Monthly Archives: July 2022

Weekend Favs July 30

Weekend Favs July 30 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but I encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

  • Screen Leap – The next level to your website. Screen Leap is a live interaction tool that allows you to screen share or post live videos to your site. What is excellent about Screen Leap is that you do not need any coding knowledge to work with the product; just copy and paste the pre-written code.
  • UX Writing Style Guide – Studies show that people behave differently when reading online vs. in print. So, Nielson Norman Group created this guide to help you write and structure your content for your online audience.
  • Spoke – The only online meeting assistant you will ever need. Spoke does all the note-taking and remembers your meetings for you so you can focus on being present. There is a free version as well.

These are my weekend favs; I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

If you want to check out more Weekend Favs you can find them here.

The Anti-Time Management Strategy That Actually Gives You Your Time Back

The Anti-Time Management Strategy That Actually Gives You Your Time Back written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Richie Norton

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Richie Norton. Richie is an award-winning author and serial entrepreneur. An executive coach to CEOs, he is featured in Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, Inc., Entrepreneur, and Huffington Post. Pacific Business News recognized Richie as one of the Top Forty Under 40 “best and brightest young businessmen” in Hawaii. He’s the author of a new book that comes out in August 2022 —Anti-Time Management: Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with the Power of Time Tipping.

Key Takeaway:

What if you could enjoy expansive freedom by prioritizing attention instead of simply managing your time? With the Anti-Time Management Strategy, you can. In this episode, Richie Norton, author and serial entrepreneur, shares the framework he’s created that helps you find motivation, prioritize your ideals, create a flexible work-life lifestyle, and actually gives you your time back. We dive into Anti-Time Management and how it will help you be present for the people, projects, plans, and priorities that matter most.

Questions I ask Richie Norton:

  • [1:29] The book starts with a missile attack — can you tell that story and share the why behind the reason it made it into the book?
  • [4:13] How does that story kinda launch what you’re trying to say in anti-time management?
  • [5:56] What is anti-time management?
  • [6:52] What is time tipping and how does that juxtapose with anti-time management?
  • [9:13] Why do you think balance is the wrong goal?
  • [10:38] How do we move away from the idea that has been ingrained into society that if you’re not sitting at a desk from nine to five, you’re not working?
  • [13:16] How do you get better at protecting the lifestyle you want to live?
  • [16:23] What is project stacking?
  • [18:51] What is expert sourcing?
  • [20:03] Could you talk about something that I think is the essence of the book — changing how you get paid?
  • [22:23] Where can people connect with you?

More About Richie Norton:

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John Jantsch (00:01): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by business made simple hosted by Donald Miller and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network business made simple, takes the mystery out of growing your business. A long time, listeners will know that Donald Miller’s been on this show at least a couple times. There’s a recent episode. I wanna point out how to make money with your current products, man, such an important lesson about leveraging what you’ve already done to get more from it. Listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:47): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jan. My guest today is Richie Norton. He’s an award-winning author and serial entrepreneur, an executive coach to CEOs he’s featured in Forbes, Bloomberg business week, Inc entrepreneur and Huffington post Pacific business news recognized Richie as one of the top 40 under 40 best and brightest young businessmen in Hawaii. We’re gonna talk about a new book by Richie called anti time management, reclaim your time and revolutionize your results with the power of time tipping. So Richie, welcome to the show.

Richie Norton (01:25): Thanks so much. I’m excited to be here. This is gonna be so much fun.

John Jantsch (01:29): So I do have to warn people that the book starts with a missile attack. Yes. So may maybe you can briefly tell that story and then tell me why that made it into the book.

Richie Norton (01:39): Well, some people may know of this, but if you don’t. Yeah,

John Jantsch (01:43): I recall. I recall

Richie Norton (01:45): It. Yeah, it has a good ending, you know, like spoiler alert, but I actually was in, I live in Hawaii. I was on a business trip in, in Tennessee. And while I was there, I get this text message saying ballistic missile attack in Hawaii. And it followed up with this is not a test. And so therefore it was not a test. This was happening. This is from our government, you know, telling us this and I’m freaking out. It’s easy. It’s easy to tell a story now, like when was happening, I mean, this was, it was real. It was real. I mean, there were people in Hawaii that reportedly were jumping into manhole, you know, so they could like take cover, like it was real. So I call, I have, you know, my, my three boys are at home. My, my wife’s home, I’m calling each one of ’em, nobody answers.

Richie Norton (02:33): And you know, the lines get crossed, you know, when there’s a disaster happening. Anyways, my one of my sons calls back and I think he was 13 at the time. And it was crazy. He said his goodbyes, you know, he is, I love you dad. And he was just weeping. And I re I remember when that happened, I just started thinking like, oh my gosh, my whole world is about to get destroyed. My family, my home, everything I’ve known the whole Hawaiian island chain, uh, like who knows what’s gonna happen here. And it was an interesting experience in addition to what was happening at the time, because I’ve had a number of, of tragedies and I’ll list them without getting too emotional here. But I had a brother-in-law pass away at 21 and his sleep. I had a son pass away as a baby. Uh, he caught pertussis, also known as whooping cough.

Richie Norton (03:23): My wife had a stroke and lost her memory. We’ve had three foster kids that we thought we were gonna adopt come and go. After two years, taking care of them, which was so hard. And I had my, I had a son get hit by a car and he crossing the street and he shouldn’t be here, but he is. But so in this moment, while there’s this missile attack, I had the strangest feeling. In addition to all the emotions, I thought, at least we didn’t live without, you know, at least we didn’t live with regret. We lived without regret. We did all the things we thought we could do. We tried our hardest, we did our best. We’ve experienced tragedy after tragedy and we’ve gotten back up and it was just this weird, surreal moment. And of course, then later we get this text saying that it was a mistake, you know, and life goes back to normal. So here we are

John Jantsch (04:13): Pretty, pretty crazy. So how does that doesn’t really anchor the book, but uses the launching off point. How does that story kinda launch what you’re trying to say in anti time management?

Richie Norton (04:24): You know, at times people will, I’m kind of stuttering cause there’s so many different ideas in my head right now. but when people start thinking about their lives, one of the first things they do is they work towards managing their time better. And the moment they do that, they, whether they realize it or not, cuz fish are the last to realize that there’s this thing called water, right? They don’t even know what’s going on. We don’t even realize that there’s this thing that’s been actually controlling our entire lives until we start looking at it. And we don’t realize that time management was actually designed specifically not to give us freedom, but to control every aspect of our lives at work and eventually into our homes. It’s not about controlling time. It’s about who owns your time, who controls your time and time management was specifically designed that someone else would.

Richie Norton (05:13): So this is important because as soon as we start realizing, oh my gosh, time is limited. Life is short. I know it’s cliche. We immediately create a priority and we instinctively put that priority last on a timeline. It wasn’t an instinct. It was taught to us in kindergarten to do that. Here’s how you set goals. And so I, I truly believe that, you know, goals from experience are tasks, goals, outside experience are growth, and there is a way to work from the goal instead of endlessly toward it. And when you have these experiences in life, you start realizing what really matters. And is there a way to make our work, support it as opposed to working toward it and never having it happen?

John Jantsch (05:57): Yeah. There’s a lot to unpack from what you just said there, but I want to get to give you a chance to say like in two minutes then what is anti time management?

Richie Norton (06:06): Anti time management is like a value centered approach. So stop timing your values and start valuing your time. Right? People will like bake a cake without sugar and expect it to be sweet. I know you can put other things in it, make it sweet. I get it. But just go with the analogy for a second. That’s like trying to live a life saying you have values in one day, you’ll live them and expect it to be a life lived on value. It’s not possible. But when you bake in freedom of time and autonomy and the things you want, even inside of an entrepreneurial business from the start, it actually expands. It creates it. So all these entrepreneurs, I’m gonna start a business to get my time and freedom back only to lose their time and freedom to the business, why they created that world for themselves. They didn’t know any other way. They learned it from corporate.

John Jantsch (06:52): So your solution of course, to, to getting a hold of this is something you call time tipping. Mm-hmm . So because that’s in the title as well. Let’s juxtapose that with anti time management.

Richie Norton (07:04): So anti time management, like the idea of time management, they control you anti time management. You get to control what you’re doing. Time tipping is kind of this framework that kind of goes along with this methodology. So the concept here I’ll make it super specific. If you are a college kid or whatever you are, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re an executive. The first thing you do when you wanna change your life in a lot of ways is you decide how you’re gonna get paid. But it, the instant you decide that you’re gonna move to the city to get paid. You made the decision to have a city life you did. And you decided that everything you do revolves around that world. So someone will get paid in a way they don’t like living. And they’ll do that for a really long time, maybe forever. Whereas someone who wants to live by a lake in Montana could go to Montana, live by a lake and make the same money or more and live the lifestyle they wanted from the start.

Richie Norton (07:59): So in time tipping, we reverse it. What’s the goal of the goal. What’s the job of the goal. What’s the reason I’m getting paid. And we go, we move beyond that. So we start with purpose, create projects around that purpose. And eventually we create a model that allows us to get paid that way. That doesn’t mean we get paid last. We can still get paid first. I’m a huge fan of getting paid first. And just saying, all of a sudden your work is in alignment with autonomy, with availability, with ability with actual productivity, as opposed to lying to ourselves and pretending that it one day will.

John Jantsch (08:33): And now let’s hear from a sponsor. You know, everybody’s online today, but here’s the question. Are they finding your website? You can grab the online spotlight and your customer’s attention with Semrush from content and SEO to ads and social media. Semrush is your one stop shop for online marketing, build, manage, and measure campaigns across all channels, faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level, to get seen, get Semrush, visit Semrush.com that’s S E M rush.com/go. And you could try it for seven days for free.

John Jantsch (09:13): So for years, you know, one of, one of the mantras always was, you know, to have this balance work, life balance. And obviously most entrepreneurs know that’s a fallacy, but you take it on pretty head on. I mean, why is balance really the wrong goal? Even,

Richie Norton (09:27): You know, it’s like the word has got, or the term work life balance has gotten messed up with the meaning. Yeah. So, so they’ll say like, I want balance say, no, you don’t wanna sleep for eight hours and play for eight hours on work for eight hours. Maybe one day, you know, like not every day. What you want is these, the essence of that is that you want the availability ability and autonomy to do what you wanna do when you wanna do it balance itself. It’s a weird word because balance itself in physics means motionless. It doesn’t move. Nobody wants a life that is motionless. It doesn’t move. You actually wanna unbalance or imbalance your life in the direction you want it to go. So you’re able to create things and set things in motion, not just do it all yourself. So I, you know, I even work life flexibility is a better term, but even that term misses the point because work life flexibility has become a perk at corporations at the moment. It’s a perk. Get a corporation is not a benefit to the worker anymore. It’s used as another way to control you. So I’m a fan of this concept of time tipping. Cause we need a new language to talk about the things we actually want because it’s not there.

John Jantsch (10:38): So this is slowly changing this sort of industrial age, you know, management, you know, era is changing. I mean my parents and my wife’s parents could never really understand what I do right, right. Because it didn’t fit into what they understood is a job. And you know, increasingly of course I was doing it 30 years ago, increasingly that, you know, my kids are like, no, that’s how I’m, you know, that’s like, that’s normal, right? That’s normal. I’m gonna have freedom. That’s right. I can work from home. I can do anything I want, you know? And so it is changing, but there still are a lot of people that are just very ingrained in that idea of if I’m not busy, if I’m not filling by my day, if I’m not sitting at a desk from nine to five, then I’m not working. I mean, how do we get outta that?

