HOST MARK FIDELMAN – GUEST AUSTIN LULIANO
Mark Fidelman 00:03
Welcome to the digital brand builder podcast where we bring you the best growth strategies from the world’s experts to help build your business faster. And now, here’s your host, Mark Fidelman. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the brand building, podcast and today. Joining me is Austin Luliano. And we’re going to talk about how to build a brand when you have zero sense. Austin, welcome to the show.
Austin Luliano 00:33
Thank you for having me. And thank you listeners. I’m really excited to share with you all
Mark Fidelman 00:38
and we are to you have quite a story. But before we jump in, can you tell us about yourself in 100 words or less 100 words or less? Your best.
00:48
I went from homeless sleeping out of my car with 43 cents to my name to becoming one of the fastest growing live streaming influencers and building my extended audience to over a million moving from From being homeless to now in Beverly Hills as a successful consultant.
Mark Fidelman 01:06
I mean, your story’s amazing. And I have to confess, I don’t know it yet because I like to approach these types of interviews with a beginner’s mind. So I’m going to be, you know, kind of veer the audience today. And we’re going to talk about your story, because I know it’s very unique. And I don’t know how the heck you went from 43 cents to being a very successful live streamer, but we’re going to find out. So let’s start with kind of the first question. I know everybody’s thinking, how did you get down to a situation where you only had 43 cents to your name?
01:37
It was due to my own actions and stupidity. Ah, and this will make sense later on in the story. But basically, I was in a small little town in upstate New York, this was like 10 plus years ago, the ideas of social media marketing and things like that were very new and innovative and cutting edge and not really establish I started building an agency because I joined my girlfriend, who was a graphic designer and sold her services. And then people started asking us for marketing. And I was like, but what are you doing for marketing? And these little tiny businesses were like, we’re spending $1,000 a month for this local magazine that gets 10,000 impressions and I’m like, you’re spending $1,000 for 10,000 impressions. Okay, what’s your return on your investment? Like, how many people have come in? And they’re like, we don’t know. And so I was like, Okay, this, there’s this new thing called Facebook advertising. What if we try this for one month, and let’s see what the results are. And as you can imagine, they had much greater results than 10,000 impressions. And I started building an agency in the small upstate town, and I started doing really well for myself, but because I was 20, and I’m really stupid and didn’t have wisdom. I made stupid, stupid errors, and I kind of lost everything. And what happened was like a smart move was to sell everything move back home with my mom who was just down the street, you know, and like, restart. But I had this little like gut instinct that said, If I do this, while this might be the safe move that logical move, I know that I am going to die as a person, not like physically, but like, spiritually, emotionally, I realized I was never going to get out of that small town and make a name for myself. And I was like, Okay, so I’m not going to do that. What am I going to do? And my girlfriend and I looked at each other, and we’re like, Well, you know, if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. So why don’t we go do that? So we packed up the last of our belongings into my little hunk of junk car, drove the three, four hours down to New York City and we happen to find the one street in our of New York that had 24 hour parking, which is unheard of. It was in this little place in Brooklyn, and my car broke down. And we were like, What the f. And it just so happened to be that like, it was actually in a relatively safe area relative being New York, but there was like campers. Now we’re parked behind us. And we made friends with somebody who was there. And for like, three to four months, we were living out of my car. Like, with no connections with no money with no resources with no prospects of a job, just trying to make it an every single day just like waking up going to the YMCA to do like a shower. I’m finding like we had these grubhub coupons that if you spent $15 or if you spent $16 you’d get $15 off so like every single one of our meals was like $16 $15 and 50 cents. Oh yeah. And like I made like 5000 new email addresses just to like gain this system. But we were like wow raping and and and struggling and like and eventually made it out. So that is how I got there and then I can go into more but if you have
Mark Fidelman 05:21
no we’re going to get there. So at some point during those 5000 meals you created for yourself very, very clever by the way. You decided either to wake up one day to change your life or something hit you. Can you talk to us about what you decided and how you decided to kind of change your path?
05:44
Sure. So it was one of those times I was scraping for a meal and I looked and I had 43 cents and we knew how to get a meal for 50 cents and I was like I am seven cents short of getting Today, and I kind of just like looked at myself and I was like, why am I here? And I had a like, come to Jesus moment where I was like, the reason I am at this place is because the millions of actions and decisions I have made leading up to this point, as it wasn’t like one big decision, it was thousands and thousands and thousands of micro decisions. And I was like, Okay, if this is the case, if I am the cause, then I am the result of the change. If I would normally make a decision one way, and I started doing the polar opposite of whatever that decision would be the exact opposite of my gut reaction, then I should be in the exact opposite place. Okay.
