From Zero to 📫 Inbox Hero: Email Marketing Success, with Jan Koch

[00:00:02.250] - Speaker 1 Welcome to amplify the personal brand entrepreneur show. Today on the show, Bob is speaking with Jan Koch. [00:00:12.130] - Speaker 2 When you think about what you can offer as a lead maintenance, think about what is one quick win that I can give somebody where then? The next natural step would be to book a consultation with you. To purchase a low ticket offer may be to get people further into the funnel and to turn a subscriber into a buyer. [00:00:33.850] - Speaker 1 Hi there and welcome back to the Personal Brand Business Show. My name is Bob Gentle and every week I speak with incredible people who share their secrets to building, marketing and monetizing their expertise intentionally growing a unique personal brand and the mindset you need for that business to grow and thrive. If you're new to the show, then why you still have your device in your hand? Take a second to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you're a regular listener, then consider sharing the show with just one person as it's the very best way to help me reach more people and to help the show grow. And if you're watching on YouTube, hello. I'm so glad you're here. YouTube is new, so if you want to help me out there, you know the drill, like and subscribe and comments. If you have any questions as we're chatting, pile them in the comments and I'm sure Yan and I will both be there to have a discussion later on. So you might have heard this before, and I've heard it more times than it this might be new to you, but when I say the money is in the list, what do I mean? [00:01:33.170] - Speaker 1 How much money? What list? What are you doing with the list? How are you growing this list? Well, that's what we're talking about today with my email list guy, Yancock from the Uncommon Solopreneur. Welcome to the show. [00:01:47.350] - Speaker 2 Thank you so much for having me, Bob. It's great to be here again. [00:01:50.240] - Speaker 1 So I'm looking forward to today's show because I don't know if I told you this, I listened to podcast, it must be a decade ago now, called The Eventual Millionaire through with Jimmy Masters. You've probably heard it as well. [00:02:04.700] - Speaker 2 Yeah. [00:02:05.100] - Speaker 1 And at the end of the show, she always asks the same question what's one thing listeners can do today to help themselves towards their goal of a million? I can't believe I remembered it. And at least 50% of the time, and bear in mind, Jimmy Masters is only interviewing self made millionaires at least 50% of the time. The answer was start growing your email list. And I've never forgotten that. So I've always known how important this is, but that doesn't mean I've always taken it seriously. So I'm looking forward to speaking about this with you today. But for the listener who's maybe meeting you for the first time and you are a repeat guest. So if you are meeting you for the first time, go back and listen to Jan's other interview. But could you maybe just start by telling us a little bit about who you are, where you are and the kind of work you do? [00:02:50.120] - Speaker 2 Absolutely. I have a smaller family here in Germany. I live near the North Sea. I have my beautiful wife, a two year old daughter. At the time of recording is there, a Labrador who keeps us on our toes. And I have a background in WordPress development, running virtual events, and at some point, I'm actually going to my 10th year of being a business owner this year, so it's dating me a bit. I realised that everything I did came back to having that email list, having people who gave me their email addresses to follow along with my journey to learn, to get freebies buy from me eventually. And in this year, this is my entire focus. I realised that last year I sent about 800,000 newsletters to just my list and I learned a thing or two. And now this year, I'm focusing on helping others do the same. [00:03:43.510] - Speaker 1 So I think there's a few areas that we could go with this. There's obviously list building and everything that goes into that, but then I think a lot of people to grow their email list and then maybe have a one dimensional focus about what they could or should be doing with it. And there's so many things that you can do with an email list, so it's probably a good idea maybe look at how can we inspire people to, A, grow their email list, and B, use that email list. And I guess what people can do with their email list is different at different sizes of their business. So maybe we can play in a few different sandboxes there. [00:04:16.280] - Speaker 2 I love that focus because everybody says, how do I get more subscribers? What type of lead magnet do I need? And all those questions, I mean, there's tonnes of content out there already, so I'm glad we are not diving into that and instead focus on what do you do with the list you already have. Because if you have 200 people, you might be sitting on several $10,000 in revenue, depending on the business model that you have. I've spoken with a lady called Sama Away on the list building school event last year. She made 15,000 of a list of 250 people because she understood what those people wanted. So one thing