Achieving Success Leading With A Good First Impression Online

Leonard Scheiner is the CEO of Geekhaus Marketing Agency, a firm specializing in helping law firms grow their business, increase their revenue, and build their online authority. He has over a decade of experience in the legal marketing industry and has helped businesses achieve an increase in revenue of over 300%.

So, grab a cup of coffee and get ready to learn from Leonard Scheiner and unlock the potential of your business. This episode of the Unlocked Show with Tracy Wilson is not one to be missed.

In this episode, you will learn the following:
1. How to successfully set up a personal brand before creating a business brand
2. How to use different email addresses for different purposes
3. How to create content that educates, encourages, and entertains.

Connect with me:
 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tracy_m_wilson
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tracymwilsonunlocked
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/tracymwilson
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/tracymwilson
Website: www.tracymwilson.com

Connect With Leonard:
Website: https://gogeekhaus.com/
 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonardscheiner/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leonardscheiner

Chapter Summaries:

[00:00:08]
Stuck in your business?  We'll help you to get unstuck with Leonard Scheiner.

[00:02:42]
Geekhaus is a marketing across all industries. 

[00:08:42]
Set yourself up for success in your own business

[00:13:50]
Leave digital dust, the power of the first impression

[00:17:49]
Building your personal brand starts here

[00:22:09]
We need to be branding ourselves. 

[00:23:03]
All marketing is an effort to be seen. 

[00:33:05]
The content waterfall method. 

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Transcript

Hey, good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the unlocked show. I'm your host, Tracy Wilson. I'm having a little bit of a giggle to myself this morning because technology, you love it, but it's not so great when you push the wrong button. It doesn't help when you push the outro for your podcast when you're really supposed to push the ins. True. But anyway, if you were tuning in nice and early and you saw that, well, you can have a little bit of a giggle on me. Things happen sometimes. I want to ask you right now, I've got a question for you guys. I want to ask you this. Have you ever had a moment where you've been stuck in your business? Maybe you've been a bit stressed out, you're kind of looking at your computer screen thinking to yourself, what the heck do I need to do? I'm trying to figure out how to grow my business and actually get more clients. Now, if you've been anything like me, you've been there and maybe you might even be in that situation right now. But what I want to say to you is you want to fear not, my little entrepreneurial friends out there, because today's episode of The Unlocked Show where me, Tracy Wilson, and this very amazing special guest that I have got with me today is really going to help you to get unstuck. We are going to help you to unlock the potential in your business. So who is this amazing person I've got with me today? Let me tell you. Well, my special guest is the one and only Leonard. Now, you guys know pronunciation of people's surnames. I always stuff it up. So Leonard, I'm just going to let you say it's. Leonard, give me your surname.

Leonard Scheiner 00:01:33

Shiner.

Tracy Wilson 00:01:35

Leonard Scheiner. And he's a CEO at Geekhaus Marketing agency that actually specializes in law firms. He's based in Los Angeles and he's been helping businesses just like mine and just like yours for the past decade to help them develop their brand market for new clients and to actually grow their revenues and their online authority. He's got this amazing framework and some tactics that we're going to share with you that's actually helped other businesses achieve and increase their revenue by over 300%. And they have earned millions and millions of dollars worth of new business. So without a doubt, you want to stay tuned today. I want you guys to go away, grab yourself a cup of coffee if you haven't already, you should have because, you know, we go live every Wednesday at 10:00 a.m. Got either a water or a drink of some sort and tune in and just listen to what Leonard has to share with you today. It is truly going to help you. If you're sitting in that moment stress, wondering what the heck I'm going to do. He's the guy that's going to be able to help you get unstuck along with me today. So welcome to the show. Leonard It is fantastic to have you here.

Leonard Scheiner 00:02:38

Thank you, Tracy. It's a pleasure to be here.

Tracy Wilson 00:02:40

You're most welcome. It's great. So I want to kind of kick off with this, right? I want to know tell us a little bit about your background because marketing agency that really focuses on helping lawyers. Tell me about how that came to be. I mean, that's a big stance to go into kind of that industry where you're back with legal firms. You better do things right. So tell me a little bit about how you got started in that space.

Leonard Scheiner 00:03:10

I absolutely love that question because most people have a really linear story about they did this and this and there was a pivotal moment and then we did that. And my story is a little bit different than that. I grew up in a very small town. I joked that we had two horses and one watering hole in our town. So very, very small. And I always had the want to do something more, something bigger. So when I left and I was doing university for the first few weeks, I interned at a law firm and I fell in love. I loved that I could take really any area of life and look up in a book or online the laws that apply to that. So whether you're making lots of money and now you've got to look at tax or asset protection laws or you're making no money and you're looking at bankruptcy or you're starting a relationship or ending a relationship with divorce or anything like that I loved how there was a structure for nearly every part of law, every part of our life. And so I fell in love as an intern and then spent the next ten years being a marketing coordinator, a marketing manager, a marketing director, a CMO for law firms. And what I loved about that was I got to go into different industries, right? Well, I guess seeing law, legal industry, but I got to go into different firms where the practice areas were different. So an immigration firm is very different than a criminal defense firm, very different than a divorce firm, very different than a personal injury firm. So I got to see what worked and what didn't. And so I did that for about ten years. I took a short hiatus, left law and did strategy consulting, some entertainment type of work. So we work with very big brands. BMW, volkswagen. Sony Studios the city of La. And what I've learned from all of that is that you only have one chance to make a first impression. So what do I do now? I run Geekhaus, and we are a marketing PR and branding agency that mostly focuses in law firms, although we've got different clients as well. So we really look at professional services. So lawyers, doctors, real estate agents, really any profession where you're taking yourself and your expertise, your knowledge, and selling that knowledge as the business. And today I'm lucky that I get to consult with clients all over the globe and help them grow their firms.

