Dave Lakhani
Hit Play Or Download MP3 (Above)…
Name: Dave Lakhani
Industry: Internet Marketing
Website: www.boldapproach.typepad.com
Product: Bold Approach
Dave Lakhani’s Bio: Dave Lakhani has been described as a “Marketing Genius”, “Business Acceleration Strategist” and “Multipreneur” by his peers and the media. He has been responsible for developing dynamic strategies driving record breaking growth and increases in sales in more than 500 businesses in the past 10 years. Dave is an in demand speaker, author and trainer, whose ideas have been applied by some of the biggest companies in the United States including IBM, US Army, Rogers Media, Micron, GE, Wizard Academy and many more. His latest book Persuasion – The Art of Getting What You Want published by Wiley will be in bookstores fall 2005. Dave is frequently seen in magazines including Selling Power, Sales and Marketing Management, Entrepreneur, Business Solutions, Retail Systems Reseller, Integrated Solutions, Home Office Computing, PC Magazine and other media including Business Radio Network, The Business Connection, The Today Show and dozens more. Dave has owned more than 10 successful businesses in the past 20 years and has deeply studied the marketing and sales leaders of our time including Jay Abraham, Brian Tracy, Harvey Mackay, Roy Williams, Dr. Nick Grant, Zig Ziglar and many more. Dave is a Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations (6 videos):
Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…
Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.
David Jenyns: Hi guys David Jenyns here from the SEO method. Today I’m very excited. We’ve got a master persuader on the line. We’ve got Dave Lakhani. He’s got a really interesting story and it started back when he was raised up in a cult and perhaps I’ll get Dave Lakhani to talk a little bit more about that and how he broke free from that. I think being so entrenched in that has given him a great understanding of the way persuasion works. He’s gone on to be a business strategist having worked with more than five hundred businesses over the past ten years. He’s a great speaker and is very much in demand on the circuit and his latest book is Subliminal Persuasion: The Art of Getting What You Want. Is that right, Dave?
Dave Lakhani: That’s actually my next to last book. The newest book is called How to Sell When Nobody’s Buying.
David Jenyns: There we go, that is the perfect introduction. Thanks for jumping on the line. Perhaps tell us a little about the new book that is coming out.
Dave Lakhani: Yes, the book came out in June. It’s interesting because it will tie into a lot of what we’re talking about. I was contacted by my publisher in February. They asked me to write the book as fast as I could. They wanted to have it out by June, so I wrote the book. They did an amazing job of getting it out quickly. We planned the launch for it and by we I mean me, because publishers do very little to really help you sell a book. I planned the launch. The book sold out in North America in eight hours online and off.
Interestingly enough, over fifty percent of my sales came from social media online traffic driven strategies. That’s what helped that book sell. You can get it at Dymocks or any place in Australia that sells books and of course Amazon and those kinds of places. It’s very interesting because the book really focuses on exactly what you have to do in what has been a very tough economy for many people, to get attention and to cause people to come to your website and interact with you.
David Jenyns: I suppose that leads into what these calls are all about and how to drive traffic to your website and how to get that attention you need and then hopefully convert that traffic. Perhaps if you can even take us through the process of what you did in the launch of that book to get that awesome result and have it sell out so quickly.
Dave Lakhani: One of the most important things I do right now is I maintain a very focused social media strategy. I’m constantly interacting with people on Twitter. I’m interacting with them on LinkedIn, I’m interacting with them on Facebook and interacting with them on multiple blogs. One of the blogs I’m using right now most effectively, or one of the blogging platforms which is most effective because it allows you to do virtually everything to your blog from a cell phone, a BlackBerry, and iPhone, anything that you might be using, I use posterous.com.
Posterous allows you to update your blog via email and so basically what happens is, if you attach a photo, a video to your email, you put the subject line that then becomes the headline of your blog post. Whatever you type in the body of your email becomes the body post.
As a result of that, when you press send, it automatically converts the video for you into a proper format, it aligns it properly on the blog. It is the same thing with photos or any other attachments that you have, audio, anything like that, properly puts in the headline, properly puts all the text in where it should go. So literally now there is virtually no reason that you can’t be responding to things as you think of them, as they’re happening and helping create that following.
So step number 1 was to begin interacting more deeply about the book with people who were following me online who were on the blogs and those kind of things and let them know what was going on, to build anticipation and excitement. So I did that from the minute I started writing the book. I talked about what it was like writing the book under a tight deadline, having a very short amount of time to write the book. I started talking to them about the interesting things that I found while I was researching the book, about the economy, about business, all of those kind of things.
I started a dialogue and I continued that dialogue and didn’t allow it to stop up to the point that the book was released. I was building anticipation about what was going to be covered, I was talking about why I wrote the book differently, why I started with the chapter zero. All those kinds of things lead people to become more and more engaged, more interactive, wanting to know more.
I also created videos which we ultimately released using a tool that allows you to actually click the video. You can click on the video and it will take you directly to a link in the site. All those kinds of things have allowed me to interact with my audience in ways that I wasn’t able to before. So that created the sort of anticipation, which created a lot of the interaction that happened.
