Repurposing Content and Finding Your Tribe

Jesse and Rich talk with Scott Carson and Stephanie Goodman about leveraging online tools and digital marketing to bring them to the top of their field. We walk through a specific example with unique tips.

Show Notes

• WeCloseNotes.com
• Canva.com
• LiveLeap.com
• Repurpose.io
• restream.io
• Buffer.com

Transcript

Jesse: Richie, a podcast day!

Richard: It’s that day, it’s not Friday this time.

Jesse: No, we did this one on Thursday, mixed it up.

Richard: Triple dipping.

Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. It’s conference week, so everything got a little thrown off on the schedule. For people who are listening to the podcast in order, which of course everybody is just dying to download on Fridays, you heard from last week that there were some conferences coming up and that’s where we’re at this week.

Richard: Yeah, it’s great, we just got back from Traffic & Conversion and ran into a friend that actually had just seen the day prior or two days prior at New Media Summit, a fellow podcaster. I’m definitely looking forward to this even though you might wonder at first why we brought on this particular niche that he specializes in, you’ll get as soon as you get to know him and his personality and you hear the knowledge bombs he drops exactly why we brought him on. It’s why you want to go to these conferences. You can learn from people that are doing things, thinking outside the box, doing things in ways that when you’re just sitting in your office trying to do your thing, you kind of get stuck in a track and just doing the same thing over and over and really forward to this one.

Jesse: I think that same idea. I read and listen to a whole bunch of e-commerce podcasts and digital market podcasts but sometimes I get stuck in my little niche as well. That’s why you gotta get out there. We’re encouraging people to get out there and talk to people.

Richard: So today we have on the show, WeCloseNotes which is actually Scott Carson and Stephanie Goodman. Welcome.

Scott: What’s up? (laughing) We’re excited to be here, guys, thanks for having us.

Richard: Yeah. So how was your experience at T&C by the way?

Scott: Exhausting. It’s the best way you would say, right, Steph?

Stephanie: Pretty much.

Scott: Because we were at NUMMI summit for days hanging out with everybody there, it was great, and then we flew across country to San Diego here which is our second home basically, and three amazing days just nuggets after nuggets, knowledge bombs, knowledge bombs at Traffic & Conversion. So just great.

Richard: Yeah. It was awesome, we got to meet at a party with another mutual friend Matt and Joe from the Hustle and Flowchart. So, first off just a little bit of backstory. What it is you do and how you got to do it? And then we’ll get into kind of the secret sauce that helped you be successful in that. That’s where they’re going to actually get more of the meat.

Scott: Oh yeah, definitely. So going back over 11 years ago, I was a previous mortgage broker. You know back in 2008, of course, everything hit the fan as we know and so I jumped on the other side and start buying distressed debt. Distressed mortgages are a really small niche out there. There is only maybe totally 10,000 true debt investors. And back then there’s maybe five thousand because of everything that hit the fan. A lot of people walked away. So I started marketing online because that was the one way that I was using to share the deals that I was doing. It’s also helped me raise capital and it helped me lead to really exploding my business, because then I started getting booked on radio shows and asked to come to speak in real estate investment clubs and sharing what a distressed note is or what is mortgage investing. And it was great. In 2010, I sold everything that I owned in Austin, Texas except the dog and my truck and we jumped in the truck and drove what we thought would be like 30 weeks right across the country, turned into three plus years. And we leveraged our social media, we leveraged a lot of the online tools that I learned at Traffic & Conversion, other marketing conferences that really helped me explode my business, become the best at what I do in my industry now. Marketing is where everything is at, no matter what type of space that we’re all in. There’s one thing that unites us all. In today’s world, I believe you’ve got to believe that you’re not just in the basket weaving, or the e-commerce, or the pet rescue aspect of things. We’re all in media marketing and you can learn something at a conference that can help you grow your business or expand your audience base or help get the word out that’s worth going to.