I would love to talk about in this conversation is how do you segment your list? How do you understand what the pain points are that your subscribers have? Because everybody has different reasons why they sign up for your list, even though they might download the same lead magnet, they might download the same checklist or report free training, whatever you have, but they want to achieve different things, they come in from different perspectives. So you really need to cater to those different things and personalise your newsletters beyond. [00:05:25.550] - Speaker 2 Hey, Bob. Hey, Yan. Hey. First name to dive into the pain points and to frame your calls to action in a way that speaks to those. [00:05:35.260] - Speaker 1 So I'd like to put things in order a little bit. I don't want to speak too much about lead magnets themselves, but something that I have observed you doing, and it's very much on my radar for this year, is being much more creative and prolific about variety. Not just in terms of the things that you're creating in order to provide value for people in exchange for an email address, but also in the ways that you're using them. I think people will be accustomed to the traditional. You create a lead magnets, and for the listener who's maybe new to the whole idea of lead magnets, it's simply this, I'm going to offer you something that you look at and you go, that's awesome, I really, really want it. I'll give you my email address for that. For me, my flagship lead magnet is the personal brand business roadmap, and it's working really, really well. But I'm doing what most people do, which is it's there on my website with a pop up, and it works, but I'm not really leveraging it to its full extent. You do the same thing, but you've got much more going on than that. [00:06:34.210] - Speaker 1 So from your perspective, what does a healthy lead magnet ecosystem look like? [00:06:40.910] - Speaker 2 It's a brilliant question. I would say lead magnet has two serious purposes. One is after somebody downloads it. So everything I take for granted here is people want it and they will give you their email address. So it has to be relevant. I'll take that as a baseline assumption. A lead magnet that performs well offers a quick win. So the times of, I'll give you my book for free, and I have this 50 page ebook that you can work through, or I give you a two hour course for free. From my experience, those times are mostly over because we just don't invest that time anymore. Even paid courses have to be short. They have to be to the point. So when you think about what you can offer as a lead magnet, think about what is one quick win that I can give somebody? Where then the next natural step would be to book a consultation with you to purchase a low ticket offer, maybe to get people further into the funnel and to turn a subscriber into a buyer. So quick win is number one. Usually a checklist work well. The roadmap that you have works well. [00:07:49.670] - Speaker 2 Sometimes you don't even have a lead magnet. Sometimes what I test right now is I just give you a series of emails explaining why your newsletter doesn't sell. So there's no PDF, there's no download. I'm just trying to get people to sign up to my list and I'll tell them, here are the five reasons why you're not making money from your email list and here's how you fix that. So that, that's a quick win. The second thing is you need to establish authority. So there's a saying people need to know like and trust you before they buy from you. So you need to establish those three things. I would challenge people to say that. You need to take it a step further. I learned that from Sean Fossler who is an amazing copywriter and he had this concept you get people to know you, to like you, to trust you, and at that point you have to challenge their perception. So let's say we're talking about how do I make more money from my list? People might think the solution is I need more subscribers. And then I come in and say, wait a second, what good is adding 10,000 people to your email list if they still don't buy from you? [00:09:00.570] - Speaker 2 And if you can't even get the people who are on your list right now to buy from you, why have more people who end up not buying from you? Either so you're looking at a different problem or you need to offer them a different perspective on the same problem. And then that's where you position your solution. That's where I can then say, hey, think about segmentation, think about personalising your email newsletters, think about using automations in certain ways. So this is where you challenge them, where you say, hey, take a step back. Here's why I am the expert, here's why I think you are coming at this from the wrong angle. But you can only do this after they got to know, like and trust you in the first place. [00:09:43.240] - Speaker 1 My philosophy on lead magnets is similar to yours in that I feel a lot of the time getting somebody's email address is really quite easy. You could essentially you could make a big promise on the COVID of a PDF or an email course, get somebody's email address and then deliver nothing. And in many respects, the lead magnet has done its job. You've got the email address, however, how are you going