guy that is able to get under the hood of your campaigns, of your website or your social media and figure out what exactly you need to do to be able to drive more traffic and sales and from more of a math algorithm, database guy to learning about personal branding.
So can you imagine someone who's an auto mechanic becoming an artist. That's sort of like my journey.
Teresa: Well, my husband is actually an aircraft engineer. So when I think when you're an engineer, you have a certain brain. You have one of these brains that you can just look at instructions or look at something and you can just figure it out.
And I, that to jump from doing what you did to doing kind of more the personal brand stuff is a really big jump. But how do you undergo about Yahoo doing the stuff then?
Dennis: Just over 20 years ago.
Teresa: Like when I think back 20 years, you know, that was like, so early on. The stuff that you must've been doing and learning about. And you know, you were right at the beginning or did it feel like that?
Dennis: Well, even 10 years before that I built some of my first websites. So I've been building websites for over 30 years, but the internet shifted because back then it was just websites. And now you have all these apps. Back then you didn't have, I mean, the phone was really just to make phone calls. The texting was only barely coming on.
You didn't have video, you didn't have apps. You didn't have all this mobile stuff going on back then. The phone was actually a phone for talking, or if you're lucky to have a mobile phone, it was a the Motorola one that's in the car. You know, the, the one that's like a suitcase. Oh like that, that's what mobile was.
And if someone had a mobile and they were carrying around this gigantic heavy luggage that had a phone, you thought they must've been a really important business person, right. To be able to use a phone. Nowadays phone is this thing here. We don't even use it to make phone calls. We've 90% of what we use it for is social media and texting, and games and things like that. So I've had to adapt my journey for any of us that I'm over 40, but any of us of my generation, we know that a lot of this stuff is not native to us. And thus doing videos on social media or even taking a selfie is kind of a foreign, almost awkward kind of thing.
So I've had to adapt and it's interesting working with other business owners, entrepreneurs, marketers like you on helping other people adapt to that.
Teresa: Yeah, and it is interesting because I often talk about when I started, I did my degree 16, 17 years ago, and back then, none of this stuff existed. Like you said, we didn't use phones for that.
We didn't have social media, we didn't have any of those things. And I used to work for big companies. I worked for Land Rover heading up their corporate marketing. And it was only businesses like that, that could afford to do marketing and suddenly and you must've seen this so closely given what you do.
You know, when we talk specifically about things like SEO, suddenly the world just started to open up to everybody. Did you see that?
Dennis: Yeah. The world of SEO was an engineering thing before because to rank on Google you had to have links, which means you have to have control over websites. So those people that control the ability to put links on websites that are linking to one another.
And so it was a technical challenge. So to even have a website back then was to easily be able to rank because there were only a few thousand websites and now they're literally a trillion web pages that are competing. And because everybody is now an influencer, because anybody can say something on Twitter and potentially go viral.
That creates a huge opportunity for us, but then we have to figure out what is it that we need to do to be able to track our audience so we can tap into the fact that there are now 4 billion people on the internet instead of just a couple hundred thousand.
Teresa: Yeah. And I think that's often where only half the picture shown.
So, you know, we'll talk about how amazing this is for smaller businesses for personal brands to get themselves out there because there's the social media and you don't need to be a huge, massive company or organization with a massive marketing budget. However, I think we almost make it sound like it's too easy.
And then when people try and put themselves out there and they don't get seen, and they're not being picked up by search engines or their ads aren't landing or whatever, they then start to think something's really wrong. But the truth is it's, it's really open, but it's also not as easy as that. Is it?
Dennis: Yeah, it's an oxymoron, isn't it?
Because there are people have the dreams, especially as young adults that all you have to do is do a tweet and all of a sudden your viral and you have Lamborghinis and success, right?
Teresa: Yeah. And I've got a 18 year old step son and an 11 year old daughter and they think that, you know, oh, ‘Well I'll probably just be a YouTuber.'
And it's, it's really interesting. Cause I can sit there and go ‘Yeah, you could be, get totally be a YouTuber'. But also it's having that conversation of, do you know how hard you have to work to do that? Like, it's not as easy as just literally posted on YouTube. So what I'd love to talk about today for my audience and because I'm a little bit selfish and I want to know about this stuff as well.