Richard: Yeah, it’s funny I’m gonna hold up my phone here. So you’re not gonna be out of here. I see it on the podcast but I often say to clients like “This is our greatest opportunity. But it’s also our potentially greatest obstacle because it’s everybody’s opportunity.” We used to be mesmerized by the screens on the desk in the living room, otherwise known as the TV. And then we were mesmerized by our screens in the office and then the folding screens that went our backpacks and you know carry on. And then now we have them in our pocket and their screens within screens, within screens, and everyone’s fighting for attention. It starts with attention and marketing is the story that makes sales easy. If you have poor marketing, sales are hard. It sounds like based on that backstory there too that you were doing live events and then you kind of made your transition to say “Let’s be able to scale this better.” Is that when you started to make your move with the online?

Scott: Oh, totally. We did a lot of events, I was doing like seven-eight workshops a year and those are hotel events. There’s a lot that goes into, a lot of overhead, a lot of scheduling, a lot of moving parts, and steps are VP Operations and a lot of that, and it just got exhausting. We looked at where we’re home. We’re spending more nights on Hotels.com hotels than we were at home in Austin. Yeah, 35-40-50 flights a year, that’s not fun. We still travel a lot right now but we did figured out a way to cut that down, right, Steph? So we started doing online of it because we’re doing webinars, and webinars to add to our audiences 2011 every Monday night and we’re like “Well, why can’t we do something like this it’s online?” And it actually came from a big failure, it’s actually Steph’s idea.

Richard: The failure or the correction?

Scott: The correction. (laughing) Thank you very much, thank you, Richard.

Richard: I don’t want you to get in trouble.

Scott: Exactly, thank you. We were going to put on this big event in Houston Texas when called the Build Your Legacy summit. I dropped 25 grand in marketing costs. The cost is 60 grand in AV and audio to have 300 people at it. And we sold like eight tickets.

Richard: Ouch.

Scott: Yeah. Buddy’s flying across the country. I was about to have a heart attack. I was stressed out. Steph can verify that. So we killed it, we killed the event and then when we were driving to Dallas, Steph had this great idea.

Stephanie: I turned around. We’re on the road to Dallas, and I turned around and the hamsters have been churning for two days and I’m like “Wait a second, we do all these webinars already. Why don’t we just do this online?” As much as we were tired of traveling and dealing with hotels and things like that and other people having to take time off work and to be with their family. Let’s try and put this thing online and see what happens. The worst that can happen is it’s a flop and we modify it, change, or we just don’t do it again. His eyes lit up and it was really cool because he looks at me: “That’s a good idea. Let’s do that.” And after that, we started doing our workshops. After that, we started doing our workshops virtually.

Scott: Yep. So it went really well. Next time we did it, we did this convention, we actually still do today called No Camp: content, actions, marketing, and profits. Do it all via like Zoom webinars, two rooms, 34 speakers, 700 paid sign ups from 30 states, 12 countries, recorded all. And it completely revolutionized the industry because a lot of people wanted to go to a hotel workshop but they don’t want to pay for travel or airfare or leave their kids at home. Now they can watch from their laptop, their computer or their smartphone and really take in a lot of the live content without the heavy overhead and time away from home.

Richard: I mean that’s part of it too. We love the conference, talking about the importance of going to conferences, but you want to be strategic. Because the true cost isn’t always just the ticket. It’s that time away from your business, the time away from your family, the time to fly and all the logistics of it. So with your first major move into online, where do you get started? Was it specifically back into the webinar piece, or what was your first step?

Scott: Our first step is that we are already using Zoom. And we just said: “OK, let’s just expand this”. Instead of doing an hour, let’s go make a turn into three days. And we do this all via this one software and what can we get people? We’re like “Yeah, we can do this very easy.” So we just went to our online marketing man to sell tickets and so we going out and speaking 10 times for one event. I just started leveraging Facebook. Facebook groups. Meetup.com, the other online portals where people started sharing what we were doing, what we had coming up, who was speaking and did it consistently enough. And tomorrow we’re still running a full-time real estate investment firm during the day. A lot of this is at night after we’re done after five, focused on that 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. hustle. Our side hustle’s events while the main business is real estate. And so really focusing on using those tools to help us. OK. Let’s get people here to make it valuable or at least here virtually whether they’re joining us live for this three and half days or they’re watching the replays afterward.

Jesse: And paying as well.

