Everyone Hates Marketers | No-BS Marketing & Brand Strategy Podcast

Louis: Bonjour, bonjour, and welcome to another episode of everyonehatesmarketers.com, the no-fluff actionable marketing podcast for marketers, marketing consultants, founders, and tech people who are just sick of shady, aggressive marketing. I'm your host Louis Grenier. In today's episode, you'll learn how to talk to and land highly inferential individuals to market your stuff.

Louis: My guest today has been a serial entrepreneur for 15 years now. He's the co-founder of FreeeUp, a marketplace connecting business owners with the top one percent virtual assistants, freelancers agencies in the world. And he actually recently sold it and made some good money in the process, but he didn't choose to retire and go to Bahamas just yet because he started actually a new venture called OutsourceSchool, which is an education platform for entrepreneurs who want to learn how to scale their business using virtual assistants. So, you can see the connection there. So that's why I'm super happy to have you Nathan Hirsch on board. Welcome.

Nathan: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.

Louis: So stating your word to understand how to land big influencers for FreeeUp. That's one of the things you told me. So why did you want to do that in the first place? Why did you feel like it was important for you to connect to highly influential people?

Nathan: Yeah. It's funny because I still remember about a year and a half ago, someone ran into me at a conference and they said, "Oh my God, I've heard you on a podcast. How did you become such a good marketer?" And in my head, I've never really looked at myself as a marketer. I mean I came from the Amazon space. I did Amazon for seven, eight years. There was really no marketing there. There wasn't even Amazon ads when I started on Amazon. So I didn't have to grow a brand.

Nathan: And when I started on FreeeUp, I had no idea what marketing was. I had no idea how to run ads, get influencers, do content swabs, I didn't even know a backlinks were. So I really learned everything from scratch. And it kind of came to the basic idea of, "Hey, I'm not a risky person." I know that sounds weird as an entrepreneur, but I'm not one to dump $20,000 into ads or $50,000 into a sponsorship.

Nathan: I was going to take small calculated risks that hopefully had a big return. So one of the lowest hanging fruits was, find people that have your audience and figure out a way to work with them. And that's really the basic for organic marketing. And then it just comes down to how you want to go about it.

Nathan: And one of the best ways is working with influencers because, when you have someone who's not only promoting you but putting their name behind you, and they've already spent a lot of time establishing their name, establishing their presence, that gives you a huge head start over all your competitors and all the other service providers out there, especially in a space where there were the Upworks of the world, there were the Fiverrs of the world.

Nathan: So in my mind, if I could get the influencers to point the direction towards FreeeUp and not towards them, that was a huge advantage I had as a small business.

Louis: And how did you come up with the idea? Like was it just in your head that made sense, it was natural, or was it from somewhere else?

Nathan: Yeah. I mean, every idea in my head is really trial and error. That's really my mentality as an entrepreneur. Very rarely do I create like two or five or 10 year plans. It's, "Hey, here are some things I think will work in my head will work and let's throw them against the wall and see what happens." And I get rejected a lot. I kind of compare it to, I'm getting into real estate now. I want to become a real estate investor.

Nathan: Well, I put in my first deal yesterday, and I got rejected. That was my first experience into real estate. And my first experience going into influencers was the same way as I was going to reach out to as many influencers I possibly could that I felt had my target audience. And if at the end of the day that failed, I'll tweak it, I'll tweak it. And if it's just not working, I'll move and direct my attention towards someone else. So it was more of about trial and error experiment than some master plan.

Louis: Gotcha. So, there's one thing to say for us before we move on to something else. A lot of people seem to make you believe, make people believe that influencer marketing is something completely new, that it only happened in the last five years in Instagram and whatnot. Well, that's actually not the case whatsoever. I mean, let's be straight. Reaching out to people exactly as you described, reaching out to people who have an audience that you share like that is kind of in line with yours who have a bigger audience than you to promote your stuff, to vouch for you to endorse you is not new.

Louis: It happens in politics since politics was even started. So I just wanted to say that because a lot of people would think it's a new thing. It's not, and it relies on just normal psychology, right?

Nathan: I mean it is, like you said, it's the very basics of being an entrepreneur. And I feel like people go into business and they're like, "Oh, I need this big ad budget." Well, FreeeUp did $12 million dollars in sales in 2019 and we spent $1,000 a month on ads. And that was strictly retargeting. So we were figuring out how do we organically get in front of other people's audiences and point the traffic back to us?

Nathan: And it's very much a long game over a big game. Even now when I'm doing it with OutsourceSchool, I'm not waking up every day and going, "Boom, OutsourceSchool, OutsourceSchool, OutsourceSchool," to the world. It's small things that we can do to chip away to improve our SEO rank, to get another group of target customers, to build a relationship with another influencer. And to put ourselves in a place that's very evergreen, where our link is going to be in someone else's course.

Nathan: And every time someone buys that course, they're going to come across link going forward. So we don't find ourselves just doing, let's say one off Facebook lives that in six months no one's ever going to see a gang because they're just buried so far below. You're getting into a place where you're front and center to someone's audience over and over and over again. And that's really the goal.

Louis: All right. So before we go into like a step by step on how you, like from what you've learned, how would you do it again? And how do you do it? I know you have kind of a method that you've developed. Why do you think so many people struggle with it? Like why do you think some of the entrepreneur and marketers struggle with this like how the fuck do I reach out to those highly influential people? Why is it such a struggle for people?

Nathan: I think the first thing is rejection. People are scared of getting rejected. Where in my mind, I'm getting rejected every day, every week. If a week goes by and I'm not getting rejected, then I didn't go out hard enough. I didn't contact enough people. I didn't put myself out there. I didn't take enough risk. And I've had people where it took me two years to just get on the phone with them and finally build a relationship, but I didn't just give up the second that they said no, I continued to follow up. I stayed respectful.

Nathan: I didn't get aggressive or angry or how dare they not talk to Nathan Hirsch? That wasn't my attitude at all. It was, "Hey, you're an entrepreneur. You're an influencer. I understand you're busy. It's up to me to prove that I'm going to build value to your audience." It's not all about me. It's, "Hey, how can I add value? How can I bring something to your audience that'll actually benefit them and at the same time make you look good?"

Nathan: Because that's what they really care about. That's what the big influencers care about is protecting their integrity, their name, their image. They spent a lot of time building this community and they're kind of like the gatekeepers there. They don't want to let someone else in there who could possibly destroy or disrupt it.

