Mastering Metrics with Dan Sanchez: Grow Your Digital Reach

Overview:

In this episode of "Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders," host Kerry Guard sits down with Dan Sanchez, an expert in audience building and digital marketing. Dan shares his journey from graphic design to marketing, highlighting his experience in transforming a university's enrollment rates through innovative digital strategies. He emphasizes the importance of consistency in content creation, leveraging live interactions, and the power of audience engagement in digital marketing. Dan also discusses the shift away from traditional marketing metrics towards meaningful audience connections and value-driven content. This conversation provides valuable insights into audience building, the significance of consistency, and the future of digital marketing strategies.

Transcript:

Dan Sanchez [00:00:05]:

There you go. You got it.

Kerry Guard [00:00:06]:

Let's do this. I mean, it's for the holidays, right? Dan, we're here. We're here for.

Dan Sanchez [00:00:13]:

Yeah. Yeah. I keep on the silly gesture thing, even though I trigger it with like the thumbs up all the time on accident. There you go. Just for intros like that. So you can walk into a digital room with some.

Kerry Guard [00:00:25]:

I mean, yes. And to that, we're right on brand here. This is perfect timing. I'm here for it. Welcome to the show. Welcome to Tea Time with tech marketing leaders. This is the second to last episode of 2023. Dan, you'll be proud of me.

Kerry Guard [00:00:42]:

You'll be proud of me because I have done it, hopefully, I have one last episode next week with David Moondy and it'll be my 52nd episode of the year. 52 episodes.

Dan Sanchez [00:00:55]:

You all the consistency in that. So hard. Well done. Congratulations. I don't think I've ever done something like every week for a whole year before. I don't think it's ever happened. Unless it's like something addictive, like drinking coffee every day or something.

Kerry Guard [00:01:09]:

I will say I cheated a little where the first half of the year was pre-recorded, but I banked it and I am scheduled until March of next year. So I am setting next year up for success. And it's all thanks to that whole consistency seeds that you've been planting and we're going to dive into that in a minute. If you are here with us on tea time with tech market leaders, welcome to the show. We're excited to have you. This is live, which is beautiful because that means you get to join in with us and enjoy in the conversation. And I'm looking for you in the comments and I'm paying attention. So if you are here, say hello and we look forward to your questions, which I hope you've brought in spades, because this is the time to dig in with the expert.

Kerry Guard [00:02:00]:

It's going to happen. It's going to be brilliant.

Dan Sanchez [00:02:03]:

Be selfish, ask your question.

Kerry Guard [00:02:06]:

Yes, lean in. This is it, the end of the year. Gearing up for 2024. If you have it, let's hear it. I am here with the one and only Dan Sanchezez, or dance, hashtag Danchez. If you are following along with the one and only. This is all about audience building. Dan has been doing this for eons.

Kerry Guard [00:02:29]:

It feels like he's got a course on it. We're going to dig into that in a moment. If you aren't following him on LinkedIn, be sure to head on over and make that happen because this is an episode for us all to sort of take note on and figure out how we are going to cultivate our audiences in 2024. The world has shifted, you all, and it is no longer a numbers game. Dan and I were just talking about this, and I was just talking about this with Andy Trerzini as well. It is no longer a numbers game of just like filling the top of the funnel with as many people as you possibly can and then whittling it down. Whittling down. It is now about who do I need to be speaking to and how can I build a relationship with them in the right way with value and intention. And that is why we have Dan Sanchezez with us here today.

Kerry Guard [00:03:19]:

Dan, welcome to the show. I'm excited to have you on. I'm excited about this topic. I think it has been a long time coming. You've been on the forefront of it, and now you're going to help us all make it. And yes, yes, that. Perfect timing. Stars aligning, all the things.

Kerry Guard [00:03:38]:

Tell us your story, Dan. You weren't always an audience builder. You weren't always a marketer. How did you get started? Where did your story begin and how did you get to what you're doing now?

Dan Sanchez [00:03:51]:

I mean, I'm a marketer and I got to marketing through graphic design, which is kind of a weird road to take, but it was a great road because I found I loved design. I liked making things. I liked making things beautiful. I like visual communication. But at the same time, I started diving into more things. I started getting into web design because that's what people were paying for back then, and then social media. And before you knew it, I was doing people's emails and asking the questions of, like, well, what should go on a website and what should go on an email. Starting to ask marketing questions.

Dan Sanchez [00:04:20]:

What's the purpose of this thing? Where do people come from and what do I want them to do once they're here? And all of a sudden, I started drifting into marketing. And marketing got me into one of the best jobs I ever had was working as a marketing director for a small university. They were losing students right and left, just not getting nearly the enrollment they could. They were, like, just dying. And I came in as a marketing department of one for this dying college, and my first marketing director role probably shouldn't have been even a director. I should have just been a marketing manager. But they gave me the keys and gave me all the autonomy to do pretty much everything without hardly giving any input. It was one of the best jobs I had because of the amount of autonomy I had and redid the website and the copy and the positioning and did all the stuff, ran all the ads, and we grew and I grew.

Dan Sanchez [00:05:15]:

My team started hiring staff members and had lots of interns, but we grew the university. It actually, like the things I did worked. I took the HubSpot playbook for B two B SaaS and applied it to the college. No college fares, no buying sat list, none of the normal stuff colleges do. I just went right to lead Gen from Facebook ads, Google Ads, SEO and took the inbound marketing playbook, and just applied it beautifully to the college. Later on, other colleges started calling me be like, what did you do? Because we tripled the enrollment of the school. It was awesome. Who knew? Like, the inbound marketing playbook worked if you executed it right and it was a thing of beauty.

Dan Sanchez [00:05:53]:

People would search the keywords and we'd be there. Adwords, SEO articles, home pages, and social posts for all kinds of keywords. And then Facebook ads. Man, 2015 to 2020 was a beautiful thing. Facebook ads was before Apple kind of.

Kerry Guard [00:06:08]:

Like killed or before they killed themselves.

Dan Sanchez [00:06:11]:

Not the sad place it is today. Rip Facebook ads. But it was during that time, too, when things were going well and enrollment was going up and up, leads were going up and up, that I noticed a problem. And I noticed it before everybody else did because things were getting better. But I noticed the cost per acquisition per lead going higher and higher. And we were split, testing the heck out of the landing pages and the follow up to increase conversion rates. So nobody noticed it, but I did. And you could see the trend of where it was going.

Dan Sanchez [00:06:45]:

Everybody figured out that Facebook ads were so good and AdWords was great, but we'd maximize that and we maximized SEO, and there wasn't so much volume. We maximized the amount of volume over on search. And Facebook ads was getting more expensive every year, no matter how good our creativity was. I was like, oh, my gosh, what are we going to do? And that's when the need for audience growth really started, was planted inside of me. And it took me a while to figure out what I needed to do, because when you look at marketing, there's like, well, there's three major buckets to pull from. You can pay for it. You can go and beg someone to get on there in front of their audience. We call that earned media, right? Or we can build our own audience.

