The Surprising Power of Combining Long-Form and Short-Form Creativity for Explosive Business Growth with Luis & Fonzi Camejo

0:02Who's ready to rock today Fire Nation JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network with great shows like marketing against the grain. Today, we'll be breaking down the surprising power of combining long form and short form creativity for explosive business growth. To drop these value bombs, I brought Luis and Fonzie Camejo into EO Fire Studios. These are two brothers from Venezuela, and they came to the USA on soccer scholarships after cold emailing 300 coaches. They turned entrepreneurs and started selling vinyl stickers door to door, and they now run a successful podcast platform as part of the HubSpot podcast network.

0:39and help entrepreneurs kickstart their publishing. And today, Fire Nation, we will be talking about the surprising power of combining long-form and short-form creativity for explosive business growth. We'll be talking about setting up your own pipeline platform. We'll talk about how and why speed is critical in today's world and how you can monetize content and how fast you can do that, why content is king, and the role of content in your ecosystem, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to our sponsors. Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

1:17Business Made Simple takes the mystery out of growing your business with episodes like how to get out of your day-to-day operations without crashing your business. Listen to Business Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. Skip the trip to the grocery store and skip the chopping, prepping, and cleaning up too. Factor, America's number one ready-to-eat meal kit, can help you fuel up fast with meals delivered straight to your door. Head to factormeals.com slash EOFire40 and use code EOFire40 to get 40 % off your first box. All right, Fire Nation, we are about to dive into a fantastic episode about the surprising power of combining long-form and short-form creativity for explosive business growth.

2:01And I am bringing in two brothers from another mother. They are also part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. As I mentioned at the beginning of the show, we've gotten to hang out in person, have some amazing dinners together, Luis and Fonzie. And I want to start with you, Luis. I really want to talk about the six phases of profitable content because I love breaking things down into steps, into processes, into phases. So what are those six phases of profitable content? Yeah, absolutely, John. And thank you for having us in your amazing platform. So, you know, across the years and we have a production company, but we've also produced content for ourselves and we try to communicate with our team in many ways.

2:43And we're trying to figure out this way on how can we set it up in a way that is replicable. We can replicate it with the people that we help and also in our team. So phase one, right, is the what you say thing, right? So a lot of the people that come to us or even ourselves when we're trying to do the podcast was, hey, what do we actually talk about? We actually recorded 20 episodes. And then after that, we're like our minds went blank. Right. And then so that's normally like phase one, trying to figure out there's different ways that we can do that. Then phase two is the creation, the actual creation of that content.

3:16Right. So for us, it came just on the video side, on the podcasting side. That's where we found our home, specifically live podcasting. So we actually do the live production. And then, but for other people, it might be just writing, writing the blog. And that's, what's your creation process that feels good to you first, right? Because if we don't feel good initially, then it's going to be really hard to keep consistent. The third phase is a production part of it. Like that creation that we have now, it's like, what's the outcome? What is the final asset that we're actually going to do? Is this live podcast going to turn into an audio podcast as well that gets published a week later?

3:53Is it going to have multipurpose and we're going to create clips out of it? Like what's that outcome that we really want to achieve, right? And this can change depending on if you are a solopreneur or an entrepreneur or a company with massive resources, right? This can vary in different volume. Right after that is a piece that we call easy piece of the distribution, right? How are we actually going to get our message out there to the world? Where are we, you know, plugging our message? Is there a network? Is there a specific platform? Is it multiple platforms? And we have to keep this in mind as we work in the process, because obviously we want to impact as many people as possible in our marketing, our niche, in people that we want to listen.

4:32And then right after that, we distribute the content. Then how do we actually connect it to our business? How do we make money from it? So there's obviously different ways. For us specifically, it's through the relationships that we build in our show. But for other people, it might be affiliate marketing. It might be presenting an offer to somebody. It might be, you know, running ads in massive distribution to a book funnel, for example. Depending on your type of business, there's going to be different ways on how you can connect that content that you're creating into your business. And then after that is how do we actually manage all of these stages, right?