Is I want that talk around the kind of personal brand side of it and the kind of stuff in terms of. You, what can we do to, to one build a personal branding? And then how are we using these other things like SEO, like paid, like Facebook ads. Do you use nothing else? So I think let's just start generally around kind of like building a personal brand persona. Is it where?
Dennis: Yeah. Yeah. So let me show you something that I literally just actually enabled screen sharing. If you could.
Teresa: Yeah of course.
Dennis: And I'm going to show you something very special. Just half an hour ago, I did a presentation for five or head 2000 people registered. So I literally just got off that to spend time with you Teresa and all of our friends here.
So check this out and you see this screen here. Yeah. Content engine. So when we can divide our personal branding efforts into almost a factory line process, this is how we're going to win in spite of all these channels on TikTok and Snapchat and Twitter and all that, because those are distribution channels.
That's the tealish color here. And then the asset production is video. So the main thing is when you tons and tons of video, which I'll show you in just a moment and what to do with that, but even proceeding that we need to have a strategy, which is our why. Right assignments and it start with why, ‘Why do I stand for?
What are my goals, content and targeting. Who's my audience. How do I resonate with them? What problem do I solve that I can document provably authoritatively so that other people then want to be able to buy products and services from me?' Most people who are solopreneurs as you, and I know where the smaller businesses, they don't really have clarity around that.
Therefore they can't produce assets in the red column that tied back to that strategy. And then they can't distribute that across the website and email and social media. And you know billboards, you know, whatever the different channels are that we want to distribute it. And then into the orange, when we want to amplify that.
So think of this as a progression, we call this the content engine where it's like taking raw material and then ending up with the finished product over here. So understanding our direction and the strategy, which is goals, content, and targeting to producing lots of video with our fans and our consumers and our friends and our clients and our employees and our partners and anyone in our community to then getting it out there.
Most people, they confuse the distribution channel, they'll say, ‘Wow, YouTube shorts. Did you know that one minute vertical videos are killer on YouTube?' Yes. I know that's a distribution channel. ‘Did you know that you can do these TikToks?' Yes. That's a distribution channel, but you need to have the content to put into the distribution channel, which is in the red.
And prior to that, you need to have a kind of theme and a strategy on what you're producing to then produce the content to then distribute it to then amplify it, which is on the ad site. And because people confuse all of these proponents, they mix all four of these components into one thing that it's like taking two things that you like, like maybe like chocolate milk and you like diet Coke or something like that.
And you pour them together. That's nasty. Yeah, right. But think about Teresa and everybody, when you separate out your content engine into these four components, then if you're producing video in that red column, and then all of a sudden this new social network pops up or this new tactic or new landing page or a new tool or whatever it is, pops up, you're in great shape because you can just take the content you have and then repurpose it.
So then it can live as eight second Snapchat videos, right? Yeah, you can reuse that you can take a webinar or podcast. Like w what you and I have right now and chop it up into articles. So we can start to rank on a website. Right. We can take a transcription of our conversation here and turn it into a series of articles.
We can pull out 15 second snippets and turn them into Instagram stories. Right?
Teresa: So can I ask you a question then? One thing. And it's so good that you've said this because it really sits with what I talk about. Right at the very beginning, your underneath a strategy brief, you've got goals, content and targeting.
So like you said, it's the, why it's the, who, what you're doing for them. So if they get that bit wrong, the rest is done for.
Dennis: Yeah it's an avalanche. Yeah.
Teresa: So what would you say if you had to sum up very quickly. Cause I get that this is a big section, but what is, what kind of the some of the things that you can suggest that we can do to ensure we're getting that bit right?
Dennis: That's a great question. You want to amplify what's already working and that means you have to be really good at market research. Really good at listening. So I'll show you. So now we are on your website teresaheathwareing.com right. Did you know that you ranked on 130 some keywords. You rank on your name, you rank on message marketing made simple. You rank on Dean Graziosi, fiancé, right? These are all these things that you rank on. A lot of the time it's going to be other people's names speaks of the podcast, but the membership guys you're promoting these guys. I can see me out a lot of friends that are in common, but if, you know, if at all you guys out there, you probably don't even know what your keywords are, but if you know, from your analytics.