Dan Sanchez [00:07:26]:

And honestly, I didn't know a lot about earned media. I tried. I hired some PR people. I submitted some PR Newswire. This little bit of that, like little this, try to do the press release thing, try to knock on media outlets that. I didn't get any traction there.

Kerry Guard [00:07:42]:

You got to have real news.

Dan Sanchez [00:07:44]:

So I was like, well, we need to grow our own audience. And I just didn't really know how to do it. Then we did do one thing successfully, and we built a massive, we started a whole new website for a much general, much more general audience, and we sealed the heck out of it. You're talking like 300, or 400 articles pulling in a collection of maybe 500,000 page views a month in site traffic. We never figured out how to get that site to turn into an audience. Going back, I'm like, oh, that was so good. I just didn't know how to convert them to an audience. I should have just built a newsletter out of it and a podcast.

Dan Sanchez [00:08:21]:

But no, I didn't think about that. I was trying to get them to go from visiting the article. Right. To lead just doesn't work that well when it's broad. Can't skip the middle. But that led. Yeah, you can't skip the middle. And I didn't know how to do the middle game very well, but that's really what the audience is.

Dan Sanchez [00:08:36]:

Audience is the middle game. We talk about it as marketers all the time, but most of the time, marketers spend all their time talking about product marketing.

Kerry Guard [00:08:44]:

Oh, interesting, right?

Dan Sanchez [00:08:46]:

How can we get people interested in the product? Because we have to get them more aware of what we do it. We need to create a category around the product. It's all about me, me, I. And that's so much still what content marketing is about. It's me monster, if you've ever heard. I'm trying to remember what comedian that is. I think it's like Jim Brogan. I can't remember.

Dan Sanchez [00:09:09]:

There was a comedian that talked about, like, the me monster, that guy who shows up at the table just talking about him and his achievements and how great he is and how much money.

Kerry Guard [00:09:18]:

He has, or they want to oftentimes. John Doe.

Dan Sanchez [00:09:23]:

That's what we're doing as content marketers.

Kerry Guard [00:09:24]:

Patrick. The me monster. Brian Rogan. Brian Reagan. Brian Reagan. And the me monster.

Dan Sanchez [00:09:30]:

There it is. I knew it.

Kerry Guard [00:09:32]:

I'm like, drop it in.

Dan Sanchez [00:09:34]:

The me monster. That's classic, that's what we're doing as content marketers all the time. It's all about us. Me, my. The problem is, if somebody's not in the market for exactly what you do at that time, which is most people, right? Like, how many people are in market at a time, maybe 5%, let's be generous, at 10% in market in the.

Kerry Guard [00:09:55]:

Quarter, meaning you're talking to the right audience at the exact right time that they need this thing that you're selling. Yeah, 10%.

Dan Sanchez [00:10:03]:

People that are, let's call them problem-aware people, people that know they have a pain point or even open to what you're selling right now. Most people aren't. It's reality. So what do we do? Yeah, we do.

Kerry Guard [00:10:17]:

We do. Yes. Let's pause there for a second because you're skipping ahead of your dance. Stop giving the game away. I'm skipping ahead. Shame. No. And I think whatever everything you're saying, we've all lived right where we've played the top of the funnel and we've played the bottom of the funnel, and we've sort of skipped the middle of the cultivation piece of, like, I got people to my website and I got leads to download this thing and then it.

Dan Sanchez [00:10:49]:

Now what?

Kerry Guard [00:10:50]:

It's moving now there's a shift in the universe, and Trevor van Warden will totally agree with me on this. Hello, Trevor. Welcome to the show. On there has to be this relationship-building middle ground of how you meet people where they are and then continue to harness that relationship until they're ready to actually work with you and to build that trust. In the meantime, we've broken, broken sales, and marketing has broken the trust of the buyer, and we are paying for dividends right now, and we have to make up for it. And Dan is going to help us figure out how to do that before we get there, though, Dan, and give the game away. I loved your story. And working with universities is such a great place to start, and being the sole marketer is a great place to figure it out.

Kerry Guard [00:11:43]:

It's where we've all sort of. I remember being a solo marketer on a $10 million account at a very big agency. When you show that you're very capable, they keep giving you more stuff to do as a single person and tell you to figure it out, and you do, and that's just what we've done, and it's a wonderful place to be until it's not. And I think we're all sort of turning to the experts to say, well, what do we do now? We've been figuring it outers as long as we can possibly could be, but now we need a little help and support, which is why I've started the show, which is why you've built courses, which is why there are so many marketers out there. Speaking up to say this is what works and this is what doesn't, and stop doing these things, start doing these other things. So yes to that, we're all on the same page in terms of where the market is going and why. Before we get there, though, we're all human and life is hard in this moment. It is Q four.

Kerry Guard [00:12:37]:

We have a week and a day left. If you're taking the week off between Christmas and New Year's, this is it. This is the final stretch. But what is it for you, Dan? What's hard right now? What's a challenge you're currently facing?

Dan Sanchez [00:12:53]:

It's funny, I ran into a challenge a couple of weeks ago and now I'm taking massive action on it because I realized it was a problem for me and therefore probably is a problem for many. This year of 2023 has been a year of AI. People have been waking up to that and I've been using it. I've been in chat, GPT, I have a pro version, and I'm using AI tools. And I finally was just like, you know what? It's time to roll up my sleeves and figure this out and go into the deep end, get out of the shallow end where I'm playing, and actually really start to learn it. But I found there wasn't a lot of substantial this is how you know where you're at and this is where you need to go. There wasn't a roadmap of how to learn AI for marketing. At best, you can find some YouTubers or people on TikTok talking about little tips and tricks here and there, and they're all general, like maybe applied to business, but there's not a lot out there.

Dan Sanchez [00:13:49]:

So I was like, okay, so I've been taking a swing over the last couple of weeks of trying to figure out how to organize what should be, and I've started interviewing a bunch of people around AI to try to figure that out, mainly just for myself. But of course, if you're going to do it and try to figure it out, you might as well build a roadmap for other people to follow. So that's the problem I've been trying to figure out over the last couple of weeks because I'm using AI enough to know that this is for good. Now, I remember doing this in 2010 when it was social media and feeling like this was the future. People are talking about it a lot, but people haven't really started catching on to using it a lot. It's just talk. It's all theoretical, all the podcasts are talking about what's going to happen ten years from now. And I'm like, forget ten years from now.

Dan Sanchez [00:14:33]:

Let's just talk about what's working now or maybe six months from now. So that's the problem I'm currently running it, like, trying to tackle. We'll see if I start applying some audience growth principles to that and build an audience around that topic. So we'll see.

Kerry Guard [00:14:46]:

Well, we are on the edge of our seats, and you're not alone in that topic either. Dan, I'm actually going to. You should join next week's episode with Dan Mundy, and David Moondy, where he's going to actually walk us through how he uses AI to cultivate content he is building. The beautiful thing about his content is that it's not at a mass scale or trying to do a lot of content. It's about doing really intentional content using AI. And the content they're producing is gorgeous and it's intentional and it's just so good. And you'd be surprised that it was AI-driven. And I can't wait to have that conversation with David.