Nathan: So having the right mentality is key. I think having some fundamental referral or affiliate program is key. And a lot of people say they have a referral program or say they have an affiliate program, but it's not really out there. It's not clear on their site. It's not, let's say, clean and easy for someone to understand and remember.

Nathan: If you ask anyone out there what the FreeeUp referral program is, it's 50 cents for every hour that we build to someone that comes from you forever, it's clean, it's simple, it adds up over time. We paid out $250,000 last year in affiliate money. So when I'm going to an influencer, not only do I have an affiliate program, but I have a page that explains it. I have a track record of, "Hey, we paid out X amount this year. This is how it works. We have a software that runs it."

Nathan: So I'm trying to make it as easy as possible for that influencer. This is how I'm going to add value to your community. I make it clear, "Hey, I care about your reputation, I'm going to make sure that I'm actually going to take care of them." And I have that fallback, really solid program that they're going to get that kickback from.

Nathan: And I think a lot of people fail when they're setting that up, because they might say it here or there, but with FreeeUp, we're mentioning on every phone call to the bottom of every website and we're trying to get it out there as much as possible and it's consistent across the board.

Louis: So, afraid of being rejected, not keeping things simple enough, or like the actual influencer or influential people to get something in return. Is there anything else people struggle with?

Nathan: Probably just the research phase of it. Figuring out influencer that actually makes sense for them. I think everyone wants to work with Gary V. What would happen if Gary V promoted my business? But that's like a tier one influencer. If you want to work with the tier one influencers, you've got to work with the tier two, you've got to work with the tier threes. You got to work with the tier four.

Nathan: So figure out who are those tier four to six influencers that you can target and establish relationship. And they're almost kind of good to test everything you have on, because I can promise you if the tier five influencer thinks your affiliate program is terrible and they're not responding to your emails, you don't have a chance to kind of moving up that ladder. And that's kind of what we did and you kind of have to do that in every single space.

Nathan: So Gary V, I'll put him in the marketing space, although he's kind of entrepreneurship, Russell from ClickFunnels at the top there too. Any commerce, we were able to make it up to that tier one influence. But we started off with just the Amazon software companies, the smaller ones. And then we moved into the Amazon bloggers, which we thought was a step above, and we slowly chipped our way up there.

Nathan: And the cool thing is it kind of leads to each other because a lot of these tier people that they know each other and you'll kind of slowly move up the ranks there. So I think starting at the right place, not going after the tier ones from the beginning, and establishing and testing on those lower tiers. Building a strong relationships where it's not just about you, and then working your way up the tier in the industry or multiple industries that you're targeting is the other place that people go wrong.

Louis: I'm happy to tell you that I'm actually a tier seven influencer.

Nathan: Yeah. I've always wondered what tier I am. I'm definitely not tier one, but I hopefully I'm somewhere in that two to five mix.

Louis: I'm a mini micro ... what's before macro in the metric scale? Like the nano. I'm a nano. Yeah. I'm a macro nano influencer.

Nathan: Well that's the other thing that people get wrong. They kind of skip over the nano and the micro, but sometimes those are great influencers because they might have 1000 people that follow them, but those 1000 people love them. They have a personal relationship with them. They buy from them. If you can build a lot of relationships with the micro and the nano influencers, you can build a business around that.

Louis: Yeah. And that's what it's interesting and I think that's what's happening more and more. The internet 10 years ago was like this huge, wide open space where everyone would get in the same place. Like the social network site went online. A lot of people use it. And now it seems like more and more we are going towards a more siloed private community approach because people are sick of getting a lot of stuff.

Louis: Like they really want to get their stuff with their people. And so I suspect that is going to be more and more difficult to find a influencer that touches so many people. And as you said, it's probably going to be more about connecting with people who have smaller audience but highly engaged because they give a shit about what this influencer or just this person has to say really.

Louis: So let's talk about what you started to mention, let's talk about the actual method, the way you would recommend someone who's starting out. So, very much like you were in this position four years ago, right? Or five years ago with FreeeUp when you started out. No one knew you. No one knew FreeeUp. You had to get your way into there. So just wanted to mention something before we start.

Louis: If you want to learn more about influencer marketing, we recorded two episodes before. So episode 75 with Tyler Farnsworth and episode 117 with Melinda Byerley where we talk about different sides of this type of marketing, but I'm pretty sure you have a lot more stuff to add to this, so let's get in.

Louis: So let's say we are creating, we have a company, we are either a marketer, a founder, an entrepreneur. We have something that is good enough. It's a good product already. But yeah, we want to get in front of other people's audience. How do you go about it? What is the number one step, the first step?

Nathan: Yeah. So when I say to have a influencer marketing plan, yes, it's the top guys. It's a small guys. It's even just a client that they might have a, I'll say a big mouth for lack of a better word, but they'll go to conferences, they'll talk about you, they'll tell their friends, they go to meetups. So you're really kind of targeting all of them at the same time. And the way that we go about it is, one part is podcasts.

Nathan: One part of it is content swaps and I'll dive into each one. One part of it is the actual influence trying to get influencer to promote you. And the other side, which I'm blanking on right now is the affiliate program, the referral program, which we kind of talked about. So let's start with podcasts. Podcasts are just a great way to, yes, connect with influencers because a lot of influencers run podcasts, but it's a great way to network and get to know different entrepreneurs that are in your space.

Nathan: If you're running a marketing agency, you should be trying to go on marketing podcasts all the time. Chances are those people are well known in the marketing space. They know other marketing agencies, they have an audience of people who need marketing. So just building that relationship is a key place that people mess up when they're going on podcasts.

Nathan: A lot of people, they'll show up, they'll record, they'll leave, and that's the end of that. And they're like, "Oh, I accomplished my goal. I got in front of my audience." Well, you missed the whole relationship side in it. And that's what's going to bring you going forward and lead to other connections. Other things that people don't think of is the backlinks.

Nathan: I mean just being able to go on a podcast and have your link out is only going to help your domain presence, your SEO going forward. Other things on podcast is leading to those content partnerships. So I've been on podcasts where at the end we'll have a conversation and we establish a more long term relationship. So with content swaps, you want to set it up so it's very organized.