What was very interesting about this wa,s as it was released, social media did exactly what we hoped it would do. It caused people to then share the message. While I was sharing the message with the 16,000 or 18,000 people who are on my Twitter following, the 5,000 people on Facebook, because I’ve reached the Facebook limit, the thousands of people who read my blog. What happened is, a percentage of those people, and frankly not even a large percentage of them, maybe ten percent of the people then either retweeted or recommended it on Facebook or linked to it on their blog. Of those thousands of people, a good percentage of those people’s friends, followers etc did the same thing, which created massive exposure that first day and resulted in the books selling out in under eight hours in North America.
David Jenyns: What are your thoughts on selling? Obviously persuasion is such a big part of what you do, selling, using social media. Everybody talks about the idea that social media isn’t the platform for selling, it’s that interaction and relating to your customers. How do you tread as far as selling through these different social media outlets?
Dave Lakhani: I find that sort of a funny argument really because social media is simply another messaging distribution outlet like radio or television or print or anything else. That isn’t the most interesting thing.
What is interesting is they make a distinction between having an interaction with your client and selling. The best sales people, the best marketers, the people who best interact with their clients who provide people with valuable information, who cause them to be polarized who cause them to be interested or intrigued and then talk about solutions to problems they’re having and all those things.
I think where they get mixed up is, if you use social media as a tool to shout at people, to try to interrupt them for their attention and get them to pay attention to a sale where you’re asking them to buy now, now, now, then they turn on you very quickly. That’s where people have made the mistake.
It’s not the fact that social media isn’t a tool for selling, it’s a great tool for selling, it’s a great tool for distributing your message that influences people highly. It’s not when you use old techniques of screaming at people, at trying to interrupt them, of spamming them, all those things. That’s what turns people on you very quickly.
David Jenyns: Yes. The process that you went through for this launch, is it quite a structured thing where you very much look at, I’m going to make sure I do x number of Twitter posts, I’m going to make sure I make a few posts on a blog and x number on Facebook? What sort of structure, systematized process do you follow or is it more as people interact, do you interact where the attention is at that time?
Dave Lakhani: It’s a combination of the two. I had a very specific strategy for how much I wanted to interact, what kind of videos I wanted to create. I put videos up on Veeple for example and I can send you a link to that if you like. That’s the clickable video and it has analytics on the back end so I could tell immediately what people were interested in. If they clicked through to something I talked about in the video, that let me know they were interested in this or they weren’t interested in it. I could create more of what they were interested in and do less of what they weren’t.
Those kinds of things allowed me to be very targeted and specific in what I was doing. So to answer your question, I had a very specific process for making sure I tweetered on a regular basis, I updated the blog on a regular basis, I Facebooked on a regular basis. All those things that really worked that I was doing. I did as many pre tele seminars as I could for the book. All of those kinds of things allowed me to be very methodical in my process and to make sure that I was reaching the sort of mind share that I wanted to.
Then as people interact, I made sure I interacted with them as well because the best way to get people to talk about what you’re doing is to have a conversation with them that’s interesting and compelling to them, so that they’ll then report it to other people. That helped increase my following base. Then the day that the book released, it helped increase the number of people who retweetered or talked about it in social media blogs about it or created their own videos or reviewed the book on Amazon, all of those things.
David Jenyns: I’m imagining toget that initial swell, obviously you’ve already got a little bit of attention with some past work that you’ve done. So you’ve already got that initial following of people and you can start to seed that. If you’re working say with a new client who doesn’t have that, how do you go about starting to build up that presence? Is it just putting good content out there, and if you build it, they will come?
Dave Lakhani: That’s a great question because as social media proliferates, obviously there is more and more good information out there. So you start of with building a powerful persona. You have to develop a person worth hearing and worth watching. You’re right, I’m fairly fortunate with this book. I speak to about 100,000 people a year around the world so there are a fair amount of people who follow me.
But having said that, my first book, when I first started this business, I had no clients either and there are now a lot of people just now getting into this business and are building a following. The thing to remember when you are getting into this business, there are two camps in this. There’s my camp which is the right one and there’s the other camp. The other camp says numbers of following matters because social media is a numbers game. That’s a very old school mentality.
That’s the sort of antiquated television sales mentality of listen, we have a million viewers. Well a million viewers don’t mean anything. You’ve got Ashton Kutcher, these celebrities who have a million viewers, Oprah who has a million following her on Twitter and it really has no impact. People don’t pay attention, there is no mind share.
What really matters is not the number of followers, it’s the number of followers who interact with you and who do something as a result of their engagement with you. So they retweet you, they actually have an ongoing conversation with you, they recommend what you recommend, they see you as an aggregator for information out there.
So when I have a new client, we start out by building a persona for them. We start out by saying, ok, what makes you compelling and interesting? What can we do, how do you need to show up all of the time in order to be that consistent, personal brand that people have to see, in order to connect with you.
Social media is in many ways a one on one game. You’re building a personal brand because it has a voice. Even if you’re the voice of a large company, that voice has to be consistent, it has to be specific and it has to be planned. Specific, consistent and planned is a very big important point.