06:51
And I was like, this sounds kind of strange and what I I have to like, tell the audience this kind of came to fruition, because I am very much into personal development. I’m very much into understanding that what you consume, not just physically but mentally, credit hates what you do. Like if you eat cupcakes and cheesecake all day, I don’t care how much exercise you do, you’re gonna get fat. Well, if you consume a mindless media all day, then you’re going to have thoughts and actions that are going to predicate you being mentally sluggish. Like the worst thing you can possibly do is watch the news. The news is specifically geared to make you in fear like this COVID-19 thing, every single person like I understand a majority of your listeners are struggling right now and I 100% fear for you. But like they The news is trying to keep you to consume their information, and it’s not really helping you. You just need to touch it surface level. So I decided that what I was going to do is every single day I was going to listen to hours upon hours of those motivational YouTube videos because I had a computer and I had a phone, thankfully. So I went to Starbucks and I listened to the, you know, aspirational, motivational type content, I would go to the library and I would get audiobooks. And I listened to that on Audible is one of the best resources you can possibly get for your money. It is just fantastic. And so I would be consuming these different things. And then it made me have that thought of change my actions around and I started small, I was like, okay, normally when I get off of the subway, I make a right at my stop. Instead of making a right I’m going to make a left. Really it does no difference. Like it just changes my pattern and puts me one block out of the way which slows me down by like 30 more seconds, and it won’t fundamentally change anything. But what I later found out was that’s called a pattern interrupt from neuro linguistic programming. It’s changing the pattern in your brain and going and doing something different. And then that little pattern interrupt of just making a life started doing more things and more things like, hey, there’s this free networking meeting that normally I would have to, like, spend $1 I think it was 25 to get on the subway to get into Manhattan, which was a little bit hard. You know what, I’m gonna do it, I have some weird sort of feeling that I need to do this thing. So let me just go do it. And even though that is like two, three meals for me, I’m gonna go do this. And yeah, it was it was these little tiny actions that changed my trajectory. And that led me to bigger things. Another thing that I did that I was really conscious of, is listening to Tony Robbins, he talks about the power of tithing. We want more money in our life, and we hoard all this money. Well, it puts us in this mindset of we don’t have any Not and I was like, Okay. Tony is like you need to give money away. This is the short version of it highly recommend you listen to them. And I was like, Well, I have 43 cents right now, this is my meal, I need to get seven more cents so I can actually get a meal. I have nothing I can give away. So what can I do? And there’s this cool little TED talk that I listened to that said, our brains do not understand the difference between reality and imagination. And the, like high performing athletes, Olympic athletes literally imagine themselves running these races, and the same neurons firing the same patterns as when they’re imagining it as when they’re actually doing it. And they know this personally to be true, because like I was a snowboarder for many years, and I can literally close my eyes and imagine myself going down the mountain snowboarding and I can feel my muscles twitching in my legs have Yeah, different little micro movements that I would do. So I went, Okay, if this is the case, then what I’m going to do is I’m going to challenge myself as I walked down the street to look at random people in the eye, and then imagine giving them $10,000 in cash, like being like Mr. Beast before Mr. Beast started doing this. And I would imagine their reaction, I would see their facial structure as they broke down and cried, I would see people get angry and yell at me telling me this is a joke and like, they must be on like candid camera or something. I would see people like, just screaming and hugging me and every single human interaction that possibly could happen from that experience. And internally, it made me feel so good to be like, look at what I’m doing. And I would be very, like
11:48
I would I would pat myself on the back because it’s my imagination. And I’m like, nobody knows like what I’m doing right now. So I’m like, look at you, Austin. Look at you having so much abundance that you can hand people 10% thousand dollars. And yeah, those micro actions, those pattern interrupts those manifestation techniques, all of those little tiny things. I did it every single day. And over time, it led me to a place where what happened was being in the social media space, this new sort of social media medium came out at South by Southwest. It was called live streaming. And nobody did it before it was brand new. It was an app called a Meerkat. And it was premiering, and I was like, well, I want to check this thing out just because it sounds interesting. And I joined up with a buddy of mine, and we jumped in together to do this sort of live streaming thing just because we were like, We had no plans, no goals, no anything. We’re just like, let’s see what it is. And our first live stream had 3000 concurrent viewers watching us and
Mark Fidelman 12:58
because you were early or as epic Cuz you guys were that interesting. Both
13:02
it like it was it like, I’m not gonna deny that being early helps like it massively helps because you get 100% organic reach, you get so much extra promotion, it’s so much easier to cut through the noise when there’s not that many people and you get to know all those people. So it becomes a very collaborative space super early on. It’s not who’s beating who who’s doing what it’s like, yo, how can we work together? How can we do this? Isn’t this fun? And so you end up collaborating? So our first I find,
Mark Fidelman 13:37