Nathan: And what we like to do is once every quarter, we'll make it easy for them. We'll keep track of it. We'll reach out them and say, "Hey, what do you want to do together this quarter?" And if they're too busy, then no big deal. We'll follow up again. If stuff's going really well and is helping them and it's helping us, let's do more than once a quarter. Or maybe if someone is small, you schedule it out so it's once a year, once a half year, depending on what you can handle.

Nathan: But figure out something that's reoccurring and that could be a blog swap. You write a guest post to them, they write a guest post to you. It could be a podcast, it could be a YouTube video, it could be a promotion in a newsletter. Those are very popular. It's very easy for us to put someone else in our newsletter and say, "Hey, check out our partner," and vice versa. So podcast to relationship.

Nathan: We talked a little bit about those influencers and reaching out to them and trying to establish almost more of an affiliate arrangement where they're constantly promoting you and they're pushing you out, mention you in webinars and stuff like that. And then that referral program that I mentioned you should have a base for, but you need to be telling every single person at the end of every sales call, every client call, "Oh by the way, we have this referral program. This is what it is." Get people to remember, get people to talk about it.

Nathan: And when you have a business that you're constantly establishing those four things, getting on podcast consistently, getting in front of other people's audiences, establishing partnerships that are ongoing, different content swaps that are benefiting both parties, slowly chipping your way up that tier influencer lists like we mentioned before, and a referral program that's actually converting that people like that becomes a basis for just your clients, for micro-influencers, for even podcast hosts. All four of those things together is a very powerful way to grow your business.

Louis: So, let's start with podcasts and thanks for mentioning the overall arching strategy. So how do you even select podcast in the first place? Let's start with that. Like how do you know this is a good one to reach out to? And then we'll talk about how to reach out to them and all of that.

Nathan: Yes. So I like to come up with basic metrics of podcasts that we want to be on. And at the beginning, honestly, some of those metrics go out the window. You just want to be on as many podcasts as you possibly can. It's good practice. It's good building up and you never know. They might work out as your schedule gets booked and booked more, as you become busier, your business grows maybe you become a little bit more picky on what podcast you come up with.

Nathan: But you can say, "Hey, they have to have 100 reviews on iTunes. They have to have X amount of likes on social media. They have to have X amount of downloads per month." So you can set your own standards there and do research, and obviously I'm a big proponent of hiring a virtual assistant, but you can hire, we've hired podcast agencies before who will go out and pitch podcasts for us and we'll give them baselines. Like we only want you guys to focus on this level and higher.

Nathan: And then we'll have VA's and maybe our own researchers first handle the stuff that's here and lower. From there, you kind of need a plan. I mean, no one wants you to go on a podcast and just brag about yourself and sell your company for 30 minutes to an hour. You need to establish, "Hey, here are some stories that I can tell. Here are some ups and some downs I had as an entrepreneur. It wasn't straight up," because no one kind of had that straight up adventure.

Nathan: And what is my plan for actually reaching out to them and what are some tweaks from there? So I like to make it as easy as possible for someone to find out if I'm a good fit for their podcast. I have a podcast pitch that goes over, "Hey, here are my core topics. Here's my core story, here's a little bit about me." And super respectful understanding that they get tons of pitches every single day.

Nathan: Once they actually respond to that and you're interested, you want to work around their schedule. Again, making it as easy as them. Before the podcast, a lot of times they'll send over a list of questions. I didn't do it for this one because I knew that you already knew what direction we were going in. But again, making it as easy for the podcast host to be like, "Hey, here are topics, here are questions, feel free to ask your own, but here are some good ones."

Nathan: And then after the podcast, "Hey, here are my show notes, canned email, here are my links." Again, making it as easy as possible for the person. So really turning the whole podcast pitching structure into a standard process of your business that you're doing every single day, every single week.

Louis: Yeah. I think this is why this podcast is a bit different because yeah, I know some guests, some people ... So, if you're listening to this right now and don't have a podcast, you probably don't know this, but behind the scenes what happens is we have a lot of people reaching out, wanting to be a guest on a podcast. And what happens is usually what you described, right? Pitch, make it super simple.

Louis: Then you have this piece of question and every time I see this piece of question, I'm like, "Shit, if I actually accept this guests, if I ask the same question, my podcast is going to sound like everyone else." So I mean this is also what you need to be careful of from the perspective of a podcasters, is making sure that you try to have your own angle or else you just turn into like interviewing the same guests as everyone else with the same type of question than anyone else. I mean for you it's great, right?

Nathan: Right.

Louis: But for the podcasters, it's like I think that losing a bit. So yeah, that's why I try to keep to one topic, and this is why we talked about influencer marketing, and usually I don't send questions in advance apart from one or two, but I especially don't accept guest questions for the same reason. But I very much like this idea of keeping things super simple.

Louis: So as you said, summary, like who you are, your story, and you mentioned the word story. And this is important. So for me, I would personally connect way more with someone who tells me a real story of someone who struggled to find ... did a few mistakes instead of someone who just present himself or herself as a very under shit and like one of the Forbes under 30, just everything is so good.

Louis: Is like, "Yeah, this sounds a bit too good to be true." So as you said, one summary page that is real based on the story, and then what you said after. So you do the interview, obviously you're being nice and all, but at the end you actually would send them show notes. So tell me more about this.

Nathan: Yeah. So it's email with a nice thank you, really appreciate you having me on, whatever. And then underneath that it's, to make it easy for you, I have attached my headshot, here are my social media links, here's my bio in case you didn't have it before, here's about my company or a lot of times, we'll create a landing page for them.

Nathan: We haven't gotten that far at OutsourceSchool yet, but we did that a lot with FreeeUp where we'll say, "Hey, you can direct people to freeeup.com/ the podcast host name or the podcast name. And that's where we would mention our affiliate program too, "Oh by the way, you get 50 cents for every hour that we build with them forever. Here's how you quickly and easily create a link," and we'll put it in that page and, and you'll be good to go.

Nathan: So setting that up to even make money on your business and hopefully think about you going forward because that podcast host is going to interview lots of different entrepreneurs and they might be talking to an entrepreneur that says, "Hey, I'm struggling hiring right now." And they'll say, "Oh, I had Nat on, and here's a page. Go check out FreeeUp."

Nathan: So it all kind of goes hand in hand creating that system where people can constantly throw people back your company very easily. You're making it easy for them and you're constantly chipping your way up that tier influencer list. And one last thing here. Podcast kind of goes the same way as the tiers. You've got your tier one podcast and obviously people that are just starting out and you're working your way up.