Kerry Guard [00:15:30]:

So these conversations are going to go beautifully together in the way you cultivate your audience and the way that you bring value. So yes to that and yes to the challenge you're facing. And I can't wait to see what you're going to do in terms of how you figure out how to use AI to best build that content to meet your audience where they are, because it's two different audiences, too, and that matters. So hats off to you.

Dan Sanchez [00:15:51]:

It's true. Well, speaking to marketers with both sides, so we'll see how it goes. We'll see which one I end up becoming known for later on. But audience growth is not going to go away. So I'll continue to be talking about that for a long time.

Kerry Guard [00:16:04]:

I love it. Let's talk about audience growth. So you gave us sort of your origin story like Batman, in terms of why audience growth sort of hit you, of why it was important in that middle ground. Talk to us about where you started. So you were hitting the top, you were hitting the bottom, but you weren't sort of figuring out how to cultivate the middle. So where did you begin on that journey of figuring out, okay, we need to cultivate an audience and how we.

Dan Sanchez [00:16:33]:

Do that between here and there. I got a job at Sweetfish, which is a b two b podcasting agency. At that point, I had done social media. I'd even been a professional social media manager. But I'd not ever grown an audience, but it was Sweetfish and James Carberry who actually taught me distinctly how to grow an audience. He had grown an audience with his show B Two B Growth, and I became a co-host of that. And he showed me how to do it on LinkedIn, and I took to it like a duct of water. I was like, is that what you have to do to grow an audience? I will say growing an audience organically takes a substantial amount of time, but I saw the effects of it right away when I started posting.

Dan Sanchez [00:17:17]:

I had James coaching me through it, and we kind of built a network of all these friends. I kind of tapped into James's friend network on LinkedIn that made a massive difference. And I posted two or three times a day for five months, every day, engaging everybody.

Kerry Guard [00:17:36]:

Let's unpack this. Because you said three times a day, I think a lot of us are lucky to post once a day. I used to post once a day. I think I down to once a week. The struggle is real. And then you said to engage with everybody in their mother. I mean, I can post regularly. That's mostly not a problem.

Kerry Guard [00:18:03]:

Or when I was doing it, well, it wasn't a problem, but actually getting the engagement was definitely a struggle. So talk to me first about how you were able to gear up to three times a day. Was every piece of content took you an hour to 3 hours to write and really intentional, or was it just like, about making it happen? Walk us through that, because I want to go lay down just knowing that I should be posting three times a day.

Dan Sanchez [00:18:33]:

Yeah, I don't know another way around it. There's a cost to it if you want to grow organically without help from paid media or earned media. Some people have natural advantages where they have leverage in some kind of way, or they have a paid budget to amplify their content faster. And that's a great way. If you have that, then it's faster. But if you're starting at ground zero and have no paid media or earned media or some other kind of boost somewhere, and I guess I wasn't completely starting from ground zero. I was the co host of b two b growth, just getting thousands of downloads a month. And I had James, who was commenting on my post, and he had reached.

Dan Sanchez [00:19:13]:

So that made a difference and helped springboard it. But still, I took that opportunity and ran with it. Posting a lot of content in the beginning is critical for a couple of reasons. One, you get more at-bats, you get more attempts to try to figure out what actually works. That's a big part of audience growth, especially on the acquisition side, is finding what actually works, finding what actually gets resonance. And it's funny, I've been batting this around on LinkedIn lately, where I'm saying reach is better. Reach comes before resonance. If you're not getting reach, you're probably not getting resonance.

Kerry Guard [00:19:53]:

What do you mean by resonance?

Dan Sanchez [00:19:55]:

There's no way to know if your content's resonating. If it's not being seen by anybody. You're fooling yourselves. And b, two b marketers are kidding themselves if you think you're getting resonance without it being seen by enough people. The algorithms judge resonance by reach. There's ways to game it and throw out crap content that still gets reach, but there's no way to get resonance without reach. You have to get it in front of people. If you don't, then how do you know if it's resonating? Your goal in the beginning is to sort.

Kerry Guard [00:20:24]:

Of a double-edged sword, isn't it? Because what does reach even mean in terms of your specific audience? Right.

Dan Sanchez [00:20:37]:

Yeah, totally different. But if you're not getting dozens of comments or driving towards that means where you're actually having conversations with the right people over the right content, you're probably not there.

Kerry Guard [00:20:48]:

So in terms of what reach means to you, does it have to be in your ideal, exact ICP, or is it a bit gray to get your numbers up?

Dan Sanchez [00:20:59]:

Oh, gray, yeah. I'd be trying to shoot more broadly at first because at first, you don't even know. Look at any creator on any platform, there are exceptions to this. There are always exceptions, but they're almost always testing out all kinds of things until they figure out what their audience actually is, and then they start to double down on what's working. It's always a test. And see, at first, all creators have to go through the process. And I'd say that's the biggest difference between being a content marketer and a creator. A content marketer knows how to make content and push it out there.

Dan Sanchez [00:21:32]:

But a creator actually knows what resonates and can usually find it faster because they've proven that they know how to get it. They know how to get and keep attention. So in the beginning, the reason why you want to post so much so frequently is that it's like learning a language, right? It's really hard to make the jump, but then you start to hit a consistent point where you're just struggling with it, speaking it. Speaking it to the point where you start dreaming it, because you're doing it so much, you're starting to build an intuition, a feeling, a 6th sense over what's going to work and what's not. So as each piece you post and you start to see who's interacting with it and how it's getting some posts getting reached, some posts getting more engagement, trying to hone in on that signal, you start to build a sense of discernment around what actually resonates. And that's why it takes a volume of content for you to learn what's actually working.

Kerry Guard [00:22:23]:

Let's talk about that kind of content for a second. Because personally I sort of struggle with this because I like to talk about lots of different topics, which I think is a blessing and a curse. So I'm a mom, so happy to talk about my children all day. Can't help it. It's just part of who I am. And I love to draw parallels into leadership and b, two b in that. And that content does pretty well. But it's not really what my ultimate audience, my buying audience probably really cares about.

Kerry Guard [00:22:59]:

So I could definitely build an audience around being a mom and being an entrepreneur and being a CEO all day, every day. But are those the people that are going to buy from me? That's a struggle for me.

Dan Sanchez [00:23:15]:

Yes. I don't think they necessarily have to be the same. You have to ask yourself, is it getting me closer to where to my buyers are? Are the buyers seeing it versus just engaging in it? It kind of depends. Look at Gary Vee. Gary Vee is mostly engaging with small businesses and entrepreneurs, especially a lot of entrepreneurs, and marketers. Who is he selling to? Fortune 500 CEOs and CMOs Right. Very different audiences.

Dan Sanchez [00:23:41]:

CMOs are of course in his audience, but for the most part, it's a very different crew he's talking to. But he's using that as like, look at the attention I can get here. I could do the same for your brand. Right. Let's look at Tod Klaus, a smaller creator than Gary Vee. He's selling lavender for salespeople, but his audience is marketers. So he talks about marketing, how he's marketing essentially lavender and doing funny skits that are made for marketers, kind of making fun of sales.