I find when you get in there early, there’s just it’s like a new, let’s just say a new Netflix. And there’s only three channels. Well, three shows you’re going to tune into one of those three. But now there’s, there’s hundreds of thousands, but we’ll talk about that in a bit. Sure,
13:52
keep going. So it was definitely because we were early and I definitely believe there. Were It’s a natural charisma, like, engaging personality thing that was going on. Because just because you’re early doesn’t mean people are gonna watch you, like people will leave like time and attention are the most valuable resources. So I believe it was both. I definitely know that, you know, being early helped. So like the first 3000 live streaming, concurrent viewers, a little light bulb went off in my head, and I was like, Oh, this is going to be huge. So we started doing this on a very regular basis, weekly doing a show together, and then like me doing my own live streams on my own, and Meerkat and Periscope had, like a leaderboard type thing of who’s got the most like, engagements, who’s got the fastest growth rate, you know, so on and so forth. And I became The second fastest growing live streaming influencer at the time, the only person who beat me was big daddy g Grant Cardone himself and for the listeners who don’t know Grant Cardone is a billionaire now. He is a huge celebrity name in the entrepreneur space, specifically real estate and multi best selling author. So yeah, I’ve interviewed grant multiple times we’re gonna get him on on this program as well. But he’s,
Mark Fidelman 15:28
he’s hands are pretty full right now.
15:30
Yeah, grant is amazing. And I love him. I met him in person. We had a nice conversation. I don’t mind being number two to Grant Cardone. Right.
Mark Fidelman 15:39
Yes. back down. He wasn’t even as popular as he is. Now. He’s just off the charts.
15:44
Yeah, he’s he exploded with the live streaming because he became his own Press Agency, which is exactly what every single one of your listeners can do with video with live streaming. It is the most powerful tools you have available to
Mark Fidelman 16:00
Well, how did you go from livestream you got early success. So that was encouraging shit if I had 3000 people, you know, my first live stream, I’d be very encouraged to, but how did you go from that to monetizing that audience? Cool, perfect question.
16:16
So what ended up happening is, I was doing these shows, and one of the early successes I had with live streaming and like my shows that we’re doing the best the best type of content was talking about live streams and talking about what’s working and what’s not. And it’s because it was new and interesting. And everybody was trying to learn best practices, everybody was trying to, like, get in and we were kind of learning from each other. So like little simple things that you don’t think of, but like when you’re doing your first live stream, and you’re talking about something, maybe it’s like, five tips to be more effective at live streaming, right? And you get a bunch of people in there and they start asking questions and you start saying hello All of a sudden after a brief moment, you forgot where you are. And then you have that blank out blank moment. And you’re like, What do I do? Like an easy thing we all learned is, before you do your live stream, write your headline down and write your five tips. And then like, check them off as you’re going because you can’t see that on the camera. And then when you get distracted, and you’re on tip number three, and you’re like, Oh, yeah, okay, so tip number three is boom, and you go right back into it, and it helps keep you focused and on track, like little tiny things like that have been massively helpful. So I started talking about, you know, live streaming, which then went into marketing because we were all learning how to convert those live streamers over into people signing up for our email lists and our marketing funnels and I had a background in marketing and I was semi successful. But there was also this like contradictory thing going on in my brain, which was like Massive imposter syndrome. I was like, holy crap, you know, I’m homeless. I’m sleeping out of my car. I’m a failed business owner. Like, why is should anybody listen to me? Like, I’m the worst person to talk to about this. And so like, I was also having that chatter going on in my brain. And I realized, like, okay, I could either continue to try and hide this and fake it till I make it. Or I could do a hail mary and be like, Hey, here’s a real world situation. Here’s my failures, here’s what not to do learn from my failures. And I was like, that’s really scary. So I’m gonna go and try that because worst case scenario, a few thousand people, like know that I’m an absolute fraud and they all tune out and Okay, that could happen. So I I started getting really real with my audience and I was like, Listen, I like this is my failures. And what ended up happening is people really resonated with that. And they were like, holy crap, that’s really powerful. Thank you for sharing what hasn’t worked for you, thank you for sharing where you were. And people started asking me for more advice on what to do. And I’m like, but I just said to you, like, I’m not the person to listen to. But it created such a level of trust that I was willing to say, Hey, this is where I failed. This is what I don’t know that people were like, well, I want to know what you do know. And I started building myself out as a consultant because people wanted help getting on camera and getting confident and learning how to speak and then they wanted to learn how to build marketing funnels and how to turn your live streams into content that you could use other places and it just naturally more from there. And that like that just it just kept building and from live streaming, it went into marketing and marketing and went into all aspects of social media because they’re all kind of the same thing. When you boil it down, like there’s a fundamental thing you need for each social media. And then I started creating viral content on things like tic Tock and lively which was the live streaming platform and you know, it just it keeps building and that’s the fun part about my industry is like, it’s never going to be the same from one day to the next.