to feel about that person? And I think that's kind of where you're going. So my philosophy is make a big promise or make an important promise and keep that promise over deliver on that promise. Because how the person feels about you when they join your email list is almost more important than getting them on your list. Having people who are positively disposed towards you is way more important than simply having people's data. [00:10:27.350] - Speaker 2 Yeah. And understanding what they want, why they sign up, is also very important. So one thing I have in my onboarding sequence is I ask new subscribers five questions. What is one goal that you want to achieve right now? Click on one of five links and it's an easy text link list, so it's not super complicated to build. Everything goes to a dedicated landing page where there's a 1 minute video of me saying, hey, thanks for sharing this with me, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's my best content. Scroll down to get a quick solution for your problem or to make a next step to your goal or whatever it is over delivering, just as you said. And when somebody clicks on that link, I know exactly in my ConvertKit platform, okay, they want a bigger email list. They want to make more money. They feel stuck in their business. So then I can tailor the content I'm about to send them in an email sequence. And I can funnel people into a list of emails that says maybe five emails about building a bigger email list. That's only relevant though, for subscribers who clicked on I want a bigger email list. [00:11:36.030] - Speaker 2 If I send this to a subscriber who clicked on I feel stuck in business. I don't know what to do. What will they do with the bigger email list? That's not what they are worrying about right now. So you have to keep in mind that when you deliver the lead magnet, you need to get more insight from your subscriber so that you can then follow up with them with relevant sequences. [00:11:57.750] - Speaker 1 So looking at segmenting that you can go crazy with that. I remember in the old, infusion soft days, people would get themselves properly tied up in knots with this and employ really expensive consultants to take care of this stuff. Segmentation can be taken way too far. What does a healthy segmentation look like for the average business owner like you or I, where it's a solopreneur business, just the basic meat and potatoes. This is what you should be doing as a minimum. [00:12:27.610] - Speaker 2 As a minimum, define three pain points that you can solve for your subscriber if they are different enough. So let's say comparing feeling stuck and confused in business with I need a bigger email list, I know exactly where I'm going. Those are two very different buckets of people. Then what you can also do, what I'm working on with the client right now is they speak to different types of people. So one audience they have is local facilities, school, stuff like that. The other audience are business owners, corporates, very different type of messaging there. So those are two different types of segments that you can employ. As you said, don't go crazy. Start with the basics. Pick one build up from there, and then you'll see how your campaigns work and how the sequences get taken up by your subscribers. Another thing that is very important is you want to have obviously customer status in those sequences. Did that person buy from me yet? Did that person purchase product A, product B, product C, so that when I promote product A in a newsletter, I can exclude that sales pitch to all the people who bought it before. [00:13:43.340] - Speaker 2 So you don't annoy them. Instead you put in thank you for purchasing blah blah blah to build more rapport and increase customer value. [00:13:51.370] - Speaker 1 So one thing I'm wondering about is methods of segmentation. You've spoken about links in emails, I know you have, for example, quiz funnels in order to achieve segmentation. What are the most common methods of segmentation that people should be thinking about? [00:14:10.130] - Speaker 2 I would say entry points to your email list. Think about following up with contact form submissions from your website. Those have clearly expressed an interest of learning more and doing business with you. So they are in a segment, warm Subscribers, warm leads, whatever you want to call that. Then you have your traditional hey, here's my PDF, give me your PDF and here's my email address call type of people who don't know you and who don't really want to work with you. They just want to get that quick win and then you need to nurture them. And then you have people who are in the checkout process but abandon the card. So you have card abandonment and recovery sequences for those and then you have the customers. Those would be rock solid way to start. And then you can dive deeper into the pain points from there. [00:14:58.190] - Speaker 1 It's quite interesting thinking about all that. It really does dictate that the more you focus a lead magnet on an individual pain point and not solving everybody's universal problems, the more you'll know about that person and subsequently be able to communicate with them to those pain points much more effectively. Let's take somebody, most