So if I go to Google analytics, I go to my Facebook analytics, or going to be Twitter analytics or LinkedIn analytics. And I come in, I see what are the keywords we come over in the list one here, here, I'll show you I'll show you a big website to show you we're not just making stuff up. The risk of showing big websites is the small people will say, oh, I can't do that because I don't have 5 million people on my website.
Teresa: It's not about numbers per say, is it? It's about understanding the stats.
Dennis: Yeah. All right. So here's one of our sites and we, I like to go to the source medium report. I don't want to go too technical, but just, just know that we're looking inside Google analytics and we'll go back the last year. Let's just say, and we've driven two and a half million dollars in the last year selling gift trees.
So I'll just show you by the way, substitute your name, your brand, your products and services for here because this concept works universally. Don't think, oh, well this website sells gift trees. Where you plant the tree when a loved one dies. So it doesn't apply to me. It applies to every live. So just understand the principle, forget about what's actually being sold.
So in this case, right, plant the tree when a loved one dies, right? Give trees all different kinds of trees that you can order. Right. And most people will think, okay, well I want to sell more gift trees or I have a new product and I have a lemon tree. Right. I have other variations of this, but let's think a little bit deeper.
What is it that people are actually coming to me for. What I might think I know what they're thinking about. I might think I know better than them. I might want them to know me for something, but I have to start with what people actually know me for. What people actually, because I don't wanna amplify something that's already working.
So check this out. Let's go to my Twitter for example, and I'll, I'll move fluidly between Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Google analytics output. I'm going to show you it's the exact same principle. Yeah, right. In terms of personal branding and it is sort of an engineer's view of the world. So you'll just have to be kind to me on this.
Okay. So I know that I'm known for the dollar a day approach, which is taking a piece of content and putting a dollar a day on Twitter, a dollar a day on Facebook. So I live it and I breathe it. Right. And you can see that here's a tweet that I made a few days ago and you can see a few thousand people saw it.
People are engaging on it. Right. And I made, I've made a whole bunch of these little posts just minutes ago and I can see what what's resonating. Right? Simple little things like, ‘Hey, can you help me get to 72,000 followers?' Or the different things I'm saying. And do you really know what it is? So you can literally ask your audience.
So here I asked them yesterday, what platform do you want to learn the most about? Well, they don't really want to know as much about Facebook anymore. Okay. Well, if I know that I know what I should be talking about and not talking about. People really seem to be talking about Twitter and TikTok right now, at least for my audience.
Then I can go a little bit further and go into my analytics and I can see of my top tweets. So here in the last 28 days, I've had 860,000 impressions. 40,000 people came to my profile. But what is it about my top tweets? Well, here's one. This is one where I'm saying congratulations to a friend that just launched her product.
Hmm. Okay. Well, that's cool. Here's my top follower. Let's look at the different tweets that I have. And by the way, this applies to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram website. It's just, it's not just a Twitter kind of thing, but what I'm trying to do is I'm learning from my content to see most people, they just they're so busy producing content and that they don't analyzing it.
Right. I'll look, even Twitter's having problems. Fine. Fine. Let's go to LinkedIn. So I want to analyze what's resonating because I'm going to throw a fuel on the fire. The idea of amplification is taking something that's good and making it better. So if I put a dollar in the machine, so you and I, Teresa, we have actually, I take it as I take $10,000.
Right. And if I put that in the machine, it comes back and gives me three times whatever I put in the machine. So I put, I put $10,000 in. And then lo and behold from whatever doubles it, you know, now I've got, now I have $20,000. Right? Well, great. But what if I only put a nickel in the machine that only get 10 cents back?
So with the idea of the social amplification or this content engine that amplifies the LinkedIn and Netflix and Amazon, all of these are amplification engines. Right. But if something that's possibly becomes more popular because we know the algorithms amplifying, what then should we put in the machine. What should we be looking for? How should that change our approach?
Teresa: So you're looking at past posts, past content and the stuff that's really spiking. Those are the things that you're then either, you know, cause some of these questions you were asking were really simple. So do you dive a bit deeper on it? Do you expound on it? How does that work?
Dennis: Okay. So look, I put out a little post is like a trial balloon. So here's one, you can see three days ago, right? You can see this. And literally, I just take a screenshot of my Twitter. So I made a tweet. I said, ‘A great mentor takes no credit for their students' success.' And then I'm trying to drive engagement.