Tracy Wilson 00:06:03

I love that because I can really resonate with that and relate to it because like me, I kind of started, as you could call it, an intern in the financial industry. And that sort of got me started. Similar sort of story, so parallel stories, which is quite interesting. And I suppose the interesting, even more interesting to this is you being in a law firm and kind of realizing that, oh actually, I can take the expertise that I have and actually create something out of that to now be able to help not just one law firm, but many law firms. And for those that are listening today, after us kind of giving this intro, they might be thinking, gosh, but I'm not a law firm. I'm not a law firm. However, what we're going to be talking about today is very relevant, right across all industries. It doesn't matter most of the people that are listening to, listening to the show today, it would be consultants, coaches, mentors, professionals of sorts that have done exactly what you're talking about, taking their skills, their expertise, and actually turning that into a business of sorts. Let's talk a little bit more about that based on what you've said. And there's also an audience that's watching today that wants to do that, but they haven't yet done it. I want to go there because I think there's a lot of value in us talking about how does one do that? Like, how and why should somebody take their skills, their knowledge and their expertise and actually turn it into something that becomes their livelihood?

Leonard Scheiner 00:07:41

It's a great question. I definitely hear your point of like, how does this apply to other people, right? Does it apply? And most definitely it does. So what I do with attorneys is specifically for attorneys, for lawyers. But the principles remain the same. The principle is about building online authority. The principle is about you have one chance to make a first impression. The principle about you can't overcommunicate or it's really hard to over communicate, right, when we're talking about marketing. So most of the principles that we would apply to a lawyer or a law firm apply to doctors. They apply to therapists, they applied to high performance coaches, they applied to consultants. They really apply across the board anytime when you're selling your time or you're selling your expertise. So definitely, yes, that is true.

Tracy Wilson 00:08:42

In your experience, how have you seen people take that skills, that knowledge and the experience that they have, and actually turn it into a business of their own and maybe mitigating some of the risk? Maybe we can highlight some of the risk associated and some of the things that we can do to mitigate that risk.

Leonard Scheiner 00:09:03

Tell me a little bit more.

Tracy Wilson 00:09:05

So what I'm talking about here is, like, let's say we had somebody right now who was, I don't know, they were working for a law firm and they were like you, they were working in a law firm. They were the CMO for that particular law firm. And now they've decided, you know what, I've got a decent amount of skills, a decent amount of experience here. I want to go and start my own thing. I'm curious to know, what advice would you give to somebody who wanted to do that, who wanted to kind of take the leap like you and I have, and step into their own kind of world of consulting or coaching.

Leonard Scheiner 00:09:45

Awesome. I would say to someone who is looking to make that shift, whether you're in a freelance position now and you're looking to make that a little bit more official and go from freelance to being the CEO of a consulting firm or a creative firm or a marketing firm or a coaching company. Or even if you're in a nine to five right now, and you're in the corporate world and you're looking for it's, like you're driving down the freeway and every day is another mile, and you're just like, where's my exit? Right? If you're looking for that exit, some things that you can do before you actually make that leap is setting yourself up for success. And a few things that you want to do to make sure that you set yourself up for success is, look at this, you've got your work email, right? And if you're incorporated it's to the email of your employer, right? But what about yourself? What about your personal brand? So we want to look at setting up our personal brand, and we can do this without ruffling too many feathers in our corporate with our corporate boss. We can just start branding ourselves. So, you know, I've got the agency website. You know, the agency is Geekhouse, so we have gogeekows.com as the agency website. But me as myself, I have Leonardnardshiner.com. So I branded myself, basically, I was maybe a year into my career as doing legal marketing. And about a year in I started seeing things that I could share with people, like what's the difference between a copyright and a trademark? Right? What are the elements to every brand? What is this? What is that? And so my website at that time was kind of a blog. And this was years and years ago, so there wasn't this cadence of blogging that now we know today it needs to be okay once a week. That's ideal. Great. Well, this was along many, many years ago. And so I would just write what I thought and put it up there, right? It was not perfect. It was not perfect. It might have been polished from my standard at the time, but it was definitely not perfect. So what I did though is I established real estate online for myself, Leonardnardshiner.com. I own that. I will always own that. No one has the ability to now own my name from a website standpoint. So for anyone who is in a corporate nine to five, or if you're a freelancer, I would say first and foremost, before you know the name of your company or a partnership or whatever brand you might create, brand yourself. It is the safest way, because now I use the tools and what I've created in my personal brand and I parlay those forward into the agency.