5:05Like what's the process that we use? What's the team that we have to manage? What are the stages on the production side? What are the stages on the creation side? So this is very macro view. But as we start diving into one of these, I think it's super important to keep those in mind just to make sure that we have a structure on how can we stay consistent and actual profit from the content that we create. I love those six phases. I love how you broke those down. Before we move on to the next topic, Fonzie, is there anything that you want to dive into with these six phases of profitable content?

5:33I mean, honestly, it's a structure for you to do things in a repeatable manner, right? Because a lot of times with content creation specifically, what we notice is that every time somebody wants to start something new, they feel that they have to start it from scratch. When in reality, it's like, hey, it's simple. You got these six steps, pretty much fill in the blanks, and you're going to make it consistent from now on. So at the end of the day, we don't have to reimagine the process and do things over and over again. And this framework for us has worked for over 400 podcast episodes, right? So at first, we didn't really have that process.

6:14The more we did it, we started kind of like discovering and putting the pieces together. But now every single time we're going to do something, we just follow those six steps. Listen, every one of these six phases, Fire Nation is incredibly important. And I want to laser focus in on two. Distribution. That's so critical. That's something you need to be thinking about. And again, that's going back to one reason why Fonzie, Luis, myself, Jenna Kuchar, Amy Porterfield, Donald Miller, and so many other great content creators and podcasters specifically have joined a network like the HubSpot Podcast Network because it helps with distribution.

6:47I'm right now promoting Amy Porterfield's show during my sponsorships. I mean, that's huge for her because my listeners are hearing about her show, and that's happening for my show across different platforms as well. So distribution can be key. And then another one I want to really focus on is making money because at the end of the day, Fire Nation, we can say we're going to go out there and just try to add value to the world, and I want you to do that. But you can't keep adding value to the world unless you're being profitable, unless you're making money. That has to be part of the process. So, Fonzie, there's something called the publishing pyramid.

7:16Let's dive into how the publishing pyramid can help get the process started that we want. First, what is the publishing pyramid? And then secondly, how can it help us get this process started? Yeah, absolutely. The publishing pyramid is actually another one of the frameworks that we can like stumble upon as we were creating content. And it actually came out from another podcast question. They asked us, what is the process that you guys follow to create? And right there on that moment, we started talking and we realized that it all fit into this pyramid of sorts, right? So when we started publishing content, like I mentioned before, we thought about recreating things over and over again.

7:58But also we were, and I'm doing here air quotes, victim of all of the random advice that you can find online. And we thought we could operate at the level of people that have teams behind them and they have these different amount of resources, right? Totally different capacity than you can have. So we started operating at that level and what we found was quick burnout, right? And I'm sure some of those listening right now might find this a little bit relatable. You might think, you know what? I'm actually tired of trying to put all this content at all this volume at this scale, right? When in reality, we started kind of like looking back into the process.

8:38Okay, what is the most important piece for us? Is it the quality of the production? Fun fact, we actually tried to start a previous podcast, which we only recorded five episodes and we published none. Why? Because the quality of the production was way, way ahead of what we could actually handle at the moment. So what we decided to do was, OK, quality of the message over quality of the production at first. That is going to become the foundation of our pyramid. So when we discovered that, we just started focusing on the message. Right. Are we saying the right thing? Is it resonating with the audience?

9:14Yes. Awesome. How can we be consistent with this? and consistency became the second part of the pyramid. How many times a week can we actually publish about this, talk about this, X, Y, and Z, right? Again, there's not a one size fits all solution for everybody, but for us, it worked going live every single day. What we decided to do was, guess what? Do we have 15 minutes a day? Just so you know, 50 minutes of your day is only 1 % of your day. Do you have 1 % of your day to potentially create something that can impact lots and lots of people. So for us, it was a no-brainer. We did have 15 minutes a day and not to spell something here, but if you look at your usage on your phone, let me tell you, you're going to find those 15 minutes pretty, pretty easy because I'm sure you might, you know, be investing those in social media already.