I want people to respond. I want to know what they think. So of course they come in and comment and we have a few thousand people that have seen this, right? And I could take the posts that are the most popular and the idea of throwing fuel on the fire, right? Put gasoline on that flame or whatever your analogy is, is I want to get more out of the things that are doing well. But in order to do that, I can't just take the things.
I can't just identify the ones that got the most traffic or the things that got the most sales, because I could go over here into Google analytics and I could look at my conversions and look, I could look at what products have sold the most. And I can say great, here I've sold. Let's see what sold the most.
See, I don't even know, but Google's going to tell me that this one, the Southern Magnolia tree large, it's the one that sold the most right. Of this $2.4 million in revenue. This one has 300,000 and then it goes all the way down and you can see there's all these other products, but whatever, you know, what is it that I want to double?
W would you rather double this one or would you rather double something that I've only sold one, one of, and I've made a hundred dollars on what would you rather double? Yeah. That's what I'm thinking about it. And that's what most people don't understand when it comes to digital or social media. Or they just try to do everything well, 80-20 focus on the thing that you really, really want to double or TEDx.
So in this case, I could look at this post, this isn't the most popular one, but I just clicked on one of them randomly. Okay. So now I want to understand, well, okay. Why, why are people engaging on this? Well, let's see. What are people saying? So people are commenting. They're providing feedback. They're asking questions.
I'm learning so much by seeing what the audience is doing. Let's go ahead and look at the, at the post on LinkedIn. They're telling me wow 70 people who work at Amazon viewed this post and a LinkedIn and had been Desta and an Accenture. Huh? What is this telling me? Consulting companies, larger tech enterprise people are engaging on this particular post founders are engaging on this post because they understand the mentorship's important and sharing and people from the bay area and London, and more kind of Metro, urban sophisticated sorts of areas.
Right. So that's what we've learned on this particular post. But if we go to another post, we'll see something completely different, right. We'll see a different audience depending on the nature of what's going on with that particular post. So let's go to my notifications and let's just go down to, you know, whichever one, this one, right?
You want to grow your brand, make 9 videos and then boost them for a dollar a day. Right? This is something I'm known for the dollar a day approach. Now this only got 1200 views. Now, why is that? So you've got to play a little detective mode, right? We have to, we have to understand what's going on with the data otherwise, what are you going to do with it?
But the fact that there's a ton of data, it doesn't mean anything unless we know how to interpret it. Right.
Teresa: And take action based on it, because.
Dennis: Yeah. So we call that metrics analysis action. Otherwise, it's just a bunch of noise. Well, it's because it was from 48 hours ago and it's not had time to build up momentum. But even in the.
Teresa: Starting point and that's probably not bad is that?
Dennis: Yeah. But now look at who's engaging on this people from Upwork and YouTube. And so these are content creators, sorts of people, right? Because I'm saying, ‘Hey, you want to build your personal brand, start making videos.' And three people from YouTube saw that isn't that kind of cool. Wow this morning, three people saw it and now we have marketing specialists and we have salespeople and we have the see how the algorithm is doing the workforce.
So I could put a con a piece of content out about how I liked the barbecue, right. And so the algorithm, whether I post it on YouTube or Twitter or Facebook, the algorithms going to find other people who like barbecue, if I'm talking about barbecue. Right. So it's kind of obvious, but it kind of isn't that what you're talking about the algorithm is trying to work for you is trying to help you get the right people to see your content.
Now, why would the algorithm want to help you like that?
Teresa: I guess, you know, it wants to put good content in front of people who want to see it.
Dennis: Why would they want to do that? I mean, why not just show ads to people all day? Why not just show whatever content they decide that I want other people to see.
Teresa: Cause they want people to stay on the platform.
They want people to engage. They want people to want to be there. And I think obviously when you're, when you're just being served, I mean, I guess there's some ridiculous ads at the moment and I'm like, I don't want to see this stuff, you know? So like you said, if, if people are seeing content they want to see, then they're going to carry on, they're going to engage and they're going to want stay on that platform.
Dennis: So the network has an incentive to show you content that you like, because the longer you stay, the more ads are going to consume and the more you're going to buy. So any of the social networks they're free, they make their money on ads, right? So they're trying to get you to engage more. So that's why TikTok is making so much in ads right now is because people go to TikTok and they just it's so interesting.