Nathan: Well, you can use podcast to build up to those higher tiers. When I'm pitching bigger podcasts, I mention, "Hey, I've been on Mixergy, I've been on Entrepreneur on Fire." I won't name drop to the extreme, but I'll put in, "Hey, here are some ones that related to you," that will help me kind of get there to the next level instead of, "Hey, I'm Joe, I appeared out of nowhere. I'm running a business, have me on your podcast." It's all about slowly improving your conversions over time.

Louis: Yeah. And people need to remember that no one really gives a shit about them. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean that very respectfully, meaning like no one is likely have heard from you if you're only starting out. So don't expect like as you said, tier one, tier two people, or podcasts or whatever else to reply, you need to build your way up. Like do you have a friend that has a podcast? Be on there.

Louis: And then this friend may know somebody else and just be patient with it. I think, well, again, already, I figure out from you just talking to you, reading about you a bit is that you are a patient guy. You're someone who's willing to put time and effort into something, build relationship the long term. And that's what it takes to do this properly, doesn't it?

Nathan: Yeah. I'm actually not a patient guy, which is funny. I'm very impatient.

Louis: In business maybe.

Nathan: Yeah, in business, I'm more than willing to kind of chip away at things little by little. I understand that, "Hey, what can I accomplish today that actually moves me closer towards the end goal?" Another kind of idea off of that is networking, and it all kind of goes hand in hand. One of the things that I like to do every single week is reach out to three new entrepreneurs. And network with them.

Nathan: I'm not selling them, I'm not pitching them. I'm learning what they're doing, telling them what I'm doing. If there's some way to work together or help each other, I'm all about it. If not, I like knowing other people in the space, and you can use networking too to all levels. If you're going after influencers and this influencer's rejecting you or this influencer is not responding, well, my three entrepreneurs for that week are probably going to be people that maybe that influencer follows on Instagram or Facebook.

Nathan: So, I'm kind of networking around the influencer and the same thing goes on podcasts. I've had podcasts that I really wanted to go onto. I'll listen to podcasts and sometimes I'll listen to them. I'm like, "Oh, I know that guy. We connected," and boom, that's my in to get closer to the podcast. Or my three networks for the day might be the guests that were on that podcast.

Nathan: And I don't reach out to them being like, "Oh, hey, I heard you on the podcast. Can you get me on?" I reach out to them to build a legit relationship, add value to them, hopefully help their business. And six months later, when I'm going to try to get on that podcast again because I'm constantly trying to get on ones that I've been rejected on, I have a little bit more of an in, or maybe I've established a relationship with a few more people that can help me push a little bit farther to actually getting on.

Louis: So before we move on to the other methods that are all like interconnected with each other, you're started with podcast which you could have mentioned the content swaps first. What's your system to keep track of everything? And don't tell me it's all in your heads.

Nathan: Not only in my head, we'll use Pipedrive and we use Google Docs. Those are really pretty basic. My thing to do is I have a VA that organizes all of it. I create a process. I let them own the process. They're monitoring my inbox. If I have a phone call with a podcast person, I'm telling them how that call went. And they're keeping track of all that in a very organized system so that I don't really have to. Anything that's PDS manual follow up work I almost always outsource to a virtual assistant.

Louis: So how do you do it? Let's dig into this process a bit before we go into content swaps.

Nathan: Yeah. So, I start with the teaching of VA how to research a podcast. So what are they looking for? They're looking for reviews, they're looking for the domain presence of their website. They're looking for their social media presence. And then any other information about the person, what industry they're in, what their audiences like. Do they have a Facebook group? Are there 500 people in that group? Are there 100,000 people in that group?

Nathan: So to actually understand what that person is, and then I also teach them to be able to figure out if I've already been on the podcast, because if I'm hiring a VA and in my life I've been on 200 plus podcasts, I don't want to reach out to people I've already been on their podcast. So that's the baseline, is teach them how to research, teach them how to understand which one you've already been on.

Nathan: And then I usually have them submit a certain amount to me per day. So I like to wake up to stuff on my desk and my desk is figuratively, they're emailing it to me, but I'll run through this list and some of the names I might know and I might be like, "Oh, wow, Roland Frasier, he's a tier one influencer. I'm not ready for that yet. Let's put that in the back pocket." Or, "Hey, I actually know this guy through blah, blah, blah. I didn't know he had a podcast. I'll go reach out to him."

Nathan: Or I'll say, "Hey, these 10 that you sent me today," and I like to establish a number, a hard number. "Hey, you're sending me 10 every morning by 7:00 AM Eastern time," or 15 or whatever that number is. I'll say, "Hey, I want you to pitch these five with this pitch, these five with this pitch, do a little split testing on pitches that are very similar but slightly different and go from there."

Nathan: And then once we get those emails back, they'll check in and actually go and record, "Hey, this was a response. Oh, we got Nate on. Oh, a week later, this guy hasn't responded yet. Let's send one follow up." Or, "Hey, this guy rejected us. Let's set a reminder to follow up in six months."

Louis: And that would be so your VA would send emails on your behalf?

Nathan: Yes. So either that or they'll set up what ... I use yet another mail merge. So they'll set up the mail merge and I'll just review it and click the send button. So technically it's me sending it, but I don't like VA's to pretend to be me. For 99% of the time, they don't do that. So they're really just setting everything up so I can just review and send.

Louis: Yeah. And this is why I was asking you the question. I wouldn't like it either. So, yet another mail merge is a program that allows you to do what's called a mail merge. If you don't know what a mail merge is, it's I would say between sending an email to one person and they're sending a newsletter via Mailchimp. It's like, it basically sends one email at a time to certain number of people.

Louis: It sends them individually, but it sends them in a batch and each email is sent separately, like every minute, every five minutes or whatever. But like you completely abuse that stuff. Some people abuse that stuff. They get banned pretty quickly or like their email domain gets banned pretty quickly. So typically Gmail I think allows you to send what? I think it's 100 or 200 a day.

Nathan: Yeah. And I do not recommend pitching 100 podcasts a day. We're talking in the five to 15 range that I know are going to go down well or have a good opportunity for success. And the other side of it is I mentioned that I hire bigger name PR companies or podcast companies to get me on podcasts. Usually I pay 200 or $500 per podcast. Sometimes you have to buy in books, sometimes you don't.

