PROACTIVE Podcast with Chris Hogan

Published Oct 28, 2019 VIDEO TRANSCRIPT Chris Hogan - Good day world, Chris Hogan coming to you live from MeMedia Studio here at Burleigh Heads for episode 109 of "Get Facted Up". And I have with me Tegan Boorman from Social Law Co. How are you Tegan? Tegan Boorman - Good, thank you, how are you? Chris Hogan - Excellent, thanks so much for coming in to the studio. We had a chat a little while ago out and about on the Gold Coast and it was quite interesting. We were talking about influencer marketing and I guess the contractual arrangements that maybe they're not doing. Tegan Boorman - [Tegan] Yes. Chris Hogan - Or some of the pitfalls that are happening in influencer marketing at the moment. Tegan Boorman - Tricks and traps, yep. Chris Hogan - Yeah, so we did touch on some of the things we need to say around, you know this is sponsored content. Tegan Boorman - [Tegan] Mhm. Chris Hogan - Can we just reiterate that again for the audience? - Yeah, so basically it needs to be apparent and clearly distinguishable as being sponsored content when they're posting it. So that may be they do the #add, or #sponsored, or some other way to actually endorse the fact that it's a commercial arrangement and the reason why they're actually posting it. It doesn't necessarily have to be that every time. In my opinion, risk wise you would be better off to do it because, then it's obviously, absolutely clear that's it's an ad and everyone seems to know if you use #ad it's very clear that it's a paid endorsement. You are better off to do that, however, it's not in every case necessary. Chris Hogan - Right, so that's a great DIY thing that influence marketers should be doing right now. Tegan Boorman - Yes. Chris Hogan - Off ya go. Tegan Boorman - And a lot of them are doing it. More and more I'm seeing you know the big brands that have started not so great in terms of their disclosure. I'm seeing changes and they're starting to implement some more of the DIY stuff, so that's fantastic to see. Chris Hogan - Great, so what are the some of the pit falls that are happening beyond, you know like-- Tegan Boorman - Disclosure? Chris Hogan - Yeah, and why do they need to engage a lawyer? Tegan Boorman - I guess without a commercial agreement, you don't really know what they terms are between you, and you're leaving it open to a court to determine what the intention of the parties were when they actually entered in to that arrangement. So by having an agreement, you can actually turn your mind to the facts and what you want from the content that are creating and what's expected of the influencer. And for the influencer in return what's expected of them and how that content's going to be used. You really are taking it out the realm of, you know, we think we can use it like this and let's just grab it and run with it to a more commercial approach. And this is become a business now for people. They need to be clearer on what they are paying for and what they can do with it and by having commercial agreement in place, it takes them a long way to actually be able to say, this is what I paid for and this is what I should be able to do. Chris Hogan - So for example, we might be taking a photo of somebody showing a product and that it's meant just for Instagram alone. Tegan Boorman - Correct. Chris Hogan - Maybe their brand goes, oh no we want to use it on all of our packaging or a billboard or something along-- Tegan Boorman - That's right. Chris Hogan - Those lines. And that's not what the influencer signed up for. Tegan Boorman - Well that's right because an influencer might have a different fee that they would charge for that. And they might have a you know a package of services that they offer. And it might just be for a one off post that it's a small fee however if you want to use that content and create a huge big campaign around it, then that's an extra fee they could be earning extra money for that. And that may not be what they've considered to be you know what they were doing for that fee. So yeah. Chris Hogan - I'd say influencers starting out as influencers might be like, open to that, yeah, happy to be-- Tegan Boorman - Absolutely. Chris Hogan - Anywhere because that helps-- Tegan Boorman - More exposure. Chris Hogan - Raise their profile right? Chris Hogan - So where are we seeing, I guess these contracts coming in. Is there as, you know, is it based on followers? Tegan Boorman - It's a tipping point, it's a risk consideration that needs to be thought through by both the brands that are engaging the influencers and the influencers themselves. So the real legal risk in terms of failing to disclose and what not comes from the A triple C's ability to be able to enforce the Australian Consumer Laws. So under that you need to make sure that you know you're disclosing things properly and as part of that the A triple C have put out guidance and said that they're more likely to investigate things where you know there's widespread detriment or risk of detriment and that these are you know blatant disregard for the legislation and particularly if you keep coming to their attention, it's going to be an issue for you. Chris Hogan - Sure. Tegan Boorman - You know it needs to be a risk assessment that the brands and the influencers are making at the time of you know thinking through their campaign as to whether or not we need to go and get an agreement or you know is it sufficient for us just to sort of make sure that we're agreeing on terms. Or is it just a let's just grab it and run with it because we think the risk is low here but the thoughts around disclosure should always be there from the start. Chris Hogan - Great, and so what are some of the other pit falls that are happening before, during, after influencer engagement? Tegan Boorman - I guess for fees so there was an example recently in Victoria, where it actually went through the courts whether or not she was entitled to a certain fee. So it was an ongoing sort of arrangement and you know posts were sort of added at her discretion but there was no influencer agreement in place and at a later date she decided to archive a lot of those posts and then go and collect her fee and you know rightly so. The brand said well where's the posts? I can't even see them. I haven't got the value that I thought I was getting by this being on your Instagram page. So you know that's an that's an example of you know a consideration if she had an agreement to say these are the posts. I'm entitled to archive them after