Richie Norton (11:23): It’s true. And I, I think what’s amazing is this is one of the first times I think in history, cuz a lot of the, I, you know, I work with corporations. I work with executives. I work with entrepreneurs. I work with the everyday person. But when you talk about it from like retaining talent, you know, you know, point of view, things start changing because you realize that someone is only in a job for on average in America, 4.6 years, that means you’re turning over at least every five years, more or less. And when that happens, you have a new opportunity. Look, you as an entrepreneur, you can change projects or careers every day. Right? Right. Yeah. But if you’re in one place one time and everybody’s changing every five years and you realize that leaving a job and getting a new one will get you a higher pay raise than staying for the three or 4%.

Richie Norton (12:05): They’re gonna give you every year. Right. Changes the dynamics. So what happens is this is the first generation. I mean generation now, I don’t just mean what age group in generation. Now everyone who’s living. This is the first time that everyone realizes they actually have everyone in quotes. Right. Everyone realizes they have a choice in the matter. Yeah. Yeah. Whether they do something or not is different, but the switching costs are so low to do something new. Whereas in the nineties, even in the two thousands, it was pretty hard. And before that almost impossible today. So they go, wow, it’s so hard to keep these kids on the, on here that work, is it? Or do they just want, do they just know they can do something else and make more money for in, in less time and they’re actually more productive and you wish you could do that too. And you’re jealous. Like what are we talking about here? but what’s cool is our parents, grandparents, they set us up for this. This is the success that they were working towards. So those who don’t wanna take advantage of it, I think it’s an awareness thing. And then those who want take it advantage of it, the opportunities now it’s, it’s never been more readily available.

John Jantsch (13:07): So one of the things that I think trips, a lot of people up is especially, well, people that are bought into what you’re preaching is that there are a lot of things that want to take your time. yes. So, so how do you get better at protecting? You know, you could set up like, here’s my flex, here’s my lifestyle I’m gonna live. And then everybody just like starts piling on.

Richie Norton (13:26): Now that that’s a great question. And it’s, what’s funny about that is like, it’s the same thing with money. When someone realizes you have money that people are like, Hey, I need some money too. Can I have some money? Right. So I like to believe in this concept that I call time flow there’s cash flow and there’s time flow. And you’re right. The people who are the most productive are rewarded with more work. So instead of getting things done, you know, from nine to five and they can get it done in between, you know, nine and 12 or whatever, they don’t get to go home early, early, they just get more work. So then we, everyone starts saying, nevermind, let’s all be average. Let’s all just do the same thing. Let’s spread out day, the exact time, you know . And so here we are.

Richie Norton (14:05): But for people who are trying to like figure out what to do at their time, I straight up, I have to help many people free up their time. They do it on their own, just sharing their principles. And a lot of times they go right back to doing more work. So there’s no judgment of how you fill your time. You’re gonna do it however you want. But there is a way to make one small move that allows one. It makes lots of decisions that you would’ve made disappear. And on the other hand, it creates a number of different opportunities and possibilities. But to answer, it’s like more of a bigger picture question, Aristotle called it a final cause. So like an acorn becomes an Oak tree. So a lot of times we’re planting things that aren’t acorns, but we expect them to become Oak trees.

Richie Norton (14:46): So the moment you realize that, then you can go back and make your work aligned with what you wanna do. Like someone says, I’m not making money. And I say, when’s the last time you asked someone to pay you? Oh no, I’ve been working so hard. Well, if work to you means you’re gonna get paid. Don’t you think you should ask someone to pay you cuz you haven’t worked a day in your life. If you’re defining work as getting paid, now you don’t have to define work as getting paid. But if you do, you should be asking people to pay you that’s aligned work. So when it comes to like how you make your decisions, Aristotle called a final cause. And the idea was an acorn becomes an Oak tree. So academics will use an example of like a table and they’ll say so I need wood.

Richie Norton (15:22): And I need to be able to have a design of how to make it. And I need someone to put it together and voila it’s done well. What’s the goal of the table. If it was to have like an heirloom for your family forever. Cool. If it’s because you have some nice people coming over, some business people, some family, and you wanna have a nice dinner. You there’s Uber eats, man. You can go down the street and go get a taco anywhere. You, you know that there’s a food truck of every flavor everywhere. So when you realize it’s not the dinner, it’s not the table, it’s not the wood. It’s the experience. Well then you can change what you’re doing. The idea is stop focusing on means and focus on ends. Covey didn’t say begin with means in mind, he said begin with the end in mind. And so I think we’ve made goals, habits and strengths. We’ve turned those into means, sorry, we’ve turned. Those means into ends into themselves. So then we lose all of our time and things that don’t lead us anywhere. Even though we think they are, instead of just saying, you know what, if I just did the thing, all this stuff would go away. I’d have more time.

John Jantsch (16:24): Well and how much stuff do we do in the name of being busy? That doesn’t really go anywhere, right? Yeah. So one of the, you have the book broken up into sections. One of the sections is ultimately some practices, you know, for implementing your methodology. So I jotted down a couple that I’d love to hear you explain a little more project stacking for the first

Richie Norton (16:43): One. Oh man, that’s such a good one. it’s such a good one. The concept is how it’s not multitasking. It would be super single tasking. Where one thing you do impacts all of your other companies, whether you like the guy or not. Elon Musk is a master at this thing. You know, his one company will affect all of the others. So you know, space X and you got the solar thing and you got Tesla, they’re using similar technology. They’re using similar resources. One thing impacts the other, you got this boring companies. Now these cars can go underneath. So that’s the idea is you might say, I wanna do all these different things and I’m not saying it to do ’em all at the same time. Maybe you will. Maybe you won’t. But if you can look at your projects and instead of putting them linearly, turn ’em over and stack ’em, it’s almost like this alignment allows you to say, Hey, I wanna make this decision. And this decision makes these different things in my life happen. I can give you more examples, but is that a good, is that, yeah,

John Jantsch (17:44): That’s a great example. And I’ll actually take it. If some people are thinking, oh Teslas, blah, blah, blah. You know, but I mean you write a hundred blog posts over a hundred days. You turn that into a hundred pieces of audio content that turns into a book. I mean that, you know, that’s another way of kind of looking at it on a real simple term, isn’t it?

Richie Norton (18:00): Oh absolutely. You know, every time we share an example, just leave, have a super example. It becomes like, whoa, like, so for me, yeah, I was an entrepreneur. I still am. People ask me questions. So I wrote a book about it. This is an alignment. The book. I mean the other book I’m referring to is the power of starting something stupid. That book turned into coaching consulting, online courses. All these things can happen with the same client that turned into me creating a product based business, where we make over a hundred different products at any given time for entrepreneurs all over the world. And now I’m making yoga pants and I’m making tiny houses in the same breath. And then I’ll be like, wait, what are you talking about? Like, yeah, it’s one decision. And it all came because of the book, the mindset. And now I have an editing company for people and people go like, what are you doing? How you do so many things. So I don’t, my job is to get people their time back. And if there’s a way I can do that in a way that also gives me my time back. Why wouldn’t I?

John Jantsch (18:51): Yeah. And it leads to another practice expert sourcing.

Richie Norton (18:55): This is, so this one’s so important. Expert sourcing is so important because what most people do, you know this, we all do it. We all do it like, oh, I need to delegate or I need to outsource or I need to hire an employee. So what they do is they go and find someone that’s as cheap as possible. But with that choice, it is not about money. They could be the same price. Just depends on what’s going on. But they intentionally go into it saying, I’m gonna teach this person how to do what I do. And they intentionally from the start have set up themselves instead of having zero jobs, they now have at least two or three jobs.

John Jantsch (19:30): that’s why it’s so hard to do. Right. That’s why people don’t

Richie Norton (19:33): It. It’s like I’m gonna hire this person. I’m gonna teach them how to do it. They’re gonna do it wrong. And then I’m gonna do it myself. . But in, in inherently in the word expert, I’m inferring, they know how to do it better than you. Right. There is zero training in expert sourcing. Sure. There’s little things about, I like this. I like it done by then. And here’s how, you know, we work, but this person should be able to teach you how it’s done. And in that sense, everything changes.

John Jantsch (20:03): Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome way to look at it. Let’s wrap up today talking about something you’ve hinted at, but I want you to hit this dead on because I think it’s in a lot of ways. I think it’s the essence of the book change, how you get paid,

Richie Norton (20:15): How you get paid dramatically impacts your life in every way. And I don’t mean how much you get paid. I get that. You need to make a certain amount and I get the more the merrier you and I both know millionaires. Maybe even some billionaires that have no time and they hate their lives. They’ll say they’ll even say money is easy. Time is hard. How you get paid, decides how you live your life. So if I am making a ton of money, but I’ve decided I have to work in a swivel chair, I will stay in that swivel chair spinning around all day long. When I told myself I wanted to work from my cell phone, this is before Facebook. This was before Facebook, when phones folded it was a decision cuz I knew that would force me to have to think, wow, I can’t be in an office.

Richie Norton (21:05): How am I gonna get this done? I can’t necessarily have people all around. How am I gonna get this done? So it allows you to be creative, these positive constraints. We’ve ended up just being on the road for six months at a time with our kids, screaming in the back of the car, doing whatever we want. Not that we had all the money in the world, we’re making money on the road while we’re good, just like we would anywhere else. So the idea is when you can create an environment that allows you to live the way you want, then you can also get paid to support that environment. And it’s a very different way of thinking, but it works like magic.

John Jantsch (21:37): Well, and it’s kinda like the end in mind of thinking too, that you just mentioned too, is if you start there , you know, then all the decisions you make, you know, should support that. And just, as you said, in some cases, they force you to make certain decisions. Don’t

Richie Norton (21:51): They, they do. It’s a forcing function. And so that’s why with small moves, you can reclaim your time. You can be as productive as you already are. I’m not saying get rid of things that you, that are good that you like. I’m just saying, don’t lie to yourself when it’s not working, let’s just work on something that’s in alignment. And here’s how to do it in a way that creates time for you and your family and for others.

John Jantsch (22:13): And, and I guess we could spend a whole nother show talking about how you actually figure out what alignment means, but there you go. That’s for another day, right? the Richie. Thanks so much for stopping by the duct marketing podcast. You wanna tell people where they can connect with you. Obviously the book will be available wherever you buy books.

Richie Norton (22:28): Yeah. Go to Richie norton.com. And if you go to Richie norton.com/time, I have a 90 day action plan that helps walk you through this. So you can find your alignment and make these things happen now, you know, and it’s really powerful. So, but honestly, John, I’m just so grateful to be on your show. Thank you so much. This has been so, so good to me

John Jantsch (22:45): Now. You, you bet great book again. I appreciate it. And hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Richie Norton (22:51): Definitely. I’ll see

John Jantsch (22:53): Ya. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we create a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment dot co .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d. Love to chat with you about the results that you get.

This Duct Tape Marketing Podcast episode is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and Semrush.

 

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals seeking the best education and inspiration to grow a business.

 

Everybody’s online, but are they finding your website? Grab the online spotlight and your customers’ attention with Semrush. From Content and SEO to ads and social media, Semrush is your one-stop shop for online marketing. Build, manage, and measure campaigns —across all channels — faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Get seen. Get Semrush. Visit semrush.com/go to try it free for 7 days.

 

How To Have Your Most Productive Day Ever

How To Have Your Most Productive Day Ever written by Sara Nay read more at Duct Tape Marketing

About the show:

The Agency Spark Podcast, hosted by Sara Nay, is a collection of short-form interviews from thought leaders in the marketing consultancy and agency space. Each episode focuses on a single topic with actionable insights you can apply today. Check out the new Spark Lab Consulting website here!

About this episode:

In this episode of the Agency Spark Podcast, Sara talks with Dennis Riley on how to have your most productive day ever.

Dennis Riley is the founder and owner of Goals To Results. As a small business owner and strategist for over 28 years, Dennis now helps business owners take control of their business using data, strategies and systems. Dennis is a firm believer that small business owners need to guard their time and eliminate time drainers from their schedule.