Mark Fidelman 20:22
How, let me stop you there for just a second. How did you get comfortable on camera?
20:28
The same way you get comfortable up on stage, you hit record, and you start it is the only solution to getting comfortable on camera.
Mark Fidelman 20:41
I agree. I I did 30 videos in 30 days too comfortable looking into a camera lens because that was the most distracting unhuman thing possible for me. I like looking people in the eye and talking to them. So I agree with you. You just got to hit record you got to set out to do 30 videos in 30 days and then from then from there, I was like, cured of any issues I had looking into a camera. So that’s good advice. I
21:07
also have like techniques for your listeners. Alright, like this. I’m gonna, I’m gonna run through some, but definitely, it’s just practices The most important thing. If you are really nervous about getting on camera, the best thing you can do before even trying to hit record and shoot it out there, as you grab your phone, set it up on a tripod or hold it in your hand, pull up a video, do the selfie video and record yourself speaking for two to three minutes about literally any subject. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to post it on social media. You just need to save it because what will happen is you’ll start getting comfortable looking at yourself and we are our own worst critics. So what you’re going to do on the first couple of days, you’re gonna go oh my god, I make this weird face like when I smile or when I think like I squint My left thigh and a looks like I have a droopy eye, oh my god, you’re going through all these self criticisms. And you’re eventually going to move through it. Because once you realize you’re doing it, you can start changing. So just recording and going through that motion helps a ton. And you can go back to your very first day, and then you can look at your 30th day and be like, holy crap, look at how much I’ve improved. The second thing is, look at the actual camera. Don’t look at your face, look at the little hole that is your camera. Because when you’re looking at your face, whether it’s on like a zoom call or at your phone, your eyes are off, and it doesn’t make it feel like you’re engaging with the actual audience. When you stare at that little camera and you smile. You actually are looking people in the eye and they can feel that it’s really weird. We can actually communicate a lot of energy and emotion through the camera. Then imagine the person not at that location. Circle, but three feet behind that little circle. Imagine your best friend smiling at you cheering you on throwing two thumbs up, because then that’s naturally going to make you happy. And you’re also going to project your energy just a little bit further, because the camera adds 10 pounds. It also takes away about 50% of your energy when you do when you’re hungry. Yeah, you know this from experience, like when you’re talking on camera, if you’re talking Normally, it sounds like this. It does isn’t so weird. You tell people you got to do to x your energy and then make it feel natural, which is very challenging to most people, but it feels natural when you are talking to somebody three feet away because naturally, when somebody is further away, our volume raises up, we project a little bit more, our chest goes a little bit wider, we stand a little bit taller to project our chin even goes up to project a little bit further. These natural little tiny body movements change how our energy is projected and when you’re on camera, you do that if you’re looking past the person past a little hole that is the camera to imaginary person behind you. I’m literally doing this right now smiling as I’m talking, I’m looking at my sink counter, like it’s nothing but it’s further away, and you feel better. So like little tiny things like that. Make getting on camera so much easier.
Mark Fidelman 24:25
What? Okay, and those are great tips. I’m sure we can go all day on that. And it really is exactly my experience your You and I have had the same experience. How do you decide before we get back into monetization? How do you how do you decide on your topics?
24:42
There are two ways you look at topics. One, I say look at who you were 235 years ago, and what did that person need to hear? needed to know and start there because Then you’re speaking from wisdom. There’s a lot of people who try and talk about things that they intellectually know. Like, I intellectually know how to do stock trading. Like It, it, I’ve studied it. I’ve never traded a stock in my life. So I’m not about to go and talk about it. There’s a difference between intellect and wisdom. And it completely resonates with people when you’re speaking from wisdom. So looking back at where you were a few years ago, is a very good trick to use, because then you can start building an audience of people you actually can serve. And this is talking about like a personal break. And the other way to look at it is what are trending topics, because there’s always something new in the news cycle and if you can hop on those trending topics, and really like resonate with your audience around one of those things, you can build Have a ton of momentum really fast. That’s kind of how I’ve gone viral time and time again, is knowing what those little topics are, and then creating content that resonates with that topic. Actually, I have a third way too, which is a more strategic business. And once you start building an audience, the audience is going to direct you in what they want to know you’re going to have a natural intuitive feel, because you’re going to hear from people again and again and again, the same sort of questions. But what I would do from that is then I would build out using the tools and resources online that are keyword research tools. Okay, what are keywords? What are phrases? What are things that people are asking and start building content around that sort of evergreen type situation, because that can feed into so many more things other than just like a single piece of content?