Scott: That’s what it all comes down. (laughing) And a lot of people wanted to start off doing free events. Free has no value, there is no investment by the person either attending or listening, they’re not going to show up. So if someone does think of a site that’s what they charge. Your time is viable, what it’s 47 or 97. Something, charge something so that you get serious people there because the last thing you want is to invite a bunch of people for free. And there’s no investment on their part. They don’t show up and then you’re left guessing who’s going to pay your money out of the way and trying to figure out.

Richard: Yeah, there is something to be said. I don’t think it was just fanatics. People do tend to pay attention to what they pay for. And I can’t tell you how many times. Now that’s the beauty of podcasting, you can still offer something for free i.e. they can listen to the podcast but we’re still gaining. The more successful say an Ecwid listener is, the more they apply some of the things they learn, the longer they’ll potentially be a customer. So it’s not always necessarily a direct sale but somewhere down the line, you definitely need to be getting paid. I was going to ask you, do you charge for that summit right out of the gate or do you do, I’ve seen it done where they offer it for free that one time but if you want to buy the recordings or do you just charge them right from the beginning?

Scott: We do the opposite, we throw the recordings and I hate to say this but I think people sign up for recordings of an event is the biggest waste of time because it usually takes most conferences six months to deliver. I’m too busy in six months to go back and watch it. We do have early bird pricing. Now you want to save 99 bucks next month. It’s 199. Next month is 299. Last minutes — 399 and 499 because you’ve got some logistics to go to at the very end. But yes, charge in the beginning. Now we do cop some people in like if someone’s a past military or first responder will compliment our workshop for one time, we want to help them out. Or at times we’ll run a special “Hey, invite a guest for free or bring a spouse.” Those are some simple things that we do but for the most part, it takes time, your time is valuable and what you’re offering somebody, it should be a value and make it because people will value that. And the big thing I tell entrepreneurs too, because we have a lot of them with real estate investors are coming out of the job, is nobody’s going to value your time until you start valuing it yourself. If you give it away, people are going to value it as cheap. If you charge for your time, we’ve all got attorneys as buddies, right? What do they charge an hour, at least $250?

Richard: Exactly, 15 at the most. (laughing)

Scott: Just keep in mind that you’re valuable, you want to work with people that are going to value your time. There’s enough dead wood out there. I can’t price pigs that watch everything for free. It goes back to my high school college DJ shopping event, I had all the price picture. “– Can I get that free T-shirt? — Weren’t you here just last week in a free T-shirt? You can’t. You want another poster for your wall. OK. Great. Here you go.”

Richard: So when you got started, you’re on Zoom, you’re doing these events. How did you first start marketing it? Did you mail to your list first, did you go back to social?

Scott: All the above. One of the most valuable things that people can do is first know who you’re targeting and know where they hang out. That’s targeting real estate investors, for the most part, we know that our ideal clients are 35-75, college educated, homeowner, make somewhere between 75 grand and 250 a year. They have some sort of management title. Manager or CEO, some sort of O in their title and they also like to order things online. So we go to where those people are. We spent a lot of time and leverage LinkedIn to be able to identify people. We all spent a lot of time on Twitter, although a lot of people are like “Twitter’s dead.” No, Twitter still good because it’s short, fast, sweet. When you’re dealing with people that have money they want their information delivered to them short and sweet. Now we also leverage Facebook as well with targeting the groups there, creating custom audiences. We take our list, upload our list and then do it Look Alike the audience as well and target to them and then we really have a thing we call it, it’s marketing octagon, we try to pick one piece of content and share it in seven or eight different places across different platforms. And that helps dramatically because 80% of sales are still made for the fifth contact. So if we can hit them on LinkedIn, or hit them on an email, or hit them on YouTube, or they see us they’re like “OK, what do I have to do get this guy to keep talking to me. I either need to unsubscribe or I think I’ll go and sign up now.”

Jesse: Let’s dive into Octagon a little bit. You mentioned, maybe give an example of a new piece of content that you have in mind or something you’re working on. Go through the steps.

Scott: A lot of entrepreneurs are trying to sell something, right. So our asset is we are selling properties or nuts so we take a property back. We’ll take a good picture of 30-17 Detroit drive in Flint Michigan. So we get a good picture of the property. That’s our Instagram post.