 

This episode of the Agency Spark Podcast is brought to you by Termageddon, a Privacy Policy Generator. Any website collecting as little as an email address on a contact form should not only have a Privacy Policy but also have a strategy to keep it up to date when the laws change. Click here to learn more about how Termageddon can help protect your business and get 30% off your first year payment by using code DUCTTAPE at checkout.

The Power Of Regret

The Power Of Regret written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Daniel Pink

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Daniel Pink. Daniel is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including his latest, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, published in February. His other books include the New York Times bestsellers When and A Whole New Mind — as well as the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell is Human. Dan’s books have won multiple awards, have been translated into 42 languages, and have sold millions of copies around the world. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family.

Key Takeaway:

Everybody has regrets — it’s human. Understanding how regret works can help us make smarter decisions, perform better at work and school, and bring greater meaning to our lives. In this episode, 5-time NYT best-selling author, Daniel Pink, joins me to talk about the power of regret and how looking backward can actually move us forward in life. Daniel debunks the myth of the “no regrets” philosophy of life through his research in social psychology, neuroscience, and biology.

Questions I ask Daniel Pink:

  • [2:37] How does one really conduct research on regret?
  • [3:44] Are there were differences between the world product and the American product?
  • [4:53] There are posters and tattoos around the world that say no regrets, so how is this a positive thing?
  • [6:49] Are you saying that people make mistakes and learn from them?
  • [7:42] How did you land on this particular topic?
  • [11:44] Could you define what regret is and how it differs from disappointment and guilt?
  • [16:51] Could you walk us through the four categories of regret: foundation, boldness, moral, and connection?
  • [19:35] Does the demographic data show that older people have different regrets or bigger regrets than younger people?
  • [22:41] How does the research you’ve done connect with or have a relationship with mental health?
  • [25:49] Where can people learn more about you, your book, and your work?

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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by business made simple hosted by Donald Miller and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network business made simple, takes the mystery out of growing your business. A long time, listeners will know that Donald Miller’s been on this show at least a couple times. There’s a recent episode. I wanna point out how to make money with your current products, man, such an important lesson about leveraging what you’ve already done to get more from it. Listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:45): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Daniel Pink. He is the author of five New York times, best sellers, including his latest, the power of regret, how looking backward moves us forward. His other books include the New York times best sellers win and a whole new mind, as well as the number one New York times, best sellers drive and to sell is human. His books have won multiple awards have been translated into 42 languages and have sold millions of copies around the world. He lives in DC with his family. So welcome to the show, Dan, I should say

Daniel Pink (01:23): Welcome back. Yeah, no I don’t. How many times is this now? John? It’s like five

John Jantsch (01:27): Or five. I’m go. I’m gonna, yeah, at least. I mean, like, I didn’t mention Johnny Bunco, but you know, you were

Daniel Pink (01:31): . That was, yeah. I was thinking as I, as I was look putting together my to-do list for the day and like what kind of appointments I had, I was thinking, geez, Louis, I think this is like the fifth time I’ve been on Jan’s show. So yeah, I think the sixth time I get a free bagel. Isn’t how it works

John Jantsch (01:45): With you. That’s actually let’s I like that idea. Let’s not talk about your book then let’s just talk about politics in DC right now for the whole show.

Daniel Pink (01:52): Uh, I, Hey, go for it. Go for it. It is, you know, if you wanna bring tears to your audience’s eyes, that’s fine with me. It’s your show. Yeah,

John Jantsch (01:59): No, I will forego that, but some people may not know that you spent some time in politics and did some speech writing for at least one president, if not two.

Daniel Pink (02:09): Well, I have, I, I worked in the reason I live in Washington is that my wife and I came here as a very young people. I worked in politics. I sort of fell into becoming a speech writer. My wife was a litigator for the justice department, and then we both left those jobs, but we didn’t leave DC and ended up raising, um, ended up raising three kids here. DC is a lovely place to live. And the truth of the matter is that day to day, it is far less obsessed with politics and most people outside of the beltway think.

John Jantsch (02:37): Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. So let’s, let’s get into the book regret, the power of regret you for most of your projects, you do a lot of research and you did something called the American regret project. I think you, I think I heard you talk about how does one really conduct research on regret?

Daniel Pink (02:53): Well, it’s a great question. And so actually there’s sort of three legs on which this book stands. One of them them is I looked at about 50 years of research that scientists did on this emotion of regret. And this is research done by developmental psychologists, uh, by social psychologists, by neuroscientists, by cognitive scientists and others. I also did, as you mentioned, the American regret project, which is just a gigantic public opinion survey, the largest public opinion survey of American attitudes about regret ever conducted to try to get some insights about this profoundly misunderstood emotion and then, but wait, there’s more. I also did a third piece of research, which is called the world regret survey, where I collected lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of regrets from all over the world. And so that, so I wanted, so that’s how I came out there. A lot of work involved trying to crack the code of this deeply misunderstood emotion.

John Jantsch (03:45): I’m curious, and you don’t have to answer this necessarily. I’m curious if there were differences between the world product and the American product. It’s an

Daniel Pink (03:52): Interesting question. And the answer is maybe yeah, and here’s why there, there are two different kinds of surveys. The American regret project was a public opinion survey. And so I can make very safe claims about, you know, are in America, are there demographic differences in regret? What are the sorts of things that people regret, et cetera, et cetera in the world, regret survey, it wasn’t a random sample. I just invited people around the world to submit a regret. Now I ended up with a lot of them. We now have a database of over 21,000 of them and my hunch. And I just wanna emphasize that it’s a hunch I’m willing to make certain claims about the American regret project and demographic differences and other things about American attitudes on regret, my hunch. And it’s just that is that looking at the 109 countries that were represented in the third piece of it, these regrets are pretty universal. Yeah. These regrets are pretty, a lot of ’em are pretty universal. Moral regrets are a little bit more complex because people have different notions about what it means to be moral. But overall there’s a kind of a stunning amount of universality to these regrets.

John Jantsch (04:53): Yeah. The human condition is the human condition. Yeah. Right.

Daniel Pink (04:55): Exactly. Exactly.

John Jantsch (04:57): So let’s get this out of the way. There are posters and tattoos around the world. that say no regrets. So like how is this a positive thing?

Daniel Pink (05:06): Well, I mean, no regrets is no regrets as a philosophy of life is not a particularly good idea for at least two reasons. I mean, truly one is that you you’re leaving a lot of capacity on the table and two you’re kidding yourself. Otherwise is a great idea. Cause because, because here’s what we know. Here’s what we know again, going to that first leg of this stool. Here’s what we know about regret from 50 years of of research. Everybody has regrets. It’s a universal emotion that, that everybody has regrets. Uh, truly the only people who don’t have regrets are people with some kind of problem, uh, sociopaths or people with brain damage or gen degenerative diseases or brain lesions that is like not having regrets is a sign of a disorder. Or it’s also a sign of that. You could be five years old too, cuz your brain hasn’t developed.

Daniel Pink (05:47): But the point is that not having regrets is a sign of a brain that isn’t fully mature and isn’t working properly. So that’s kind of weird, right? Cause I don’t, you know, you were joking around about, Hey, let’s have this fun conversation about regret and here’s the thing I don’t like regret. It doesn’t feel good. Yeah. I don’t like it. But here’s the thing. This unpleasant emotion is everywhere. It’s ubiquitous. It’s one of the most common emotions that human beings have. And so the question then becomes if something that’s so widespread, why you have this unpleasant thing, that’s widespread why and the answer is cause it’s useful if we treat it right and we haven’t been treating it. Right. And when we treat it right, not ignoring our regrets, like those ridiculous, no regrets posters and not wallowing in our regrets, but confronting ’em there’s evidence that confronting your regrets properly can help you become a better negotiator, a better strategist, uh, think more clearly avoid cognitive biases, find greater meaning in life, solve problems, faster, solve problems, more elegantly. There’s a whole array of benefits if we treat it right.

John Jantsch (06:49): Well, so in some ways you’re saying it’s like mistakes, did we learn from it? Right. I mean, is that kind of what

Daniel Pink (06:56): We’re saying? Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, so, but did, but let’s push that a little bit further. Okay. So what we want, you know, everybody makes mistakes, errors has failures. The question then becomes what do you do with them? And the idea that in the face of bad choices, in the face of stupid decisions and indecisions, you should simply never look backward. Ah, it’s in the past, it doesn’t matter or say, I don’t wanna deal with that. Cuz that makes me feel bad. And I only wanna be positive. That’s a bad idea. What we know is that if we treat a regret systematically, we can learn and grow. And so what’s perverse yeah. About this no regrets philosophy. And you mentioned people with tattoos that say no regrets, no one, but you might as well get a tattoo. This is no learning. no growth, no progress. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:42): Yeah. So I want to veer here for a minute. I’m curious how you, I mean you’ve written a pretty eclectic set of books. I’m kind of curious how you find a topic that you say I’m gonna write a book about this and then how you landed on this particular topic.

Daniel Pink (07:57): Well, in general, I have to be really interested in the topic that was really, you know, this, you know, this John writing a book is a giant pain in the ass. You know, this it’s hard, it’s hard. Okay. It’s really hard. So you gotta pick something that you really are interested in and really care about deeply. And that is truly not most things. I mean, truly it’s like it’s most things I do writing a book about. It would be like a form of punishment for a white collar crime, you know, so, so, so what happened in this book was that I had regrets and I was at a point in my life where I was in and someone was trying to reckon with them. I was at a point in my life at the very least where, to my surprise, I had room to look back.

Daniel Pink (08:42): You know, I’d always thought of myself as this like young guy. And all of a sudden I realized I’ve been doing this for TW this book writing thing for 20 years, I had kids graduating from college, like what the hell’s going on. And so I had room to look back and, and as I look back, as many people do, I said, ah, if only I had done that or if only I hadn’t done that and I realized I’d made some screws and mistakes and things and I wanted to make sense of it. And the curious thing though, was when I came back and started, when I very sheep started talking to people about these, my regrets, instead of people recoiling in the way that I kind of expected people leaned in, they wanted to talk about it and that’s, and that was, it was very intriguing.

Daniel Pink (09:21): And so what I ended up doing to your question about books, I was actually working on a totally different book at the time when I started think, when I started encountering this, I was working on, I had a contract for an entirely different book, a book that had nothing to do with this. And I put it aside for nearly two months and I started doing some basic research on regret and ended up writing a brand new, maybe 30 page book proposal for an entirely new book and went to my editor and publisher and said, Hey, I know I’ve contractually obligated to write a book about X, but I think this book about Y that is regret is way better. And let me try to make the case to you that this is a better book. This is a book that I’m, that I like, I feel in some ways compelled to write

John Jantsch (10:07): And, and you of course said, can I keep the advance on the other book for a while too? well,

Daniel Pink (10:11): Yeah, what

John Jantsch (10:12): We did, we just swapped

Daniel Pink (10:13): It out, swapped it out, you know? Yeah, yeah. We just swapped it out. We just said, okay, so don’t do book, don’t do that original book, do this book. And you know, as long as you give us words in English that we can put on pages, we’ll be reasonably happy.

John Jantsch (10:27): It’ll all come out in the wash.

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John Jantsch (11:44): I bet you, some people struggle with like, what is regret. Exactly. Yeah. And I know I’ve had the advantage of hearing you talk about this book at, at a conference I attended and it was, I thought, thought it was interesting that you talked about disappointment and guilt and that’s not regret. And so I wonder if we could kind of sum that up for us.