Mark Fidelman 26:57
Okay, love that and very similar. To what I do, again, I can’t believe we not shared notes on this. And I would just add to that, that, you know, I also look at trending topics for the day, or for the week, and I try to build my own unique perspective on top of those. They’re not necessarily evergreen content, but it’s something that if you’re I try to balance both, you know, what’s trending, and then what’s evergreen and I try to balance those at the same time.
27:29
So the Yes, I 100% agree with you. The reason that you do both of them and this is just for me, like very practical standpoint, evergreen content is very hard to create something that ranks extremely well, because everybody has created that evergreen content and everybody is fighting over those keywords, those key phrases. trending topics are really great because there’s not that much competition and if you can move fast and pivot to whatever that thing is, you can get a lot of momentum. And then you can use that audience that you’ve built off of these trending topics to kind of fight more competitively for the evergreen content. Yep.
Mark Fidelman 28:16
Great, great set of ideas. If you’re listening, you know, take those to heart. It’s a little bit of extra work. You’re not just doing it ad hoc, which I don’t recommend, unless you’re really talented, meaning plan it out a little bit in advance. And if you see opportunities to, to jump on a topic, I would I do want to get to monetization. I think that’s important because you really, I know you move the needle up to six figures and, and I interrupted you as you’re going through the story, but how did you start monetizing the audience and what exactly did you do?
28:47
So the easiest way I found top monetizing an audience is creating a service is trading time for dollars and like everyone Financial person always tells you to like scale. And we talked about online courses and things like that. trading time for dollars is very, very effective, because you start really learning and selling it very easily. Like, if you’re a copywriter, and you can make a persuasive sales copy, you 100% can have six figures just on that alone. Because there are so many businesses right now. Like simply take any niche. Let’s take martial arts, I love martial arts. You go into Google right now. And you go martial arts studios near me. And you go past that first page of answers. And then you go to the second tier and you start looking at different martial arts studios at their websites and look at, okay, how’s the copy? If it’s boring and dry, and it doesn’t feel like it converts? I would open up a Google excel sheet I’d put the martial arts studio name down, I’d put their phone number town, I’d put their website down, then I would bring that URL and I bring it over to Google’s a free tool that looks at how it loads on mobile and go is that mobile responsive? Those are perfect leads for you to call up and be a lot less than simply put, your website doesn’t convert. It’s boring. It’s try, I can rewrite this. And I can increase your conversions. If you have 100 people coming to your website right now. And only two of them are signing up saying yes, I want your free class and I rewrite this and it goes to four, I have now doubled your revenue. And that is a very easy conversation to have. Now I understand martial arts studios are closed right now because it’s not an essential service. But like this applies to anything, any sort of business in your area. You look at the mobile responsiveness. If it’s not responsive on mobile, you literally can shoot a video a 62nd video. Hi, my name is Austin Giuliano. I was taking a look at your website. Here’s what it looks like on mobile. Doesn’t that look terrible? Like, do you think this is converting? If you want help fixing this and making it look good, it could look like this, this or this, you have a couple examples. Give me a call. My number is bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. Then you’re on the phone with those people. And you send those videos through their contact form like, Hey, this is something that’s going on. You can be generating revenue for yourself. It’s service based businesses are the easiest thing to sell because so many people need help. And you are an expert at whatever you do. From there. As you build your audience. You can build that out into things like online courses and digital products. You can build that out into affiliate marketing like a fantastic way of generating revenue is like here are tools that I consistently use. And I wholeheartedly recommend. I have to caveat this and say two things with affiliate marketing. One, do not just pitch any tool because you think it’s going to make you money, actually value the audience you’ve built and don’t sell them out just for the quick cash. Because even though you might make some quick cash, you’re going to lose trust and trust is so much harder to build. And to affiliate marketing isn’t going to make you a ton of money overnight. It is just one of the things you can do. You can Yeah, so like
32:44
as you build out your audience, another great revenue source is public speaking, especially if you’ve been on camera and you feel comfortable on camera, transitioning those skill sets over to actually being on stage is hugely powerful. Use public speaking as a lead generation tool for myself. Because that is an hour when I’m up on stage, I’m giving value. And it’s such a soft pitch, hey, these are the type of people I’m looking for. If you know anybody like this, or if you are one of those people come speak to me, I will be at the back of the room. Let’s have a conversation. It’s that simple of a sell. So turning public speaking, making money on the back end by driving to like right now virtual summits are massive, they’ve exploded. There is a virtual summit that is happening on the fourth through the seventh that has like 30 top name speakers like Pat Flynn of Smart Passive income. We got the number one redditor Gallo boob who is a massive creator going on and speaking like, and it’s completely free. So being able to join those sorts of organizations or events that are happening, explodes your income because it explodes your network and then all of a sudden, that goes even further because you get email lists or you have, you know, make money on the back end with, you know, selling products or whatever it might be.