Kerry Guard [00:24:12]:

Right?

Dan Sanchez [00:24:14]:

But naturally, marketers are becoming more familiar with lavender, but they're talking to salespeople all the time. So they're probably going to make referrals over to their sales partners. So it's a smart move in his case to talk to marketers about lavender as a case study, yet still plug it.

Kerry Guard [00:24:31]:

Okay, let's sit here for a second because I think this is important about who you're talking to. So for me, I can write content, like I said, all day, in regards to leadership, in regards to being an entrepreneur, in regards to being a mom, but not necessarily in regards to what we sell, which is SEO, digital ads in the realm of digital marketing. I mean, I can talk about that stuff, but I just don't find it. I find like, I'll just be on a repeat record of these are the things you should do and these are why you should do it. And it just doesn't feel interesting to me, so I don't write it about it. Right. But it sounds like that's okay if that's what the audience is interested in, regardless of whether it's my buying audience versus not the fact that it's an audience, that's what matters.

Dan Sanchez [00:25:26]:

Yes. You do not have to write about the core thing that you sell.

Kerry Guard [00:25:32]:

Sounds so counterintuitive to me.

Dan Sanchez [00:25:35]:

Yeah. The goal is to build relationships and the attention of the audience that you want to sell to, or at least somebody that influences them. You can sell to the people underneath, like getting an audience of the people underneath them, hoping that they'll influence the decision maker. One role above them. It kind of depends better just to build a relationship with the people above them. But the higher up you go on an.org structure, like getting an audience of just cmos is difficult but still worthwhile if you can do it.

Kerry Guard [00:26:05]:

But they're also human. And so talking about things that are outside of necessarily these specific things I do and playing to more of the human element is like because I'm human.

Dan Sanchez [00:26:15]:

And they're human, it is absolutely a way. Yes, you could totally build an audience of marketing executives who I assume is the one buying your services. Are you selling to small business owners mid and scale?

Kerry Guard [00:26:27]:

Yeah. So if your startup scales up so you're ready to make that leap and start really growing your business, we got you.

Dan Sanchez [00:26:36]:

Okay, so your marketing directors or VMs are probably your ideal. Yeah. Okay. So that was a similar target for sweetfish, but yes, you just need to build an audience of them more so than you have to be able to talk about your direct services. Because then if you have their attention, every once in a while you can come in with an offering of your services.

Kerry Guard [00:27:01]:

Right.

Dan Sanchez [00:27:02]:

And you'll be able to, it's like free advertising because you've built your own audience of the right people and every once in a while you plug how you're helping people like them.

Kerry Guard [00:27:10]:

Yeah. And tell stories.

Dan Sanchez [00:27:11]:

In fact, most companies get in trouble with what I call the meatball Sunday, and that's a term Seth Godin coined in a book, like, long ago, but he had a different interpretation of it than I do. To me, meatball Sunday is a company trying to put all their content into the resource section of their website. But there's a problem with that. And there's a reason why everyone struggles to build an audience on their company blog. Because your company blog is full of all kinds of content. It's full of top of the funnel content as well as bottom of the funnel content. It's got top tips for those who aren't aware of the problem and need to start discovering how to solve it. All the way down to company announcements, maybe things for your investors or your employees, maybe new feature announcements or ways to use the product.

Dan Sanchez [00:27:56]:

It's a mixture of way too many things. So you end up with something that looks like a meatball sundae. Sundays are great. Meatballs are great. Stick them together. It's horrible. But that's what we have going on on most corporate blogs is that exact combination. It's different content for different people at different times.

Dan Sanchez [00:28:13]:

So my recommendation is to create a separate media brand that can talk to all the things your actual audience cares about and then leave your corporate brand to talk about. Well, the corporation, the product. Have your product marketing here. Build a media brand with all the fun stuff your buyers care about here. Of course, the content can be shared between the two once in a while because you still want to be able to advertise your product, of course, and the media brand.

Kerry Guard [00:28:36]:

Yeah, I mean, that's my struggle, right? So I have tea time, which I love doing, and I really don't want to make it salesy. And I don't want to talk too much about what. Because at the end of the day, I'm here to create relationships with the people that I would love to do business with if they want a need to do business with me and my company. And my company is MKG Marketing. And so sometimes these two things are looked at separately. We have tea time over here. Do you have MPG over here? But how do you help bring them together? How do you help let one know that the other exists in a way that doesn't feel like you're giving one? I don't want to give the heart of what tea time is away. Right.

Kerry Guard [00:29:15]:

At the end of the day, though, I need a business to stand the other thing up. So how do you cultivate these things to work together in that way? It's tough.

Dan Sanchez [00:29:26]:

There are so many different ways to do it, but you can actually create, you just did one right now where you're like plugging in your company in his example and now you're talking about it, right? It's like a crossover right there. There are many different ways to create crossovers from the media brand to the corporate brand. If you want a really good example of somebody who's doing it really well, just go subscribe to the hustle. Very popular newsletter bought out by HubSpot. Makes a ton of sense because guess what? HubSpot is all over that newsletter in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. I mean, they're the sponsor across the top, of course, but in every newsletter there's like a big download of some kind of like, hey, check out this new HubSpot resource to help you accomplish x. We have a new template that does this. We have a new template, we have a new book.

Dan Sanchez [00:30:06]:

We have a new, even though there's always something new in there to go and download.

Kerry Guard [00:30:08]:

It's their icon on the homepage. But it's the hustle as the brand. But you know that icon, you can spot it a mile away. But yes.

Dan Sanchez [00:30:23]:

Look for all the crossovers and the hustle going back to HubSpot. HubSpot's doing it right. They also recognize the value of just having an audience. That's not because HubSpot already had how many emails and podcast listeners and web traffic. Why did they have to buy a have? They probably had their own, but they recognized that the hustle had the audience of the right people and had a good content like flywheel going with their podcast and their newsletter, which they just acquired it instead of building it themselves. Most companies can't afford to acquire it.

Kerry Guard [00:30:56]:

So you need to build the building piece. So we've talked about who you're speaking to piece. There are lots of ways to do that. Like we talked about, we talked about the consistency piece and I think we need to even dig into that more. But we'll circle back on that. So let's talk about the how piece. So we know that we are in the business of needing to build an audience. We need to build the middle, right? We can get people to our website and we can generate leads all day, but how do we bridge that gap, and then how do we cultivate it on the other end? So where do we begin? We talked about consistency and we talked about somewhat of the content, but I feel like there's a lot of missing pieces there.

Dan Sanchez [00:31:44]:

There's so many different ways to do this, but let me give you one that I'm working on right now with a client of mine called Closetrong. Closetrong is a new AI company of many that's selling AI sales tech to help people negotiate their contracts strongly. Hence the close is strong, right? Increase win rate. I've helped them launch a media brand called Close Mode, right, which talks about all things enterprise sales. Not just AI, not just negotiation. It's a broader show. We're kicking off this show by just interviewing ideal buyers.