Daniel Pink (12:00): Yeah. But that’s an important, that’s important. It’s important to understand what this emotion is. So let’s talk about, let’s talk about difference between regret and disappointment. What make triggers regret, what makes an emotion regret and not something else is typically, well, there’s a few things, but at the core of it is agency. That is regret is your fault. Regret is your fault. I’ll give you an example. All right. I li as you mentioned, I live here in Washington, DC. And as we speak here on a very overcast and steamy July day here in the nation’s capital are base. I’m a sports fan and I’m a Washington sports fan. The Washington nationals baseball team have the worst record in the major leagues. The Washington BA Washington nationals have won 32% of their games this season. I mean, in baseball. That’s unbelievable. All right. Okay. So can I, so, and I’m a fan, do I re I’m disappointed about that?

Daniel Pink (12:54): Right? Because I care. Okay. For whatever weird reason I care, whether the nationals win or lose, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. The nationals aren’t gonna care, but if nationals lose, I feel bad. Right. But I can’t feel regret about that, cuz I’m not playing. I’m not managing the team. I don’t own the team. All right. So it’s not my fault. And so regret is our fault. Now let’s talk about guilt. Cause I think that’s another really good one. And let’s even talk about shame while we’re at it. Okay. So guilt to me is a subset of regret. Guilt is a guilt is your fault. I did something wrong and I have people in my database. I bullied somebody. I cheated on my spouse. I swindled a business partner and I feel guilty about that. All right. So guilt is a form of regret.

Daniel Pink (13:35): It’s a subset of regret. It’s essentially a moral regret typically from an action. But shame is very different. Shame is guilt is I did a bad thing. Shame is I’m a bad person. And shame is pretty debilitating, right? If you know, if you make a, if you do something and this is a big problem, why people shy away from regret? It’s like when we make a mistake, we say, oh, I screwed up that decision over there. Therefore I’m an complete idiot. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m the worst person in the world. We make these universe. We make these sort of broad lifetime attribution based on a single action. So, so shame is very debilitating. Guilt is a form of regret and disappointment is simply feeling bad about something. That’s not your fault. I mean, again, I’ll give you an even simpler example. Okay.

Daniel Pink (14:17): So it looks like, so I was, um, so I was thinking about my exercise plan for the rest of the day. And it turns out here in Washington, DC, it at about five o’clock there’s a 100% chance of thunderstorms. Okay. So here’s the thing I could be. I can’t regret that it’s going to rain. Right? If it’s five o’clock and I wanna go outside and exercise, I can’t say, oh, I regret that it’s raining. All right. I can be disappointed in that. But if I have to go to the walk to the grocery store and I don’t bring an, and I forget to bring an umbrella, I can regret that. Cuz that’s my fault.

John Jantsch (14:45): well, you can also regret that you didn’t go running at 7:00 AM this morning when you knew it was gonna rain. Right?

Daniel Pink (14:51): Yeah. You know what? I can’t run that early in the morning.

John Jantsch (14:54): So it’s interesting is I heard you talk about the debilitating aspect of shame. I can see people regretting that they made a poor business decision and that shaming them to the point where they won’t ever go out on a limb and make a decision again.

Daniel Pink (15:09): They’re exactly right. You’re absolutely right. And this is the, then this is, and that’s because people don’t know how to contend with that regret. Right? So, so they go the opposite direction of the no regrets, the no regrets brigade, they wallow in it. They ruminate over it. What you have to do is you have to the initial step here when you make a mistake or screw up is that you there’s a whole process that you can go through. But it really begins with something called self compassion, which is treating yourself with kindness rather than contempt. The person you’re describing there will often say to him or herself, their self talk will be brutal. You know, swearing it themselves, lacerating themselves. Don’t do, they would never talk to anybody else that way. So don’t talk to yourself that way. You don’t have to treat yourself better than anybody else, but you don’t need to treat yourself worse than anybody else. There’s no evidence that let lacerating self-criticism is in a, is a performance enhancer. Seriously, none. Zero zilch. Yeah. What you wanna do is treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt recognize that mistakes are part of the human condition. And as we were talking about earlier, that it’s a moment in your life, not the full measure of your life. And when we do that, we can open the way to making sense of our regrets and drawing lessons from them.

John Jantsch (16:17): So, so for all those people that have the poster or the tattoo we could, we can still be no regrets, just no regrets. I’m wallowing in. How’s that?

Daniel Pink (16:25): Okay. That’s fair. That’s fair. Yeah. That’s fair. I mean that’s, that’s actually a good, that’s a good way to, that’s a good way to do it again. What we have here is what we have here is this kind of performative courage of no regrets. We think that, I mean, people do it in this very assertive, bold way, right? They say no regrets. They announce it. They proclaim it. They enshrined it on their bodies as a show of courage. But that’s not what courage is John. I mean, courage is looking your regrets in the eye and doing something about that. Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:52): Yeah. Turns out there are categories of regret and you can talk about the types foundation, boldness moral and connection. But I have a favorite can I have, is it okay to have a favorite kind? So, and you can unpack what each of those are if you wish. But my favorite is boldness. I mean, I think,

Daniel Pink (17:07): Well, no surprise. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:09): You know, so, so maybe, maybe give us a really quick definition of those four types and then we can get into yeah.

Daniel Pink (17:14): Yeah. So

John Jantsch (17:15): We talked diving into boldness.

Daniel Pink (17:17): We talked about moral regret are if only had done the right thing, right? So you’re at a juncture. You can do the right thing. You can do the wrong thing. You do the wrong thing. Most of us regret it because most of us are good and want to be good connection. Regrets have only had reached out. These are regrets about relationships that come apart. People want to do something, but they don’t. And it drifts apart. Even more foundation regrets are small decisions early in life that accumulate to nasty consequences. Later in life, I spent too much in save too little. I didn’t take care of my health. I didn’t work hard enough in school. And then finally boldness regrets, which are you’re at, at a juncture. You can play it safe. You can take the chance. And when people don’t take the chance, not always, but a lot of the time they regret it and it doesn’t matter the domain of life, but it could be asking somebody out on a date, it could be traveling. It could be speaking up or, and why I’m not surprised this comes into your world. Is it not starting a business?

John Jantsch (18:09): Yeah, yeah. Or not, you know, not taking a bold move. I mean, I look at my business and I can clearly think about maybe this is in comparison. You know, some other people that maybe started when I did or do a similar thing that, that I look at and go, wow, if I’d have like gone for it in a certain way, I’d be there too. But I have where I will say I have no regrets. I love where I am but I also do. I do also recognize sometimes when I could have been Boulder,

Daniel Pink (18:35): I think we all do. And I think that’s healthy. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the thing. So the question is John, what do you do with that? Okay. This is perfect example. I feel exactly the same way. Yeah. All right. So I, there were so many times in my life when I could have been Boulder. So here’s what I can do. I can go back there and say, you know what? There were times in my life when I couldn’t have been Boulder and thinking about that right now makes me a little uncomfortable. So I’m gonna plug my ears and never con consider it again. Bad idea. Or I can say, as we were talking about earlier, oh my God. There were times when I could have been Boulder. I’m such an idiot. I’m a moron. I just don’t know what I’m doing. That’s a bad idea too. What I should do is say, huh? What’s that telling me? That’s telling me, well, it’s telling me a few things. Number one. It’s or let’s say you and I similarly situated what it’s telling us, John is this one we value boldness. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Not everybody has to value boldness, but you it’s clarifying what we value and it’s instructing us and it’s instructing us to say, Hey, you know what, next time around, go

John Jantsch (19:34): For it. Take a bigger shot. yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because you have demographic information on the research. Do older people have different regrets, bigger regrets than younger people.

Daniel Pink (19:46): This is a B. Okay. So, so in the quantitative survey, the American the public opinion survey, I had a very large sample in order to try to make determinations like this. Do men have different regrets than women do?

John Jantsch (19:57): Right?

Daniel Pink (19:58): People with lots of formal education have different regrets from people with less formal etcetera, et cetera. There were not that many demographic differences except on this dimension, which is age. And it’s a huge difference. And it’s this, when we are young, we tend to have equal numbers of regrets, of action and inaction, equal numbers of regrets about what we did and what we didn’t do. But as we age and not even age that much mm-hmm thirties is to start to take over in the thirties, forties, and then certainly fifties and beyond regrets of inaction, swamp, regrets of action. When you get to be I’m in my fifties, when you get to be my age, it’s like two to one, sometimes three to one regrets of inaction versus action, which goes to your boldness point. Yeah. It suggests that what we’re gonna, we’re gonna over time, we are, are gonna regret the things we didn’t do. Not asking that person out on a date, not taking that trip, not speaking up, not starting that business, not reaching out to a friend. Those are the things that stick with us and bug us for a long time.

John Jantsch (21:03): Yeah. I think it’s EE comings line. I sort of remembering is we regret the sins of omission rather than the sins of commission, you know, as we get older, , you know, that did, but not didn’t do.

Daniel Pink (21:14): Yeah. But the thing about that is that’s not only, you know, that’s like, that might make intuitive sense for people, but we have a, but I have data from my own survey showing this very clearly. It’s basically the only demographic difference that I’m willing to like go to the ramp arts to defend because the finding was so strong, but it’s also very consistent with what 50 years, the 50 years of existing research are shown us. But

John Jantsch (21:35): I think it probably comes down to, we start thinking and I’m running out of time. right. I mean, whereas when we’re in our twenties, we’re like, eh, I got, I’ll get another shot at that. Right.

Daniel Pink (21:44): That could be, I think that’s part of it. I think the other thing is that action regrets. We can resolve over time in some way. So we can say, so if I bullied somebody or if I hurt somebody or, you know, cheated somebody, I can go and like apologize or make amends or make restitution. There are times where you can take some of the psychological sting out of a regret by finding the silver lining in it. So it’s so if I said, I mean, this is, you know, I said, you know, one point in my life, I thought about moving to California. I don’t regret not doing that. But suppose that I did, I, I said, if only I moved to California, right. And I can say, well, I lived in Washington. Well, at least I was able to send my kids to a great school. You know, I can find a silver lining in, I can find a silver lining in that, but in action regrets, you can’t undo. You can’t find a silver lining. That’s why they nod us. Whereas one poet says they lay eggs under our skin, which I think is a lovely and somewhat creepy way to put it. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:41): Yeah. so at the beginning you were talking about research that was done in all these various fields that have some relationship to mental health. And I, you know, do you have an opinion or a view from the work you’ve done and now all the talks you’ve given and conversations you’ve had with individuals, how big of a mental health problem is this?

Daniel Pink (23:01): It’s an interesting question. Okay. So I think there’s some new, I think there’s some nuance to it. Yeah. Okay. So I think that the, I think mental health is a pretty significant issue. However, this is my view. Okay. And I just wanna emphasize I’m not a physician, right? I think that it is a little bit less of a medical issue than we make it out to be. And what I mean by that is that what I think the big issue here is that we haven’t taught people how to deal with negative emotions. Yeah. What we’ve sold them, a bill of goods we’ve said you should always be positive. And we don’t, and our lives are not uniformly positive and negative emotions have a place. We just haven’t taught people to deal with them. And so I think that we have a mental health crisis, perhaps even a me, you know, medical problem when people get so consumed by their regrets and their negative emotions that they, it ends up metastasizing to anxiety, depression, or something that is actually a medical ailment.

Daniel Pink (24:03): But, you know, but I don’t think that that every negative emotion is not a mental health crisis. It can become a mental health crisis. If we don’t tell people the truth, that negative emotions are part of life. That negative emotions are instructive. That negative emotions are in fact, in some ways more instructive than positive emotions and that we can deal with them in a systematic way. And when we deal with them in a systematic way, we can live better and work smarter. And so I, I think that among the young people, among younger people that this mental health problems we’re seeing in younger people are because they’ve somehow gotten the message from us that they need to be positive all the time. Yeah. And then, because they’re human beings, they sometimes don’t feel positive. They feel sad. They feel regret. They feel fear. They feel these negative emotions and they look around and say, oh my God, everybody else is so perfect. There must be something wrong with me. And I don’t know what to do with this feeling. And I think that’s the problem. We need to equip people to deal with negative emotions, harness them as a force for progress.