people, if I'm honest, who they've grown their email lists probably over four or five years. They might have 100, they might have 200, they might have 2000, 4000, 10,000, doesn't matter. It's just one list with no segmentation. What would your advice be to what they do with this to make that list a little bit more valuable to them? [00:15:44.740] - Speaker 2 Great question. And as you said, it's probably 95% or 99% of people. And I would always start with segmenting based on engagement. So you can't fix, quote unquote dead email list by sending fewer emails. You need to send more emails. However, the more emails you send and then people don't respond to it, you're hurting, you'll send a reputation and your emails are more likely to be getting flagged as spam. So what you do is, let's say we are running a biweekly frequency, I would recommend weekly, but that's intimidating for many people. Let's say every other week we send an email. You only send that email to the people who opened a newsletter from you in the last 90 days by default. And then once a month you email the entire list and get people back into that cadence. What ConvertKit, which is what I'm using, called Warm subscribers. And everybody who does not open an email in the last 90 days, they get into a reengagement campaign. Hey, do you still want to hear from us? Blah blah, blah. Get them to engage with that email. Get them to open the email, maybe have them click on the link that says, yes, I still want to hear from you. [00:16:59.220] - Speaker 2 You can offer them a little incentive, like a discount code or free consultation or whatever. It's relevant for your audience, that is, segmenting people who want to hear from you, from people who not want to hear from you anymore. Which is cool, because sometimes we change occupations. Email addresses change. It's just the process and the part of the game that not everybody wants to read your emails. And then over time, you weave and call to actions in your regular newsletter that you use to segment people. When somebody in my newsletter, for example, clicks on a link to Jazz AI, which we did that live stream on recently, I take them with interest tags for content creation, for Jazz AI, for written content, so that I can then personalise the messaging. And over time, you build the segments organically with this approach. Another alternative would be to just send out a survey and say, hey, what's the biggest challenge you're facing right now? What are your goals for the new year? And then implement the text based on that. [00:17:58.960] - Speaker 1 So I think this is going to be the last question about segmenting, but I wonder about conversion rates on segmenting tactics. So let's say you send out an email with a couple of links in it. If your average click through rate is going to be quite poor anyway, that segmentation might not be quite so effective, right? What's a reasonable expectation for the number of people who will self segment in that way? [00:18:24.110] - Speaker 2 Take the average click through rate that you have for this. If you have a good copywriter, you can probably double that. If you have a good incentive, that helps too. But don't expect the world from this survey. And that's why I prefer this organic segmentation over time. It's difficult to get people to self segment if they don't have an incentive to do that. Why would I tell you what I'm working on right now? Okay? Jan can send me better content. Well, I don't care about Yan in the first place. I never read his emails in the last 90 days. Why should I care about him being able to send me better content? So you have to find a different angle for that. Just more content or better content won't suffice. But if you do that, you can get people to self segment and then just build it over time. And for all the onboarding sequences you have, integrate segmentation into those as soon as you can. [00:19:16.290] - Speaker 1 What's really interesting listening to this is what's becoming very clear, as if it needed to be any clearer, that this is about a long term investment. This isn't about going looking for a quick win tactic. And it brings me right back to the beginning. What we're talking about the money is in the list. A lot of people look at email marketing as an extra, as an add on, not as the main event. But actually, if you were to look at the one point of contact that you have and that you are in complete control of it's, your relationship with somebody in their inbox, you don't have that level of control over any other method of communication other than perhaps sending them a letter, phone call. [00:19:56.670] - Speaker 2 But that's as close as it gets. [00:19:58.820] - Speaker 1 And in many respects. So I'm on your email list and you send, I think, emails three days a week, something like that. [00:20:05.970] - Speaker 2 I'm going up to daily. Now. [00:20:09.570] - Speaker 1 The power of that is, I may not read your emails every day, but I see your name every day, every single day, I see your name in my inbox, and I haven't hit unsubscribe yet, and I'm ruthless. So the like, know and trust is there. But you don't want people on your email list that don't want to be there. You want people to go, that's yancock again, I'm not going