They just keep watching and watching and watching. So when we look at Twitter or Facebook, or here, we'll go to my Facebook. The ultimate here and this newsfeed, right? So here's, here's my newsfeed. This is my Facebook. Yeah. And we're scrolling through it provided that it loads properly. You're going to see what Facebook thinks that I wanna see.
Yeah. So I served a lot of doctors then real estate agents and entrepreneurs. So they're showing me, my friend, Glen Bo who's a dentist because I've clicked like on a lot of his stuff. So they'll, you know, it just keeps showing me more of the same thing. Cause I keep telling them, this is what I like. And then I see an ad, right.
It says sponsored. So the second thing you see is normally an ad. Whether it's on Google or Facebook, you know, that those organic and then add, and then more organic and then more ads. And it knows what kind of content I'd like. It also, even the algorithm is looking at the image and determining where it is and determining who's in the background and reading the words and things like that.
And determining what I might like to look here's another ad. Right? So every five or six, it shows another ad. Yeah. So what if I told you Teresa that the algorithm that drives Amazon and Netflix make the recommendations on what it is that you should buy next, or what TV show you should listen to. What, what song on Spotify or what should show up in your newsfeed or what is going to be on Twitter?
What if I told you that they were all the exact same algorithm? How would that, what do you think about that? How would that change tips?
Teresa: I didn't, I think in one way, I'm surprised you feel like they'd all have their own little like quirks and tweaks and whatever, but it almost feels once you know how to process it on one platform, you just have to go to another.
Because one thing I was thinking about is when I was looking at your LinkedIn, I wonder if the same types of people like the marketing specialist and that, because I'm just thinking of some of my audience where they might be, even me, I'm serving lots of entrepreneurs, lots of people who are in their own businesses.
But actually when I'm on LinkedIn. If I looked to my stats, which I haven't done for ages, it might be that I'm serving other people. It might be that, you know, actually there are other people engaging in my stuff and therefore I need to tailor my content to better suit them rather than just put the same stuff as I put out everywhere else. Maybe.
Dennis: And most people, you're right Teresa, most people don't even know who their audience, they think they know who their audience is, or they wishfully believed that it's, this is their audience and it's not actually their audience. So if we came here and we looked at the things that you have here, what can we learn and engagement.
Let's look at the comments. So most of what you're posting here is a picture of yourself with some kind of quote, which is great, right? Cause you're trying to teach, you're also motivating, you're sharing your brand, but why is it that some of these things don't get much engagement and it's not to say that engagement is the name of the game.
Right. But let's try to learn from this. Why is it that these posts aren't getting engagement and why is it that other ones will drive more? Right. This one draw more. Why is that? This one is way better. Why is that?
Teresa: The ones that are driving more are my, my sort of weekly curated posts. Whereas the other ones are more the kind of, you know, they go out there all the time, the podcast that goes out there all the time, I share other people's content when I'm speaking somewhere or, you know, so yeah, it's, it's a bit more when it's thought about, or there's a story behind it or a kind of conversation behind it that it seems to work a bit better than.
You know, then something like that. I mean, that's actually not as bad as some of the others, but you know, something that's just a lead magnet or whatever.
Dennis: Yeah. So when you are willing to listen to the algorithm and not just wishfully believe what you want, but you and I and other entrepreneurs will notice.
When you promote and there's nothing wrong with promoting you definitely promote. You can sell things. You can say, ‘Hey, I have this item.' ‘Hey, you can buy this thing.' Or ‘come to this league or ‘join the webinar.' Right. You can certainly do that. But notice that when you are elevating other people and you're saying congratulations to your team, and there's a lightweight moment saying, ‘Hey, so-and-so on our team just had a baby congratulations' or someone got promoted or wow, congrats to this customer who just hit a certain milestone.
Those ones do way better than ones which looked like they're polished, which looked like advertisements, which look like. Even this one here, you're trying to combine sharing knowledge, right. And you know, your friend, Samantha King, and here's the stuff, but it's the algorithm. And the users realize that this is promotional.
So when you're trying to promote, they're not going to do that. And you put a link in here which kills it. So notice I had to click to expand this post. But what happened, what actually happened is most people went right by. Here I'll show you. Like here, here, you got a flash sale, right? Not much happened here.
Right? Flash sale flash sale. But how many people are going to click on, see more to expand it.