Nathan: But again, I'm keeping them if I'm going to pay for them, I don't want them to get me on this brand new podcast that just came out. I want them to get me on higher level ones that hopefully they have a connection with. They have an in with that I don't have. So then it becomes how do I make sure that both these people aren't pitching the same people and making sure that the VA is reviewing the list of this person and checking off each one before we give them the go ahead to make the pitch on the bigger podcasts.

Louis: Nice. Pretty nice. And I think this system can be applied to other stuff. So we're talking about podcast here and we are recording this episode in 2020. I'm thinking like in 2030, will this be relevant? Yes. Maybe it's not fucking podcast, maybe it's Tik-Tok, video live, or whatever it is. I don't care really about the channel. What matters is podcasts is a nice way to ran someone else audience in a sense.

Louis: Like this episode is like people hear it, people hear about you. You'll be exposed to like marketers, marketing service providers, and all that, and it's kind of a swapping time of me getting good content and you are getting exposed to the audience. But again, that could be applied to any other type of channels. Right?

Nathan: Yeah. And let's flip this too because the last year of FreeeUp, I created my own podcast, the outsourcing and scaling show, which they were going to continue to run. I'm no longer the host, but I'm a big proponent of create a business before you create a podcast. I could have created a podcast on day one, but for the first two, three years of FreeeUp, I wanted to build FreeeUp before I was spending my time on a podcast every week.

Nathan: That's more of my personal preference, not necessarily how anyone needs to go about it. But what having your own podcast allows you to do, and I've seen this a million times, is get people to talk to you that otherwise wouldn't. Because if I'm going to an influencer and I'm like, "Hey, let me tell you about free op, let me network." A lot of times they're just like, no.

Nathan: But if I'm like, "Hey, I have a podcast, I think you'll be a great guest for it." A lot of times you'll have an in. and I actually had an influencer who's an awesome person. I respect her a ton as an entrepreneur and nothing bad to say about her, but she rejected me. And not only did she reject me, but she pretty much said, "Don't contact me again." Which for me I take seriously because usually when I get rejected, I can follow up again in six months.

Nathan: So this one kind of stood out. Well, I launched a podcast and I posted on social media that I had a podcast. Well guess who messages me saying, "Hey, I'd love to be a guest on your podcast." She does. And she comes on and we build a relationship and we did content swaps going forward. So it's almost like getting on podcasts is great and that'll help you get in front of a lot of communities.

Nathan: But if you have your own podcast to have people on and assuming you're doing a good job and you're growing it and all of that, that kind of adds you that extra little in where if someone's a little bit harder to land, if someone isn't going to go for what's working with everyone else have in your back pocket, "Hey, I'd love to have you on." And a lot of times that'll lead to a swap where you now go on their podcasts.

Louis: Yeah. It's a reciprocity kind of rule. So when you struggle to reach out to someone out of the blue, it's mostly because you expect a lot from them and you don't give out too much in return. Well podcast, it's almost 50, 50. If you have a nice audience, people are likely to come here because they know they'll be exposed to the audience and you get to build a relationship and get good content from them.

Louis: So podcasts, one thing, thanks for going into that. You mentioned a few times the words content swap. Define that for me?

Nathan: Yeah. So this is the key about content swaps. You want to have a few different ways that you can do content swaps. They don't always have to be my way. I like to do blog swaps because my companies tend to have a blog, YouTube channel because we do videos. Podcasts is another one. Newsletter is an easy one if you have a newsletter every week.

Nathan: But other people take it crazier with content swaps, like with courses or an all dorks, that sorts of different stuff. But establish a baseline and be realistic about what you and your team can actually handle. If you're doing $20,000 a month in top line revenue and you have a two person team, are you really going to commit to all these different channels ongoing and building up with 100 partners and having to do content swaps for them every single week? Probably not.

Nathan: So figure out what's realistic. We have X amount of channels. This is not a content we can consistently put out there that'll still be high quality. If we put out three blog articles a week, well, okay, I can't go and tell 200 partners, I'll put their blog in my blog or their guest post in my posts. It has to be somewhat realistic. So establish what you have, established what your team can handle, and then find people that these aren't necessarily influencers, but these are companies that have the same audience but do something completely different than you. They're not competitors.

Nathan: So for FreeeUp, for example, we are a marketplace for virtual assistants and freelancers. We would find an Amazon software company. We worked with a lot of Amazon sellers, so getting their software in front of my audience doesn't hurt FreeeUp at all, and getting FreeeUp in front of their audience doesn't hurt them at all.

Nathan: So it's a great way to be mutually beneficial. And then it's establishing what's easiest for them. Well, easy for them is, "Hey, we're going to take control, we're going to organize it. We're the VA people. We're going to have a system and process where every quarter, every six months, whatever we agreed to, we're going to reach out to you and say, "Hey, it's time for the content swap again. Let's quickly come up with something that's easy and good for you," and not putting the burden on them to reach out to you or remind you or anything like that.

Nathan: So establish what you can actually handle. What kind of content is going to be. Do research on what those partners are. Reach out to them, make it easy for them, and then make sure the content that you're putting out there is actually good content. I remember when we first did this, we got feedback from someone that our blog posts were too salesy. They didn't have that much value. Well, that was great feedback for us.

Nathan: As a new person trying to build a brand, I made sure that no blog posts going forward was like that. So make sure that you're communicating with them and that you're getting feedback and that the relationship is continuing to benefit both parties, and over time we were working with over 200 partners that were constantly putting our stuff in front of their audience. We are constantly putting their stuff in front of our audience and that non-salesy value added way.

Nathan: And that led to a lot of great relationships and really being well known and respected in the space. Because if I'm going after the eCommerce industry and I work with all these different eCommerce providers and businesses, well that looks a lot better than someone who might do the same exact thing as FreeeUp, but they don't work with any of these partners.

Louis: My issue with content swaps in general is, it's difficult to protect the brand. I'm just taking this example of like this in my podcast right, which is like as you can guess from the name is a bit out there, I like to have a strong positioning. And so it wouldn't make any sense for me like to let's say to partner up with a company that just does shitty spammy marketing, and then publish a blog post on my site that just, it would devalue my brand.