Tracy Wilson 00:12:57

That is a great piece of advice and something I would echo. I think that is such an important thing. And a lot of people kind of tend to wait until, oh, no, I think I might want to go and do my own thing. Oh, I should create my personal brand. You want to start doing that as early on as you possibly can. And I want to say, like, for you guys that are listening today, you know, we love actionable steps in the unlock show. So Leonard has just given you one of those step today would be go away, jump on and see if you can actually purchase your own domain name. And if you're a little bit like me, Tracy Wilson is pretty common. I've had to go with Tracy M. Wilson. So if you've got to do a little bit of a variation on it, make sure you go and claim that. And I've talked about this on some other shows too, so you can go back and have a bit of a dig in my archives and you'll find some other shows where I've spoken about that in particular. So, Leonard, one of the things you talk about in the topic of today's conversation ride is about this first impressions. And you were saying that we only have a very short period of time, very kind of a minute, few moments to be able to create an impression online. Let's talk a little bit more about that because I'm assuming it's like when we ask here what's your digital breath is, it either snowing like roses or it doesn't stink. Tell us a little bit more about that. And what do you mean by that?

Leonard Scheiner 00:14:25

Yes, so when someone looks you up online because they're thinking about doing business with you, or they just want to check you out, maybe they've got a referral about you and they've already reached out to you and maybe you've already had a consultation. At some point, though, your potential client or potential customer is going to check you out online. So when they Google your name or they Google your company, but most of the time they're going to Google your name, what comes up? We really want to understand how we are being represented online. So think about it like this. If you get ready in the day, ready in the morning for the day, putting your shirt on, your blouse, on your shoes, you're doing your hair, and you walk out, and maybe there's toilet paper coming off of your shoe, right? That's always the funny thing that people have happened to them in movies, right? And so if you're walking out with toilet paper on your shoe and no one tells you, you kind of look silly the rest of the day. Well, this is basically the same thing, but the digital version. So if you're a coach for, I don't know, wellness, if you're a coach for business, if you're a coach for love and relationships, basically anything, or you're a dentist, or you're the local oil car, oil change place, it doesn't even matter what type of business you are. I know we're talking to coaches today, but really, any type of business, you're going to be looked up online. So we want to make sure that we have left the digital dust and the clues kind of like digital breadcrumbs, for someone to be able to build a relationship with us on their own online. Now, what do I mean by on their own online? If someone looks me up, I'm not there with them. They're on their own. And so they're looking me up, and they're finding the details that they have that are there, right, the results that are there. So they're going to see my website. They might see my agency site. They might see our LinkedIn profile. If you're in the press or if you're in the media, one of those articles might come up. So what I like to do when I have a new person come in and we're consulting with them or doing a consultation, I'll open up an incognito browser, and I'll just Google their name. John Smith. Very basic, right? Like, what would your average commonplace person search, right? John Smith, health coach. John Smith's, lawyer. John Smith. Maybe it's just John Smith. And so I want to see what comes up on that first page, because then it tells me what work we need to do. If you've got nothing coming up there, great. We need to create something for you so that your results are pulled in. Or if we look there and it's half good, half bad, how do we increase the good and how do we suppress the bad? So we go through all of that with our clients so that they understand this is what you're being met with, and we're looking at, okay, your next best competitor has 15 articles in the press. Well, we probably want to do something like that, too, so that we can be competitive with them.

Tracy Wilson 00:17:49

So on that note, when you're looking at something like that from either a standpoint of gosh, they've got nothing, there's no presence here, or, hey, they've got some sort of presence. What are some of the things that either a law firm or a professional like you and I could actually do to ensure that their digital footprint is actually a nice footprint to actually look at. How can we do that? So that it actually represents your firm, you as the individual, your company in the most positive light. What sort of things can they do?

Leonard Scheiner 00:18:29

We always want to be in that positive light, don't we? So this is why building your personal brand starts before you build your company brand. Doesn't need to, but often it does. It's beneficial if it does. So I started building my personal brand over ten years ago and I didn't start building my agency brand for Geekhaus until maybe four or five years ago. So when we're looking at these first steps that we want to take, I would say your website is definitely number one. So I got Leonardnardshiner.com fantastic second step. You will be amazed even today, less today, but still today. You will be amazed by how many people are impressed when you have your own email address. Now for my personal stuff, I use a Gmail address. So here's my three email formula. We're just making it up on the fly because this is what I use. I have a Gmail address that is personal and it's a version of my name, right? So you can either use your first name, last name you could use like, my name is Leonard, but some people call me Leonard, some people call me Lenny, or hey, you always works too. So you can use some version of your name. I would actually recommend that it's something where we don't immediately know that it's you. Here's why for like your health insurance company that you need to give them what email you're going to give them. Maybe I want to give some of my email and I don't want them to be able to research me online, right? Maybe I'm checking out at some store and they want to send me coupons and discounts. Well, I don't want to receive those, right? So you can give an email address that is at Gmail that is still yours and it's kind of incognito. So out of the three, that is the first one we all probably have that, right? I think we all have the flutteringbuttifies@gmail.com or something like that from years ago. So I use that email for those types of things. My second email is my email at my own website. So I have Leonardnard@Leonardnardshiner.com. When I had that ten years ago and people would see me write that on a contact form or whatever, immediately they were like, wow, I'm going to go check out that website, where they were like, wow, you have your own domain, you have your own website. It was a lot of impression that were positive in that first moment. So that's the second email and then the third is your business email. So I've got Leonardnard@gogeekows.com. So those are the three emails that I set up and I use them differently for each one of them. So I think that if you're starting your own brand or you're starting your own business, it's important to have some of those, if not all of them, because you want to use them differently for different things.