Dan Sanchez [00:32:17]:

So this is a classic playbook out of Sweetfish, which is kind of an ABM play, more than it even is a content marketing play. But lots of people like to be. Let's see where we're going. You interview ideal buyers so the VPs and the directors of marketing you'd like to get to know at the companies you think might be interested in your services. You don't sell them at all, and you don't try to generate leads from them. You literally just build relationships with them systematically. At the same time, you can start that way, start to build up your skills as a host, and start to build up the quality of your content because at first, nobody's great at it, but you get better at it with reps, and you start to hone in on quality.

Kerry Guard [00:32:55]:

Do not listen to my season one. That's all I have to say.

Dan Sanchez [00:33:00]:

Everyone's got to go back to season one for inspiration, right? That's why I like to go to the YouTubers, like famous YouTubers, go to their first videos. It gives me hope.

Kerry Guard [00:33:10]:

Mr. Beasts of the world. Go back to those seasons. Yes. Okay, I can agree with that.

Dan Sanchez [00:33:16]:

Slowly but surely, you get a catalog. You start to get better at being a host and creating content. And you can start to input your own points of view as you're talking to guests, maybe start recording some solo episodes, maybe getting higher profile guests who you can have like, little fun debates with. As your point of view starts to develop yourself, you start to move from what I call an ABM-style show to a thought leadership-driven show. As your own point of view develops and gets refined, as your hosting experience gets better, as you're able to actually draw out interesting ideas that help and lead and guide people, aka thought leadership. Right? And you can start to transition to start to build an audience here. But it didn't start from ground zero. It started with you just building relationships.

Dan Sanchez [00:34:02]:

It's cool because those relationships can have bigger wins early on, right? Because relationships are powerful. They can win business. They could also be future employees. They could be partners for you. They can be referrals for their other friend who's at another company that needs your services, and maybe they don't. You don't know. It's serendipitous serendipity that really wins the day when you're building relationships.

Kerry Guard [00:34:24]:

Let's talk about podcasts because they're definitely a hot topic right now. They're a hot commodity. The way that I built my show was not for the listening audience. It was to say, I want to have some interesting conversations. I've been having interesting conversations. Now I just want to record those. My first season, like I said, do not go listen to it. My first season isn't about talking to b two b marketers, which is now the show I sort of focus on.

Kerry Guard [00:34:54]:

It was before talking to a lot of partners because that's just who I was comfortable with. So it was easier to talk to my peers at first than it was to talk to my potential customers or the people I really wanted to, quote-unquote, press. So that's how I started. But it wasn't about the ultimate listening, even to this day. I love listeners. I love that people are hanging out with us right now. I couldn't believe my numbers when I went live. That was wild.

Kerry Guard [00:35:28]:

But it was never about that for me. Is that true in sort of this ABM model, that it's nice to have a listenership, but that's not really, like, the ultimate goal? And is it ever the ultimate goal?

Dan Sanchez [00:35:43]:

It's secondary to a relationship. But of course, you need it to be. You can't completely ignore it. Otherwise, you're doing your guests a disservice. Right. They're coming on expecting to be an audience, honestly being asked questions. I like to go on shows even that I know have no audience because I find so much value in other people asking me questions. Because interviewers like yourself end up pulling new things out of me that I didn't even know was there.

Dan Sanchez [00:36:12]:

Sometimes because they ask a question with a spin of it that I was like, I didn't know. I thought that, can I get the recording of that? So I'm going to turn that into content somewhere else. So it's useful to be asked questions in and of itself. But of course, most people want to be in front of an audience. That's why they've agreed to come onto your show. So you need to be doing some degree of audience growth in order to get them in front of you. In order to do diligence for your guest. But you're right.

Dan Sanchez [00:36:37]:

A relationship is primary, audience growth is secondary. Eventually, you can flip it around and make audience growth primary, because honestly, there's more leverage if your audience is a good enough size than even the relationships with the guests.

Kerry Guard [00:36:49]:

Okay, so let's keep building on this. I want to get to that audience piece because I think that's. Honestly, I'm being a little selfish here, people, but hang in there with me, because I think we'll all benefit selfishly. Like, that's where I think I am of. I need to make that switch, which is really hard for me. But before we get there, in sitting with. Okay, so you got the ABM method, you got some guests on. And I want to say, being a podcaster myself, and having been for the last four years, it is not a walk in the park.

Kerry Guard [00:37:20]:

And you've certainly done this multiple times now, Dan, how do people get started? I mean, you made it sound so easy. Just grab some people to have a conversation with and just keep going.

Dan Sanchez [00:37:34]:

It's gotten easier, too, than it had even three years ago when I started. It's gotten so much easier and clearer because right now there are tools out there. Zencaster is my favorite, where it's all in one. You can literally use it. Like Riverside. It's got the recording aspect, it got some production aspect where it'll take the two different video feeds and swap them back and forth, and then you can publish it and it gets sent out everywhere. And then they even have the clips thing attached to it now, too. So you can, within a few clicks, go like, oh, here's all the clips.

Dan Sanchez [00:38:04]:

Publish, archive, publish, delete, archive, and just kind of send them all out once you hook it all up. So it's gotten really smooth on the tech end if you want to keep it super simple like there's always anchor, which is now Spotify for podcasters. If you just google that, they have a free tool and you can literally just do solo episodes, and record them. Honestly, find podcasting easier than any other medium because it's easier, just for me at least, to come up with a bullet point of list and then just start talking. I will say that I've spent more time sitting in front of a camera, and practicing talking in front of a camera. Just through loom. I've built the media department, so I just had to get good at getting in front of a camera. There is a skill to that, but once you know it, I don't know.

Dan Sanchez [00:38:49]:

I hate writing long blog posts, so I usually just turn on the camera, record, and then just take the transcript and have chat GPT turned into articles for me now. Yeah, but it's even easier to be a podcaster because you don't have to come up with the content. You literally just schedule meetings with people who hold you accountable because you have a calendar appointment with that person now. And then you just have to ask them questions. And if you're stuck on what questions to ask them, just find the thing that they're known for and ask them. Hey, so help me define that thing you do. Why is it so important? How do you do it? Why?

Kerry Guard [00:39:21]:

How? Game away here at Dan.

Dan Sanchez [00:39:26]:

Come on. The five w's and how have been like the game for journalists for forever.

Kerry Guard [00:39:30]:

It's true. And he's making it sound very easy, folks. And just to set clear expectations, it does take practice and a while, especially if you're an introvert like myself. The struggle is real. But to your point, Dan, it's definitely just the consistency game. Whether you're writing for LinkedIn or whether you're showing up for podcasts, it's just getting in the game and making that. I will say that I started even simpler. I started on Zoom because everybody has Zoom and you can record.

Kerry Guard [00:40:00]:

Zoom's good, you can download it. The only problem with Zoom, I've stepped up my game. Thanks to Peter Wheeler. I've graduated, if you will, and now I make sure that I'm recorded and my guest is recorded. And then we can splice that because I'm doing video now, so we could splice them. But if you're just doing audio, Zoom is great. It is not fancy. Everybody has it.