Louis: So I would understand that I need to make sure that I kind of select the people and the companies that do good quality stuff that align with your value. But then here's the issue that I start to see is, once you have relationship going and whatever, might become difficult to say no. Because if you say no to them, then they're going to say no to you in a sense.

Louis: Like quick pro quo, and I always feel that the value, the quality kind of goes down as you go because you just let's just, "Whatever, like let's publish this guest's posts because we'd get in front of their audience." So our standards are a bit low. So how do you deal with this?

Nathan: Yeah, fantastic point. So one of the best things that you did, let's just take blogs for example. And we do the same thing with videos, podcasts, we have a list of standards. It's on our website and we establish upfront what the expectations are. You obviously you run your brand is different than my brand, my brand for FreeeUp and even for OutsourceSchool, and my brand in general is not really swearing, not really being aggressive or political.

Nathan: Like that's just the brand that I've built. And so for me, in our guidelines, it's like, "Hey, we don't want swear words. We don't want that kind of aggression in our posts." And if someone submitted it, I had a team that would review everything and we weren't mean about it, but we would send it back to them and be like, "Hey, it's not hitting these guidelines. We want all of our posts across the board to be hitting them. Can you guys revise them?"

Nathan: And I agree that once you start going down that path, it's really hard to pull it back. But the key is you set those guidelines up front and keep them ongoing. And if someone is breaking them or not following them, you stop it right there, fix it, and only then move forward. And if you notice like any of the big partners that we work with, they send us those guidelines.

Nathan: Like they're not going to take our crummy little blog article that has nothing to do with anything and put it on their site, and I've had plenty of people reject our blog articles and have us redo them, and that's okay. They've got a guideline, they've got a brand to upheld. So I agree that setting those standards and holding people to them, whatever your brand is, whatever you're trying to do with that particular content method is extremely important.

Louis: I'll try not to swear that much in the last-

Nathan: No, it's not that I hate swearing and I do in my personal life, it just you will never see me on a podcast just like dropping the F bomb. No.

Louis: I'm messing with you.

Nathan: I know.

Louis: So, if we go to the other stuff, which is okay, we partner up on whatever. What if your partner is caught into some shady stuff or the brand is being devalued a lot because their CEO did something stupid. How do you deal with that then when you have like 15 guest blog posts from them in your blog?

Nathan: Yeah. And I never really had this happen, so I might not be the best person to speak on this. I kind of handle everything with honesty and transparency. That's part of my brand. So if theoretically someone we had been working with for the past two years did get caught up on that and it was known in the industry, I would probably address it to the community and be like, "Hey guys, we've ended this partnership." Or, "Hey, we're at least going to put a hold on this partnership until stuff clears up and more information gets out there."

Nathan: And I'd probably take the approach to review those past 15 blog articles and if those 15 blog articles. If those 15 blog articles added a ton of value and they were fine, maybe some way we're leaving them there. If not, maybe I'm pulling them off and I let that company know and I give them a chance to pull off our stuff if they want to. And to me, although that might hurt short term, it's going to help you a lot more long term.

Nathan: And that's kind of how I would approach any situation. On FreeeUp and this didn't happen often, but if there was a freelancer that had a bunch of issues and I knew that they were getting complaints that they had five clients left, I wasn't going to wait for those five clients to complain. I was going to reach out to them and say, "Hey, how's it going with that freelancer? I just want you to know these are some of the issues you're having. I have your back, what can I do to make it right?

Nathan: Do you want to keep working with them? Do you want us to remove that person and get you someone else and get you some credit or refund you whatever it takes?" And I feel like in business, if you just take that proactive approach, things always tend to work out in the long term even if it's slightly damaging in the short term.

Louis: So give me some examples of content swaps. So I mentioned blog posts a lot, but like what other ways can you be kind of partnering up with others?

Nathan: Joint webinars is another one. That's not something that I did a ton of. But there's plenty of people that are selling their courses and they're trying to promote this webinar. So if they have this webinar coming up on Friday, you can either promote it to your audience or I've done it where I bet on the webinar with them and half the webinar was their business, half the webinar was our business. We will join them together and try to get as many people in as possible.

Nathan: Another one that I think people should do more of is networking event after conferences. So I think we're in a time where think about how many conferences there are. Conferences are expensive, they're expensive to sponsor, they're even expensive to go to. And a lot of times if you're someone like me, you get kind of overwhelmed at a conference. There's thousands of people, and you're trying to figure out who do I spend the time on? Which is a tough decision.

Nathan: So instead of focusing on that, focus on the networking party. So what I've done is we'll reach out to our partners. We did this with Skubana, with Helium 10 who are big Amazon software companies, and we said, "Hey, let's combine together and do a three person meetup or a two person or two," ... I should say, company meetup, where I'm going to blast out my list. "Hey, you guys are at prosper, this Amazon conference in Vegas, you guys all get a free ticket to our after party."

Nathan: Same thing. They do it to their list. It's posted all over social media. Three companies that are not competitors, but they're in the same space, they're partners coming together, at the end of the conference at seven o'clock at night at 7:30, we're meeting at this bar all you can eat, all you can drink. It's even cheaper than a sponsorship. You get 200 or 400 of probably your best or biggest clients there along with, "Hey, let's invite some influencers."

Nathan: We know that these tier one influencers, tier two, tier three are all going to be at the conference. Let's reach out to them and say, "Hey, by the way, we're having this after party. Here's a free ticket for you if you want to come." So you've kind of combined everything with now the factor of meeting in person in this exclusive event that you're hosting, that you kind of own and have the power for and you get them all there. And that's been an incredibly effective tool if you're doing that every single quarter at some of the biggest conferences in your industry.

Louis: Good idea. That's a nice one. I haven't heard of it before. I mean, I've seen it happen, but I didn't think about it this way, so that's nice. So blog posts, webinars, doing after party after event type of thing. It doesn't have to be unlimited drinks, unlimited food. You can be quite creative. Anything else?

Nathan: Yeah. So, we live in the age of courses. OutsourceSchool is launching a course on how to use VA's. We'll partner with courses that do different stuff. Let's say someone is running a course on Facebook ads, they're promoting it. That's their business. I'm running a course on VA's. Well, why don't I talk to them and partner with them and I'll create a five minute or 10 minute part of their course for them on how to use VAs for Facebook ads.