You start out by developing a persona, something that people would be interested in listening to and hearing from. It doesn’t matter what your audience is. I’m not saying you have to go out and be over the top and crazy and all those things, but what I am saying is, you have to be very consistent about it.
You have to be whoever your consumer expects to see in your position. They’re looking for the most knowledgeable, interesting expert they can find and that’s the person they’re going to follow. It’s being consistent, it’s creating this persona and then it’s putting out that killer information, the category killer information, the information that’s going to bowl people over, get them very interested in what you have to say and coming back for more. You have to do that too.
The interesting thing is, this does not happen overnight. When it does, it’s a fluke, it’s a mistake, it doesn’t happen overnight. People build trust over time, rarely do they build trust overnight. You have to provide them with enough information that’s compelling, that brings them back, that they have time to build trust with you, so that they then can engage in the conversation so they can then buy from you.
By doing that, start with that persona, create that information and be ruthlessly consistent about it. When I have a new client who’s doing this, this is what I tell them. For the next ninety days you have to write a blog post every day. For the next ninety days, you have to create at least two videos a week. For the next ninety days you have to create at least one audio a week. For the next ninety days you have to tweet at least ten times a day with something that is interesting and compelling. For the next ninety days you have to ask at least two powerful questions that people might have that would lead them to ask more questions about your product on LinkedIn.
When we start with that process, that seems very overwhelming to a lot of people. They say, oh, I can’t create content at that level. Well, if you can’t, you need to back up and regroup and decide what it’s going to take to do that, or maybe you’re in the wrong business. The reality of it is, what most people feel when they say, oh, that’s too much information, I don’t know if I can do it, is they’re not prepared for it.
So step number one, even preemptive to starting that strategy obviously is to sit down and say, ok, I need to create blogs over the next ninety days, I need to create twenty-four videos. So what are twenty-four topics, questions, concerns, interesting things people might have about my product or service that I can talk about, that I could create videos about?
When you break it down into those simple topics, I can talk about these twenty-four things, I can have an audio around these twelve things, I can write blog posts on these ninety things, you’ve suddenly got something that’s very interesting.
What I’ll let them do in the last twenty days of that is, they don’t have to write blog posts that they’ve necessarily created themselves, they can respond to other people’s blog posts. They can begin introducing other ideas into their blog. Initially we want them to do that and there’s a very specific reason and focus for that. What we’re trying to do is dominate the keywords in a category. All of the blog posts that we’re writing, we’ve done our keyword research ahead of time, so that we know these are the keywords, these are the key phrases people are searching for in order to find our product or service.
Those keywords or key phrases are going to end up in the headline of the blog post and they’re going to end up in the blog post body, so that we have more and more relevant, valuable links back from the search engines. That is one of the most overlooked things that people do, but that’s the real reason for having such an aggressive strategy.
Once that first ninety days is up, you’re going to let up a little, but for the next year or for the balance of nine months, you’re still going to post at least three times a week on your blog. You’re going to be doing video at least once a week, you’re going to be doing audio at least a couple of times a month, you’re going to be tweeting every day, Facebooking, all those things that are required in order for you to dominate the search and to dominate the top of mind awareness in the category you’re trying to create.
David Jenyns: What you’re talking about there seems like a very people centric brand building process. What are you thoughts on social media? Is it all about having it focused around that one person and building that personal brand? Can it also lend itself to businesses as well, like particular business promoting? How do you think that works?
Dave Lakhani: It lends itself perfectly to either one. If you’re an individual and you want to build a personal brand, it’s superb for that. If you’re a company, it’s superb for extending your brand or building your brand awareness of your company as well.
The key is, you have to have either someone who is in a position of authority, a CEO, a senior director of marketing if you’re a larger company whatever it is, giving the authentic voice to that message. If not that person, then you have to empower the person who’s going to write whatever it is they will and to give them the authority to be able to create your voice or take your voice and carry it out to the masses in a way you approve of and is coherent with you. Also, so the experience people have meets the expectation you’ve created when they come into your store or they buy your product or they call you on the phone.
It works perfectly for either one and it’s just a matter of creating that authentic voice, being very transparent, being very relevant and making sure that if it’s for a company or a product and it’s not senior people themselves writing and doing it, the person they put in charge that they have enough trust in that they will authorize them and give them the authority to do what they need to do.
David Jenyns: That’s some awesome feedback there and having the correct voice especially when it filters through these different action items that you did give. I’m wondering, you talked about social media also being the first step, that little action plan that you just gave us there, is that something that you, when you’re first working with a client, you say, here, this is what you need to follow. As far as breaking it down even further, writing a blog post, we’re talking just setting up a blog hosted on your own server?
Maybe I’ll drill down in to each one just to get a little bit more on each one of those topics. So for a blog, how would you go about setting up that blog and getting them ready for that?
Dave Lakhani: There are a couple of ways of setting up the blog. You can either use Posterous like I talked about before which, again, you’ll find at posterous.com, which is a free blog service. You can port a domain name over to it so it would be your domain and then your blog would show up when they type that in. You can do that or you can use a WordPress blog or a TypePad blog, any of them you want to.