Mark Fidelman 34:15
Were you moving people from the live stream to some kind of a landing page? Absolutely. We’re trying to sell products directly from the live stream.
34:25
The first thing I did as I went from the live stream the content into a lead nurturing system, going to an opt in so like, if you go to my website, social dot, Austin giuliano.com, you can sign up and I have a free training around social media, which teaches people how to build their very first social media marketing funnel and like sales system, because most people cannot wrap their brains around it. So it’s very, very native to just say, hey, go check this thing out or you know, We were using Bitly links back in the day. But yes, I was doing landing pages to an opt in. And from there that goes into email marketing going into low dollar products, you know, like, the very standard marketing system. But it wasn’t. That wasn’t the thing that everybody did back in the day. We didn’t know we just kind of made it up as we went along. We’re like, Hey, I got this free training. Hey, you know, I’m going live. So come check this thing out, you know, we were using each tool to kind of help promote the other tool. And I highly recommend that nowadays, people continue to build their email list, build their list of text message marketing, because that’s,
Mark Fidelman 35:41
yeah, those are the only things you kind of control Right. I mean, everything else can be changed. Look what YouTube’s doing with with censoring content in the crypto space and other areas, everything, everything on Facebook, Instagram, they change their algorithms, you’re screwed if you’re relying on them. So you’re right. You got to build the text I think you have to be careful with it but text is one of the only things that almost get 100% open rate so correct out.
36:08
Yeah for right now Exactly. They’ll have they’ll have other tools that that stopped that but for now it’s a good thing to have but you can always call the person for example if, if worse came to worse so yeah text and email only two things that you own the. The other reason you want to get text and email is for retargeting, because if you aren’t doing this already, I highly recommend you start the process of retargeting your audience, there is a system I implement which is called a value add system where, for instance, on YouTube, you those pre roll ads where you skip after about 15 seconds. They don’t charge you unless the person watches about 30 seconds or more, which is really fantastic. Well, I’m caveat being that like, you still need a really good ad so bye They want to charge you, it’s just, they don’t charge you for a bunch of the skips. Anyways, what you can do is you can create a value add advertisement, where it’s like, maybe two, three minutes long of just you giving tips and best practices are something that your audience really wants to know. And you create an advertisement and you run it as pre rolls. I did this with a client and that ad got a 50% retention rate. So it was about a five minute long video and people were watching it for two to three minutes, this entire advertisement because they were just giving value after value after value. And you can do a soft pitch at the end like hey, if you want more, you know, come check me out, blah, blah, blah. But then from there, you retarget that audience that’s watched the 50% or more and you give them another value add and we do it again and again and it’s for pennies that you’re getting your your content in front of people and you don’t even have Have them on your email list. But what ends up happening is the organic search results skyrockets, because people are like, Who is this person that is on all of my things like we saw that with Billie Jean is marketing. We saw that with Tai Lopez, like, their names just explode because they are in front of you non stop saying their names. It’s a really effective system. And then when you come in and you’re like, hey, sign up to this free offer this list this product is whatever it is, it has a much higher conversion because your audience is now very receptive to what you have.
Mark Fidelman 38:38
Yeah, I want to stop you right there because that’s such a key point. I just want to re emphasize that and that’s what I’m in the business. That’s what this podcast is about digital brand building is exactly that build your name or your company’s name in front of anything that you want to sell or do with that audience. And the conversion rate like quadruples, wants because they feel like they know You, you know, Austin, if I knew you for 10 years, right, and you made a recommendation to buy X, Y, and Z, and I trust you, because you and I have talked every day, for the last 10 years, then I am so much more likely to buy that. And the same is true with what I call digital brand building or just brand building, build that brain, then you can start selling and I like the way that you’ve done it with live streaming. And I like the way Tai Lopez and Billy have done it. You know, despite what you think of them, and even Grant Cardone they are very effective at brand building, and now you know, they just get on a live or get on a video or even send an email and they’re showing tons of product studies.
39:41
Exactly. It is that easy. Sir, there’s a mentality that goes behind that of being comfortable with building your name that way, but that is a completely different conversation. tactics are simple, the tactics are the same thing. There is the If you want to make more money, the simplest thing you can do is ask for money. Ask more people to purchase from you. How many times have said, Have you asked somebody to purchase from you today, this week this month? like think about it. advertising is literally having the equivalent of millions of people knocking on doors asking for that sale. And they’re doing it 24 seven. So it’s hugely powerful. It is probably the one thing with social media that I think so many people are missing out on, you don’t even have to create content. You can be an expert in the ad space and you can do insanely well.