Richard: Of which they could take a picture just to tag here. You, the listener, could take a picture of your product the same way that Scott’s going to start to unveil here and do the same thing. He’s just going to tell you from his perspective of how they do it to drive business back because this is the overall octagon for marketing to drive traffic to your site. So even though he’s going to reference from, he sells real estate services and prop other things that are around notes, you can take this same process and apply it to your t-shirts, your mugs, your food product, whatever it is you have.

Scott: Exactly. It’s great stuff. Take a good picture, throw on Instagram. Your little story about what the picture is. “Hey, here’s a great property” and use the hashtags of whatever you’re people, whether it’s #entrepreneur, or #realestate, or #area or #cashflow, use those 11 hashtags in there to drive it. We’ve got a good picture. Next thing we like to do is we’ll do a short little video, 2-5 minute video. Often it just me on my cell phone doing a little selfie: “Hey, I got this great deal on this property in Michigan. Yadda yadda yadda.” Two to five minutes, “If you want more information, go to my website and use this to get signed up.” Then we share that video to YouTube and we usually do a Facebook Live as well. So it’s on Facebook Live, on YouTube.

Jesse: When you’re making this video you actually do it live?

Scott: Yeah.

Jesse: You pushed the button for live on Facebook and then that’s recorded and then you download that later to use for you.

Scott: That’s correct. With the whole download button, then uploaded to YouTube and then we take that link. It’s a Facebook link or the YouTube link and then we send that to Rev.com and that’s a transcription service and they transcribe it because I don’t have time to sit there and transcribe what I talk.

Jesse: You don’t trust the YouTube?

Richard: You do talk fast.

Scott: Yeah, I talk fast. Most people have to put me on double slow to understand versus double speed.

Richard: They’re like “Wait a minute.” Correct me if I’m wrong but I’m almost positive. They transcribe by the minute.

Richard: A dollar a minute.

Richard: So did they adjust your pricing because they’re like “This is…”. (laughing)

Scott: Yeah, “I guess he’s 10 pounds into a five-pound bag.” (laughing) They send a transcription really fast. A 2-5 minute video, I may have it back in two hours or sooner. So I take that transcription and I just put it into my description video on YouTube. I go back and adjust it on Facebook so now I boost my SEO.

Jesse: Now let me backup and dig into that because I know that YouTube does their own transcription like the machine learning whatever, it’s not that good at all actually. So do you put it there, or do you put it in the description of below the video?

Scott: I put it in the description below the video because YouTube is only in the search of your title or your description or your keywords.

Jesse: Got it. If you’re lazy and you’re like “Man I got like 50 words in here and I can’t think of anything more.” Here’s your answer. Put a hold on a transcript.

Scott: I’ll do this for my podcast as well. I have an hour podcast, it won’t fit, it only fit the first 5000 characters. Okay, so I put the YouTube link or the link that I want my people to go back to. If you’re selling something, you put a link with then go buy it. You want the title to be clean. You know something exactly what it is. Description, keywords that get my Youtube juices flowing. Which is also owned by Google so that helps Google juice kick in. Then we take that same transcription, that same video and the same photo for Instagram and we’ll go over to LinkedIn and create a LinkedIn article, a little blog on LinkedIn which works really really well. People love to read those.

Jesse: Especially for your market.

Scott: Exactly. Exactly. If your clients are on LinkedIn, it’s perfect for a lot of things. And then we can take that article and then share that to Twitter, share it again to Facebook again, or share to different groups as an article.

Jesse: You share your LinkedIn article on those. OK, got it. Just making sure for people are listening. You haven’t mentioned anything doing a blog and website yet. There are a lot of free tools, you log in, you do a little bit of work but this is all available to everybody listening right now for free.

Scott: Exactly, because you don’t have to be a website expert to do these things. These are the lowest entry points, the easiest. The only thing that’s cost us anything would have been the Rev transcription, if it’s five-minute video, it’s five bucks. This is on the free version of LinkedIn. You haven’t paid for anything. I’m not posting any ads on Facebook usually and that’s the great thing. So you have this article. Now I will go to Facebook groups that where our people hang out. There are millions of Facebook groups, they don’t care if your basket weaver or ski diver or whatever it is, sell a tiddlywinks, and there’s a group for you. So post there and then we will also take it one step further. We’ll go to different specific like meetup groups, meetup.com, and post on their discussion board a link to the video or link to the article. It’s a little surprising meetup group is about half of them that will actually publish their email list too that will go out to everybody, it’s a part of the meetup group.