Kerry Guard [00:40:26]:

Have a conversation, record it, get an intro and outro, minor editing, and make it feel natural. And then publish. Yeah, publish it. Sometimes you get started and the first ones are going to be really rough. And that's really okay because you got to start somewhere. Like I said, skip the season two.

Dan Sanchez [00:40:51]:

Interview your friends first, maybe do a solo episode of you just talking. Then you interview your friends, and then you start reaching out to more people, people on LinkedIn. The fun thing is people rarely say no to being on a show. So if anything, they say nothing. And then I've had probably three people in 1000 different DMs I've sent to be on a show before.

Kerry Guard [00:41:13]:

Let's talk about your outreach then. So how do you ask people to come beyond your shelf?

Dan Sanchez [00:41:19]:

I have a couple of different methods. Like if I'm doing the ABM thing where I'm trying to build relationships with ideal buyers, I'm probably doing that more systematically where I'm using some automation tools to create a list and then systematically go and connect and then shoot them a DM and then have a follow-up. Usually, I'm opposed to using automated tools for something like LinkedIn, but in this case, I started off doing it manually and I found I was just doing the same thing over and over again. If you want to improve your hit rate on those guests, then obviously customizing it with like, hey, going beyond like hey, I love that you're a leader in XYz company. I'm doing a series that covers this topic that whatever, like something really general, so that the automation makes sense, but doing something more specific. Like hey, I saw your post about X. I'd love to talk to you about it on my show. Those are always going to work better because it's more personalized and you know they're going to be into speaking about that topic since they just posted about it.

Dan Sanchez [00:42:16]:

Or if the company did something remarkable and you knew they were leading the team on it, whatever that is, it increases your yes rate. Otherwise, for my own personal show, I'm usually just looking for interesting things people have said on posts and I'm like, I'll hit them up in the comments and be like, hey, would love to have you on my show about this. Sometimes they're in my comments and they start to argue with me, but in a polite, respectful way. And I'm like, hey, I love the debate, man. Let's have that. Do you want to come on my show and debate this out? I'll get those on there because that's just good content. I love hosting debates.

Kerry Guard [00:42:50]:

I agree with that.

Dan Sanchez [00:42:53]:

And who else do I get? Sometimes I put out calls for guests, like recently with the AI thing. I was like, hey guys, I'm trying to figure this out. Who's killing it with AI? I want to do his whole series on it. Drop your names below. I want to interview almost all of you. And of course, people recommended themselves, they recommended their friends, and I just systematically started doing all of them.

Kerry Guard [00:43:13]:

I've done all three.

Dan Sanchez [00:43:15]:

That's my next line.

Kerry Guard [00:43:16]:

Yeah, so I've done all three. I would say early on, ask your friends because you want to have honest, easy conversations that you're used to having and then use. I think it's really easy to use automated systems when you're early on. Like, I had a single script and we went out and just, I said, this is my ICP and we just went after it. I got lucky. It was 2019 Q four when I started sending out my DMs for people to be on my show. And then by February of 2020, my show was filled up because COVID hit. Everybody was home and everybody was bored.

Kerry Guard [00:43:55]:

So I got kind of lucky there. Maybe it's a little harder now to do, but I would say if you just are honest of like, hey, I'm starting the show, I'd love to have a conversation with you. Come on, let's hang out. Those work really well. And then once you have a great backlog and a good reputation, I'm with you, Dan. I love that I can sort of hand-pick people now. And I love doing the calls out, too. I did it earlier this year.

Kerry Guard [00:44:20]:

I said, hey, I need to fill up my show here. I tagged all the people who had been on my show before and said, who do you recommend? You've been on my show. Who should come on for the next round? And I think you were part of that crew. Actually, I was totally inundated. It was fantastic. And I got some amazing folks who I wouldn't have connected with before as recommendations, and it's been a blast. So those are all great ways to figure out how to get new folks on your show and to have great conversations. Totally agree.

Kerry Guard [00:44:53]:

So let's talk about flipping the script now so you have a great show like we talked about. Like, okay, we could hand-pick our people. But at some point, if you want a bigger reach, it needs to become about the audience who's listening. So how do you cultivate that audience?

Dan Sanchez [00:45:12]:

Let's talk about podcasts specifically, because obviously, you can grow an audience in so many different ways, from social to newsletter to YouTube to podcast to even direct mail. Like, just so many different ways to build an audience. But let's talk about podcasting. It's unique in that it's wicked hard. Like, ‘s harder than all the other channels, other than maybe like direct mail or something. But it's hard because podcast in and of itself has a horrible discovery engine. Only a few people can be on top of the charts, and their charts aren't getting any bigger, or any more niche for you to narrow it down. There are only so many featured podcasts on Apple and Spotify.

Dan Sanchez [00:45:49]:

So what do you? It’s unlike YouTube, where you can grow a YouTube channel just through YouTube alone. Almost all the YouTubers and books written about YouTube do not talk about how to up your YouTube game through Twitter yet. That's exactly what we have to do for podcasting.

Kerry Guard [00:46:08]:

Wait.

Dan Sanchez [00:46:09]:

In order to grow your podcast audience, you have to find other channels in order to get people to your podcast. It's a deeper level of. But it's worth it because podcasting specifically is intimate and is just a deeper level of connection and engagement with an audience. So it's not the very top of the funnel, but it's a step-down. So you have to build almost a funnel in order for people to get to said podcast.

Kerry Guard [00:46:36]:

So it's not a single channel. I feel like what I'm hearing you say is it's not about being on one channel like LinkedIn or YouTube, but it's about being on many channels to be found.

Dan Sanchez [00:46:51]:

At least two or three, or at least one and one or two others in order for your podcast to grow.

Kerry Guard [00:46:57]:

Yeah, so, like, I'm on Apple. That's unique to all because I published through Anchor. Right now we're going to switch to transistor. Peter will correct me if, you know, they go out to all of the big. So you got Apple, Spotify, Pocket, Google, you name it, it'll publish to that. And then I publish to LinkedIn like I do right now, live as well as YouTube. And then I also will transcribe it, create some show notes, and then publish to my own website. It feels like the only way to make podcasting to grow an audience is to make it as accessible as possible.

Kerry Guard [00:47:41]:

Not just your video and audio, but even transcriptions, as many different avenues as possible.

Dan Sanchez [00:47:49]:

Yeah, right. And if you want to set that on autopilot using something like cast magic really is. Yeah, it's cool. Is it? Make your transcript and then run it through chat GPT automatically with your custom prompts to make all the other content you want from it. I'm really hoping they help automate the process so that I can just publish it. And then it goes through cast magic and then goes everywhere else so that I don't have to ever go in there again. Just set it up once and automatically does it. I talked to their founder recently.