10:05So once we decided to go live for 15 minutes every single day, then we, you know, we had a challenge. Where do we distribute this? And you were talking about distribution. For us, it was a matter of leveraging already where the eyeballs are, where the attention is. So for us, it was just, okay, can we actually repurpose now this live into other social medias? And we discovered that now those 15 minutes that we had to create content, actually it expanded a little bit more because of the distribution. So we had to start thinking about our capacity. Do we have the capacity to distribute in all these platforms?

10:40So that is the third part of the pyramid, capacity. And once we started doing that, something amazing happened. On day 15 of what we call a 45 live challenge, which, you know, pretty self-explanatory, we went live for 45 days in a row. We actually closed at that time what was the biggest deal for us, just from being consistent on social media. And that allowed us to have more resources to invest all over again in the pyramid. So the very top of the publishing pyramid is resources. And once we get more of those, we decided to invest in them back into the message. So now you can run ads to get feedback quickly.

11:19Right. You can increase your consistency. Right. You can post more. Now you can also increase your capacity because guess what? You can hire labor and now you have somebody else's eight, 12 hours extras that they can invest into publishing or help you create your content, increase the quality of it, etc. And then the product of that is you gain more resources that you get to invest back into the publishing pyramid. Fire Nation, there's so much to take away from this. I think it's so critical for you to step back and realize that you can implement so much of what Fonzie just shared into your business.

11:55But one thing that I want to repeat is quality of message as the focus. Quality of message as the focus. I love that point. We're going to be talking about so much more all around this topic. when we get back from thanking our sponsors. We all want the same things for our business. More leads, faster sales, and better insights so we can serve our customers at the highest level. One thing we all don't want, to waste time and money trying to figure these things out. So what's the solution? A CRM that's easy to set up and customize. Sounds too good to be true, right? But this CRM exists and it's called HubSpot.

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13:41And I promise you won't get bored with their menu. With 34-plus chef-prepared, dietitian-approved weekly options, there's always something new to try. This May, get Factor, and enjoy clean eating without the hassle. Simply choose your meals and enjoy fresh, flavor-packed meals delivered to your door. Head to factormeals.com slash EOFire40 and use code EOFire40 to get 40 % off your first box. That's code EOFire40 at factormeals.com slash EOFire40 to get 40 % off your first box. We're back and Fonzie, we're going to keep it with you because I want to talk about setting up your own pipeline platform, B2B.

14:20Tell us more about this. Yeah, this was actually a pretty cool realization that we came across as well. I feel like all these realizations have come through taking action, right? Which at the end of the day is kind of like the basis of content. Like nothing happens if you don't put your message out there into the world. So what happened is after we did those 45 live, we had some local clients here in town. And, you know, 2020 came in and with that madness and all of a sudden we lost 80 % of our customers. because, again, local clients, they shut down. We were left with lots of times in our hand.

14:58So what we decided to do was start our own podcast. We only had one online client at the moment, and we decided to kind of model what he was doing, three podcasts a week. So that's what we started doing. Eventually, we started bringing in guests into the podcast, and shortly, we actually realized, wow, these are the people we would love to work with. These are our ideal customer or ideal partners or honestly, our ideal friends. We just want to increase the value of our network. So what ended up happening is that in around three months, we recovered that 80 % of the business that we lost at the beginning of 2020.

15:36And then we managed to scale the business and we managed to bring in actually six people for in-house team to help us out with everything we were doing. And that's about the time that we discovered the value of having your own platform. And for us, that was a podcast. But guess what? It doesn't necessarily have to be a podcast. The basis of it is for it to be a collaborative based platforms that allows you to connect with deal makers or people that are going to help you find and connect opportunities for your business to move forward. So there is actually a lot that goes into the pipeline platform.