Mark Fidelman 40:40
Yep. Okay, so I love taking hypotheticals and I want to throw an example at you before we wrap up and see what you would do.
40:48
Okay, I love this look. Haha.
Mark Fidelman 40:50
Wonderful. I’m glad you’re willing to tackle this Austin. What if you were starting a travel channel. Do you want to do live streaming for Travel Channel.
41:01
What I got to do there? I’m gonna take my good friend, Jeff Goldberg. He started in New York City with me basically doing exactly what you talked about New York City is this living, breathing entity. It’s literally a character in movies, the city itself. And he went around looking at every Busker that has ever like played every natural, like tourist attraction, you know, Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, things like that. And he went around and he live streamed every single one of those things, six to 10 times a day, like just going around, showcasing the sights and sounds of New York City. And he exploded in popularity because people all around the world. We’re like, Hey, this is cool. I’ve always wanted to experience new york and I don’t have the resources to do this. If you can do something along those lines, you can start building your audience. And then what you do is I would reach out to the travel bureaus of various Institute like various states various cities and say, Hey, this is who I am. This is my audience. They’re highly invested in going to these various locations. You know, there’s a high interest in this, I would like to talk to you about you guys sponsoring me to come do this thing like GM, check out Arizona, let’s say on go look at the Grand Canyon, which could be hard because like Grand Canyon doesn’t get cell reception, but just for instance, doing that you’re going to be able to travel for free, you’re going to stay at these hotels. And then as your audience grows, you can, you know, start working deals on the back end. That’s like hey, you’re gonna pay me X amount of money to come do this and also stay at your hotels. This is what all those Instagram influencers have been doing for a long time. The thing is when it comes to travel right now very difficult to do. But if you’ve built an audience around it, those travel bureaus are going to want to so freaking badly because they are going to want to re stimulate their tourism business, which is going to take a massive hit.
Mark Fidelman 43:30
Yeah. And so what if, what if you’re an existing business that already is doing a lot you want to move into live streaming? Do you turn yourself into a live streamer influencer to promote your existing properties? Or, you know, what recommendations would you have for that person?
43:48
That’s going to be a little bit different from person to person business to business, so I’m going to talk in broad brushstrokes here, but generally speaking, people connect with people. So you as the owner becoming the face of your live streaming platform, or if you’re doing YouTube videos, whatever video platform you’re doing, even if it’s a podcast is much more likely and better to be receptive, then if you try and bring somebody else in to do it, because like your social media manager, you might love them, they might be great. The thing is, at the end of the day, they can go to another business, they can go work for somebody else, and then the face of your company has now shifted, if it’s you, and there’s a problem that happens while you’re on live streaming, you get to handle that right then and there and they don’t have to pass it off to you for you to come back and handle it. So there’s a lot of benefits to you taking it over. What I would do is let’s say I’m going to make a perfectional business here because it’s a A little bit easier for my brain. Let’s say you are in Hawaii and you do boat tours of like the surrounding islands, I would 100% every single boat tour that you do go around and show the natural beauty I would show the rainbows that are happening and the dolphins that are swimming, I would talk about it I would talk about like various things. The more you show, the more desire you’re going to create. And people are going to tune in and watch it people don’t go, Oh, I saw what Hawaii looked like on a video so I don’t have to actually show up. They go I saw what it looked like. And I absolutely have to go there. So now that’s on my desires. That’s my like vision. That’s my vacation that I’m going to save up for and make it so the more you show, the better it ends up being. I would do that I would start talking to each of the employees, you know, and I’d be like, Hey, you know, so what’s your experience? What do you recommend? I would make your organization very human, like human, and maybe talk to the chef who makes the meals as you go out or, you know, talk to the luau dancers who are have their dance and and have them teach a lesson you know, so you can do it at home too. I would look at various ways you can create content and just get creative. And the fun thing is, if you do bad if you fail, if it doesn’t resonate, nobody’s going to remember.
Mark Fidelman 46:29
Yeah, right. That’s the thing people don’t understand is that most First of all, I think most people watch your videos wants you to succeed. But if you don’t, you know, they’re not gonna remember it.