John Jantsch (25:04): So I regret that I didn’t lean in a lot harder to my baseball career, but it sounds to me like, uh, maybe I could still get a tryout with the NATS.

Daniel Pink (25:11): Well, yeah. This year you could, and you know, this year, this year you could, but that’s an interesting, that’s an interesting thing that, you know, it’s like the question then becomes like, what do you do with that kind of regret? Cuz that’s not an uncommon regret. Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of sports related regrets, actually, John. And so, so the things like, okay, are you going to get an MLB contract? Probably not. Okay. But the question is like, what is it about that that you regret not leaning into? So you felt like, okay, I didn’t push myself to the hardest I could push myself. You know, I didn’t take a, I didn’t take a big shot and there are plenty of time and plenty of other realms in which you can push yourself hard and you can take a, you can take a big shot.

John Jantsch (25:47): Awesome. Always great catching up with you. Dan tell people where they can connect with you and the ways that you want to. And obviously the books are available everywhere you

Daniel Pink (25:55): Buy books. Yeah. The best other starting point is my website, which is Dan pink.com, D a N P I nnk.com. And there’s a newsletter. There are a lot of free resources, all the books, all, you know, unicorns, rainbows, cotton candy for everyone, all kinds of good stuff

John Jantsch (26:10): And no regrets posters. I can touch you. Dan. Thanks again. Uh, always great to catch up and uh, hopefully we’ll see you one of these days there on the road.

Daniel Pink (26:20): All right, John. Thanks for having me back. Look forward to my bagel next time. Hey,

John Jantsch (26:24): And one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not.com.co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and Zapier.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

 

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Weekend Favs July 23

Weekend Favs July 23 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but I encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

  • How to Professionally Say – If you have ever been trying to type an email for work and you know what you want to say but are not exactly sure how to say it. Well, now you have a solution. This is a guide for your daily “professional” interactions (just kidding, try at your own risk).
  • Ruttl – Acts as a digital whiteboard for website reviews, bug tracking, app reviews, PDF and image annotation, and much more. Ruttl is a new type of website feedback tool that creates a great team and user experience.
  • Cloud Vision API – Cloud Vision API is a tool by Google that allows you to upload your image and see the recommended image annotations. This is very useful when labeling digital images or improving SEO.

These are my weekend favs; I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

If you want to check out more Weekend Favs you can find them here.

The Rising Importance Of Images In Google Search

The Rising Importance Of Images In Google Search written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Mike Blumenthal

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Mike Blumenthal. Mike is the Co-founder and Analyst at Near Media where he researches and reports on reputation, reviews, and local search. Today, he also provides Local consulting to a range of businesses, big and small, across the SMB and SAAS marketplaces. Mike is assisting Air.cam, an online professional photographic marketplace, with pivoting to the local marketing space and helping them bring the power of photography to every business located in the US and Canada.

Key Takeaway:

Google is emphasizing images more and more in search. AI and machine learning are helping drive Google’s incredible understanding of what is in an image. In this episode, I talk with Mike Blumenthal about the technology behind visual elements in search, the role that images play today in search, and how and why you should be using images in search to your advantage.

Questions I ask Mike Blumenthal:

  • [1:51] What’s the growing importance of images in search?
  • [3:21] Are you suggesting that images are also important for things not quite as clearly defined as products?
  • [4:45] What can search engines know about images now and how has that changed?
  • [6:19] What do you say to the business owner that doesn’t like that Google shows competitor products in search?
  • [7:55] Would you say that the visual elements of a typical blog post today are sending information to Google that adds to the search component and gives certain ranking signals?
  • [11:33] Is there a relationship between visual search and voice and text?
  • [12:40] What’s the role of AI in all of this?
  • [14:21] Are you suggesting that somebody could take three pictures that they are thinking about using for something and use a tool that would say this is actually the best picture from a Google understanding or from an optimization standpoint?
  • [16:52] Where is augmented reality with images?
  • [22:32] Where can people connect with you?

More About Mike Blumenthal:

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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by business made simple hosted by Donald Miller and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network business made simple, takes the mystery out of growing your business. A long time, listeners will know that Donald Miller’s been on this show at least a couple times. There’s a recent episode. I wanna point out how to make money with your current products, man, such an important lesson about leveraging what you’ve already done to get more from it. Listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:46): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Mike Blumenthal. He’s the co-founder and analyst at near media, where he researches and reports on reputation reviews and local search. Today. He also provides local consulting to a range of businesses, big and small across the SMB and SAS marketplaces. He’s assisting a company called air.com and an online professional photographic marketplace to pivot to the local marketing space and helping them bring the power of photography to every business location in the us and Canada. So the reason I talk about air.com cam I’m sorry, is that we are gonna talk about visual search images in search. So Mike, welcome really back to the show. It’s been a couple times for you at least.

Mike Blumenthal (01:37): Thank you very much for having me. It’s always a pleasure to speak with you both personally and professionally.

John Jantsch (01:43): Oh, thanks so much. So let’s talk, I mean, I’ll give you the really big question that you could probably talk the rest of the show for, but you know, our, you know, what’s the growing importance of images in search, you know, what are all the factors that are leading us to talk about this thing?

Mike Blumenthal (01:59): So Google just today announced that 40% of their audience, younger audiences don’t even come to Google search anymore because they prefer the visual nature of TikTok. So talk, so Google has gotten this for a very long time, but search has become about entities more than keywords. And in that Google is streaming visuals of entities everywhere in the search results. These days, both in older search results and newer search results and images, both drive search results and convert users. So they play an ever increasing role, not just in the non search world of social, but particularly in the search world of Google. Google is emphasizing images more and more. I did a analysis of the pixels of a mobile screen on a small business focused to keep a search and 35% of the surgeries. Well, 36% were image pixels versus 2017 when there was 0% of the search results were images on mobile. So they’ve moved very rapidly and very heavily into a visual stream of information as opposed to text.

John Jantsch (03:15): Now, I think for a long time, if I searched for something that was clearly a product, I was getting visuals in there. But I mean, are you suggesting that this is really, even for things that are, you know, not quite as clearly defined as products.

Mike Blumenthal (03:29): Yes. So if you break up say a mobile search result adds at the top, let’s say LSA, add local service ads. Right, right, right. Google has started putting images of lawyers in there, obviously, excuse me, in product searches, you see products, but in the pack, you’ll see carousel associated with each business in the organic result, Google will show up to five images in the mobile result for a loca for organic page. And then they have a whole range of new search units that are strictly visually based order food searched by photo. And it doesn’t need to be in a visual industry, could be in pest control, could be in plumbing. Yeah. Obviously in purchase driven industries like jewelry, it’s obvious, but it’s showing up everywhere in all of those elements, ads, local pack, organic results, new search units, and virtually every one of those has become image Laden.

John Jantsch (04:30): So going back to the ancient ages of the internet, you know, people would sometimes even turn images off because of bandwidth issues and things. And so we, we all got very into producing, you know, alt attribute, you know, describing what the picture actually was. And that that was a, a help. Certainly it was a help to visually impaired, but it was also a certainly a help to Google to maybe know what that picture is about. What can search engines know about images now? I mean, how is, how has that changed?

Mike Blumenthal (04:55): So it’s the most exciting part of search these days is Google’s incredible understanding, driven by AI and machine learning of everything in the image. They understand the objects in the image. They understand the entities in the images. They understand the color patterns. They understand whether they’re suggestive or unsafe in a yeah. Yeah. Social sense. They even understand clothing styles, not only do they understand color and color patterns, they can read and understand the logos. They can read text and convert the text image to a text understanding. So they literally understand all aspects of an image, whether you have an T tag or whether you don’t. And this is to me, the most amazing thing, because they’re using that extensively to match images, to search your intent in the search results. So they will actually show you images based that the search results will change based on your query, the images will reflect closer to your query than

John Jantsch (06:01): So one of the knocks I’ve heard on this a little bit, of course, you know, business owners like to complain because they think Google’s there to serve them. is that, you know, if I search for a product, it will also say, uh, here’s some things like that that you could buy, or if you like that, you’re certainly telling us your style is this. And so here’s some competitors products that you can buy again. You know, what do you say to the business owner that says, I don’t like that because they’re showing my competitors, I’ve done a great job, you know, of optimizing and showing up and search, and now Google’s going out and showing my competitors

Mike Blumenthal (06:35): Well, Google is as Google does. Right? And they’re big. And you’re little the reality is that more people see you on Google search than see you almost any place else in the world. And the other reality is that more people convert to your business from Google search directly from Google search than from your website or any place else in a number of studies that I’ve done, joy Hawkins has done is Sterling sky, anywhere from 75 to 85% of local conversions are happening right on Google. Other words, people are clicking the call, right. Click to right driving directions right then and there, and not coming to your website. So you can either accept that reality or ignore that reality. Obviously ignoring 75% of your conversions. We’re not talking about visibility or talking about conversions. It is a mistake. And if they’re gonna give you the conversions, particularly if they’re gonna give ’em to you for free, I think you need to maximize it to do that to you need to understand that this is where you’re going to be seen the most. Yeah. And not only do you have to optimize your listing, you have to optimize every image and everything you do there. So that when you are compared to these other places, you look both, you look visually better and reputationally better so that people choose you.

John Jantsch (07:55): Would you say, so let’s say a typical blog post. Would you say that the visual element of that blog post is now sending a signal? That’s going to be a ranking signal to search engines, even if it’s just vaguely about what the post is about, or are you saying that we should be picking a, uh, images that we can optimize in that would clearly like enhance, you know, the search component, you know, rather than just the visual component.

Mike Blumenthal (08:23): So the latter, it’s not clear in organic that images are ranking factors, but Google understands the content of images and it will increase your clickthroughs. If Google includes an image in your organic results. So you get direct benefit from it. In the local, we have hard concrete evidence of conversion increases anywhere from 15 to 90% upticks in conversions. And there’s some research out of patient pop, where they saw a 15% increase by switching both their Google local and their website from stock images to professional images, they actually saw about a 15% improvement in appointments at the participating practices. So big numbers of improvement, and it comes from sort of everything. It’s not just the blog post, it’s the blog post plus the website plus local, I think. Yeah. So I don’t think you can focus on any one of those, but if you’re going to, if your search result has images and your competitors doesn’t have images, then you’re gonna get more clicks regardless.

John Jantsch (09:34): Yeah. And I think that’s a great point because I think we get so obsessed with, you know, ranking , but that, that, you know, if there were five, five competitors on page one, and just, as you said, maybe I’m in the three position, but I have an image that’s very attractive. You know, I’m gonna, not only am I going to get more clickthroughs, I’m probably going to improve my, my search results. Aren’t

Mike Blumenthal (09:56): I time and you’re gonna improve your conversions, which

John Jantsch (09:58): Yeah. Which is ultimately what

Mike Blumenthal (09:59): We’re after what it’s all about. Right. I mean, interesting research out of Airbnb 2017, where they deconstructed photographs and under understand the elements of them and then analyzed when they followed these sort of rules of photography with professional photographer, photographs that followed the rule of thirds and good lighting and balanced imagery, they saw rental units increase sales on average by $2,800 annually. We we’re talking big bottom line numbers from having better images, nothing else changed. The images changed and dollar values of the listing went up.

John Jantsch (10:39): Yeah. I actually saw, at some point they were actually offering photographers, you know, local photographers to go out and shoot your place for, because they knew how much value that had cuz people were doing a really, you know, you’d see some really bad photos. And so yeah. Makes a ton of sense.