Tracy Wilson 00:21:50

That is great, separating things like that and giving everybody a real understanding of which ones we should have and why we should have them. Why should you? Most people say, well, why do I need to have three of them? I think that has provided a really solid explanation as to why. So let's kind of talk about this now. So now we've realized that from branding standpoint, we need to be branding ourselves. We understand that. We understand that we need to get by our own domains, create our own personal brand as well as our business. And then the email side of things, what are some other things like in terms of content creation? And I know you're going to relate this to law firms, but it's the same. The principles like you say are the same. So in terms of content, because nowadays we've made a huge shift from just the days of right, just create like a law firm, create some white papers or some articles. We are so much more than that. It's podcasting, it's live shows, it's blogs, it's personal posts, it's quotes, and the list of things goes on. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and some of the advice that you would give people as to what their digital content planner might look like?

Leonard Scheiner 00:23:14

Yeah. So when we're looking at content, content is under the umbrella of marketing and all marketing is an effort to be seen. So I think that's pretty well understood is that anything that we're posting, anything that we're putting out there, we want to be seen, right? And so if we're creating content, then what is the purpose? Right? That's always the question is who are we talking to? And actually Tracy, you and I talked about this, right? So it's like who are our listeners today? How can we best serve them right? This isn't for me and this isn't for you. I mean, of course it is to some degree, but really, who's benefiting from this conversation the most is those who are listening and those who can really implement. So if we're talking about content, we want to be sure that what we're talking about, whether that be static posts or blog posts or any of that. We want to relate it back to ourselves and the business while serving the audience. So let me break that down a little bit. So if I'm a lawyer or if I am really anything, I'm going to talk about something that's going on and then I'm going to relate that to how I can help. So for instance, we're talking about there's this conversation going around right now in the US that at a federal level they might ban non compete agreements. So a non compete agreement is I work for this tech company like Facebook, and I am a senior coder at Facebook. Well, I can't then go hop and go work for, let's say, YouTube, right? Because I've got a noncompete agreement. So let's just leave it there for plain terms, right? So if there's this non compete agreement, then I, as an individual, can't go work other places. And now how do I make a living, right? There's an issue going on. So if I'm an attorney and if I'm an employment attorney, either on the employer side or the employee side, I still have something to talk about, right? I can talk about it this way or I can talk about it that way, but how we talk about it is really key. So if I'm talking about that issue of we're looking into a federal ban of non compete agreements, well, I want to do a few things in my content. I want to educate you because that's why you're here. You want value. So I definitely want to deliver on the information that you're looking for. I want to educate you, give you some answers that hopefully you can't just Google and find yourself. So I want to educate you because that's what's going to keep you sticking around. I also want to encourage you so that it lifts you up a little bit. And so we've just talked about this really heavy thing that's happening, and then I'm going to encourage you about the positive outcome as it pertains to you, my audience, my ideal target, customer or client. I also want to entertain, though. So am I going to sit there and do all the stuff like this and entertain you? Excuse me? Or educate and encourage you like this? No, I want to entertain you because that's fun. So this is really where we get to pull our personality out and different platforms will look a little bit different, right? So on LinkedIn, we're going to be a little bit more professional about things, right? But if I'm on an Instagram story, I can be more of a butterfly. I could be more of an animated type of person because that fits the mode of the platform. So in any piece of content, I'm looking to educate, encourage, entertain, and then a little bit of sales and promotion, because I want to be all, book a call now, book a call now. Right? Whether you're a realtor or you're a health consultant or you're a marketer for attorneys, we don't want to be having the call to action. Always be sales, sale, sales. So I call it the three E's in S P. So educate, encourage, entertain, and then sales and promotion. That's what we want to make sure that we're accomplishing, either in an individual post, but really, in every post that we do, we can accomplish all of those. So you had asked about how do we approach that, right? So that's kind of how we put the content together. But how we approach that from a very bird's eye view is we want to be talking about the topics that our ideal customer or our ideal client are talking about. So I'll go on and I'll look at trending topics. On Google, there's a website called Answerthepublic.com, because it gives you the who, what, when, where, why on kind of like a wheel. And then it auto completes the question that you type in. So I can really understand what is being searched, which means that's what they have the questions about, and it gives you ratings, right. So if I'm searching how to launch my brand or if I'm searching how to brand a startup, those might be the same thing, but maybe not. So I'm looking at the Wording as well. It's very conversation driven, right? Like, what are people searching? So I'll look at that first, do a plan of the different blog topics that I might do or the different content ideas that I'll do. And just to tie a bow on this answer, I would look largely at what's being asked. I'd look at competitors, I'd put together a whole list of stuff, do research, and then out of that, look at the best topics that can be pulled from there. And then when we're writing on those topics, I like to do what I call the content waterfall method. So we will start with topics. We choose one as our first one. We write long form on that topic. So we'll do a long form blog from that long form blog. The reason why we want to do it as long form is because if your website is set up correctly, the Google Bots, yes, they're called the Google bots, will come and scrub and scrape and crawl your site for all the key details. Now, if we're having them crawl a page and only has 600 words, because that's your blog, you're only going to get 600 words crawled. But we really effort to have it around 1800 words. Reason is the Google bots will scrape up until about 1800 words on any given page. So we want to be able to so if they're coming for the buffet, let's just deliver to them the buffet. Right. So that's our link. Also, if we've got that much length, we can pull out parts of that long form blog and waterfall those down into social content. So it's the most efficient and effective way to really produce professional content that's coming where we kind of need some insight from an expert or a professional.