Nathan: For them, it's beneficial. They're getting this, hopefully people look at me as an expert when it comes to VA's. Hopefully I'm dropping good information and high value stuff, but they're getting a free piece of content, just theirs, that they get to put in their course and add value to their course that they're offering. And for me, I'm now in their course forever.

Nathan: I'm going to have a little link back. They just spent value and they're getting me and my brand or my business. That stays with people. It's evergreen, it's always there, and stuff like that is incredibly mutually beneficial. So anything that you can do to get in someone else's program for the long term that actually adds value to them and the people buying their product is also a big one.

Louis: I'm sure you have another one. So go on.

Nathan: Obviously YouTube videos are the easiest ones. I think we live in the era of podcast, but let's not forget about YouTube. I love just making YouTube videos with people. They can be short, they can be five to 15 minutes, they can be back and forth. They don't always have to be interview style. And a lot of times, let's say Cubana was a good FreeeUp partner, we'll do a YouTube video with Cubana and we'll talk about their software. We'll talk about VA's using their software.

Nathan: It all kind of comes together. So people watching it are like, "Hey, here are two big people in the space working together. I can rely on them, I can trust them. Oh and I can buy both their products and put it together and have some synergy there." And I'm getting to actually view them and see them talking and see them building a relationship and they get to kind of know me at a higher level.

Nathan: Some podcasts do video, but for the most part, all podcasts are audio. So kind of not forgetting about that video component and being able to get in front and talk to someone and have them see what you look like and how you act I think is an important part of building a brand. And also getting in front of other influencers.

Nathan: If you have a YouTube channel that this video has 25,000 views, when you reach out to the influencer and you want to get on their podcasts, "Oh by the way, check this out." Or, "Hey, would you like to come on my YouTube channel because I've got 50,000 subscribers on my channel and I'd love to get you in front of that audience."

Louis: So you see, I knew you had another one. So YouTube, yeah, I mean you sort of just doing interviews, you said like you can actually be a bit more creative in the format. You can get together in the same room and explain like how those two software work together or how those two courses complement each other. Talk about your life story. You can even do a sort of, as you've mentioned, for webinars, five minutes of part of the same video.

Louis: So there's plenty of ways you can do it. So like podcasts, YouTube, webinars, after event, blog post. I think we've covered the biggest one. What is the biggest mistake people make with content swaps you think when it comes to partner up this way and exchange content?

Nathan: I think over committing is probably the biggest one because it's so easy to be like, "Oh, I'm going to partner with all these people and I'm going to do one piece of content every month." Well, that can be very distracting from your business. So you have to understand what you can actually handle, what your team can actually handle, what makes sense from an expense point of view. And you need some way to track those metrics.

Nathan: If you're working with a partner for two years and you're spending money every single month putting out content for them and you're not getting any sales, any customers, no one's even clicking on the link, you might need to restructure or re-figure out that partnership. So really understanding everything from the front to the back and not just going blindly, "I want to partner with everyone." And obviously the research component is key as well.

Louis: And obviously you'll have VA's there to help you with this research side, right?

Nathan: Teaching VA's how to be good at research is one of the best things that you can do. Research is time consuming. You have to do it all the time as an entrepreneur. The second you can get a team of people that can actually understand and think on their own and do research where it's not just cut and dry, it's not just, "Oh, this person has 100 iTunes reviews. They can actually dig deeper," read some of those reviews, see what they're like on other channels and put it together to see, "Hey, is this actually a good fit?" The easier it's going to be.

Louis: There's a good book about it about processes, you mentioned that before, like the E-Myth Revisited. She like tells you about how to standardize your business and like create methods and processes so that you can actually outsource to others, whether it's employees or virtual assistants or contractors. So I'd recommend if you're listening to this if you're interested to read this books, is pretty good for that.

Louis: So the last thing you mentioned on the subject is this notion of affiliate program. And there's something you mentioned, referral program, something you mentioned on FreeeUp that you used to do, that FreeeUp still does, but obviously you sold the business. You mentioned keeping it simple. And so do you have any other advice there in order to set it up? Because let me make sure I understand properly and please correct me if I'm wrong.

Louis: So you would have a referral program that would give something to someone in return for them sending your stuff or like promoting your stuff. So let's say they promote FreeeUp, someone's sign up through their link, and they get something in exchange, they may get, I don't know, like five percent for life of the cost of the business or whatnot. Right?

Nathan: Right, exactly. And whatever that is. And I would even test it and give yourself some wiggle room to. And we do this all the time with different businesses and I advise people to do this. But let's say your affiliate program is 10%. Well, if you land that tier one influencer, give him 15%, offer 20%, whatever that is that's higher than everyone else. And that's going to kind of give you an in.

Nathan: If you're giving everyone the top that you can possibly give someone, that doesn't give you a lot of wiggle room. So you can have different levels of partnerships. Hey, these people are just a blog post every six months. This person is a top influencer that I'm going to give the biggest referral money to, and make it actually worth their while to continue to promote in front of your audience.

Nathan: And I'll even keep track of it. So I've had people that out of the blue, they just became a really good affiliate partner. Like sometimes you go on a podcast and you think it's going to be great and it's not and you don't get any sales. And sometimes it's the opposite. You go on a small podcast, but those 200 listeners are active and involved. And same thing with influencers.

Nathan: So let's say that someone pops out of nowhere and they're becoming a really good affiliate partner, reach out to them, set up a call and be like, "Hey man, I saw that you're crushing on affiliates. What are you doing? What can I do to support you? Can I get you a page? Can I get you more information? What if I doubled this referral code so every time you go on a podcast, you drop our name?"

Nathan: Kick up those partnerships to the next level and build on them and make it a win-win for them and for you.

Louis: Yeah, that's really interesting. Thanks for sharing all of this. I haven't come across most of the tactics you mentioned there in general. As I said, I think it takes a lot of patience to do this and in my opinion, that's what is good. Like good marketing start from that, takes a while, takes a long time to build relationships and therefore it takes a long time to do marketing the right way.

Louis: So thanks for sharing this and well done on your success so far, what you've done. And thanks for sharing your knowledge as well. I have two more questions.

Nathan: I have one quick thought off that that just kind of popped in my head.

Louis: Go ahead.

Nathan: So last year, FreeeUp's Facebook page got blocked, which sucks. We tried everything to get it back. I don't think the reason that it was taken down was legit, but at the end of the day, it didn't really affect business that much. And that's because all these referral partners just kept referring people.