Teresa: Especially…
Dennis: I bet you, the people here.
Teresa: You know, if they can identify it's a sales post as well. Then they're probably not know probably going bother.
Dennis: Yeah. So the a you're getting penalized because you're not going to show up in the feed because the algorithm can instantly determine that you're promoting.
Yeah. So it's not, it's a chicken and egg. You're not going to get the reach of the ones who you do get the reach with you get a low engagement rate. And then because you have a low engagement rate, not many people are going to click to see more. And then finally, because very few people click to see more, almost nobody's going to click on the link here at the bottom.
Teresa: Yeah. So. Exactly. It'd be great to take that example. So obviously we know we've got to not got to, we know, you know, if we're trying to promote things or get things out there, what's your thoughts then around, if you were going to do a sales post, you had something to sell. Your a cart open and it was now time to sell that thing.
What types of posts would you be considering doing then to help with that all important engagement interaction, getting people to click on it. What would you kind of post perfect posts look like?
Dennis: I'd give them a tip. Just one tip, for example, you have here, you're obviously selling, oh, there's six lessons and there's these bonuses and whatever.
What if you just literally gave them your very best tip? ‘Oh, the number one tip I use to build my list is I do JVs with other people where we do a pre webinar, you know, or we message, or we, we do a bundle or we do whatever it is and here's how I do a bundle. What I do is I take my buddy who's got a course for a thousand and I've got a course for a thousand and we say, Hey, if you buy his course, I'll give you mine for free. So it's buy one, gets the other one for free.'
So I'm just, I'm literally sharing a tip, right? And say, this is what, this is a tip that I use last month. And this is how it performed. And here's the screenshot. Right. I'd literally just share that. Or I would say any of these things here. So you got this email, email onboard swipe file.
Great. Literally show some of this stuff, right? Show these templates, this videos on how to use the Canva template. Great. Take a one minute snippet from that and say, here's a sample of here's how you use the Canva templates to be able to get more people to register or whatever it is, right. Literally give them free samples, little pieces of the course.
Don't tell them about the course. Literally give them the highlights. It's like a movie trailer, right? To get people, to watch a two hour movie, you have a one minute highlight that shows all the explosions and the best scenes and the kissing and the cars crashing and whatever it is, you, you, you, you actually, you don't teach them, but you actually share the value.
And let's say, you know, maybe there's a few other people that are co-teaching this with you. Take snippets of what, from the course, maybe it's professional could be snippets of this. Well, you're actually sharing value. And when you do that, people love to watch, people love to consume. But if you're promoting, people are going to click experts on your stuff.
It's just going to get hammered. Right? So don't slash sale because for stuff, it doesn't even matter to me that it's a flash sale. Cause you haven't yet shown enough proof and you, you haven't gotten me interested yet for it to be a deal. Right. Who cares if it's a deal, if I'm not interested in it first, right?
Teresa: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally.
Dennis: So these, you can see that this is almost good because here you've got, let's see social media clip. Let's see what this is. Okay. An 18, second clip.
Teresa: Amazing job. You know juggling a lot of stuff.
Dennis: Okay. So you're sending people to buffer, but why not just directly embed audio or video right here.
See, I see this all the time. People will go onto Facebook and they'll upload a YouTube video and they'll say, ‘Yeah, I keep posting these YouTube videos I wonder why that might be.' I wonder if you, if you work at Toyota and you drive a Honda, it's probably not very good. If you go to LinkedIn and you're posting buffer, if you go to Twitter and you post a Facebook video or pictures. If you're, if you're on LinkedIn and you need to post to LinkedIn, you need to upload it to LinkedIn.
If you're on Facebook, you need to upload that video or picture. If you're on Twitter, you need to upload that to Twitter.
Teresa: That is interesting though. And, and the example you gave before, and I've seen this work so many times is where you've done a tweet, and then you share that tweet in other places. Like that's interesting that, that works. Is it just?
Dennis: I took a screenshot of it.
Teresa: Yeah. So it's a screenshot.
Dennis: So they didn't have to leave the platform. The key is, look, you're trying to get people to leave. So all of these here, you, you keep putting these links. What do you think happens? Well, how do you think LinkedIn or any other network is going to look at this when you're trying to get them to leave LinkedIn. They're going to kill your post reach.