to unsubscribe. Because those are people who are into you. You don't want people who aren't into you in your email list. [00:20:35.870] - Speaker 2 Yeah, you're bringing up a fantastic point. One thing I see as the biggest advantage of email marketing is that you are constantly in front of people. So even when somebody tells me I get 90% of my sales from referrals, I have a really strong network, I don't need to do any marketing. I still try to get them to understand that, hey, if you want to accelerate that referral engine, what is the one thing you need to do? You need to have conversations, you need to remind people that you exist and what you can help them with so that somebody can refer to you. So email is the best place to do that. And even if it's once a week, if you send the same email the same day, the same time, for three months straight, guess what? People will at some point expect you in their inbox. And one thing I would add to that is whenever I increase the frequency of emails I send, my open rates increase, they don't decrease. [00:21:34.710] - Speaker 1 That's really interesting. So let's look at actually using email, what should go in them. So me, I do falling off the wagon a little bit at the moment, but I'm climbing back on the horse. I do a weekly email newsletter. I have a weekly podcast going out. I have a YouTube video every week. I have a tool I'm recommending quite a lot. I have a few things going on. So it's essentially, it's a digest of that. It's quite visual. It's not a text, pure text email, but I know it's probably not enough. But the average creator, let's say, who maybe has a podcast, maybe has a YouTube channel, maybe simply writes a blog post. How should they be approaching email, and obviously they have products and services that they're selling as well. What does a healthy email marketing output look like in your eyes? [00:22:24.260] - Speaker 2 Once a week is the bare minimum. If you can do more, do it. And I'll share a process if you want to in a minute. For sending out, I spend like 2 hours a week for seven emails, so it's not too bad. And then you can repurpose that content into social and into blog posts and blah, blah. But what you want to do in your emails is you want to train people to click on stuff. If you don't have a call to action in your emails, you're wasting your time writing them. So in every email that I send, I have at least two links. Two maybe sales pages, maybe squeeze pages, maybe book a call with me, maybe here's my latest blog article, maybe here's a Twitter thread that I enjoyed reading. And the value that you put into this email is a conversation that comes up over and over again. I want to send valuable emails. How do I find ideas to write about every single week? I don't want to annoy my subscribers by sending them irrelevant emails. And my best advice for that is just be mindful of what's happening around you. [00:23:29.910] - Speaker 2 What's the conversation that you enjoyed? Where there's a lesson in there, where you had a realisation that you didn't have before? Or maybe the conversation we are having right now. You've asked some very good questions that I can repurpose into next week's email newsletters and then I can drive traffic to your profiles. And I train my subscribers to click on links in my email so that when I have a sales pitch, they know, okay, the stuff that Jan has in his emails is actually worth clicking on. What is a situation that you remember from the last two, three weeks? If it stuck with you and if it made you feel good, chances are it makes your subscribers feel good too. Because guess what? They are human. And when we think about value, at least from my perspective and my experience, I often think about value as I have to teach something. Here's how to write seven emails in 15 minutes and they are still good. Here's how to use jazz by AI. Blah, blah, blah. Making somebody smile is incredibly valuable. Just shining a light onto their day. They might have some very hard conversations that day. [00:24:36.140] - Speaker 2 Your email comes in and you share how your daughter made you smile because she draw on the wall or something like that. I love you, daddy onto the wall and that makes you smile. Those are the things that should go into email. And if you're listening to this from a business perspective and say, I will never put something like this in an email, you can still share content from what is happening in the business. What is a project that has gone well. What did you learn in that project? What's happening in your industry that you have to share your thoughts on, that's relevant for your audience? What is in the news right now that you can spin off into a conversational piece in an email to make yourself accessible as a person and not as a business? Because we do person to person conversations. We do person to person business. I'm not buying Bob's course or Bob's coaching because of the brand that he built, but because of the person that you are. So we really have to simplify the process, I think, and just put out a text, 100 words, 200 words. Put something in there that makes people smile, that teach you something, that shares a relevant resource and hit send. [00:25:44.780] - Speaker 1 Listening to you