16:13but I want people to think about it on how can I use collaboration to open doors and increase the value of my network. Because at the end of the day, that is the most basic part of it that is going to help you increase the profits inside of your business. Literally about 90 % of the business, of our business, has come through the podcast, whether that is the guest becoming our client or the guest introducing us to our next client. Again, it's incredible, the pipeline platform. We absolutely love it. And actually this year we have started to talk more about it because in the previous two years, we were more of the recipients of it.

16:55And now we're like, wow, you know what? We've actually, I feel like we've become a little bit of an evangelist on the pipeline platform. So it's been absolutely amazing. And yeah, I hope people lean more into collaborative platforms themselves. I mean, Fire Nation, think about it. 90%, 90%. That is such a massive number and really exciting when you really dig into it and think about what that could do for your business. And Luis, this really brings up the fact that speed is critical in today's world. How fast could one monetize content? Let's talk about the actual speed involved here. Yeah, absolutely.

17:33I'm a true believer that since day one, right, and it ties back to the six phases and it ties back to the publishing pyramid, ties out to the pipeline platform, right? So for us, it took us about a couple of weeks because that was the amount of time where we decided that, okay, we need to bring somebody into our platform and that presented the opportunity to explore business together, right? And we're talking in the business sense. so there's different aspects or different versions of this depending on like what you're selling right you know we can talk from low ticket so that process if it's a little bit more automated on a low ticket item it might take a little bit more it might take a little bit more resources because we're running ads into maybe a funnel or maybe a thing and just we gotta measure that process but for us really when we run into this problem of okay we gotta generate some revenue right away because if not we're gonna run out of money we're freelancing at the time it was okay what's the fastest path to cash what's the fastest path to somebody that could potentially point us in the right direction whether they become a client whether they become a partner whether they become a referral source and for us was bringing that person into our platform and having a conversation and exploring possibilities after that right you become a friend you build that relationship and then I'm okay with doing that ask so now we're seeing content as this vehicle where I can build that relationship and ask the person behind the camera or behind the mic, if there's something, if we resonate on the message and we resonate on the relationships, I'm sure there's something that we can do together.

19:03So for us, since day one, we have a very funny story. Actually, our older brother, he lives in Colombia and he wanted to work with us. And we're like, hey, do you speak English? And he's like, no, I don't speak English. I'm like, okay, I'm so sorry. You cannot work with us because we do everything in English. But here's what we'll do. Well, what about we set up your platform, right? We try to sell services down in South America. So his, his tryout to be able to do this was to run through the 45 live challenge, right? And through this process, he got used to publishing consistently and building his own process.

19:31And then after that, we decided to launch a show of, of just him, right? He, he found his message. He found what he really wanted to do. And, but he wanted to also generate cash very quickly. And what he wanted to do was train corporate teams. That was his background. That's what he did. And we're like, OK, perfect. Who's somebody that you can bring onto your platform that you can have this amazing conversation to build on one side is authority, relevancy, trust with the people that tune into your show consistently. Right. But at the same time, that person can provide to you an opportunity for a conversation for a next step in what you want to do.

20:05and it took him about 40 episodes to listen to us. And he was bringing all these amazing people that had an incredible content. And then he finally was like, oh my gosh, like there's nothing, like I really need money for next month, right? And he's like, okay, well, here's the thing. Let's brainstorm who's the next person that you're gonna bring that you can actually present an opportunity. No of the first guests, even though the content was amazing, it didn't present an immediate opportunity for him, which that's what he needed at the time. So then he was able to bring this HR representative who then after the interview, they build this amazing, incredible trust and report.