Jesse: So they publish the emails?

Scott: They publish one generic email that goes to everybody in the group.

Jesse: Oh, that’s a nugget.

Scott: Yeah, very big nugget. So like we have a part of 40 meetup groups in our biggest markets. But there are only the groups that publish the actual email. Maybe like Meetup620, meetup.com, or whatever the Tampa Bay area… As long as I join that group and send an email from the email that I joined at the group. It’ll go through the moderator, if it’s something that’s useful, they’ll prove it. Now I just went out when he mailed out to 5000 people. So meetups are targeted, targeted people that are in the specific meetup.

Jesse: Yeah. Meetup groups for people that don’t know they’re very specific to very specific niches. I mean I’ve been in some before and like. You name it. Yeah, the basket weaving, whatever random niche you think like. “I don’t know where to find my people.” Check out meetup. They might be there.

Scott: Oh yeah, totally whether you’re saving animals like Steph loves to do or you’re part of that awesome podcasters meetup or we have a meetup tonight with San Diego note investors with a small group of like 50 people. But it’s a very niche and high-quality high-targeted things. And then the other facets of the Octagon can be whatever things may be right. Maybe you’re posting stuff to Reddit, maybe you’re posting on Craigslist. Or you’re sending an email out to your database.

Richard: That’s great. And just the one thing I want to add to. Scott says he goes live and I believe based on what’s going on with the algorithms and they want to get as much reach as possible you too should go live. However, it sounds like nothing. You don’t have to go live now. You could do the same thing if someone wanted to take two-three takes is something new to them and they’re a little bit freaked out to go live. You could polish the video and then do the exact same process.

Jesse: Exactly. Exactly and there are some tools out there that are pretty inexpensive, like you could use Lively.net which is a great service. You do one video and all then share across different groups that you’ve got. It also posts LinkedIn and tells you “Hey, Scott Carson is going live on LinkedIn right now.” Also, I have a posting that goes at Twitter: “It’s Scott Carson going live now on Twitter” so it gets your audience cross-pollinated to go back to your main Facebook Live.

Jesse: So Lively will give you like a little countdown or something like. Or is it just when it goes live it’s recognized?

Scott: Exactly, when you go live, it recognizes you went live on your personal Facebook page, atomically shares into your business page any other groups you want and then to Twitter and then also to LinkedIn at the same time.

Jesse: So for all those people out there they’re holding their phone, doing whatever they’re going to be notified right then if they want to get a little five minutes of knowledge from that person they follow. Boom, you’re right there.

Scott: Exactly. Exactly. And then there are the other websites too like Repurpose.io was another great, it was like 12-20 bucks a month something like that. Whereas if you went live on Facebook, it’ll recognize that and then you can just log in to Repurpose and hit one button and it’ll upload the video to YouTube for you and you can have your keywords and things automatically uploaded for you. Saves time. Yeah. And then also another purpose, a really great nugget is Restream which allow for you to if you wanted to run your videos through Restream and radically share it to YouTube, share to Twitter, share it to Facebook, as well for 20-25 bucks a month. Oh, Respream is maybe a bit more expensive, 50 bucks if I remember correctly. But those are great tools to do one thing and have it exponentially delivered for you.

Jesse: Yeah. And at the end of the day, all this octagon thing we started with a 2-minute video. You have 3-minute video whatever you pick up your phone. You push the button whether it’s Facebook Live. That happens automatically all these other things are available for free. There’s a little bit of work, or you can use these services that help cut down on the time, you know. So this is great. Great knowledge for people out there that are “I don’t know what to do. I don’t have traffic to my website.” Well, pick up your phone. I’ve actually said that on another podcast too. Yeah, just pick up your phone and start talking. Yeah, it’s a little awkward the first couple of times maybe the first 10 times you won’t get it.