The purpose of the blog though, is to develop links back to your main website so that when searches are done, people end up back to wherever it is that your products and services are, so they can learn more about your company.
To set up the blog it’s very simple, I’m not going to walk through the technical stuff of setting up WordPress. You set up a WordPress blog and that’s where all your posts are going to be at. Ideally if you use a WordPress blog it would be a sub domain of your main website. So you just have a link to it. In my case it would be howtosellwhennobodysbuying.com/blog or boldapproach.com/blog or whatever it is and then it would go there. Those are the kind of things you want to do.
Then from there what happens is, your domain is ranking higher and higher in the search engines because everything is your domain/blog/whatever the topic is with the keywords in it, that’s what’s going to get it ranked. So the purpose of the blog again, is to drive traffic back to your website and as well as showcase your knowledge. As people search for these terms, or they search for these keyword phrases, they’re coming back to you and seeing you as the most knowledgeable expert.
My goal when I help a client start this process, is to think of it like this. We’re casting a net and any place you step on the internet, we want you to step into our little net so that we can reel you in.
David Jenyns: Some of these other nets that you’re setting, things like the video, how do you go about distribution for that? Are we talking just YouTube or are you using other services like TubeMogul?
Dave Lakhani: Excellent question. YouTube is still the biggest traffic driver of them all. So we definitely focus on YouTube and it’s the same thing. The thing that people miss on YouTube though, is they don’t think through from a keyword standpoint what they title their videos.
So we focus very hard on what title are we going to give the video because, again, that’s what helps it show up in the search engine. They forget to put a hyper link url in the description back to their website so that when people do go there they can. They forget to edit the video to include something that tells people where their website is at on the video, so that while people are watching it they know where to go.
All of these things make a difference. So we focus on YouTube first and then we use TubeMogul to distribute to as many different places as we can, because again we’re trying to spread this out as far as possible and find people wherever they reside or wherever they find us.
David Jenyns: Cool. And audio was another thing that you mentioned. For distribution of that, is it more just through the blog or have you got audio services as well?
Dave Lakhani: Yes, it’s a combination of things really. We focus on iTunes quite heavily because it’s fairly simple if you’ve got a niched category to be the number one show on iTunes.
It’s just very simple. There’s podcastradio.com and there are a number of other services like that. Blogtalkradio.com allows you to set up a very quick radio show that you can then integrate into iTunes and start moving it up the charts. Many people do still search iTunes for free things to listen to that they’re interested in.
All this is about generating and building an audience and a following. So we’re trying to reach out to as many people as we can in as many different ways as we can so that wherever they look, they keep stumbling across us in your product or service or topic category.
David Jenyns: Yes and then you’re doing some of these other things, setting those nets. There was the tweeting, obviously that’s done through Twitter. Are you looking at integrating any of that. I know Posterous has that option where you can be posting on there and directly post on other web 2.0 properties and have it fed through. Do you link that together or do you see it a separate channels to be handled as such?
Dave Lakhani: I try and link it all together. For those people who are following me and who have contacted me, I want them to be able to get my best information first. So they may not be watching my Posterous post as often as they watch my Twitterfeed. They may subscribe to my Twitterfeed on their cell phone and my Facebook updates on their cell phone. So if they’ve got their cell phone in front of them, I want when I post a new Posterous post, I want it to show up on their cell phone right away. I want it to show up wherever they’re at.
I want to have the highest likelihood that these people are going to click and engage with me and then share that information with people. The best way to do that is provide them multiple different pieces of information wherever they might be, so that they can click on it immediately.
David Jenyns: The other one I think you mentioned was LinkedIn and using that as well and that obviously all links in together. You take them through that process, it’s a three month process, the ninety days.
Having a little bit of a look you can see you’re very much looking at your on page optimization, selecting your keywords, making sure they’re in the appropriate pages. Then you also effectively get some off page optimization because it’s all linking together, the YouTube linking back to your site and your blog and Twitter linking through. So it’s all linking through. Do you have any other off page optimization or is it all internal all of those different sites you’re working on?
Dave Lakhani: No I do other things as well. Like this interview for example. I encourage people to link back to my site for these interviews so that they can find out more about me so that I’m getting obviously the back links that count. I do guest posts on other blogs and those kind of things.
I also do offline marketing as well for things where I’ll send out postcards. I’ll use something like voiceshot.com and go to my existing customer list and make them aware for example that I’ve got a new blog post, when my book came out that my book was releasing. I let them know about it first and they got a personal message from me.
I do those kind of things as well as I still maintain an email list and encourage those people to interact with me because even if they unsubscribe from my email list, chances are high, by now they’ve subscribed to me in one of these other places, so I’m not really losing them. Although on the other hand, I don’t really care if people leave me, email or any place else. If they don’t find me compelling and interesting, they’re not going to buy from me, I don’t really .like wasting my energy with them, so if they leave, I’m ok with that.
David Jenyns: Yes, because it all does come back to you’re doing all this and you’ve set out what your focus is and the reason you’re doing it is obviously is to convert that person at the other end. This is all very good for driving the traffic to your offer. Perhaps you can talk a little bit about, I know this is a strong point with you as well, creating the offer. How do you persuade someone to buy?