46:39
And let me just add this to the first hater you get because you will get haters you will get people pooping on what you do. Celebrate. Because if you are attracting haters, it means you’re on the right path. Statistically speaking, it’s something like 25% of People are going to love you for who you are 25% of people are going to hate you. And 50% of people are just not going to care. My goal whenever I do anything is to take that 50% that don’t care and push them to the extreme. I want you to hate me. And at which point you’ve probably tuned out of this podcast already, where I want you to love me, which if that’s the case, that’s fantastic. That in between is the worst part. So when I ever I get a hater, I get really excited because I’m like, Oh, I said something that evoked emotion so much that they had to like blurt it out like a frickin child throwing a temper tantrum rate. What did I say, oh, what can I learn from this? How can I like, take it even further, because I want to push you away. I want my haters out. So I’m going to push them away. And the kind of the great thing with social media is if you get haters coming in, they’re yelling at you. It’s just Jacks the algorithm up and more people see it and then people come in and defend you or more haters come in and then eject your algorithm up even That’s outrage marketing, it works extremely effective. And then in two, three days, everybody’s forgotten, but you still have the benefits of all of that outrage.
Mark Fidelman 48:11
Wonderful. So I mean, we’ve we’ve been a little longer than my typical podcast, but I do want to ask you this question that’s I’ve been trying to figure out so live streaming is great for a real time audience. And even on Facebook, it sits around and it circulates on people’s feeds that have tuned in before, but it’s shot in kind of a vertical mode. And I’m a big fan of YouTube and I like putting things on YouTube because of the SEO value. There’s like no SEO value on Facebook. So how do you what do you recommend people do that are shooting in vertical but on YouTube, it’s got to be landscape except for YouTube Live. How do you you know how do you create you have to create a second video do you use two cameras? What do you do?
48:53
simple solution. Turn your camera sideways.
48:56
I’m even on Facebook Live,
48:58
Facebook Lives and If I am not mistaken, have made it so you can turn the video sideways and it records horizontally. Ah, yeah, you could do both. Yeah, you could do both. So like this is whenever I create live streams, I’m also looking at how do I chop it down. You can take a live stream or podcasts like this and turn it into multiple pieces of content. You can take your live stream, go on to Fiverr find a video editor and be like, here are the timestamps I need you to cut this down I need you to add effects color correct. Make sure the sounds great. And for probably under $100, you can have a number of pieces of content good to go for social media and then you start posting it which goes into the whole you know, organic social media, you can direct people back to the full clip like with a podcast or with the full live stream or the full YouTube video, whatever it may be. Yep,
Mark Fidelman 50:00
Okay, wonderful. We we’ve got to wrap things up finally and what I do typically, Austin is I ask people two final questions. The first is what is the hottest digital marketing tection technology that you can run recommend today maybe it’s a live streaming technology
50:19
I’m the hottest technology is the one in between your brain tools and technologies are great mindset and your approach are going to Trump everything you do. So I am going to start there.
Mark Fidelman 50:32
Who is the who’s influencing the most in marketing today? And I’ll tell you that in our conversation before you you recommend it very Gary Vaynerchuk or Gallo boob who I never heard of before, but maybe you could explain
50:45
Okay, so I’m gonna say gala boo because I think he is the most underrated person on the internet right now. Reddit is the front page of the internet. If it hits the front page of Reddit. It’s going viral and pretty much everything you’ve ever done. See across your Facebook feed or your Instagram that has gone viral. Got it scarred on Reddit, or got pushed and promoted on Reddit. gala boob is the number one creator on there and he has this the most. It’s called karma. They’re fake internet points. People love him. People hate him. But basically if he gets behind something, it’s going viral. So he is probably the most underrated person on the internet. Everybody knows Gary Vaynerchuk and Grant Cardone and Billie Jean is marketing, for marketing for creating these viral things. I think that is really cool as people who kind of work behind the scenes.
Mark Fidelman 51:44
Okay, so he’s just on redditors the other places,
51:47
he’s across all the social medias, but Reddit is his main platform.
Mark Fidelman 51:52
Got it? Okay, number one karma guy. I mean, that’s saying a lot. Especially these are the the harshness of the harsh critics. on Reddit, if you’re posting anything, you gotta be ready for the backlash or praise. And if you get the praise, it could really turn that post into a sensation like you said. Okay, so where Austin can people get ahold of you?
52:16
The easiest way to get ahold of me is to Google my name Austin, a US TNIULI. A and O. do find all my social medias. You’ll find my website, you’ll find more podcasts that I’ve done anything on. I really like social media. So come over, say you found me from this podcast, say hello. Let’s be social. It’s pretty fun.
Mark Fidelman 52:45
Wonderful, and I really appreciate you coming on the show telling your story. You came you went from 43 cents in your pocket to six figures. It’s an amazing story and you started it with live streaming you built from there and I encourage you all to listen to this podcast again, to get kind of the insights as to what he did and how he did it. So again, Austin, thank you for being on the show.
53:09
Thank you for having me. I appreciate you and all your listeners. Thank you for listening that song. I really appreciate it.