20:40And Mario was actually able to present an offer for them. And she's like, you know, guess what? My company would love this, but we don't have the budget. But let me introduce you to a different company. And he was able to provide training for 200 sales representatives right after that episode. Right. So if we use content as a vehicle to collaborate and build these relationships, opportunities will come from day one. Fire Nation, you're taking notes. I'm taking notes. I mean, this is so much valuable stuff with you looking to grow your business, not just over time, but we're talking about now. And Fonzie, let's bring this home with a bang, brother, because content is king.

21:15So let's talk about the role of content in our ecosystems. Yeah, absolutely. And at the very beginning, we promised, not kind of, we actually promised about the combining long form and short form content for explosive business growth. And this is where is that I know we've talked about platforms, about podcasting, which are all long form pieces of content. And funny enough, actually, YouTube, right, one of the, if not the biggest player in content out there, actually released an article talking that one of the things to pay the most attention to was the relationship between long form and short form content.

21:53So you're putting all this effort into creating your podcast into your platform, right, whatever it is, It is a long form piece of content. You can leverage that to create short form piece of content and start building more of your content ecosystem. Guess what? You want credibility. And every single time somebody is going to see you, they might go press on your profile and search for that credibility. At first, it might be implied credibility. As soon as they see you. Right. For example, if they see us talking to John, they're going to be like, whoa, those two brothers, they must have a lot of credibility.

22:27Right. That is implied credibility. Next step, they might go check on our profile. And if we have our content organized, answering the questions of the people that we want to help of the market. Right. We have our message again, the foundation of the publishing pyramid. We have our message in place. We're going to earn that credibility. So that is super important and that's why you need your content ecosystem to be on point is because people are going to judge you from the very first second that they see you and your content answering questions delivering value is going to present them with opportunities and it's going to present you with opportunities to grow your business.

23:07We have a saying, we say consistency is art. And consistency when publishing creates art, which is an acronym for authority, relevancy, and trust. Every single time you put your message out there, you're earning that authority, that relevancy, and that trust of the people that you want to help. So leverage the efforts that you have, right? measure your capacity, measure your resources. And based on that, you can leverage the long form pieces of content, extract some of the best pieces and share them so you can start funneling people into your world, into your ecosystem. Straight fire, Fire Nation.

23:49And Luis, I want you to take us home, my man. What is just the one key takeaway that you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from everything that we talked about, you know, from the six phases of profitable content, all the way down to the publishing pyramid, that pipeline platform. You know, we talked about so much great stuff. What is the one key takeaway you want to make sure Fire Nation gets? Then give us the best way to connect with you, any call to action you have, and then we'll say goodbye. Absolutely. So a lot of the friction point, right, it comes from like, how can I actually be consistent?

24:19Like that's the first step. It's like, how can we be consistent over a long period of time to be able to build this authority, relevancy and trust and build more relationships as we go. Right. So the very, very first step is, can you do a time study? Like Fonzie said, like, and this might take a second in that week, like, where am I spending my time? Right. And you're going to be able to see and identify that you're actually time rich, that you have opportunity, right. To create. And then based off of that, based off like your own time, or if you do have a team and those resources, right. Based on those, then you can start building your six stages right what do I do in stage one what do I do in stage two and now you can start building that system that can sustain creation over a long period of time right because right now every single company I do believe that needs to be its own media company and have control of their message and the only way to do that is if we build our in-house teams and processes uh based on not only on frameworks but maybe your own frameworks as well but if we have to figure out how can we be consistent over a long period of time.

25:22So I want people to pay special attention to this. That's how we were able to to start the show and keep it so consistent when we actually took the time to have that honest conversations with ourselves and be like, what is the actual time that we have to allocate to first figure out what we're going to say, create it, produce it, distribute it, and then connect it to our business and then using a tool or a system to manage it all. So I hope that helps. How can people connect with us? The best way is on social media. Our handles are at Biz Brosco, B-I-Z-B-R-O-S-C-O. Or you can also go to bizbros.co and you're going to find information in there of what we do and the show and everything else.