Dave Lakhani: Right. Well here is the thing that people need to remember when you’re doing all of these things. Only polarized people buy things. Only polarized people buy things and you have to be seen to sell. You have to be seen to sell. So if you’re not taking a stand, the only that happens when you ride the fence, and you sit on the rail, and you try and balance that way all the time, and you never take a side, the only thing that happens is you get splinters. Nothing else happens, nothing good happens from that. You can’t please everyone all the time.
It’s better to please a hungry crowd of people who agree with you than it is to try and appease a crowd who couldn’t care less. That’s what polarization is all about.
Polarization is taking a stand and saying, this is who I am, this is what I’m about, this is what I believe. If you think about that, and it doesn’t mean you have to be a jerk, it doesn’t mean you have to be mean, it doesn’t mean you have to be any of those things, but it means you have to be transparent and relevant and say the things that people who could potentially buy your products or services can come down off that fence and agree with you on.
You’ve got to knock them off the fence to get them to buy. So when I’m looking at constructing an offer or even a persona, I’m looking at, how do I creating that polarization? The next thing is I’m looking for, what does it take to get these people to say yes to something? So we constantly look at the psychology of consumption for example. There was a recent research study done that said that if you get people just to try something briefly, they’re much more likely to consume it longer term than they are if they don’t try it at all.
Even things like bitter medicine and those kind of things, if they try it and they have an immediate result from it, then they’re much more likely to engage it much longer than they are if they don’t try it or if they don’t have an immediate result. So whatever we can do to give people an immediate result, listen to this, do this thing, see what’s going to happen as a result of doing it and I’m going to teach you thirty more strategies when you buy the product. This gives people that sort of immediacy and that causes them to say yes more often.
Things like giving to receive, the law of reciprocation still works. If you give people something in advance, they’re much more likely to engage with you. This is one of the values of social media. Why we create so much video on blog posts is because we’re
preemptively giving, giving, giving and as a result, what we’re getting is people who are saying, this person is giving me so much, I need to do something in return and so they do.
David Jenyns: Obviously you’ve got you book and you went through those processes and sold out your book. You’re not necessarily going to get rich from selling a book so that feels like that first step. Obviously you give out great content and then they take the next little step, which is yes, I’m happy with what Dave’s putting out. The next little step is buying the book and gradually you’re getting them to make bigger and bigger commitments. How do you see the process after they buy a book and where do you go from there?
Dave Lakhani: For me the book is the top of my funnel. Really social media is the top of my funnel. That’s the free line for me, so that everything that I give away on social media is free and then when I get them to engage and buy the book, I know that’s the first step to establishing a profitable following.
There are two different groups of people for me. There are the people who haven’t bought from me yet and there are the people who have bought from me.
The people who have bought from me have moved further down into the funnel. They buy the book, they’ve become more interested in what I do. They’ve given me an initial early yes, saying yes, I trust you, yes, I’m compelled by what you say, I want to read your book and I want to see if my experience with your book matches my expectation. When experience meets expectation then they move further down the funnel.
They may buy a set of DVDs like my Renegades of Persuasion for $200 or they may buy another product or a tele seminar I’m doing or something like that for $100 or $200. They may come to one of my live events for which they’re going to pay anything between $1000 and $2000.
Each time they make that purchase they become more valuable to me and they move further and further down the funnel, not just valuable in the sense that they’ve spent more money with me, but valuable in the sense that the deeper they get into my funnel, the more religious they are in their willingness to help me spread my message.
These are my true believers. These are the people who are going to go out and defend me at all costs whether I defend myself or not. These are the people who are going to go out and tell their friends and family to buy this product or service. These are the people who are going to get their colleagues to do it, these are the people who are going to come to my events and be my evangelists. Those people have tremendous value to me and they’re to be protected with great vigour.
David Jenyns: It’s funny how you can already start to see the parallels drawn between what you’re talking about there and what happens in a cult. You get those few key members who are the ones who are really strong believers and I think Cialdini talked about the idea of looking around to other people to get cues about how you should be responding.
I’m curious to know, as you’re starting to build this up, how do you help cultivate that and help that propagate or do you just let them go out and speak as they will?
Dave Lakhani: No, and here’s one of the biggest fallacies of word of mouth marketing. Everybody says word of mouth marketing is the best marketing I can get. But word of mouth marketing works both directions. If people don’t understand what they should say about you, they’ll say anything about you. My focus is to get as many people as possible who will take my message and repeat it verbatim as I can. I’m constantly telling people what are good things to say. I’m not going out and being that blatant about it, saying please say this about me.
What I’m saying is, here’s the message I repeat over and over again so that you understand it and then that’s the message you’ll repeat. People parrot what they remember. So we want them to remember these certain things about us.
When you’re looking at building up this group of true believers, you want to give them things they can talk about, so that they can go out and tell people the best and most relevant things that will get those people to jump into the top of your funnel and hopefully dive in deep and grab a book or grab a book and tape set early because they came in with a recommendation.
David Jenyns: Do you have any way, how do you integrate, when I think of testimonials and things like that, how does that integrate into the marketing?