Teresa: Yes, that's inevitable to leave. Do they?
Dennis: So what you'll see other people doing is they'll say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, link in the comments. And then in the comment, they'll say, come get it here. Right. So if you want to kill your posts, it can be the most amazing post.
Just go ahead and put a link here. If you want to kill it and have it get no reach, just do that. Why would you do that, right?
Teresa: Yeah. Yeah. And would you say, uh, I know that's the thing on Facebook. Is that the same on Twitter? Obviously in Instagram, that's not an option. Would you not link in Twitter either?
Dennis: What do you think?
Teresa: I'm guessing no.
Dennis: Right. Obvious, right? Cause the algorithm. Look at how the network makes money. Each of these social networks makes money by people spending more time on the site. So if you ask people to leave the site A, they don't want to leave cause they're busy surfing and then B the network doesn't want them. Told you want to do is upload the video here, upload the picture here.
Don't make them go to some other, you know, buffer to be able to listen to the, the audio or whatever it is, like, make it right. Make it convenient. So that, that way it's just faster and it's easier. Right, because I don't wanna have to go somewhere else to watch some 15 second video. But then you can still have the link cause you can have the content here.
And then if they're still interested, then they're going to see the comments saying, ‘Oh come here. If you want to learn more.' Oh, okay. Now I'm going to click on the link. Instead of just trying to force people, forcing people straight into a link, it's like that annoying sales person, you know, when you walk into a store and the salesperson comes right up before you have a chance to look at anything, And it's ‘Hey, can I help you buy something?'
No, I'm just looking. No, go away. I'm just looking. Okay. You know what I mean? You don't, you know, that, that over-eager salesperson comes up to you and just starts annoying you. You don't want to be that person.
Teresa: No. And that's the equivalent, the online equivalent of that. And I do, I love the fact, you just said something a minute ago which I've, I've written down thinking I'm totally gonna do that.
So I'm doing a bootcamp soon. It's a free bootcamp, but obviously it's a bootcamp in line to promote my Academy. Which I'm always very honest about. People know I'm a very honest person, they know what's coming. But I've already done the bootcamp once and now I'm thinking is I've got all this kind of stuff.
You might not be able to find that actually. Cause it's, uh, it's not up at the moment, but I have got all of this stuff where I've run the bootcamp already. I've got all these videos of me teaching and answering questions and, you know, pre I've just literally today, I've been sat here thinking how are we going to promote the bootcamp?
And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and I'm going to take clips of me because that's where I come alive.
Dennis: That's it. You see what to do now, you're going to amplify the stuff that already works. So take a look at your previous bootcamps and don't just collect testimonials,. The actual highlights, the actual interesting bits that will cause people to say, ‘Huh! Wow. I didn't realize I could do it that way.'
Teresa: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that. So can we touch on, because I'm so conscious of your time and I do want to touch on this. Can we touch on looking at something like Facebook ads or paid traffic? I should say before we got on. I've noticed. And I know lots of other people have noticed that paid traffic, especially on Facebook is not forming as well as it has done. Are we like, so let me tell you what I've been promoting.
And then you can kind of tell me where I'm going wrong. So I've been promoting things, I don't know if I've got anything running at the moment, cause I'm about to go into it, but I've been promoting some podcast stuff. So videos of me interviewing great people, I have been promoting things like my social media bundle. There I am. Like various things like that. Yeah. Is it just the live stuff. I'm not anything running at the moment.
Dennis: Okay. Fair enough. Okay.
Teresa: So, so what, like what should I be promoting the tips and the videos and the things like that rather than the direct sales post or the direct call to action posts?
Dennis: Unless you have about 20 cents. Got to put it out.
Teresa: So I was just saying, should we be promoting the kind of tips and the, and the clips and the things that we've just been talking about from a post point of view through Facebook ads or should we, are we using those ads for directly going join my thing as a remarketing thing?
Dennis: Do both. You're going to make 9 posts. 3 WHY posts, where you're telling your story and your mission and meaning. 3 HOW, where you're sharing your knowledge and best tips about selling.
And then the 3 WHAT, which is come join my masterclass here it is, come here, and here's the details early bird registration, whatever it is. And then make 3 videos on each of these. And then put them out there and then let the system optimize for you.