there, I was reminded of something that I often remember, which is a lot of people think that they would really like to be thought leaders. They would like to be visible as experts, but they're not willing to lead with their thinking. And that's where you move from simply being somebody who has an inner life to somebody who shares their thinking, and people resonate with that. And then you become a thought leader. It's not something you can manufacture. It's not something you can delegate or subcontract to a PR company. You can try. It might work for a week, but it's not going to be sustainable. It's not going to be authentic, it's not going to be relatable. I remember a case in point. I got an email from you this morning, and I don't read them all, but this one made me smile. And it was all about how a morning routine might just not be for you. I thought you know what? I had been punishing myself with this for years. I don't need a morning routine. I have got so much time. I've got my business and my life to the point where I have enough time. [00:26:47.480] - Speaker 1 The thing I should be measuring is, am I moving consistently towards my goals? And that's really stuck with me. It made me feel better about myself and by extension, about you. [00:26:57.640] - Speaker 2 I love it. Do you want me to break down the logic, like why I chose this specific type of topic? [00:27:04.230] - Speaker 1 I think that would be important for people because I think there probably is a lot of people sitting there thinking, I don't know if I can achieve that level of vulnerability. What happens if people disagree with me? People might not like me. This is the standard resistance to that. So I think offering something to that resistance would be really useful. [00:27:21.380] - Speaker 2 Yeah, you have to flip the script with this, and this is easier said than done. But coming back to the point you made as I want to be a thought leader, guess what? Not everybody likes a thought leader. So what I did with this email is to set. The stage. Last year, I spent 13,000 on the coaching, and part of that coaching was, you have to have this really good morning routine. So Yan, being a cheap guy, said, okay, I spend money on this. I better implement this stuff. And I went wild. I ended up with a 45 minutes routine, meditation, journaling, stretching, visualisation reading, everything that the self help gurus proclaim. I did it and I made it. And it was to a point that when I didn't do the morning routine, I felt bad, and the entire day was gone because I was constantly thinking, oh, I didn't meditate today, so I'm not mindful, and I make bad decisions, or I didn't stretch today. And one thing that's really important to me is I have a two year old daughter right now. I'm 33, all good. I can play with her. I can keep up with her. [00:28:29.190] - Speaker 2 When I am 50, I still want to be able to move around so that I can play with her. So stretching, mobility, exercise, even to me right now, is super important. That's why stretching was in that morning routine. But there's no point in beating myself up about it if I have a call at 07:00 a.m. In the morning, or if I have to drive my daughter to the kindergarten or whatever comes in my way of doing that routine. And in that email, I shared this exact position. And there are so many people claiming I got $10 million in revenue because of my morning routine and all those billionaire morning routine videos you have on YouTube. And I wanted to stand against those, because when you email, or when you create any content for that matter, you have to have a villain that your audience also stands against, so that you are on the same side of your audience fighting against that villain, against that common perception, whatever you want to call this. And that is why I sent out this email, because the villain is, I don't let anybody tell me what to do. And the alternative I offered in that email was, be resilient enough so that you don't need a morning routine, and instead just make it a habit to cheque in around noon. [00:29:48.230] - Speaker 2 How's the day going? Am I moving closer? To what's? My goals? That's the only change I made. [00:29:53.280] - Speaker 1 So a lot of people listening will probably be thinking, you know what? I'm not a very creative person. I struggle with a social media post once a week. That's maybe 50 words. How could I possibly become creative enough that I could generate a 300 word email once a week, let alone once a day? You're a systems guy, I know this. And you have processes for everything. What is your process for capturing these ideas, cultivating them, nurturing them, and then actually putting them out into the world? [00:30:26.230] - Speaker 2 The biggest problem people face with this is they don't separate ideas from writing. So when I pull up my LinkedIn I want to write a LinkedIn post and I have to think about, heck, what am I going to write about? I spend 20 minutes and then I close LinkedIn without having written anything and I'm banging my head against the wall. What I do is I spend 30 minutes a week catching up on conversations. I have a folder in my email inbox that says Curation where newsletters that I don't read on a day to day basis, but from influencers who