Scott: I mean 80% of sales happen after the fifth contact. That’s what everybody has to realize. We live in such an impatient society. “I want it now. Give it to me now. I want my sandwich, my tacos delivered to me now.” I’m like, Jesus Christ, get your fat ass off the couch and go get your Taco Bell. All right. Yeah, but you can do everything delivered relatively easy but you just gotta do it again and again and again cause consistency is what really builds brand value. People know that you’re not. Yeah, we talked at the break about how when markets go down you have multi-level marketing things and people draw in circles and all these snake oil salesmen come out. Don’t be a snake oil salesman. I don’t care if that you want to be a double diamond eagle, all right, selling soap on a rope. That’s not fun. You sell your own stuff. Yeah, just use the tools that everybody else is using because if you think about it, like Starbucks, this is a great nugget. Starbucks is a multi-billion dollar company. They have nine people running their social media. Nine people for the entire company are using the same tools that we just mentioned. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. If you need to create an image, you’re not good at taking photos, use Canva. Really great, easy to use, that’s basically 12 bucks a month.

Jesse: See you guys use Canva for your images.

Scott: Oh, daily.

Jesse: I do use it as well. I guess I refused to use Photoshop because I’ve been doing this a long time and I still don’t know how to do it right. So yeah. Canva is a good tool. Is it Adobe Spark or am I thinking of that one?

Scott: That’s Photoshop or the Adobe Spark. Yeah, like the Adobe Spark. It’s a bunch of fun.

Jesse: Yeah. Bunch of bunch of stuff you can use. What do you use for your posting on social? Like do you just do it live on Twitter or do you use another tool?

Scott: There’s a couple of tools. We use Buffer because we’ve different I mean Buffer is free. It is free for anyone who’s getting started. I think you do your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, and allow you to do that schedule. Very easy to do for those that have side hustles or doing side hustles. That allows you to pre-plan out your calendar a couple of weeks out. So if you’ve got things coming up, you’ve got to work Monday through Friday, spend Sunday night and plan your marketing calendar hit going forward.

Jesse: Get those pictures out there scheduled, and try to figure out what time they’re gonna be looking at Pinterest or whatever.

Scott: That’s the thing. If you have an Instagram account you go and see when people are looking at your views. You know the best time to post especially whether you can send an email or post something. Our biggest bang for a buck when we send an email. That’s Sunday night at like 6 and 7 p.m. They’re just starting to think about the weekend, they’re getting that “I have to go back to work tomorrow.” Checking their emails and they start saying “Oh, hey, there’s an email” and you read about this “Oh, this looks exciting. I’m feeling really crappy about my job. I want to do something different or I want to buy the stuff.” That’s a great way to hit them and then using pre-scheduling your social media to hit. We just had the Super Bowl. We had stuff set up to go exactly at 7:00 p.m. when the Super Bowl ended. And then a lot of people to post to social post like 9:00 at night because we all do it. We’re all set to bed at 9:00 checking out our cell phones. And that’s a great way to add a lot of connections and organic relationships online at that time.

b>Jesse: Yeah, that’s good. Good advice too because if you’ve been around a while there’s this old idea of “send your emails on Tuesday through Thursday at from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Period.” There was never like that, that was not to be questioned.

Scott: It was a law according to God. (laughing)

Jesse: I’ve heard it so many times like I remember that’s when you do it. Well, maybe if you’re in a specific business niche where you know somebody is sitting in that in their office read an email. But most people right now are actually not reading the email at the office, they read an email on their phone and like you said for social maybe you’re not actually reading you’re not looking at Pinterest in the office at 10 a.m. on Tuesday. That’s like the time you actually get your work done. Think about when you were a customer base is actually looking when they want to see the stuff that you’re putting out there. Right. Like you guys actually your niche is probably Sunday night. That makes a ton of sense because they got to go to work in the morning. Yeah, makes perfect sense for e-commerce people out there. Maybe that won’t be the best time for you. But think about it, think when do you look at social, try to put yourself in their shoes and then would they want to see whatever it is you have to sell.