Tracy Wilson 00:31:06

What I really love about this, Leonard, is that there's a real system and a process around this, and it's not just coming from, hey, this is what I think you should do. This is actually coming from many, many years of testing, research, factual data that backs up that this is actually the tried, true, proven method to build a brand that stands a piece. Of time that gives you a foundation to continue to launch pad from which I like. And that waterfall method, it is such a clever thing because I mentioned this to you before we jumped on the show. I do a similar thing with even these shows, right? The fact that I can do a live show like this, have somebody that knows what they're talking about, such as you come and speak on this particular topic, enables me to stream to multiple platforms at the same time. Enables me then to take that one piece of material, like we were saying, give them the buffet. We're providing a buffet now. And then we come back in and we go, okay, now, what were the pertinent points out of that particular thing that we now can pull out and we can now create as other content for other platforms? And all of a sudden, it kind of takes away, I suppose, that challenge that a lot of people kind of hit me with as a marketing agency was, well, how am I going to create that much content? It's going to take me a whole lot of time, right? You have just, like, bang, squashed that argument flat on the ground. I mean, there is no longer that argument because that one piece of content that you've enabled people to create has now become a piece of content that is continuing to work for them for a long period of time. And I want to go a little bit further on that because one of the things you do talk about is like this concept of leverage. And we've sort of touched on this a little bit, but maybe we can talk a little bit more about that and get people to understand. When we're creating the material online and we're creating a brand, give them the kind of 500 foot view of why that's so important, and then let's bring it back in and say, well, you know, we've talked a little bit about the article or the the 1800 word piece of material, and we've broken that up. What other things can they do? So let's start high and then let's bring it in a little bit closer to home.

Leonard Scheiner 00:33:45

Awesome. So if you are an expert and you have a wealth of knowledge, we want you to be sharing that, right? That's what is going to attract people to you. So long gone are the days where you would get a referral for a doctor and then call that doctor's office, make sure they're in your insurance, and then go, now we get that referral from maybe our GP or general practitioner, and then we do a lot of research online, right? So we definitely want to make sure that we are satisfying every place online that someone could look. Let me digest that a little bit. So does that mean that we all need to be on YouTube and Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and TikTok and bing, bang and bangjang. No, we don't. We don't need to be on all of them, but we do need to secure our placement on them. This is what I mean. So I am not an avid Twitter poster. Admitted, I am not, but when something is posted to another platform, we also post it there, right? So that's great. I'm also, again, not a Twitter poster. So what if I didn't want to share stuff there and I'm just against Twitter for whatever reason? Well, then we at least want to secure your profile. We want to secure your name. We want to have something up there that at least says health coach or foot doctor or something, right? We want there to be a result for them to find. The worst thing that someone can do is no accounts found or something like that. So going back to your question of what's our big view and then going into more specific view. So I look at that again. It's called content waterfall method. So I'm looking at did we have anything that is very noisy? And what I mean by that is like national press. Did you have an article, did you appear on a news program? Do you have any nominations? So in the lawyer realm, there's many nominations, super lawyers, rising star this, that are always rolling, right? And so every industry usually has awards and sometimes you just have to put your hat in the ring for it sometimes appears to nominate you. But in any event, if you've got some press or a claim, we want to take that and pop it down one rung of the waterfall. And so if we've just got an article, let's say, let's say we just got an article in Bloomberg Law, which we did for a client just a few weeks ago, so we took that article for him that was in Bloomberg, and we broke that down into a blog because we have content that is off site. We want to duplicate that on our site. So it's not a copy and paste, obviously, but it's talking about the same topic and then referencing back to that blog that's on Bloomberg, right? So we're having a hyperlink in there. So we go from a big piece of press, maybe then we talk about a blog. Or maybe we turn that piece of press into a white paper. Or we want to take that and distill it down into another piece of content. So let's say we do it with a blog, right? So we've taken a long feature article in Bloomberg Law and we've broken that down into a blog for our own website. And then, well, what do we do with the blog that's on our website? We need to get it out to people. How do we do that? So we're going to take that blog and like I mentioned earlier, we're going to pick out parts of it for social, but we're also going to take that blog and do an email campaign about it. And so that email a campaign, multiple different emails. We might do one email or might do a few emails based on how juicy and how information rich or educational rich that piece is. But the gist of that is that we would go from national press down to a blog and then we would have that in maybe a YouTube script, right? I can read the blog on YouTube. Or maybe we just stay with an email blast and then we take that out and do an email campaign so that all of our people on our list know about this topic that we just discussed. The key there is that if we're sending them to the Bloomberg article, which we definitely could do, or if we're sending them to our blog, which do you think would be better, sending them straight to Bloomberg or sending them to the blog? Well, if you guessed sending them to the blog, you are a winner because that is going to get traffic going to our site, right? So as many clicks, as many visits as we can get to our site, the better. Now on that blog, we might have them click in the email, go to the blog, and then on the blog it says, this is a digest from whatever, right? It doesn't matter. But we want to get them to our site. So I really want to be conscious of where we're directing our traffic to because it's traffic and every click counts. So assume we've got our blog written, we blast that out, maybe there's a few emails or just one email on that. Great. Then we're on the other side. We're also going to create social content. So that could be an Instagram post, could be a carousel. And then from that we can do reels and videos and anything else that we want to do. So that's our view. We start with large press and acclaim, work it down into some quarterstone content, some blogs, some white papers, maybe a free guide. And then we put that on social. Long life. Long Life social being like a LinkedIn article around for a long time, but then we look at short life social, which is a story, which is only up stories 24 hours. Yeah.