Dan Sanchez [00:48:21]:

I was like, come on, man, you need to automate the process. We'll see if they do. But you still have to build an audience somewhere else first or pay to bring people onto your podcast. You can use paid media in order to bring people and just drive them straight to subscribing and listening to your podcast. And that works relatively well. The secret of a lot of these top-ranking podcasts, too, if you ever notice, like, there's people ranking number one for the marketing list all the time, they probably got there through paid media, or they're probably paying for it regularly. NPR shows they're all paying one hundred k a month in growth or one hundred k a year. To get a lot of those shows to the top and keep them there, that's their distribution strategy.

Kerry Guard [00:49:06]:

Promote really well. NPR and Vox Box do this really well too, where you'll be listening to one show and then they'll promote another show, which is handy if you have multiple shows. But that's a whole other podcast that we do not have time for.

Dan Sanchez [00:49:23]:

So one other key, I got to say, for podcast growth, and I learned this from Jay Klaus about a year over a year ago, was that a newsletter is actually fantastic for podcast growth because getting someone to jump from something like LinkedIn, where they're consuming posts that take a minute to read to a 40 minutes interview, is a big ask. Getting them to give up an email to subscribe to a newsletter is much less of an ask. So now my best play as an audience growth person for a podcast is to get people to optimize my LinkedIn to get newsletter subscribers. And then on the thank you page of the newsletter subscription, push the podcast hard, even in the next follow-up. Automated Emails podcast. Hey, did you check out this episode, and then try to get them to that form, but now you have to make newsletter content and that's hard.

Kerry Guard [00:50:17]:

So let's talk about that for a second. Newsletter content in the sense that it's separate from your podcast, in addition to or it's taking your podcast content and turning it into newsletters because those are two different things.

Dan Sanchez [00:50:35]:

Bunch of different ways to do it. You could do something as simple as creating an RSS-driven email so that every time you publish a podcast, a newsletter goes out with links to your podcast. The simplest thing you could do. You set that up once you forget it and let that thing run. I think on Pod page, the podcast website tool, it'll even do that for you automatically. Great. A level up from there is maybe taking your weekly podcast like this show, running it through cast magic, telling it to make an article based on the content, which becomes my game away. Here you edit it a little bit.

Dan Sanchez [00:51:06]:

This is what I'm currently doing. If you want to go up a level from there, not only lead with that article, maybe embed a video from that episode, but have some other segments that are small, that are fun, that are a little easier, like the tool section tools you're using, tools you've heard about that you're playing with, shout out to things that you're seeing curate a little bit, like find some LinkedIn posts that you've seen that are awesome that week that you've tagged or saved and come up with a system to find them and plug those at the end of the newsletter. Create some little smaller sections that are fun and easy to kind of browse through. Think about like back in magazine days when we used to read magazines, a lot of the little fun was the little factoid stuff like in the little box in the corner, right? What kind of little factoid and interesting things and curated content and little data points can you bring into your newsletter to make it rich that might be somewhat related to the article that you made from your podcast? Of course, if you want to make it more robust, and have multiple main sections, look at the hustle for inspiration. They have two main articles and then a couple of little tips of the day kind of stuff or a little tweet of the day kind of things going on in there. They have like a robust newsletter and that's what that would look like. So you can start simple and level it up on the way there.

Dan Sanchez [00:52:22]:

Depending on how much time and effort you want to put into making a.

Kerry Guard [00:52:25]:

Great seems to be the name of the game is to a start above all else, start and start simple, whatever your lowest hanging fruit is. And then to level up. Whether that's through podcasting, whether that's through building a newsletter, whether that's both. I agree with the newsletter. At the end of the day, I think what we're saying and what you're saying, Dan, is in terms of cultivating an audience, you got to make it yours. So it's all well and good to build an audience on LinkedIn. It's all well and good. Know I'm still calling it Twitter.

Kerry Guard [00:52:59]:

I will call it Twitter till I die. Instagram, wherever you're building your audience is great, but it's not yours. And so having a newsletter, having a podcast, having a thing that draws people in that you're then cultivating and having the attention of is really what you want to get to. Let's talk about metrics here, because I think at the end of the day, this is what we all care about, that dopamine hit. Every time you see a like to that post or you see people engaging with your content, the dopamine hit is real and we're all in search for it. But what does it actually mean to be building an audience? Is it really just a numbers game? Is it that 25,000 number, or 100,000 number you're looking for on your LinkedIn? Is it that 50,000 number you're looking for on your newsletter? It's got to be more than just we talked about initially, like, you want to get the reach to start with, and then what?

Dan Sanchez [00:53:57]:

Yes, the numbers matter. The people making fun of vanity metrics don't understand. I'm like, they slap vanity metrics like reach and likes and in comments and stuff. Like, it doesn't matter because I feel like, because they're not getting it. And I'm like, okay, it's like making fun of the thing that you don't know how to get. That's fine. But all creators I know obsess over these things. Mr.

Dan Sanchez [00:54:18]:

Beast obsesses over these things. And guess what? He's able to monetize the heck out of it because he knows how to because he has the attention on the front end. Now, of course, as a marketer, your goal is to generate really good mqls, right? You need to generate actual interest. That is a lagging metric. You have no control over it. Shoot, you don't even have control over your reach. You only have control over the output that you're putting out and the quality of that output to some degree. We don't even know what really quality is.

Dan Sanchez [00:54:48]:

The audience gets to be the judge of quality, not us, not your CEO. So we have to control what we can control and then use all the lagging metrics of reach and comments and traffic to your profile. If you're going to LinkedIn, that's the next metric is how can I increase the traffic going to your profile, which is really a landing page for you or your company, and then start setting up metrics to measure profile views to clicks on the links in your profile. Right? That link at the top of your profile, the featured stuff at the featured post section, maybe even links you've hidden down in your resume. All those links are you tracking the traffic that it's sending to the strategic places you want it to go, right? And then we can actually start to make decisions based on the numbers here. It's not like, oh, you know something's wrong if you're getting way a ton of reach and all of a sudden you're getting zero comments. Yeah, that's a problem.

Dan Sanchez [00:55:42]:

But if we're getting zero comments because we're hardly getting any reach, it's like, well, let's fix the reach problem first, right? We obviously need more reach if we want more comments because comments is what drives the game on LinkedIn. But if we're getting lots of reach and lots of comments, and no one's visiting my profile, okay, now let's solve that. Can we get people going to our profile, can we promise content over there? Usually, people just click over there because they're curious. If once you get the reach and the engagement, if people are going to your profile but they're not going back to your website, why? So you can troubleshoot each one of these little baby steps, but you should be optimizing for all of those baby steps because that's what they are. But if you're not optimizing for reach first, good luck optimizing for the other ones. You don't even have the traffic going through it to make the most of it.

Kerry Guard [00:56:27]:

Let's talk about the algorithm for a second, because I feel like that's playing a critical role in our performance. As much reach as you can cultivate. I feel like there are some lagging indicators here in terms of engagement. One is the hours no longer seem to matter. So before, you had to get as many comments and as many likes as you possibly could within that first hour, if you wanted to be seen, the game seems to have shifted there in terms of that. And I feel like no matter how big your audience is, only a fraction of them are ever going to see your content to begin with. So correct me if I'm wrong here, Dan, you're the expert, but that's just my feeling of the game I've been playing, which has been rough.