that have audiences I want to be in front of, they go automatically into that curation folder. So every, let's say Friday or Saturday, I take 30 minutes, go through what they've shared, go through the Twitter posts that perform best. There's a tool I'll share in the show notes where you can philtre what other people said by engagement. So if I wanted to be in front of your audience, except for being on the spotcast, I put Bob Gentle in there and I can see which Tweet got the most retweets likes, engagements and so on. [00:31:34.670] - Speaker 1 Not much in the last weeks, that's for sure. [00:31:37.950] - Speaker 2 And I don't start with a blank slate with this, right? So I just piggyback on what's already happening and then I put my own spin on things. So one example I still remember from yesterday, when I had a call with a friend, we talked about the same thing and I showed him a Twitter profile and one of the threads was Five Tips for Professional Networking and Why It's Important. And he asked me, yeah, there are five tips. What do I have to add to that conversation? How would I make that my piece without copying it word for word? And I said, well, it's quite easy. You share past versus present. For example, here's how I viewed professional networking five years ago. Since then, I learned ABC. This is what I think about professional networking now. Or here's how I do professional networking now. But I have to change ABC because in the future I want to have this type of network. Or here's the five biggest mistakes in professional networking. Instead of sharing tips, share the opposite ten ways to ruin your professional network. Something like that. So it's really exercise and at first the ideas will be slow if you're not used to it, because ideation, I think, is like a muscle. [00:32:52.540] - Speaker 2 The more you do it, the better you become at it. But give yourself 30 minutes uninterrupted, put the phone down, put some music on, get cosy and just think about what you have to say about what other people already said that got a lot of engagement. And that's how you start with creating content at scale. [00:33:10.610] - Speaker 1 I'm going to sound so smart here because I read this in a book yesterday and it was a work science fiction book. [00:33:15.280] - Speaker 2 I am sorry you are smart, but. [00:33:19.310] - Speaker 1 It'S a quote from Ovid. Get me? Ideas are very very fragile things and you can't form them all at once. And I think this is what I like about what you're saying is don't go from ideation to execution all in one go. Spend some time just generating the seeds of ideas. Not the fully formed plants, just the seeds. Sprinkle the seeds, see what grows, give it time. Good ideas need time. And then come back and maybe look at one plant at a time once it's had a little bit of time to germinate. I think that's so important. And a lot of people think that creative people just come up with an idea fully formed, completed in one sitting and it's done and just life ain't like that. [00:34:03.700] - Speaker 2 You speak, I have yet to meet one. Yeah. [00:34:06.670] - Speaker 1 My son went to art school. I've grown up with creatives my entire life and one thing I know is they surround themselves with ideas physically. Walls covered in post notes and postcards and images to trigger and to generate. In the same way that you're curating you have a place to go where your ideas live, they're not coming. Fully formed. [00:34:28.860] - Speaker 2 Yeah. And in this context, I feel we have to address the elephant in the room. With chat GPT AI. [00:34:35.900] - Speaker 1 It's on my list. [00:34:36.840] - Speaker 2 You go, yeah, we did that live stream the other day, which I highly recommend everybody to watch it's on YouTube and with jazz by AI, Chat GPT, whatever tool you want to use, you can create ideas like this as well. So you put into Chat GPT, give me five questions manufacturers have about selling more product. Give me five questions about creators building personal brands, give me five challenges people have with selling online. You can ask those things and the AI gives you questions and you can expand on those topics and in the livestream. I raved about Jasper AI and it is a time saver, but what you have to take into account for that is you don't have the validation how well this content will perform. Whereas with the other process I just shared, you know that people respond to this topic. So there's two ways to come up with ideas. [00:35:34.190] - Speaker 1 I think the deeper you get into content planning, the more important it becomes that you don't just go with an idea that you think is good, but you test it or you use tools to philtre ideas that you know are going to perform well. Chat GPT can't do that, but it is a brilliant creative aid for helping you quickly put together some relevant prompts. I think the danger with it is a lot of people are going to use it as a replacement for actually knowing anything, which is actually going to be a wonderful thing, in my view, because people can quality always. Rises to the top. So the more garbage there is there, the more obvious it's going to be when people really do know what they're talking about. [00:36:14.860] - Speaker 2 Yeah. And one thing. I will share