Tracy Wilson 00:40:08

That's a great explanation. And I know one of the things you talk about is like when we're looking at this, the reason I got you to kind of start at that 50,000 foot view is because we need to be looking there first, right? It's like setting us up for scale long term. When you start there, it gives you that view, that bird's eye view of going, okay, well, where am I going with this? What am I going to be focusing on? What do I want my brand to say about me? How am I going to make all of that work and then bringing the content in and saying, well, now what really matters? So what matters to the people who I'm going to be speaking to, what matters to them? And I think I've heard this terminology. It goes back quite some time in my marketing journey. But you've alluded to this that you're finding hot topics, finding things that are topical in the moment right now that people are searching. And I heard this term, it was called newsjacking that's like, grab it. Oh, that's what's going on where the ears are listening. Let's grab that piece of content. Now, how does that actually relate to me? How does that with my skills, my expertise and my experience, how can I add value to that conversation? Continue the conversation. Like you said, give it a positive, a positive spin based on that, what's going on in the market, this is what you can do. This is how we can navigate it. This is how you can benefit from it. This is how you can whatever the thing is. But from a positive standpoint, like you're saying, when you do it that way, rather than going down the rabbit hole of it's all, negative people are like, wow, I'm going to listen to more of what Leonard's got to say because I actually walk away from or move away from reading his information, listening to his information, consuming his information. Feeling better? And when I feel better about it, I am more likely to go and take some action about it. Because the fact of the matter is people want to hang out with positive people. That actually gives them the strength, the power, the knowledge to be able to do something about whatever their situation is. So I love that and I know for sure it works every single time. Now let's go here. So some could use that strategy, right, and become really clever and go, I'm going to use that strategy and I am just going to make myself look like that online. But behind the scenes, maybe on their personal pages and stuff. It's not quite doesn't gel that way. Let's talk a little bit about that and what your advice is on that. And I mean, to me, you can't hide in this world anymore. The truth shines like it's so loud and clear in any which way you cut things, the truth always prevails. So let's talk a little bit about that. And have you seen that happen before?