Dave Lakhani: It’s interesting because testimonials are undergoing a great change in the United States right now. The Federal Trade Commission has come down really hard on testimonials, so everybody is backing away from testimonials here right now. If there is any sort of financial claim or any sorts of claims about anything pretty much, if you can’t demonstrate it, the fines are tremendous right now. So people are backing away from testimonials.
Having said that, if you have legitimate testimonials you can use, particularly in Australia where the rules might be slightly different, testimonials integrated every step of the way increase sales. Social proof, which is what a testimonial is, social proof is a psychological premise that basically is best described as monkey see, monkey do.
The seminal research around social proof was done when they had a person in New York City stand on a street and stare up at a spot on a building. Pretty soon three or four people were looking up at the spot and when those people stopped and looked, then a dozen people were, when a dozen people were, a hundred people were and shortly after that they had a giant crowd that was blocking up the street looking up to see what was up on the building. The original person had gone.
People do what they see other people doing. Very few people want to be a pioneer. They don’t want to be the first ones to break new territory. What they used to say in the United States, nobody wants to be a pioneer because you can always tell who they are because they have arrows in their back. That was back from when we were settling the West here, that was the Native Americans who shot the pioneers with their arrows.
That’s sort of the same thing in business. Nobody wants to be the first one to go out and break the ground and yet entrepreneurs do it all the time and they’re successful. From a consumer standpoint, no one wants to be that first person, to be the first one to try whatever the product or service is.
So what happens is, when they see a group of people trying it and those people are happy and excited, then they’re much more likely to try it. Their resistance goes down, their natural inclination to question goes away and they’re much more likely then to engage and do whatever it is you’re asking them to do. Social proof of testimonials is an incredibly powerful tool. It’s highly persuasive and I strongly recommend you use them as much as you can because they will encourage people to do it.
Here’s what’s interesting, with social media again you get people who are retweeting or talking about you on Facebook or creating response videos or all these kind of things and they’re doing it organically. They’re providing social proof to people who trust and follow them without you asking them to do it or without it seeming contrived as often testimonials do. Most people don’t know how to give a good testimonial and most people who are asking for testimonials don’t know how to direct a good testimonial.
What ends up happening is they end up sounding like one of those hucksters on the street or on television and you don’t come up with really good genuine heartfelt testimonials that move people. What happens with social media often is, whatever people say extemporaneously is often very heartfelt, truthful, transparent and full of emotion. Those are the ones that convert best.
David Jenyns: You talked about those pioneers and obviously entrepreneurs going out there and trying to pave a new trail. You’d probably see, having worked with a lot of businesses and that sort of thing, a lot of mistakes people are making when they’re first getting started online, even if they’ve been online a little while. What are some of those big mistakes that you see people making online and how might they avoid some of those?
Dave Lakhani: Well the biggest thing is chasing shiny objects. You know they get so focused on trying to learn too many new technologies or trying to see what everybody else is doing, or they get excited about one product and they hear about one that is even more interesting that someone is having more success with. They start chasing that money. Those are the worse things they can do. That’s a big mistake, so chasing shiny objects is a huge mistake.
Not paying attention to the numbers, not doing your research ahead of time before you launch a product or service. Make sure there is actually a market for it. Understand that people may or may not want what you have. I’m working with a client right now who I’ve told on numerous occasions her product is probably not the right product for the market. But they did no research ahead of time, literally said, well this was given to me by the universe, so it must need to sell.
Well the reality of it is, whether you want to be that far out and say it was given to you by the universe, or you just have this great idea that you fall in love with and you’re going to make it happen, you can push it as hard as you want, and I’m a big believer in if you believe in something and absolutely hustling to make it happen.
But at some point if it’s not working and you’ve done everything that you possibly can, you have to ask, does the market exist? Ideally you would ask does the market exist ahead of time, before you invest a lot of time and money in trying to sell something that people may or may not want. So not knowing there is a market ahead of time.
Not developing a powerful persona that people can connect with and believe in. Not being relevant and transparent, believing people won’t find out the truth online. It takes moments if not less to find out anything they want to know about you now.
People take too long to initiate and engage. They believe it is too hard, so they’ll start out with one thing, and they’ll say, I’m just going to blog. I’m only going to do that until I’m successful. You won’t just be successful using one media outlet. It’s like saying, I’m going to build my whole business around a radio ad in a particular town. It’s just not going to happen. You have to reach out and go further.
The final thing, the biggest mistake I see people make all the time is being under funded. While it appears that internet marketing is very inexpensive to get into and it is, it’s not free, regardless of what people will tell you.
One of the fastest ways to do research for example is to use Google AdWords to drive traffic to a site or to a product to see if people are really interested in it. And if they are, that gives you a sense of whether or not it will work and, by the way, as your business grows or even in the beginning.
Almost all the beginning businesses when I start them or when I have clients do it, we start driving traffic with Google AdWords because it is the fastest most cost effective way of getting traffic that is interested in what you’re talking about to your site. You’ve got to have enough money to be able to last the ups and the downs, do the testing and to go from there.