John Jantsch (10:53): And now let’s hear from a sponsor, you know, everybody’s online today, but here’s the question. Are they finding your website? You can grab the online spotlight and your customer’s attention with SEMrush from content and SEO to ads and social media. SEMrush is your one stop shop for online marketing build, manage and measure campaigns across all channels faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level, to get seen, get SEMRush, visit SEMrush.com that’s S E M rush.com/go.

John Jantsch (11:31): And you could try it for seven days for free. Is there a relationship between image search or visual search and voice and text?

Mike Blumenthal (11:39): Well, the underlying technology of all of them are entities, real world things that Google is building graphs around people, places, item that Google is understanding more about them and the relationships between them. So at the highest level, they understand your brand and then they understand what your business does and they understand the products. Those are all entities and all searches becoming entities search, as opposed to it used to be keyword driven now. Yeah, it’s sort of conceptually driven by the knowledge graph. And this is true. Whether it’s text search or visual search or audio search, all the underlying technology in all of them is the knowledge graph with the interlinking between the various elements. So they’re all function largely the same, but Google just delivers ’em in a different format.

John Jantsch (12:36): This is a really big question that you maybe can zero in on because you could go all over. You know, what’s the role of AI in all of this.

Mike Blumenthal (12:43): So it’s critical. Google has, I don’t, if you go, if you remember back to Google, plus let me give you some history here. Sure. Google introduced Google photos as part of Google plus, and it was a very groundbreaking product that when Google plus was going down, Google photos was spun off into its own thing. And I think it was 2050 when it first came out, I was using it. And it was clear at the time that they were understanding everything in the images with no labeling. Yeah. And they understood location and all these other things about it. Now, since that time they’ve gotten 4 trillion images uploaded. They get 28 billion a week uploaded. They have scraped almost every image on the internet. They’ve gotten businesses to upload every image products about the place. So Google has trillions and trillions of images to which they’ve used to train large, these large assets to train their understanding.

Mike Blumenthal (13:42): And they, they have created one of the best understandings of images. Now AI still has its limits and certainly AI can be stupid sometimes in a non-human way and make mistakes. So in that sense, it’s really important that when you take a photograph these days, that it appeals to a human, but that it is also understandable by the AI in the machine. You’ve gotta test it. You’ve gotta know that the picture of the dentist, Google, not only does the consumer think it looks good about the dentist, but that Google as a machine understands it as well.

John Jantsch (14:21): So, so that leads me to the point. You know, we we’ve, a lot of people have been using AI to now test what’s the best subject line now that I should send. Right. So are you suggesting that somebody could take three pictures that they are thinking about using for something and use a tool that would say this is actually the best picture from a Google understanding or from a optimization standpoint?

Mike Blumenthal (14:43): Yes, I am saying that the tool you wanna use is Google’s cloud vision AI. It was used to be free now, put it behind a paywall, but the company you mentioned at the beginning, they’ve actually just recently switched their website to air cam.ai. Although the other one redirects has re has recreated Google’s tool on their website. So if you go there, air camm.ai forward size, Google dash vision, I think, but you’ll find it on the main page. Click on that, drop the image three images in and see what Google understands image ads Z. And if it’s a great tiebreaker, because if Google understands one better than the other, in fact, this happened in a real shoot. We were in a dentist office and we took a couple pictures of the dentist with their actually had their secretary in the chair. But, and one Google thought was about medical equipment because of the hand with the medical glove was in front of the, just sort of low in the image and Google mistook that as the intent of the image, whereas the one where the hand was hidden, Google saw it as a dental image, even though to human, both looked equally good.

John Jantsch (15:51): And the data from, yes. Okay. So the data from that exercise or that search would, how else would you use that? Would you put that as the alt tag? Would you use that somehow else?

Mike Blumenthal (16:02): It, I mean, alt tags are value still valuable, but the reason has returned to their original reason, which is to help people who have foresight understand the content of an image. Correct? Yeah. Google, I think gave up on all tags long ago, they realized that most businesses aren’t going to use them. I was trying to understand what, why Google was including images in the mobile search results. So I picked 50 search results that had images went and looked at the images on the website. And literally only one of them had an all tag and Google had still grabbed all these images and put it into the search results. Now I think the Alag helped Google confirm. I don’t, but they’re not using it as a primary thing. And more importantly, it helps your user understand image, right? So I think all tags are still important. Just not to inform Google,

John Jantsch (16:52): Tell me where augmented reality is with images. So I don’t know how long ago, 10 years ago, do you remember Yelp came out with that Parascope thing? I think it was called, right. And you could point your phone, the app down a street and it would augment what you were looking at. Where is that in this conversation or does it even have a place anymore?

Mike Blumenthal (17:13): Well, it does have a, well, it doesn’t have a place today from small business marketing for the most part. Now there is an aspect of visual search. Visual search has a very specific meaning. What we’ve been talking about up to this type time is visual search. In other words, search results, search results that are massively filled with images, but where people still input and text visual search as a technical term, refer to somebody, dropping an image into the search and searching on the image that’s visual search. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So Google lens has now implemented a combined search where you can take a picture of an object, add a text Modi, and then it will return results to so that’s visual search. Now the role of AI AR in this has been very slow to developed because the tools to see the AR have been slow to develop the most sophisticated tools right now are from Niantic and apple.

Mike Blumenthal (18:17): Those are the two leaders and apple has been very slow and methodical in building underlying technology into the phones and, but has been much slower at releasing a device that focuses on it. But you’re starting to see it come up in very like Amazon uses it to allow you to position furniture in your room. Oh, right, right. Those types of things where you’re seeing objects placed over real world. Yeah. And Apple’s announcement around iOS, sixteen’s gonna dramatically accelerate that. So right now it’s not quite ready for a small business to worry about it from a marketing point of view. Um, but I think there, there will be use cases. Now video, on the other hand, short video, particularly 30 seconds and shorter Google is under parsing. Those the same way they parse images, understanding all the elements in the video, the break points, the topics, what people are talking about. They’re transcribing them in real time. I think video is probably on the cusp of breakthrough has broken through in TikTok, but I think it will break through on Google very shortly. I think 30, 32nd and shorter videos have a huge role in small business marketing. And I think it’s eminently doable with the technology that’s available. And I think Google will reward it much the same way. It’s rewarding images with increased conversions, increased visibility, more phone calls,

John Jantsch (19:50): And those videos need to be on YouTube or in natively embedded on your site is fine.

Mike Blumenthal (19:57): I, you know, I don’t know where you’re gonna get the best conversion, but I would do your site. Let’s Google my business. Plus YouTube. I would do ’em all three places. And I probably would do ’em. I’d do ’em on YouTube. Use the YouTube to embed it on your site and then upload it to Google my business as well. And I think I would give you the maximum

John Jantsch (20:18): Just to Google my business, or I guess we need to say Google business profile. We

Mike Blumenthal (20:22): Do need to

John Jantsch (20:23): Say business Google

Mike Blumenthal (20:24): Business profile,

John Jantsch (20:25): Which Google business pro I had actually somebody asked me if I could help optimize their Google places page. So I was like, wow, great. That really hasn’t been updated for a while. Has it? So, so you’re saying though that to put those videos in posts on, on your Google business

Mike Blumenthal (20:38): Profile, into posts and into your photo area, both

John Jantsch (20:42): Oh into the photo

Mike Blumenthal (20:43): And Google will parse them. I was listening to a Google webinar for product experts. I’m, what’s called the Google product expert where I volunteered that was business with Google. And they really liked what they called selfies were pictures of the products in your business, on the shelf where Google and the consumer could get a really solid idea of what the place looked like and the range of products you were offering. So I think selfies are, if they’ve created a term for it. Yeah. They’re clearly focused on it. And I think it’s the kind of photograph you want.

John Jantsch (21:17): Yeah. Interesting. So in a lot of ways, one of the biggest takeaways for the local business or for the small business is just, you know, do a better job with your images that you’re using. And now there’s some tools that can tell you if you are doing a good job with

Mike Blumenthal (21:32): Well, right. I think you need to think about it semantically. In other words, you need to think about the range of services you offer or the range of products you offer. And you want multiple high quality images in each of those categories that you can drip to Google over time that Google understands as those categories. Yeah. So think about your product and services broadly, categorize them, take multiple images in each check those images against Google’s AI. And then we have found that dripping them into GMB into Google business profile, Google B P G B P, dripping them a couple a month is gonna give you the maximum increase in G B P visibility. For whatever reason, we don’t know quite how Google doing this, but it dramatically increases conversions if you do it that way.

John Jantsch (22:32): Awesome. Well, Mike, it is always great to catch up with you. You are always on the cutting edge of the stuff and testing it out and, you know, seeing real world results. So I love getting your insight on things. You wanna tell people where they might connect with you if they so desire.

Mike Blumenthal (22:48): Sure. So my primary place of writing right now is near media.cl. If you subscribe there, which is you just hit the subscribe button or near media Dosio slash subscribe, we will actually give you a ebook on imagery in Google local to that will summarize all of these things for you, put ’em in a more concrete form and help develop a plan for you. So, and on Twitter and Blumenthal, and to have opening Mentha, and I have open email. These, I always have open email, feel free to email me Mblumenthal@nearmedia.co. I answer every email. That’s

John Jantsch (23:24): Awesome. And I can attest to, at least you answer mine.

Mike Blumenthal (23:27): Well, I didn’t answer the last two you sent me, but that’s cuz I was already setting up my gear.

John Jantsch (23:32): Awesome. Well, my great catching up with you and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days, soon out there on the road.

Mike Blumenthal (23:37): All right. Sounds good. Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it.

John Jantsch (23:42): Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment dot co not .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d. Love to chat with you about the results that you get.

This Duct Tape Marketing Podcast episode is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and SEMRush.

 

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals seeking the best education and inspiration to grow a business.

 

Everybody’s online, but are they finding your website? Grab the online spotlight and your customers’ attention with Semrush. From Content and SEO to ads and social media, Semrush is your one-stop shop for online marketing. Build, manage, and measure campaigns —across all channels — faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Get seen. Get Semrush. Visit semrush.com/go to try it free for 7 days.

 

A Guide To The Future Of Virtual Meetings And Events

A Guide To The Future Of Virtual Meetings And Events written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Mark Kilens

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Mark Kilens. Mark is the CMO of Airmeet, a leading virtual and hybrid event platform. He oversees Airmeet’s global marketing team responsible for brand, demand, lifecycle, and product marketing.

Key Takeaway:

Although virtual events and meetings were a product of the pandemic, it’s safe to say they are here to stay for the foreseeable future even as we inch towards the return to normalcy. In this episode, I talk with CMO of Airmeet, Mark Kilens, about the state of virtual meetings and events today, what innovation is necessary to drive more engagement, and where the future of these kinds of virtual connections are headed.

Questions I ask Mark Kilens:

  • [1:10] What is Airmeet?
  • [2:07] How would you describe the status of the virtual meeting today?
  • [3:29] How do you think augmented reality will play into virtual events?
  • [4:33] A lot of people I talk to now are sick of Zoom, TV, sick of these kinds of virtual meets that are going on –is that a function of the technology itself or is it a function of how people are using it?
  • [7:00] Many people make the mistake of taking events and putting them online versus changing the way they present to virtual audiences — would you say there’s a difference in how you should present?
  • [8:03] Is Airmeet doing something to address that problem?
  • [10:28] What are some best practices and tips for getting engagement during virtual events?
  • [12:48] Are these practices that we should be doing in meetings?
  • [14:23] Is there a sweet spot for how many people should be in attendance for a virtual event?
  • [18:40] What do you think is the future of the big events you mentioned?
  • [19:19] Do you think we are going to be in this hybrid land for the rest of the foreseeable future?
  • [21:43] Where can people connect with you?

More About Mark Kilens:

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This Duct Tape Marketing Podcast episode is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and SEMRush.