Leonard Scheiner 00:43:13

I have seen many cases of that. So here's one thing I'll share from the very top. Who you are behind closed doors will eventually be found out. Sorry, the cat's out of the bag. So what does that mean for those who are listening here today? Like who I am behind closed doors? Okay, so I'm a goofball behind closed doors, but I'm really professional, out and about. All right, that's fine. That's not an issue, right? Because in this modern day of marketing, there is a term that's very overused and the term is authentic, but it is very true. So I'll use it here just to use it a little bit more. We want to be authentic in what we're creating and how we're bringing that out, right? So earlier I talked about the three E's in S and P. So you'll remember I said educate, encourage, entertain, and then sales and promotion. So that entertainment portion is our personality, right? There's no other Tracy Wilson, there's no other Leonard Scheiner and there's also no other you the listener. So if you think that you're not good enough let's just say it if you think that you're not good enough and you've got imposter syndrome, the best way to cure that is to start getting validation from outside, right? We can do the personal development work that we want to. And let me tell you, your business will never grow further than your own personal development, hands down. And the mood and the culture of your business, whether it's totally virtual or whether you have a brick and mortar office, it is impacted by you the founder and the CEO. If you think people come to work because they love what they're doing or they're coming to work for the wage, that's great. But there's a saying, and I don't know who said it, but employees leave bad managers. They don't leave bad companies. And it's true because you want to work with people that you like to work with. So who you are behind closed doors will always come out. And I say this because as a professional, whether you're an attorney or whether you're a doctor, whether you're a therapist, or whether you're a financial services adviser, people will do research and they will find out about you. So we want to make sure that who you are in your professional profile isn't too far away from your personal profile. So this is what I get a lot. I get a lot of how do I combine my personal brand and my professional brand? My personal brand, I'm a mom and I like to run and maybe I play softball or something like that, but that's not really what my clients want. I'm over here doing legal work for my clients, and maybe I'm doing mergers and acquisition. And my big time clients don't care that I'm a runner. They don't want to see me smiling with my two year old baby on my shoulder. How does that really combine? Or they're afraid. So I've got photos of me in a bar on my personal profile. I don't want my professional people to see that or personally. I've got this thing and there's a disconnect. So what I would say is that you get to show all of you, right? You get to show up. If you're a runner, great. If you're a pottery maker, great. If you've got a two year old, great, right? You get to be fully you. But we want to craft the narrative on our professionally facing channels that is professional. So do I want to have a grainy photo of me and my two year old on my professional profile? Probably not, unless I'm running a kid's daycare or a kid's gym or something related to kids, right? So I've seen this done before where an attorney will want to bifurcate their two personalities. And I caution that because of the fact that people will always find it, right? Even if it's under butterfly one, two, three, you're still going to get found in some way so you can have two and just own it. This is my personal, this is where I post photos of my kids. This is for my family. Great, but you're not hiding anything. And then you have your secondary professional, la La Firm or Lalala Coaching Company or whatever that is professional. Where you're giving advice, you're educating, you're encouraging. Here's the crux. You can have those two. People might see them both, you can try to keep them separated and you might do a good job of keeping them separated. But let's make sure that who you are is the same on both. So if you're very outgoing on one, let's be very outgoing because that's who you are personally, right? So we just want to make sure that the who you are is the same because otherwise we start looking fake. It starts you're trying to be someone else and we don't want that. We want you to be just you. Right? And then the second part of the.

Tracy Wilson 00:49:01

And what I say to that, Leonard, I was just going to say, and let's face it, it's much easier just to be you. Just own it, embrace it, be you. So much more difficult to try and kind of separate those two. And I've seen others try and do that like you have in the past and it's a challenge. So, yeah, like, Leonard, you just got to just be you. You are unique. You are amazing. Just to be all of you and embrace that. Sorry, go ahead with point number two.

Leonard Scheiner 00:49:31

Yeah, I was going to answer your other point about you can see what content is working and what content is not. So I had a client and I was just on the call with him last week and we were looking at his video marketing strategy and I was like, look at the posts that you have. These are like 600 views. 600 and 3645 hundred and 90. They're all about in the 600 range. And then we had one video and it had 500 views. And I was like, look at this. What were you talking about in that video that resonated so much more with people than the others? Did you boost this? Did you post otherware another place? Did you share it with someone who shared it with their people? Like what happened with this one piece of content that made it go wild. Like wildfire. Right. And there's nothing that my client there's nothing that he did that made it anything special. It's just because of what he was saying, the message landed. And so that's something that, over time, whether you're spending ad money on different pieces of ad content or it's just your regular profile that you're posting on, look at the metrics. So there's a famous person who said, what's not measured cannot be improved. And I don't know who said it, but it's very true. If you're not measuring things, it's hard to improve them. So what's nice is that we can see how many shares, how many likes, how many views and all that stuff. So we almost end up with, like, a media heat map. So of all the posts that have been done, we can see the ones that are the hottest. And so what we do with our clients is I look at that and we review it together and we identify what the audience is most interested in. If we're always talking about sales or we're always talking about bettering your gut health, or we're always talking about being a better partner right. Or whatever that might be, and it's resonating with people. Okay, my friend, it's time to double down on that strategy, because that means that your audience wants more of that from you. Why not give it to them?

Tracy Wilson 00:51:55

Yes, absolutely. I agree. So before we kind of round out today's show, Leonard, I want to because one of the things that I think is going to be on a lot of people's minds is, man, I want to be able to do all of this, but I don't necessarily have the skills to be able to do it myself. I get it. I understand what I've got to do, but I just kind of need this plan, and maybe I need somebody to work with me. How can the average business that's not a massive law firm kind of get the help that they might need to employ a marketing agency? What sort of things could they do?