Dan Sanchez [00:57:20]:

The algorithm is changing, but the other thing that's changing is just people's behavior on the platform. It changes, and goes through seasons. If you hit 2020 hard, right after COVID hit, it was a good time. That happened to be the time where I went all in. The market was also all in on spending time on LinkedIn because they couldn't go outside. They were spending more time. Tons of people lost their jobs. So what they do, they went to LinkedIn.

Dan Sanchez [00:57:43]:

Right. So that was a luck piece. I didn't know that was going to happen until afterward. I'm like, it seems like there's less attention. I'm like, well, what led to so much attention on LinkedIn in the summer of 2020? Oh, probably because hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs, or tens of thousands at least. Right. Makes sense. That's starting to happen again.

Dan Sanchez [00:58:03]:

LinkedIn is maturing as a platform, which means you can look at Facebook and what happened there. I remember the days when pages were cool and you were reaching 100% of your audience, and that slowly went away, and then pay was great, and then pay slowly started getting more expensive. It's kind of happening with LinkedIn, and that's okay, which is why I recommend the podcast or the newsletter game because we should start siphoning this traffic off. Still, there's not a better place to play for b to B or solopreneurs selling to businesses or even as a career play than LinkedIn like TikTok has its thing going on. But I'd say linked TikTok is maturing. So LinkedIn still, when I post to all these different platforms, I'm still seeing the most bang for my buck as far as time goes and investment in LinkedIn. Was it as good as it was three years ago? No. Is it still really good? And people are crushing it and getting massive reach still? Yes.

Dan Sanchez [00:58:55]:

For the amount of time you put in, it's great if you can supplement it with some paid too. But if you only got is organic.

Kerry Guard [00:59:02]:

Work it and you got to work it, you got to put the time in and it is time-consuming. But to Dan's point, it can certainly pay off, especially with the consistency and the audience and the messaging and then cultivating those vanity metrics, which are critical according to Trevor van Warden. So you know, what Trevor says goes, I totally agree, and Dan is an expert and has certainly done a great job cultivating his own audience. Dan, where can people find you? They want to learn more about building an audience.

Dan Sanchez [00:59:35]:

Danchez.com I need to turn this to because that's where people can find me. Danches.com, you can find the links to, of course, all the LinkedIn and social stuff, but courses, my newsletter. If you want to see anything that I've talked about and want to see me practicing what I've preached today, then go there and you can find the link.

Kerry Guard [00:59:53]:

And we've talked a lot about podcasting, but to Dan's credit, it is more than that in terms of building an audience. There are lots of ways to build an audience if getting on a show isn't what you feel like would be work for you. And actually, Ashley Kay asked a great question earlier on, which didn't show up in my feed, but showed up on LinkedIn, which is she's just curious to know what, according to you, Dan, is a personality trait of a podcaster. In other words, what skills do you need to have to start on that journey?

Dan Sanchez [01:00:25]:

Personality? I think you need to be curious. I think you need to be hungry. And that's one of the best ones that I've ever seen. A lot of podcasts are guest-based, as in they're interviewing people. If you're not doing that kind of a show, then you need to be comfortable with getting in front of a camera. I'm an introvert, and it took probably more effort for me to be comfortable speaking in front of a camera and just having my outline and going over it. Gosh, I remember the first time I did, I had to do retake after retake. It was painful.

Kerry Guard [01:00:53]:

I had a prompter.

Dan Sanchez [01:00:54]:

If you go to one of my, it's on one of my YouTube channels, you can see this video so hard. But I'd say curiosity is probably the greatest factor of all when it comes to podcasting. Your curiosity will lead you to asking the right questions. It's kind of like the Dale Carnegie's like how to speak, do public speaking effectively. He says the key ingredient of all is excitement. Next experience, right? But that excitement, and I'd say that applies to podcasting, too. Like, if you have a curiosity and you want to learn about it, you don't have to know anything about it. Just start getting cool people on the show or your friends on the show, and just start asking them questions.

Dan Sanchez [01:01:31]:

The audience, your curiosity will mirror somebody else's curiosity out there, which is what you need to do in order to build a good audience. I find the people that I personally want to know from, and I ask them the selfish questions that I want to ask. And over time, I've started to learn that other people wanted to ask the questions, too. I just got there first and interviewed them instead of other people, but they benefited because they can listen to it.

Kerry Guard [01:01:54]:

It's so true. It was actually a great advice that I got very early on in my shows is actually was Mike Kraft, my business partner, listened to one of my shows and he said, I think there's a lot more questions you could have asked there. I think you could have been a lot more curious. Like, I don't feel comfortable because I'm not an expert. And he's like, that's the beauty is you're not so lean into wanting to know more about it because you're not the expert. And that just opened up a whole world for me. And I totally agree, Dan, that it does just come down to wanting to be an endless know. It's like the best school ever.

Kerry Guard [01:02:28]:

I say it about my podcast all the time. It has been the best education of my career. I completely agree.

Dan Sanchez [01:02:38]:

One last thing. And this has been my thing that's more unique for me as an interviewer, but it's become my thing is I am just hungry because I want to know how to do it myself. Therefore, I ask questions about exactly how to do it down. So I'm literally taking notes. I had an interview this morning about how someone's using AI to prep for guest interviews. And I was like, tell me that. No. What did you prompt it now, what did you do after that? What did you feed it in order to get that? I'm like trying to take notes because I want to do it immediately afterward.

Dan Sanchez [01:03:06]:

And that's what drives a lot of my interviews is because I selfishly want to know how to do it. I want to be able to execute it after the interview. Some people take different approaches. Some people come at it from a human element. Some people come at it from a philosophical bent. There's all these different weird angles you can take that's mine. So find something that you're like. I love to find that way or that angle from it, and that will drive your curiosity.

Kerry Guard [01:03:31]:

I love that. Yes. I mean, do you think it comes down to what you are most interested in and being able to really dig into it and want to become your own expert in that thing, AI for you? Dan is a great example of that. Yes. Oh, my gosh. Well, go hang out@danchez.com and absorb all of this. You know, he's got great took, I took the audience growth one, and I think it's a great spot to really, we got some time coming up on our hands before the year-end with the break. Hopefully, you all get a break.

Kerry Guard [01:04:06]:

Get a break. Go take a break and learn from Dan on how to build your own audience come 2024. Make it a priority. Make it your goal. Make it happen. I'm here for it. Dan, I'm so grateful. Thank you.

Kerry Guard [01:04:18]:

Thank you so much. Thank you for listening. If you like this episode, please like subscribe, and share. We got one more show for you at the end of next week with David Mindy. I can't wait to host that one. It's going to be good. It's going to be good. Just as good as this one.

Kerry Guard [01:04:33]:

This episode is brought to you by MKG Marketing, the digital marketing agency that helps cyber security and complex brands get found via SEO and digital ads. Hosted by me, Carrie Gard, CEO and co-founder of FKG Marketing. And if you'd like to be a guest, come hang out with me. Dm me. Let's do a show together. I'd love to have you. Thank you so much.