Nathan: But if you have all your eggs in one basket, if you're constantly getting leads from Facebook ads, well if Facebook changes that algorithm or shuts down your page, or I know a good influence right now that's locked out of his Facebook account, your business can just stop and halt. So getting a lot of people that really like you to constantly promote you, it's pretty tough for a competitor to come in or for some algorithm to change, to just knock you off your porch.

Nathan: So if you do it the right way and you have that long term vision and you're growing it organically, those things are a really good foundation for a business that, "Hey, you had that foundation, now let's run ads. Now let's experiment with other stuff that can get us higher faster." But if those things fail, you still have that great foundation.

Louis: Yeah. That's probably the number one insight you've shared on this podcast to be honest. Because when you think of any it's like, if you have 250 partners and 250 people you can rely on, it's actually 250 baskets with an egg in each. And if you remove 10 of them, it's fine, it's fine. And they're very much like that because yeah, Facebook decides to change the algorithm and prevent you from running ads.

Louis: If Google changed their algorithm and prevent you from showing up in the first top results and you only rely on that, that's it. You're done. So that's a very, very good point. And it's something people need to consider, and it's not going away. Let's be very clear about this. Whatever the channel, this is not going away. This is relationship one on one, marketing one on one. Building relationship, building value, that's just never going to change. So you can rely on that for the next five, 10, 50 years ago. What do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next five, 10, 50 years?

Nathan: How to just talk to people. We live in an age where you can hide behind a computer. I'm guilty of that. I'm sure you're guilty of that, but nothing substitute from actual just conversations with people, getting to know people, offering to take someone out for dinner, for lunch, for coffee. And I think some people might go the opposite extreme where they're so caught up in the networking that they're not actually getting stuff done in their business.

Nathan: But those relationships are what take you from one business to the next. I just sold FreeeUp. We're working on OutsourceSchool. Well, I have all these relationships that I've built over the last four years that they somewhat carry over. And when I went from Amazon to FreeeUp, I had nothing there. Amazon owned everyone's email. I wasn't building a relationship with customers. It was B to C, not B to B. So completely different environment.

Nathan: Those relationships are never going away and they're also going to keep you up to date on what's working, what's not working. I've had people that will reach out to me and say, "Hey, by the way, here's something that I just learned, like I want to share it with you because you shared something with me back then that worked for them." You're going to stay up to date on what's working. You're going to get those hacks or secrets ahead of other people. And if you jump around from business to business, those relationships come with you.

Louis: Before I let you go, what are the top three resources do you recommend our listeners today?

Nathan: Yeah. Good question. So networking events, when I saw that question, networking events is my research and I would go to find the biggest conferences, go to Funnel Hacking Live, go to Prosper, which is the biggest Amazon conference, whatever your industry is, and try to get yourself an invite to every single networking event that you can go to. That's where the biggest players are going to be.

Nathan: Mostly your ideal clients where you're going to have a much more intimate surrounding it and setting. That's where I would focus my time is those networking events and I feel like those get overlooked so much or people are so tired from going to the conference all day. To me, I'd rather show up at half a conference that go to the entire networking event. But that could also be a personal preference.

Nathan: Other tools, follow the micro-influencers, see how they're doing it, see how they're rallying hundreds and thousands of people. Because a lot of people get caught up in that like the Gary V world where you're on LinkedIn eight times a day and you have this huge content team. That's just not realistic to what most small businesses are doing.

Nathan: But if instead of dissecting those huge influencers, the Grant Cardone, Gary Vs focus on the smaller ones. So people who are running 1000 person Facebook group, but that group is active, that group is buying, that group would refer that owner to anyone. If you focus on the people that are more in line with what you can realistically achieve with your business, you're going to get to that and then yes, you can eventually become the Gary V.

Nathan: I'm not saying you can't do that, but you've got to start somewhere. And if you can't grow a Facebook group or establish a community of 100 people or 1000 people, there's no way you're getting up that level anyway.

Louis: So networking event, that's one. What other resources will you recommend?

Nathan: Yeah. I'll say the micro-influencers are two.

Louis: Two. Fair enough.

Nathan: Three and four. Three things all around marketing or not necessarily?

Louis: Not necessarily. Whatever you want man.

Nathan: Cool. Built to Last is a really great book that I read, and this is why I liked that book. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, they're in the mentality that if you're not charismatic, if you're not an extrovert, if you can't go on a podcast, you can't talk about your business and motivate people, that you can't grow and scale a business. And that's just not true.

Nathan: There's plenty of companies that have been around for 100 plus years. People who have gone through multiple CEOs that were not all extroverts, not all high energy, not all charismatic. And they survived. And that book really breaks it down to what those companies did that other companies didn't. And it's not really what you think.

Nathan: So, if you are listening out there and you kind of heard everything I talked about and you're like, "Hey, I can't go on a podcast. I'm too scared. I'm too nervous." I encourage you to get out of that mentality, but also know that you don't have to be that high charismatic person in order to actually grow a successful business.

Louis: Yeah. I second that. Excellent book, and I love the fact that it's based on actually real research for years and years instead of just coming up with a method. So it's a very good book. Need to reread it again. So Nathan, you've been a pleasure. Seriously. Thank you for sharing all of those insight that you've been over the years. I'm pretty sure that you'd like to say something to our listeners or where they can find you and what they should do next.

Nathan: Yeah, so I'm really excited about my new venture OutsourceSchool, if you go to outsourceschool.com, you can join our newsletter. You can get a free case study on how we grew a business from $5,000 to $12 million a year with very little ad spend, organic with no US employees and only 35 full time VA's in the Philippines.

Nathan: And from there, we're launching our first course, our IOTM method, IOTM, I-O-T-M, stands for interviewing, onboarding, training, and managing. We're going to teach you how we interview VAs, how we onboard them, how we motivate them and get them to buy into the company and keep them around for years to come. And we really feel like it's going to benefit the entrepreneurial community and we're excited about that.

Nathan: You can also follow me Real Nate Hirsch on Instagram and Twitter, Nathan Hirsch on LinkedIn and Facebook. I'm pretty easy to contact and I love networking with other entrepreneurs, so feel free to reach out.

Louis: Thanks, man. I can see that your closing statements is pretty well rehearsed and so we're done on this, very clear. Thanks so much, man. Once again, it's been a pleasure.

Nathan: Thank you.