Another big mistake people make is they spend too much money on technology. This person I was just talking about earlier, whose product may not be a good fit for the market, spent $60,000 to create a website that could have been created using an outsourced tool to Romania or China or India. They probably could have had it created for a couple of thousand dollars. They invested $60,000 in it and that was all of the money. Now there is no money to promote it further or do other things that need to be done. It was sort of the idea of, if you build it, they will come idea.
I’m here to tell you there are way too many fields on the internet to be building it and hoping they will come. You’ve got to have a systematic process for doing it. That’s my final thing that I see people doing wrong is that they don’t have a plan for how they’re going to run their business. They don’t actually create a business plan, they don’t create a marketing plan. They don’t sit down and say, these are who my clients are and this is how I’m going to reach them tactically day by day, these are the things I’m going to do.
Without that sort of focus, that fearsome focus, you’re not going to have success. If you do have success, it’s going to be lucky and along the way you’re going to experience many problems in growth. Your business may fail anyway even if you have a viable plan because you haven’t adequately planned for how to reach people, how to communicate with people, how to persuade people and then how to serve them best.
David Jenyns: You talked a little bit about things like the outsourcing. That person could have very easily got their website made and also hinted at the idea with the planning and also having systems in place. That leads into the idea of outsourcing.
How does that fit in with a lot of what we talked about, those steps that you did go through? With quite a few of those, the person is going to need to create that content because it’s hard to disseminate that sort of information if it’s not coming in the right voice. How do you link in outsourcing and where does that play a part in what we’re talking about?
Dave Lakhani: I’m going to talk about outsourcing in two different ways. Number 1, I think people outsource the wrong things way too soon. One of the first outsourcing things is, I’m going to rush out and get a VA, a virtual assistant, somebody who is going to help me with all these things.
If you’re starting up a new business, you need to be in the fray for a while. You need to understand what your clients are saying. You need to understand what all the people you’re interacting with are saying and doing. You need to become an expert on your business before you ask anyone else to run it for you in any way.
You need to do that first. Hold out on outsourcing those kinds of things for a little while and make sure you know what you’re doing. Before you outsource your social media to someone else to do, you sure better make sure you know what your voice is and how they need to talk.
You can’t teach people to do what you haven’t done. If you’re going to actually bring someone in to do the writing, create the videos, all those kind of things, they’d better know what your voice is and you’d better know how to tell them what that voice is and how to get it and what to say and all of those things.
The other side of outsourcing is outsourcing the technology component. If you don’t understand how to install a WordPress blog, build a website, set up social media pages, build a Facebook fan page, all those things, if you don’t know how to do that, outsource that. You can get it outsourced for next to nothing. You go to scriptlance.com or elance.com. I’m sure there are some specific to Australia that I don’t know about that you can go to and you can get these people in India, in China, in Romania, in Russia to do these things for you for nearly nothing.
The last full website I had built was about seventeen pages. I provided the copy, that was it. They did the graphic design for me and I had it done for less than $300 and under two weeks.
David Jenyns: Some of those things you talked about were the big mistakes and using the outsourcing, depending on what it is you’re trying to do. Definitely they’re some big insights and you’re able to teach those because you’ve learned them yourself firsthand.
I’m just wondering now, looking back over your career, if you knew then what you knew now, can you identify, if you were to go back, where those really key leverage points were with your development and growth? For example, could you say, once I started to outsource my customer support, that opened things up for me? Are there any things like that where, looking back, you can see big leverage points?
Dave Lakhani: I want to talk about some of the things that helped me be successful first, and then I’ll answer your question specifically. My ability to hustle, my ability to go out and make things happen, my ability to work harder, work longer, work faster, be more creative, think more deeply, read more, all of those things have given me an incredible edge that most people don’t have, because I’m willing to work harder, I’m willing to do more. If it means me putting in twenty-four hour days to get what it is that I want, I will do that. I’m committed to the outcome, I’m not committed to what’s going on now.
The focus is to get through today so that we can get to tomorrow. Hustle is one of the missing ingredients in many entrepreneurs. They’re unwilling to do the hard work, particularly in internet marketing today, and particularly in a lot of internet based businesses.
People hear all these stories of people who make money in their underwear or they make money while they’re cruising around the world on their yacht or whatever. Most of those stories are either a) untrue or b) they don’t tell the true story of how many people spent days weeks, months, years toiling away to make that overnight success happen.
When my book sold out in eight hours, people said, oh my, you’re like an overnight success. I said, yes, it only took me twenty years to be an overnight success. It took me twenty years of doing the right things and focusing again and again.
That said, the things that for me have been the real turning points in my career personally, once I started making high level joint ventures with people, other people who had solid followings who could endorse me and who would endorse me.
They are people like Chris Howard, Harv Ecker, Mark Victor Hansen, Tony Robbins, all these kind of people who I’ve been able to work with. That whole process took my business to a new level. Now I was interacting with massive audiences and much more credible people who were endorsing me.
But I didn’t start with those people. They weren’t my first JVs. My first joint ventures were with people who were not necessarily the best known people. Some of the first people I joint ventured with only had two hundred people on their list but the two hundred people on their list were dedicated to them. They were their close friends, they were their close business associates, they were people who had great trust. They learned to make money as an affiliate and I got the benefit of connecting with an audience who came to me already with deep trust. Developing powerful joint ventures were very important to me.