 

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals seeking the best education and inspiration to grow a business.

 

Everybody’s online, but are they finding your website? Grab the online spotlight and your customers’ attention with Semrush. From Content and SEO to ads and social media, Semrush is your one-stop shop for online marketing. Build, manage, and measure campaigns —across all channels — faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Get seen. Get Semrush. Visit semrush.com/go to try it free for 7 days.

 

Top 10 Insights & Advice For Women Just Starting Out

Top 10 Insights & Advice For Women Just Starting Out written by Sara Nay read more at Duct Tape Marketing

About the show:

The Agency Spark Podcast, hosted by Sara Nay, is a collection of short-form interviews from thought leaders in the marketing consultancy and agency space. Each episode focuses on a single topic with actionable insights you can apply today. Check out the new Spark Lab Consulting website here!

About this episode:

In this episode of the Agency Spark Podcast, Sara talks with Corina Ludwig on top 10 insights & advice for women just starting out.

Corina Ludwig is an accomplished Senior Executive, Advisor, and Board Member with more than 20 years of success in SaaS, marketing, and advertising industries. Her broad areas of expertise include graphic design, corporate branding, brand development, HR, and leadership.

Corina holds a leadership position as the President of FunctionFox Systems where she is responsible for the corporate vision and strategy. Prior to her roles at FunctionFox Systems, Corina additionally led Human Resources for Suburbia Studios and the Traffic Manager for Ogilvy & Mather.

Corina obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Graphic Design from Emily Carr University of Art & Design. She is Vice Chair of the board of Directors for Island Women in Science and Technology and Board Director for VIATEC – Vancouver Island Advanced Technology Center.

In her free time she spends time with her husband and three great danes and runs a successful culinary business.

More from Corina Ludwig:

 

This episode of the Agency Spark Podcast is brought to you by Termageddon, a Privacy Policy Generator. Any website collecting as little as an email address on a contact form should not only have a Privacy Policy but also have a strategy to keep it up to date when the laws change. Click here to learn more about how Termageddon can help protect your business and get 30% off your first year payment by using code DUCTTAPE at checkout.

Weekend Favs July 16

Weekend Favs July 16 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but I encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

  • Rocket Reach – No more LinkedIn stalking, Google scouring, or just plain guessing when trying to source lead emails. Rocket Reach helps you connect directly with the right decision-makers at almost any company.
  • Burb – The project management tool for communities and course creators. With Burb you can see all of your communities in one place, and analyze, engage and track your success.
  • Hopps – Has experienced and vetted experts ready for you to hire. You just tell the folks at Hopps what work you need to get done and they find you the perfect match.

These are my weekend favs; I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

If you want to check out more Weekend Favs you can find them here.

Automating Your Webinars The Engaging And Delightful Way

Automating Your Webinars The Engaging And Delightful Way written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Melissa Kwan

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Melissa Kwan. Melissa is the CEO and Co-founder of Webinar. She has spent twelve years in startups and built three successful companies without venture capital backing. Her previous startup, a real estate tech company, was acquired in 2019. As a revenue-driven founder specializing in sales and business development, Melissa has learned how to build companies with very few resources — by automating what she could, outsourcing wherever possible, and inspiring talented people to join her team with shared focus and enthusiasm.

Key Takeaway:

Webinars in the various formats they exist in have been around for years. The rise of the on-demand webinar has happened over the last ten years. Many of the webinar platforms aren’t created with the customer in mind first. Melissa Kwan set out to solve a problem in the market she was facing herself. eWebinar was created to deliver a professional, authentic experience that helps engage and delight viewers. In this episode, I talk with Melissa about her entrepreneurial journey and the problems that eWebinar set out to solve.

Questions I ask Melissa Kwan:

  • [1:38] How has your entrepreneurial journey led you here?
  • [2:32] What is Webinar?
  • [3:35] How is this platform different from the other options out there?
  • [6:11] Did you make a decision in the very beginning that you wanted to steer clear of being scammy?
  • [16:42] Are you an engineer or programmer yourself?
  • [17:06] What’s been the hardest part from a tech perspective?
  • [18:37] What’s your most requested new feature?
  • [19:47] What’s the vision for the company three years from now?
  • [22:06] Where can more people learn about eWebinar and connect with you?

More About Melissa Kwan:

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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by business made simple hosted by Donald Miller and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network business made simple, takes the mystery out of growing your business. A long time, listeners will know that Donald Miller’s been on this show at least a couple times. There’s a recent episode. I wanna point out how to make money with your current products, man, such an important lesson about leveraging what you’ve already done to get more from it. Listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:45): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Melissa Kwan. She is the co-founder and CEO of E webinar. She’s also spent 12 years in startups and built three successful companies without venture capital backing her previous startup a real estate tech company was acquired in 2019 as a revenue driven founder, specializing in sales and business development. She has learned how to build companies with very few resources, something a lot of folks listening can appreciate by automating what she could outsourcing whenever possible and inspiring talented people to join her team with shared focus and enthusiasm. So Melissa, welcome to the show.

Melissa Kwan (01:29): Thanks John, for having me.

John Jantsch (01:31): So I feel like I gave a little taste of it there, but I feel like we should just have you kind of say here’s been my entrepreneur journey. We’re gonna talk about your most current undertaking, but where have you been to get you to here?

Melissa Kwan (01:45): yeah. Great question. So I spent over 12 years in, in startups. UL runs my third company. My first two was in real estate tech. The last job that I quit was at SAP and then previous to that was in real estate. So I kind of just like put the two and two together and created software for real estate. First company was a product company towards agency and then the second company was a SAS product. It was like an open house sign in software. So having done so many live webinars, demos, onboarding trainings for a consistent five years, sometimes five back to back for my previous company, I had just dreamt of a product, a magical product that would do my job for me. Yeah. While I go and have fun. And that became E webinar after that company was sold in 2019.

John Jantsch (02:32): So, so let’s, I guess let’s ask the, you know, what is E webinar? Just give us the like really quick, you know, view of that so we can kind of break it down then a little from there.

Melissa Kwan (02:41): Yeah. So E webinar, the concept is simple. We save people from doing repetitive, boring webinars over and over again. So you can imagine sales, demos, pitches, onboarding, training, product updates, customer interviews, you know, things like that. Right? So you might be running them on zoom right now, or you might not be doing them because you don’t have a person to run them. We turn any video into an interactive webinar that you could set on a recurring schedule or join on demand. So people can consume that content whenever they want.

John Jantsch (03:09): Yeah. So webinars have certainly been around for, you know, ages, internet ages, I guess, you know, 15, 20 years peop marketers have been using them, certainly live, but recently eight, 10 years ago, it seems like this platform of going and signing up and sort of watching a live , but it’s recorded. You know, that, that technology, there are half a dozen, at least you probably know ’em all, you know, people that are doing that. What’s when people say, oh, how is this different than blah, blah, blah.

Melissa Kwan (03:40): Yeah. I mean, so first of all, we don’t do any live webinars. Yeah. Right. We don’t, there is no live audio. There’s no live video. Like enough people are solving this. Yeah. Like down to like Facebook live Instagram live, like everyone in the world is trying to solve this and it really solving it and doing a great job. So what we wanted to solve was the next phase of that. How do you scale a live webinar or a presentation that, you know, works for you? Yeah. Like if you’re doing, you know, a lead gen kinda customer interview type webinar, once a quarter, how, what kind of impact would that have on your business if you made that available every single day. So that’s really, that’s the space that we’re focusing on. And if you, if anyone that’s listening to this right now thinks to themselves, Hey, I’ve seen those before.

Melissa Kwan (04:25): Right. But it’s a little bit scammy. You’re right. And that’s why we exist. I was also in my previous life looking for something that would do this particular thing and everything I found was almost like designed to deceive consumers, to trick them into buying something or create false scarcity, which isn’t what sales and marketing is about. It’s not what branding is about. Right? It’s about delivering a beautiful professional, authentic experience that reflects your brand, but also an experience that allows your customer, your prospect, your attendee, to connect with you. It’s not a video on YouTube. A webinar is where you can go and engage and ask questions and get a response back. So what E webinar does differently is we made the investment to build an asynchronous chat system. Just like your Intercom, your Zend desk, any chat bubble that pops up on a website. When people ask you questions through chat, you can, if you’re there hop into respond live, but if you’re not there, it’s totally fine. Cuz when you respond later, they still get your response on email. And I would say no other automated webinar company had actually made that investment to build up that system.

John Jantsch (05:33): Yeah. I mean, there, there’s certainly a place for on demand because you know, you and I are talking it’s 10 o’clock at night for you when you’re talking. It’s uh, dunno what time it is here. Two o’clock for me. I mean, so the, there is a, you know, there is a need in the customer journey to allow people to get the information they want when they want it. So I think the case for having those makes a lot of sense, but the point that you also made is that so many of ’em are trying to fake their live and that there’s pre-canned chat and it says there’s 27 people on right now. and I think everybody realizes that’s all just a scam, but I think we put up with it because it’s like, well, everybody does it. So how did you take on that idea? Or did you just make a decision in the very beginning? We’re not going to be, you know, spammy or scammy like that.

Melissa Kwan (06:22): The thing is John, like the last thing I would want is to build a business that facilitates a behavior. Yeah. That’s the bottom line. Yeah. So very early on, we looked at all these players and we thought, okay, like there’s a reason why they have that because people ask for it, the customers ask for it. Yeah. But what I care about and what gives my business longevity is if your customer likes you, not, if you like me. Right. So in a sense, we’re building for the, a attendee, like that’s the first experience we’re building for. And it’s almost like kind of what Steve jobs does, right? He’s like, well, you can’t have this. It has to look like this. Even if you ask for this is the better experience you have to update your OS. And I think like when you’re specing a business or a product like this, you have to make those decisions to think what is the audience you wanna attract?

Melissa Kwan (07:09): Because the market’s big enough. Yeah. So we wanted to deliver a product with integrity first, which means we had to constantly not put in features and not build features that create that kind of fake scarcity. Right. So we have no simulated chat, no fake sales notifications, no fake counter. Everything is real. You can put in sales notification, but it’s based on your conversion pixel, there is a counter, but you could choose live or accumulative, but it’s real. Like everything’s real. And our chat is one on one between the attendee and the moderator, like none of that fake stuff. Right. So we just made a decision early on to say like, this is just not a business that like, we wanna track those kind of people. And we said like, we came to terms with the fact that it would take us longer to get off the ground. Cause we couldn’t, we wouldn’t be able to win people that already on the other platforms, but that’s okay. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:59): Well I, let me push back there a little bit because I was on the other platform and I saw this as a, uh, you know, I was on those platforms because I wanted on demand and I just put up with the other stuff. Right? Yeah. But what I want to have with my customers is a long term relationship. Not a short time, I sold you something, uh, relationship. And I think that’s maybe why people put up with those is because they do work in a certain way, but not for the long term. And I think that what you’ve built is for somebody, in my opinion, is for somebody who views their relationship with their customers as a long term relationship, as opposed to I sold you something.

Melissa Kwan (08:38): Well, I would say because we delivered the product in this way. Yeah. Like it is, we mimicked our branding and how we want people to feel to MailChimp. Yeah. Yeah. Right. We wanna be fun. We wanna be a startup, but we wanna be established. Yeah. Right. We want to feel like this is a company they can trust. And that goes down to, you know, the product and integrity. Right. And the features that you have. So I would say like before this year, maybe last year, cuz we, the product’s been line for two years, you would not see companies like Zillow on automated webinars yeah. Or fresh works or catalyst. Right. Like none of those like real established companies would be on there. The people that have been leveraging, those are like a lot of solo entrepreneurs, a of coaches, a lot of like internet cash marketers, but like real companies have never automated what their webinars for this reason. Like they might have a gated landing page or they might have a video with CR YouTube, but that’s not a webinar experience.