Scott: That’s such a great, great tip. Think about your client being one person. Think about that it’s Jesse that you’re marketing to, not Jesse and his thousand friends because that’s not effective but create your marketing where you’re talking like you’re having a one on one conversation. And you’ll have so much bigger impact and response rate and just do it a couple of times. That’s the biggest thing I think most people that we said early get impatient. They send an email out to a marketing pitch. “Ah, this doesn’t work.” Just gotta do it. Keep doing it. You’re gonna get better. Embrace the word. I like to say embrace the suck because we all suck it beginning. And we just get better by failing forward.

Jesse: Yeah, that’s perfect. I do a lot of stuff on the side as well, stuff at Ecwid. And you know sometimes it is tough. You’re not in the mood. I sent an email blast this morning for something I wasn’t really in the mood but I just “All right, copy, paste, let’s just do this, press, send. All right. I’m done.” We got one got out right and same with social. You think “What am I doing here?” But you get the pictures, you take the pictures, do your captions, do the hashtags and eventually, that following will… It’ll happen.

Scott: It’s one of those things if you’re using the same hashtags, just open up notepad on your cell phone and type it once, save it that way, just copy pasting back and forth.

Jesse: I got to do that. I’ve heard this tip before, I’ve heard it several times.

Scott: Do it now. (laughing)

Jesse: Open notepad.

Jesse: Open notepad. It is a pain in the butt, you quit on the third house together.

Scott: That’s enough. (laughing)

Richard: I also love the little hacks on your smartphone like being able to put like XX or whatever and put in your website names. You don’t even have to go back in and do that.

Scott: So easy to go to XXX. (laughing)

Richard: It’s a family show, a family show. One of the things I was going to ask when you were talking about the five touchpoints and beyond. Do you do any retargeting with this or you pretty much trying to stay away from ads?

Scott: We don’t do a lot of pixels. All I need to as I found out this week at Traffic & Conversion from my best friend from Austin, he’s the best at what he does. We do a little bit, more or so with our email. I see emails who didn’t buy and targeting those lists that didn’t buy. What’s the situation or do you need a special discount, those kinds of things. That helps us with something like “a little extra bonus 25% off or we will give you a bonus to sign up now on this.”

Richard: So even you learn at conferences.

Scott: I do.

Richard: That’s great. Trying to bring it full circle here. Look at the success that Scott has had and he’s not even doing the paid advertising like Jesse.

Jesse: I caught that because I’m a paid advertising guy.

Richard: That’s his main job and that’s his main success from this. While on store he’s got other things going on too, but it’s just a perfect example, you literally have both of their sides of the table here. You have organic content creation and you can be successful. You can do paid and be successful you both can learn from each other. We all can learn from you both.

Scott: The church of e-commerce today. Amen. (laughing)

Richard: Before we get back into, let them know where they can learn more about you and all that. What would you say if someone was starting today from scratch with the Octagon be the path that you would tell them to go just to get started right away.

Scott: Oh, amen. Totally, it’s open to everybody, it doesn’t cost you anything except your time initially. Most of the things that we discussed are just free. You just got to spend time there. That’s where it’s at Facebook, LinkedIn, easy ways, Meetup.com. Go find where your tribe hangs out and spend time there, be consistent about it. That’s the thing, be consistent, post at the same time, post on a regular basis. You may be using Instagram Stories instead of posting on Instagram, but it’s alerting the followers, after that you’re posting. So just post on a regular basis and then interact. If people respond to a post, “Thanks for liking, thanks for the comment. What do you do?” Try to be interactive with your audience. And then they are like “Wow, it’s not some bot”. “Richie is a real person. Jesse is a real person.” “I can talk to these people”. A lot of people are scared of social because of bots, it’s not really. People don’t want to feel like a number, they want to feel like a real person. And that’s the thing of social is having that one conversation once getting too many, to lead to individual conversations. And that’s where you close things as individual one-on-one conversations.

Jesse: It’s tough because when you post these things on social of course people respond and then it feels like such a task like “All right, I got to respond.” But that’s part of the grind. You have to do that. I know what it’s like too when you start off an Instagram profile you have like 20 followers you like a “Man, is this worth it?” But you do have to stay after it is if you reach out to other people and cross-pollinate. I think that’s part of the thing with the octagon too, it is like your Facebook followers start out at 0, everybody starts at zero, but some of these things you mention like the Meetup group and being able to send emails. Well, alright, there are people that are already following the specific topic. Facebook groups. There might be some Facebook groups. They have like big groups and they’re very specific. So advice to people out there listening. Think about what is your product? Have you ever went to Facebook groups and typed in the name your product? And maybe get a little creative. Don’t type in just their brand name, get a little creative with the types of products you sell and figure out these Facebook groups. Go to meetup.com. I haven’t really heard that tip and I think that’s really good, I don’t think everybody does that so it might probably even more fertile ground for marketing.