Leonard Scheiner 00:52:35

The first question I would ask myself if I was that person and I'm looking at doing it myself, is, can I do it myself? So Russell Brunson, who is the CEO of ClickFunnels, he is a master at this. And and I'll adopt his thought when he says it's not the what you need to do because you know the what you know the next 510 20 what you need to do. Right. I need to it's your to do list. So it's not the what you need to do, it's the who. So, like myself, right? If I sat down and I built a funnel let's just stay with the theme. If I sit down and I built a funnel for XYZ product, okay, it might take me a few days and it might be done four out of five stars, but if I hire someone to do that and I give them the direction. So everything that's in my mind, I'm going to get down on paper because no one's a mind reader. So I'm going to detail that out on paper in writing, in black and white. Not a video. Or I gave you video feedback like, okay, wonderful, but I want a checklist that someone can go down like black and white, right? So I'm going to get all of that out of my head and then I'm going to give that to an amazing funnel designer and let him or her use their expert skills to do what I need to do. The what I need to do. So obviously that takes a little bit of resources because we have to hire someone to do that. But the thought is there that if you're trying to do it yourself, you're going to be frustrated and annoyed and it's going to come out four out of five stars. Whereas if you hire someone to do it, the who now I'm not worried about it now. Someone else is responsible for it and it's going to come out five out of five stars. Hopefully six out of five stars because they were the best person at that. So when it comes to hiring a marketing company, I would use the same principle. If you know how to do marketing, being Facebook ads, YouTube ads, and then shooting those videos, creating the graphics. What about email marketing? Crafting the cold emails, gathering the cold emails, putting that together, if you honestly do not know where to start, have a few meetings with a few agencies. And I would actually probably not like that if it was done to me, right, because we're doing a consult and it's just tire kicking is what it's called. But attend shows like this, have a few agencies or maybe just a marketing consultant, give a little bit of context into, oh, that's how I would do that. Because the strategy is going to look different for everyone. Some people are going to love to do a Facebook group and go live in there and some people are going to be like, oh my gosh, I don't want to be on camera, so I'm just going to do cold email. Any strategy can be effective if it's executed well. One thing that I want to tell your people though, as it comes to building the brand is getting that external validation. So if you're looking at really any type of business, right, from a hairstylist, to a lawyer to the best falafel restaurant, because I love falafel, or anywhere you go, any type of business, any entrepreneur, any expert, you're an expert at something. So don't discount that. And here's the next piece of advice, so don't discount that you're an expert in something. And secondly, always be leveraging that. So if I see a heat map of content and I see some things and it's a consistent theme, I might offer a workshop on that. I might offer a challenge based off of that. I might do a webinar series based off of that topic, right? Those are all things that I can do and I can kind of do them myself, right? But how do you go about getting that high level press and a claim, right? So most of the times you are hiring a very large or a PR agency with a very high retainer. And so today I want to provide all the listeners with a few free options that you can do to work to get press. So there are three websites that I'm going to share with you and it's how you can connect with your best journalist on your topic, right? And so whether you're in relationships or health or this or that, there are articles being written every day about nearly every topic that you can think of. So the first one is, let me just give all three of them to you. So Journal link and then Haro H-A-R-O help a reporter out and quoted Q-W-O-T-E-D. So all of those are platforms, websites that anyone can go to create an account. And then you can see some of the things that journalists or reporters are looking for in terms of expert commentary. So I've gotten placement on a variety of different sites where I found them on one of those databases and it's like, hey, we need someone who talks about professional sales. Hey, we need someone who talks about branding. Hey, we need someone who talks about getting PR or press coverage for small consulting businesses, or how do we get press coverage for smaller consultants or consultants that no one knows about? Right? This is how we do it. So this is how you can do it. We've got a few other ions in the fire when we take on clients, of course, but these are three ways that have actually been shared with me over the years at different times. And each one of these was like an AHA moment because you can really gain so much opportunity just from these. So I hope that that was three nuggets of amazing gold for your audience.

Tracy Wilson 00:59:20

I was just thinking in my head the number of gold nuggets that have been dropped in today's show. And I'm sure that if listeners go back and relisten to this, you really should have a pen and paper out and just take notes of everything that Leonard has talked about today and go away and take some action. Now, him and I, this has been a jampacked show. We're at the top of the hour and we could keep going talking about this stuff. Like I said right at the beginning of today's show, Leonard is an expert when it comes to working with legal firms and the like, but what he's spoken about today is very, very relevant across every field. It doesn't matter we've talked about everything from personal branding through to big corporate branding. These things that he's spoken about today apply. So I want you to take note of them. That's how you can really start to you're going to be competing with the big guns when you're talking about multi million dollar firms that have got big budgets. Just by applying these few principles that Leonard has shared today, you will be competing with them. And there are ways of you being able to do it very smartly with not a lot of money and just being really clear about what it is that you're wanting to do. Start at that 50,000 foot view and work your way down. So I want to say a huge, big thank you to you. I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I hope that we will be able to continue this conversation further down the track and we'll have you back again as a guest on The Unlock Show. But for those of you that watch today, you guys know that I always say you've got to take action. You've sat, you've listened to us for an hour now. This information is going to be of absolutely no use to you whatsoever unless you take action. So that is your task for this week, is to go away and do the things that we've spoken about in today's show. And inch by inch, step by step, you will eventually create yourself an amazing brand. So also, I want to let you guys know, if you want to tune in, you want to listen to other episodes of The Unlock Show, you need to head on over. You can find me on all the major platforms, but you can also get this as a podcast. I'm also on all the major podcasting platforms. I speak about this as well as multiple other things in relation to your personal development and business development. So if you are into that, then the Unlock Show is for you. I will continue to bring you that type of information with amazing guests just like Leonard. So thank you very, very much, Leonard. Like I said, I thoroughly enjoyed this. I know our audience will enjoy this, and I continue to wish you all the very best with your business. And for those of you that want to tune into another live episode of The Unlocked Show, we are live every single Wednesday, 10:00 a.m. Brisbane time. And so before I tune out, like I always say, go and live your life unlocked, because there is just no other way. Bye, everybody. See you again next time.