John Jantsch (09:36): Yeah. And now let’s hear from a sponsor, you know, everybody’s online today, but here’s the question. Are they finding your website? You can grab the online spotlight and your customer’s attention with some rush from content and SEO to ads and social media SEMrush is your one stop shop for online marketing build, manage and measure campaigns across all channels faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level, to get seen, get SEMrush, visit SEMrush.com that’s SEM rush.com/go. And you could try it for seven days for free.

John Jantsch (10:17): I, I tell you that one of the features that, that I really love is because one of the things we really want is somebody not just sitting there mindlessly watching, or maybe like having your webinar in a different, you know, different screen while they’re working. And they’re just listening to it is the amount of engagement.

John Jantsch (10:32): One of the things that’s very built in is you have a lot of built in features and templates for getting people engaged, for finding out who they are for creating, you know, a reason for them to say more about the who they are and what they want and what they’re trying to accomplish. And I think that maybe some of the other platforms have that, but I think you’ve really cracked that part. And to me, not only getting rid of the stuff we’ve been calling kind of scammy, I think that to me is probably your best feature.

Melissa Kwan (11:00): Yeah. So we call them interactions, right? Yeah. Um, and I was, when I was coming out with this product, I was also thinking like, okay, let’s face it. Webinars are boring. Yeah. Right. It depends on like how fun it is and how engaging it is. A lot of times if depends on the speaker. Sure. And let’s face it like topic obviously. Yeah. And not, everyone’s a great speaker. And then during live webinar, there’s lots of interruptions. People ask questions, there’s housekeeping. Maybe your connection is bad. Like none of that happens on an automated webinar cause it’s based on a video. But I was thinking like, what is it that you could deliver then put out there that can get your, a attendee to stay till the end so they can take that action. Yeah. If they don’t stay till the end, even if you deliver your CTA, they’re never gonna see it.

Melissa Kwan (11:42): So we, we have these thing called interactions, which are like programmable polls, questions, resources, sales, alerts, you know, things that allow the, a attendee to participate right. In the experience with you. So it’s not like I come in and you’re talking at me for 45 minutes and I’m playing on my phone and you’re losing me to Instagram. Like when you ask me a question, something pops up and I’m actually able to engage with it. Maybe I can see the results and things like that. But on the host side, we actually gather all that data and we deliver it to you in a beautiful, actionable and understandable report. So you can actually see like where are people hitting a thumbs up? Because within any webinar you can hit a thumbs up. It’s more of a consumer experience. Where are people dropping off? Are they answering this question?

Melissa Kwan (12:26): So you can imagine in the past six months I’ve ran my demo. I don’t do live demos. It’s all in new webinar. Of course. All right. I ran it 1500 times. And my first question is, how did you hear about us? Yeah. And about 60 PE like 60% of people will answer that question. So from a marketing perspective, that is such valuable information. Yeah. And the more I run it, the better data I’m getting to, whether it’s helping my business or helping me make a better presentation. Next time, all of that is, is very useful.

John Jantsch (12:55): And I can say, this is not exactly scientific, but we have run this same webinar for many years. And you know, we’re always tweaking a little bit. I will say that our completion rate has significantly increased since moving to ewe R now I will give one caveat because of all the interaction we’ve actually changed how we’re presenting this information BA you know, because we’re, we feel like we have all these engagement tools now. that? Yeah. So, so it’s changed a little bit about how we’ve presented the information, but I can tell you that, you know, 35 ish percent higher rate of completion than using another platform.

Melissa Kwan (13:35): I mean, we have a customer that took the exact same video. Yeah. And put it into E webinar and their engagement and completion rate went up by 50%. Like they did nothing at all. So that’s why, like, we, we encourage people to just give it a try. I think that one of the biggest pushback we have is like, well, if it’s a video, then why don’t I just use YouTube? Yeah. Yeah. And it’s just the mindset of it, isn’t it? Yeah. Like, yeah, you get a registration page, you choose it time. There’s reminders, there’s follow ups. And then it starts at a certain time. Or you can watch it on demand. Like, I, I know earlier you said like there’s a place for, on demand for webinars particularly, but like, it’s so interesting how in our everyday lives, like as consumers we expect on demand video content.

Melissa Kwan (14:18): Yeah. Like when was the last time you didn’t watch something on apple TV or Netflix or Amazon, like I expect to go there and press play and watch it at my own time. However, for some reason, for B2B content, you have to come to my show right next Tuesday at 11, my time zone. So there’s a bit of a disconnect, right. So I think it’s not only like there’s a place for on demand and B2B content. I think it’s already here. And the people that understand that will be able to use that as a differentiator in their business.

John Jantsch (14:50): Yeah. That’s such a great point. I think again, it’s one of those things where we just get used to it. It’s like, well, that’s the way we get to, you know, consume this content. But a lot of behaviors, especially buying behaviors and things really do get influenced by the way that we behave every day in life. And just your example of the streaming, you know, programming, I mean like TV guide, what’s that right? I mean, I just go and I, yeah. You know, I watch the program when I feel like watching it. And I think that kind of behavior or habit that gets developed really should be something that we’re looking at and saying, that’s how everybody wants to shop now. Or that’s how everybody wants to get their content. Now.

Melissa Kwan (15:28): I mean, another great example is like texting, like who calls now? Like maybe your family member, you’re like, Hey, I’m outside or I’m downstairs. Or, you know, if you’re in your car, like maybe you’ll call on a headphone. And we have some people that are looking at E webinar. Maybe they’re moving from zoom, cuz they’re like just absolutely exhausted from running these live webinars and they just have to scale. But one of the questions they have for us is, well, if you don’t, if I can’t answer people right away or using my voice, are they gonna be mad at me? Like, does that mean worse? Does that mean worse customer service? Because I’m used to doing this live thing and I’m used to making people feel, feel special by calling out their name or answering the question. But my response is always just give it a try because I think your customers, like you’d be surprised at how your customers would prefer tech space and how much more manageable all that Q and a is. If it is text space

John Jantsch (16:28): To, to totally agree. And just going back to E webinar, another thing that I think people will enjoy, you talked about trying to make it fun. I think the interface itself is actually, um, easier to set up and easier to, to operate, uh, and get a webinar going than a lot of the other platforms as well. So you’ve think you’ve conquered a number of the things that competitors aren’t doing. I do wanna talk a little bit about just the business of building this as well. You know, from a text import first, I should have asked you in the beginning, are you an engineer or programmer yourself or

Melissa Kwan (16:57): No, I wish I, I wish, yeah. I wish I was an engineer cuz otherwise it would be feature complete by now. so nothing would be ever wrong with it.

John Jantsch (17:06): So, so what’s been the hardest part from a tech sample.

Melissa Kwan (17:10): Oh my gosh. Like I, it is a constant battle every day, but what is the hardest? I would say the one thing, I mean, of course the first thing is just scaling. Cuz as you build a business as like, you know, people start having a thousand people in a webinar. Yeah, yeah. Or you have two of those and now there’s 2000 people and everyone’s sending a chat. Right. And then, but you can’t test for that scenario until you get there. right. So the first six months was like acquiring these customers, but then what do you do? Yeah. What do you do when everyone has it on Wednesday or everyone has it on Tuesday. Right? So we’ve kind of solved that. But believe it or not, one of the most difficult things to solve is just the flexibility, like offering complete flexibility and scheduling and also the ability to track all of those things in a report, right?

Melissa Kwan (18:04): Like all the chat and all the interactivity, like we’ve worked that kind of stuff out. But right now, give, give you an example. People are asking for the ability to pause. So say I’m running a workshop. I wanna say, okay, I’m gonna let you pause for five minutes. You can finish this worksheet and then you can press play or it’s gonna start on its own. I still don’t understand this, but apparently it messes with the timeline of the video and then it messes with all the analytics. Yeah. so it’s just little things like that, that like me and you may never think about that. We’re very happy that they’re engineers for.

John Jantsch (18:36): So, so I was gonna ask you what your most requested feature is. New feature is, and that maybe you just revealed it.

Melissa Kwan (18:44): We have an ongoing wishlist of features, but definitely what you’re gonna see next is a full facelift of our attendee experience. So what we have right now is I think it’s two, three times better than what’s out there. But what you’re about to see is something that will be 10 times, 20 times better than what’s out there because we wanna really deliver an experience that’s less businessy, like less zoom and way more consumers. So what we’re taking inspiration from is not the webinar solutions that are out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re taking inspiration from like Twitch or gaming companies or you know, apple TV, like those kind of things and see like how people actually wanna consume interactive video because this is what it is, right. Call it in a webinar automation software, but it is interactive video. So how do people wanna engage and consume that content and feel like, you know, they learn something and that and feel delighted. Right. I think delighted is the word.

John Jantsch (19:47): So are you one of those people that I could say, you know, what’s the vision for this company three years from now? Or are you really still trying to, you know, wrestle with the momentum of the moment?

Melissa Kwan (19:58): The only thing I care about right now is getting to profitability. so as a business owner, you probably understand that. Yeah, absolutely. So I would love to not be, you know, burning money, but I just want, I wanna see maybe not even the three years, like, like next year, I really wanna see people’s mind shift away from like Mo moving away from doing repetitive live webinars and just understanding that there’s a better way. Yeah. Cause all it takes is a flip, right. Cause right now this is what, you know, you’ve been doing it for 10 years. Webinars is have actually been around for 20 years. Yeah. But there is a new way of doing things that is not just better for you. Right. Freeing up your time. So you can, you know, spend more with your friends and family, but it’s actually better for your customer. Yeah. To have access to that information when they can consume it. Like the average attendance rate for all of our customers is 65%. Yeah. And that is outrageous. Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:00): Well, and I think I love about it and I think people need to, you know, customer journey, we can design the most perfect customer journey. People are gonna go through ’em the way that they’re gonna go through them. And I think that’s what, you know, a lot of times, if they can go through three or four stages of the customer journey one night, because that’s what they were really , you know, amped up about. I think that, I think we, as marketers have to realize that we just have to offer that flexibility.

Melissa Kwan (21:24): Um, yeah. I mean, I’ll leave you with one stat that I love from trust radius. 87% of buyers prefer to do their own research sure. Through their buying journey. Yeah. And 57% already make a purchase without talking to a salesperson. Yeah. Yeah. So you can actually make transparency and access to content your differentiator. If your competitor is gating everything, making people book a call, not making their webinars on demand and making it just difficult for people to get the information they need to make a decision, then they’re gonna go somewhere else.

John Jantsch (22:02): Absolutely. Melissa advi tell us where people can find out more about the product and connect with you.

Melissa Kwan (22:11): Yeah. If you wanna connect with me, LinkedIn is best. So my name is Melissa K w a N. And check out E webinar. If you’re curious how it works, there is, uh, an on-demand demo of course, delivered through E webinar in a very meta way. And it’s exactly as it sounds, ewe.com.

John Jantsch (22:25): Awesome. Well, Melissa, it was great. You know, I’m a fan. I, you know, love the product itself and answered something we were looking for. So we were happy to find it. And hopefully we’ll appreciate you stopping by the, take some time on the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we’ll run into you out there on the road one of these days.

Melissa Kwan (22:42): Thanks so much, John.

John Jantsch (22:43): Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessmentdotco.co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

This Duct Tape Marketing Podcast episode is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and SEMRush.

 

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals seeking the best education and inspiration to grow a business.

 

Everybody’s online, but are they finding your website? Grab the online spotlight and your customers’ attention with Semrush. From Content and SEO to ads and social media, Semrush is your one-stop shop for online marketing. Build, manage, and measure campaigns —across all channels — faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Get seen. Get Semrush. Visit semrush.com/go to try it free for 7 days.