Scott: I have a friend who uses Facebook Marketplace to sell stuff. She rehabs houses and stuff like that. She’ll sell the dirty carpet. Literally, she’ll get online, take a picture of the carpet, won’t rip it out, will just post on Facebook Marketplace. Then have like two or three people coming up here to pay twenty bucks for the dirty carpet and they’ll do the rehab, pull it out yourself. It’s funny, I’m like “You’re the Trash Queen. She’s like ‘Shut up, I paid for my new shoes by Facebook Marketplace.’ (laughing)

Richard: My wife swears by Facebook Marketplace. She loves it. Yeah, it’s whole another conversation. So one of the things that you said there that really struck me when you were talking about the automation and using these tools is a lot of our listeners are one man, one woman shows and this is a way to be able to scale in a whole another way. We’re ‘Okay,12 bucks, 50 bucks, 29 bucks’. Add those together, it’s still cheaper than a person out now, we’d love to employ people and you obviously have other people with your company. But yeah, that’s really important. You can repurpose everything, you say the message once and get it in a video. You can get in a text, you get audio, you can cover all the modalities. You get it Buffer, or Hootsuite and you get it to go out to all these things. So now you’re not going to have to individually post all these things. Definitely for that person who’s just getting started like that it’s super jams. Thank you so much, appreciate that.

Scott: No problem. If you’re scared of a platform, do yourself a favor — just ask. Go to a meetup group. Call in, talk. A lot of times we have found especially more seasoned students, they’ll hire a kid from the local college who studying this now social media entrepreneurship. And they’ll hire for 40 hours, would be like 10 bucks an hour for like 10 hours a week. They come in to help get started for 90 days and then maybe move into having to assist part-time to work their full-time gig.

Richard: That’s awesome. People have got to experience you. They know they can probably feel through their headphones how much you care about helping people and thank you so much for coming on the show. And I mean, it’s obviously not your niche target market, but hey, this just shows how much you believe in putting your message out there and sharing and helping people out. So super appreciate that and in appreciation of that, we really would love you to share. Like if someone wants to get to know more about you and more about what you’re doing and what’s going on in the world of distress notes. And where should they go?

Scott: One is our website WeCloseNotes.com. That’s our main landing point, WeCloseNotes.com. We have a little podcast, the podcast called the NoteCloser Show, anywhere that you listen to podcasts available. Those are two things. If you google Scott Carson the Note guy, I’m everywhere the internet, so it’s hard not to miss me right, Steph.

Stephanie: It’s true.

Scott: Those are easiest places. Two things — Scott Carson, WeCloseNotes.com. I’m not a footballer for an English football team though. (laughing) There’s a Scott Carson, who’s bad.

Jesse: Are you guys battling for SEO ratings?

Scott: A funny story. I was like googling something like swag one day. I found I Heart Scott Carson. I was like ‘Wow, I got a fan club. No, wait, that’s not my fan club.’

Jesse: How many did you buy? (laughing)

Richard: That’s funny. Glad we went to the conference. Glad to see your New Media Summit too, that was awesome.

Scott: Great, man. I love podcasting, it’s such a great group of people. Earlier, I dropped a word that we use with real estate investing, called ‘coopetition’. It’s when cooperation and competition come together. as podcasters We’re all trying to drive her own audience, driving people to our websites, trying to do whatever it is, but it’s such a friendly cooperative community. At New Media Summit, 200 people coming together. Traffic & Conversion Summit had 6000 + people coming together to really work on each other’s businesses. It’s such a great place to be.

Jesse: I think it kind of brings a full circle to why we want to bring in here. You get out there, everybody go visit the conferences, meet people, get out there, shake some hands. Bye, Scott and Stephanie, I really appreciate you coming on the show.

Scott: Bye, Jesse, thank you.