Moving away from the idea that I had to do everything internally and allowing stuff to go outside of my business and the employees that I had in my business made a big difference. At one point I had nine employees working in my business who were doing all kinds of things. I did the math one day and I said I think I can outsource this for less money. So I kept a small staff, my assistant and my brother who does all my video editing and that kind of thing. That became my staff. I made them work harder frankly, but I paid them well for it.
They had to do a few more things sure, but the result was, I was able to outsource many of the things that these other people had been doing. Now I was paying an unweighted, and by unweighted I mean I wasn’t paying employment taxes, I’m not paying medical insurance, I’m not paying all these things for people. I was able to then recover all that money and put it right back to the bottom line and my profitability went up directly and frankly my stress level went way down because I didn’t have all these people to attend to on a daily basis.
Writing a book was another turning point for me. If you’re going to be the foremost expert in your market, at some point you need to write a book. I don’t care what your business is. People say, I’m in the fertilizer business. Great. You write a book about what fertilizer’s about, what are the new innovations, how are people using it, case studies, all those kind of things. I don’t care what you tell me, I’m going to tell you to write a book anyway because that puts you in front of a whole new audience.
Even if it does nothing more than expose you to trade shows and places like that where you can come and talk about your book, it gives you such a deep level of credibility that people still instantly and subconsciously respect that.
Those were big things that were turning points for me. The big things now that are turning points for me today are obviously embracing social media. I’m sure I was one of the first people to sign up on Twitter. I was on Twitter in very early 2007 or late 2006. I embrace technologies early now and I figure out how they’re going to work. So for me embracing social media early and learning what about it really worked was something that was very powerful for me and took my business to the next level. Anybody who’s thinking about growing their business or starting their business, they can look at that and say, ok, I better be embracing this.
What they should also be doing is reading my blog, for example, and seeing what I’m embracing next because I talk about all that stuff very openly about my successes and failures and how it works. The more I do that, the more transparent I show people, the more my sales grow, the more my following grows and the more people want to interact with me.
David Jenyns: There were quite a few key points that you mentioned there: allowing outsourcing to happen, the writing of the book, the social media, and with the joint ventures as well. You mentioned some names with Chris Howard and Harv Ecker and Robbins and so on. I’m just wondering, when you’re looking to the marketing world and online, are there any other people you see as being on the forefront, people you look to and keep an eye on?
Dave Lakhani: Yes, absolutely. Dr Rachna Jain at mindsharecorp.com. She’s a social psychologist, a PhD, very tied in and tuned in to media, a powerhouse of a person. Eben Pagan, is someone I pay very close attention to. Seth Godin is another person who I watch very closely. There are probably a dozen more who I find very compelling, very interesting who have very useful stuff.
Tim Ferriss is another person to watch closely. Tim Ferriss of the 4-Hour Work Week. He’s got a lot of great information, not necessarily about the 4-Hour Work Week but how he runs his business and why he runs it the way that he does. Those things I think are invaluable in studying. This is somebody who is incredibly successful. Chris Brogan for social media is also very good.
If you want to find out what’s going wrong in internet marketing, I encourage everybody to read the blog called saltydroid.info. This is a guy who is an attorney who systematically takes apart internet marketers and he is talking about why he is going after them so hard. It’s irreverent and sometimes he uses a lot of bad language but it’s a good look at what not to do and why not to do it.
David Jenyns: Great. I think you’re definitely someone people should keep an eye on. You’re specific, consistent and well planned. If people want to make sure they keep in contact with what you’re doing, what is the best way people can find you?
Dave Lakhani: The best way for people to find me is they can go to my main website which is boldapproach.com or follow me on Twitter. I’m at twitter.com/davelakhani. That’s the fastest way to do it and that’s the way that I’ll connect with you and we’ll begin a dialogue and a conversation.
Of course the next time I’m in Australia, do whatever you can, sell your children, whatever you have to do to get to the events that I’m at. I’d love to meet you in person. It would be wonderful. I was supposed to come to Australia in December and that didn’t work out. A couple of the events changed and I wasn’t able to make it. Next time I come, it will be my forty-second or forty-third trip to Australia. I’m beginning to figure it out there that maybe I have a second home someplace.
David Jenyns: I can’t thank you enough Dave. You’re very open, very straight down the line, very generous with your time. So thanks again and I look forward to hopefully meeting you in person.
Dave Lakhani: I’m looking forward to it as well and I look forward to engaging with everybody who is on your list. I think people are brilliant for spending time with you because you give out such great information and you do a wonderful job of interviewing people. You definitely get to the crux of the matter and you give them usable information. My kudos to you.
David Jenyns: Cool. Thanks.
Download Dave Lakhani Interview | Dave Lakhani Videos | Dave Lakhani Podcast | Dave Lakhani Review | Dave Lakhani MP3
Did You Enjoy This Interview?
Start following PodcastInterviews.com and get all the latest interviews free!
Comment Using Facebook