Teresa: Yeah. Yeah. And literally put them all out to the same audiences with the same sorts of things or, you know, would you, is it like to your site, you do one and then the other, and then the other?
Dennis: So Bob, the funnel driving sales, you're going to start with your remarketing audiences.
So your email list and say your 180 day website visitor audience or whatever your largest audiences are, are your custom audiences. If that's working move to a 1% lookalike audience, right? If that's working, then start looking at your mid funnel where you're sharing the why content and drive that to your audience.
But the building from the bottom up, you're starting with your remarketing to drive immediate sales. If you're new and you've not built a list, or you don't have a lot of website traffic then, your marketing, isn't going to produce much for you because there's not enough of an audience to remarket against. But typically if you have at least a thousand people in your email list and you have at least 200 people who have bought from your previous workshops or whatnot, you technically could do it off of 20, but eat at least 200 for the system to really kind of learn who your audience is.
It can create strong lookalike audiences, which are people that look like the people who've already bought. So remember I said that before that Amazon and Facebook and Netflix and whatnot are all using the same algorithm, it's called a collaborative filter. So people that bought this particular product, they also liked to buy this thing here.
People that listen to this song, they might also like to listen to this song too. Right. You understand that? And people, people, if you bought this, you might also buy that right. Did I lose you?
Teresa: Yeah, no, sorry. I'm here listening intently. Oh no, I think you did lose me. I'm here. Can you hear me? Sorry. Tech is such a pain. So yeah, you were talking about people who buy this. Also buy this.
Dennis: Yeah you got it. It's a little spotty and zoom. You can check your video rate and see whether you have a connection issue, but you could also go to speed test.net and other places to see.
Teresa: I think it's come back. I'm having I'm tethering now and hope that we can finish up with this. Oh man tech. It's probably all the children cause they're here and they're probably on all the devices, you know, the, the school.
Okay. So yeah, we were talking about the comparison thing. So people who like the see would like that and using that in your ads.
Dennis: Yeah. So if you set up what we call digital plumbing, which is connecting your email audiences with your website, with the remarketing audiences, people that have been to the site or purchased or completed actions, can, you know, connecting all your data together inside Google tag manager, inside your CRM, inside your shopping cart.
If all of that is done properly, then it's very easy to send the signal to Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter or wherever you're running ads. And have the system be able to optimize for you. So the system will automatically, if you have digital plumbing setup automatically find the right people to target. You just have to put out those short little videos, 15 second videos, one minute vertical videos like this on yourself.
Not, not site, not landscape like this, but like this.
Teresa: Portrait.
Dennis: Yeah. You put it out there and the system will drive sales for you. It's really that simple, but you have to have enough of a signal for the system to kind of figure out who your best customers are. If it's something that's new. You're not going to have any custom audiences and therefore you're not going to have any lookalike audiences which are built on the custom audiences.
So you have to have it. And the cool thing is if you've done something a second time, like another workshop, or you have another product that's similar to this other product, then we can get more out of it because the system is there to amplify what's already working.
Teresa: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dennis honestly, you've given us so much good stuff.
I have a notepad full of notes of things that, okay I need to change that I need to update that. It's been so helpful. It's been such a great episode. I really appreciate you coming on. Obviously I will link everything up to the show notes and so people can come and find you and learn from you some more. But thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Dennis: Thank you, Teresa.
Teresa: There we go. There was the lovely Dennis. Like I said so much good stuff. We had a bit of a chat after the interview as well. And, and he's a really smart guy. He knows a lot of stuff. And he really made me think about, as you could hear on the podcast about my own stuff and how I should do it, and yeah.
And we're trying to work out a process for that. That's the other thing that actually, I just want to touch upon is the fact that. Like knowing what you should do and being able to do it are two different things. So everything for me is time and a process. So once we decide, yeah, we really need to do this.
It's like, okay, how can we do it? We need the time to work out how we can do it. And then, How can I put in a process so it's easier to do. And like I said, that just takes a bit of time and. And a little bit of effort. So don't sit there thinking, well, he's telling me to do all these things and I can't do all these things because I don't know how I'm going to do them or where I'm going to do them.
It doesn't work like that. So do what you need to do right now. And your one thing that you need to do. So don't panic cause I just thought he gave us some great advice. Anyway, I will be back next week with a solo episode. I will see you then.
