Should You Take Every Press Appearance?

0:00Alright, so we're going to talk about if you should take every single press appearance. Press means it could be getting interviewed onto a publication or it can mean going to speak at a conference in, let's say, India or something like that. I used to take every single press appearance. I had kids, then I stopped. And what I found out is whether it's press appearances, podcasts, opportunities, speaking appearances, most just don't drive ROI. They're good for branding, but you need branding with the right type of audience. It's not about how many followers you get or how visitors you have. It's about getting in front of the right type of companies or audience that would be your ideal buyers.

0:43And what I found is it's actually better to say no. When you say no, you tend to have more energy to focus on the right stuff, which just gets you much more traffic in the long run. Yep. So I've learned over the years. So I used to adopt the Neo philosophy on take everything, but I've learned over the years that just to ask a couple of qualifying questions whenever I'm asked. And by the way, like I'm obviously very gracious or grateful when people are asking because it's an honor to be asked. It means that you are, at least you're doing something of value to one other person, right? And so what I'll usually ask, the first question I'll say is, the first thing I'll say is, thank you so much for thinking of me.

1:19I have just a couple of questions for you. One, who is in your audience? Two, what will be a home run to your audience? What type of content will be a home run to your audience? and three, what does your reach look like? And so, for example, they say, oh, get on this podcast. You know, we do X, Y, and Z. Okay, yeah, that's fine. What is your reach per episode? So notice I'm not asking about how many downloads they're getting overall. I'm just asking about the reach per episode. Same thing with like a YouTube video. Like what is the average viewership you're getting per podcast episode? And when you're going to speak at a conference, sure, there might be like thousands and thousands of people there, but for your specific stage.

1:51To go back to Eric's reach, when you ask people this, make sure you do your own homework as well. Because I'll get people who hit me up being like, I have a reach of 20 million people per month. And the number is just so big. You just quickly look at their social profiles, put in their website into, let's say like similar web, and you just like something's off here. Or you can even look at their podcast and see how many ratings and reviews they have. And if it's such a small number, there's no way they have that big of a reach number. Yeah. And I mean, that's another thing, Neil. It's a character thing.

2:20If they're saying we get 20 million and it's this obfuscated thing and they're being unclear, it kind of seems, it feels icky and it feels like they're kind of trying to get one over on you. And at that point, it's just like, Hey, you know, it's okay, man. Thank you for thinking of me, but it's just not the right fit. And that's happened to me before. And for sure it's happened to Neil before in the past. So you have to have criteria. You have to have an antenna because sometimes I remember I've spoken at things in the past where I'm just like, I remember once I flew 14 hours to Brazil and I spoke not the conference.

2:49We spoke at Neil. that was a good one that the RD summit, that was a good one. I spoke at one and like, I had no filter in the beginning of my career. Like I spoke on a panel and then we talked about the most random marketing stuff that had nothing to do with like what I did mainly. And I was just like, Whoa, I got thrown in for a loop because I didn't set any criteria. I didn't define who my ideal client profile was. I didn't define what kind of outcomes I'm looking to get from something like this. And it wasn't the right audience. So ultimately it was my fault, but it takes an experience like that to realize that you need to have criteria.

3:20Yeah. And this should be with anything in your life, whether it's new business opportunities, new marketing opportunities, it's actually better to say no, because when you focus, yes, you're going to get better results. And when you don't focus, you're going to be spread thin on everything and you're not going to get the results that you're looking for. I did this with my team all the time, not just even with press opportunities, but with marketing opportunities. You know, one of my guys who works for me solid, he's like, dude, we should buy this new website for a hundred and something thousand dollars.

3:49Look, it has 12 ,000 visitors. I was like, eh, I'm like, this is just a distraction. You know how many things we still have to do that we haven't done? For example, you know, we expand to Spain and we haven't done much marketing in Spain yet. We're looking at expanding in the Middle East and we haven't done much marketing there. I was like, we already get all these leads there in these regions that we're not in right now. Why don't we just focus on that because that'll be direct revenue opportunities versus, hey, we're gonna go out there and we're gonna go buy this website and we're gonna spend all this time integrating this site when we bought a company a year ago and we still haven't finished integrating it and we still haven't finished making all the changes that we need.

4:28But yet we wanna add another one when we don't have the time and the resources. Yeah, I'll leave everyone off with this story from Amazon. So during the dot-com bust or a little after it, when their stock dropped about 90%, Jeff Bezos had hired Jim Collins, who authored the book Good to Great, in addition to a bunch of other books, he was actually in the process of writing the book Good to Great. And so when he came into Amazon, he said, you know what, Jeff, you guys need to be focused on your flywheel. And so every company has one specific flywheel that they go through, right? So it's not just about starting a bunch of projects.

5:01To Neil's point, it's about focusing and locking in on what's actually working for you, the engine that's working for you. And so, you know, when I think about our flywheel, and I highly recommend everyone look up Jim Collins' flywheel. He has a lot of different examples there. But theirs is, you know, they have this flywheel that revolves around customer obsession, right? And trying to be scrappy with what they're doing. You know, you hear the fables about they used to use doors as tables or whatever. And all these different stories. Point is, that flywheel concept got Jeff Bezos to focus in more.

5:29And from there, they didn't look back and they continue. They've built Amazon into what it is today. So food for thought, that's what focus looks like. And yeah, you only have so many resources. and your attention, your time is perhaps your most valuable resource. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, subscribe, hit us on YouTube as well. And we'll see you later.