how I use chedgpt and why. I think it is an incredible skill to learn any AI tool. I use it to outline arguments. So when I build an email sequence, let's say somebody opts into my email list, and then there's a nurturing sequence or they download a freebie or whatever, and I know where I want to take them. I want them to book a call with me so that I can sell them on something I know. I want them to buy my course, whatever it is. There is this thought process, this decision making process that your emails have to guide, that subscriber through, and tools like Jazz Power or Jet GPT help you map out the phases of this process. What are the questions they have? What are objections they have because there's so much content on the internet covering this, the AI tools are good at summarising that content for us, but then you have to find your own answers. [00:37:08.400] - Speaker 1 I think there's another aspect to this, and I'm saying this watching the time, because I know we need to stop in a few minutes. I want to circle back to this whole question of people might not like what I'm writing, they might reject it, they might disagree with me. And I think this is why your emails work really, really well, because a proportion of people will disagree with you. And I'm sure you have an unsubscribe rate that you might even share with me. But something I keep coming back to is if you want this strong force of attraction towards whatever it is that's important to you, whether it's being liked or selling products, doesn't matter. You can't have it without the equal and opposite reaction. You can't have attraction without repulsion. That's basic physics. So if you want people to be strongly attracted to you, you have to celebrate the fact that some are going to be pushed away and be really cool with that. In fact, you need to go looking for it. [00:38:00.200] - Speaker 2 Yeah, I have about 0.5% unsubscribe rate on a daily email, so it's not as bad as some people might think. But I celebrate every single unsubscribe. Not because I don't care about that other person, but I'm selfish. I don't have to pay for people in my converted account. That person will never buy from me. If my daily emails doesn't resonate with them, guess what? They won't like working with me, so there's not a good fit there and I don't add clutter noise to their lives. So that's also an aspect you have to keep in mind, is that when you send emails to people who don't care about them but you make it hard for them to unsubscribe because they use light grey and dark grey for the link or something like that, you're doing yourself and that person disservice and you hurt your brand. [00:38:46.240] - Speaker 1 Yeah, I've had the best time. I've only gone through half of my notes here. There's a lot of things that we haven't spoken about that are off the website. Well, that's what I'm saying. I think we need to do this again soon for the listener who may be sitting there thinking, you know what, that sounds kind of cool. I have email stuff. I'm not happy. I want to go deeper. How can people get closer to you, get onto your email list and get some value from you. [00:39:10.380] - Speaker 2 The best place is Jankor Co. Jankoch Co. You'll find an optin directly on the page I sent you the five reasons why your newsletters don't sell. And after that onboarding sequence, you get added to my daily newsletter and then you can see for yourself what I'm doing, how I'm doing it, and if. [00:39:29.370] - Speaker 1 People want to hang out with you on social media, where's your favourite place? I know the answer. [00:39:33.990] - Speaker 2 This little blue bird called Twitter. I am young Cork on Twitter. [00:39:38.300] - Speaker 1 Again, very easy to find, great fun and a lot of value. My final question, what's one thing you do now that you wish you'd started five years ago? [00:39:46.170] - Speaker 2 Selling prospecting. For the longest time, I was afraid of cold emailing. I was afraid of calling, getting on the phone with people. But when you warm them up, when they know you, when they trust you, selling on the phone is the most comfortable thing because you don't have to use these salesy tactics. You don't have to use secret phrases or formulas. You educate them. And when you come from a perspective that I genuinely want to help you, they'll sell themselves on working with you. [00:40:18.150] - Speaker 1 That's an awesome answer. So that brings us to the end of another episode. Thank you to you for listening at home and if you've enjoyed the show, then I would greatly encourage you to leave a five star review. That's five, like the fingers on your hand, not four or three or two or one, and share the show with just one person. If you did enjoy the show, then I would invite you to download the personal brand business roadmap. It's everything, probably too much. Everything that you would need to start, scale or just fix your expert business. You'll find a link in the show note or visit Amplifyme Agency Roadmap. Thanks again, Yann, for your time this week. I've had the best fun. [00:40:56.260] - Speaker 2 Same year. Thanks for having me. [00:40:58.000] - Speaker 1 And for you at home, wherever you are, thank you very much for watching, listening and I'll see you next time.