this date. You'll pay this fee for individual posts and in that specific situation as well they had agreed to revise the fee halfway through it which overly complicated it as well. Whereas that should have been in writing from X date these posts onwards are you know subject to the higher fee and this is what we expect from it. So it really takes out the uncertainty and the risk of a dispute arising by having those agreed terms and setting out what you're doing for the fee that you're getting. Chris Hogan - Sure, so people charging fees based on maybe just a post to their wall or newsfeed for argument's sake. Than a story and then maybe getting extra for if that particular piece of content gets a certain amount of engagement. And then are they also discussing the fact that well that was all organic. We want to put a boost budget behind that now. Tegan Boorman - Uh huh. Chris Hogan - You know, can we can we discuss that and-- Tegan Boorman - [Tegan] Yeah. Chris Hogan - And clarify what that is and what that means in terms of dollars and cents. Is that sort of stuff happening too? Tegan Boorman - I mean how they charge and what they charge for is so dependent on the influencer. Chris Hogan - Sure. - So I guess they charge what they can get, right? So the more followers they've got the better the brand alignment is going to depend on what they're going to charge. So they're each free to charge whatever fee they like. What becomes standard market practise, you know they might have a one post fee. They might have a you know a campaign fee. A brand ambassador fee. It can be any number of structuring in terms of how they charge it but yeah if it's the intention to actually sort of expand that campaign beyond the initial thing there should be some sort of mechanism and the agreement to sort of determine what fees if any are adjusted in that situation. And you know what further input the influencer might have. Chris Hogan - Great, so are brands getting themselves in trouble more than the influencers, like for example, are brands you know sort of you know we'll just use that image on our packaging or on a billboard or something like that. Are they been a little bit sneaky and and pushy here or? Tegan Boorman - You probably seen in the news recently there's been complaints about various different teeth straightening companies for example. So it is ultimately going to probably fall back more onto the brand. Because like all traditional forms of advertising you know it's where the brand is placing their product and there's an obligation to make sure that you know they're following the self regulated guidelines in that process to make sure that you know they're compliant with all the codes et cetera and in this case you know your clearly distinguishable provisions now and sewed it into the code of ethics. So yeah it is gonna fall mostly back onto the brand. That's not to say that the influencer doesn't have their own exposure and risk in the situation because you know they're a party to it and also the agencies connecting them so that's also you know they can be an accessory to this and it's a whole other landscape for them. Chris Hogan - Yeah, agencies, I know a couple. Tegan Boorman - Yeah. Chris Hogan - I was going to ask about the, I don't know what it was actually. Tegan Boorman - Lost your train of thought? Chris Hogan - Yeah I did, sorry it's a really great conversation and oh, unfair contract law. So does that sort of come in to where the brand might be going, hey we want you to do all of this for this. Tegan Boorman - It's always a consideration whether or not you know those provisions are you know enforceable, absolutely. But it's a commercial deal. So if they've agreed to you know provide the services on that basis, then that's the commercial arrangement that they made. Chris Hogan - So suck it up princess kind of thing. If you write or sign the contract. Tegan Boorman - You should be getting legal advice on your contact to start with. But yeah there's always you know mechanisms to protect in certain situations, so yeah. Chris Hogan - Yeah, okay, well. Where does it go from here? Is there is there more pitfalls that are happening that? Tegan Boorman - I think there's going to be a little bit of an onslaught of more awareness around you know content rights and usage and you know who owns what piece of content and what can be done with it. Specifically because we're about to see a new code come in in relation to influencer marketing that's going to make this more apparent to everyone involved. So you know influencers who might not have otherwise been aware that how that content can be used or that it can't specifically just be used and you know the influence that brand runs with it and then owns the content. Once that awareness comes in there's probably going to be more disputes that arise I'm expecting. But on top of that it's probably going to be clearer that they need to have an agreement. So I'm expecting this is going to be a bit of a game changer in terms of regulation. In terms of growing the industry up a little bit and in terms of you know turning it more into a transparent business transaction and needing the contract that goes with that. Chris Hogan - Sure, where does copyright come in? Because a lot of people would say, hey if it's on social media it's free from copyright so I can use it anywhere I like. Tegan Boorman - Not correct. So you know there's always the ability to share content and the platform's create the mechanism for that so if you're on Facebook and you know, you share a piece of content that's different than saving that content, and then posting it to Instagram for example. That's different and especially if you're passing it off as your own work at that stage. Chris Hogan - So you citing the resource, you citing the-- Tegan Boorman - That's right, you are citing it because you're actually sharing the piece of content that the owner, hopefully the owner, of that content has posted. If you're sharing it and when you share it you can see that person has posted it, and you're just commenting on you know, what a great piece of content it is or that it's useful that it might be something that your connections might find interesting, it's very clear that that's, you know they're actually citing that that's not their content. When you actually copy that content and you know go and use it to create your logo or whatever, then that's that's a problem. Chris Hogan - What if a influencer is shooting some content for a particular brand. - [Tegan] Mhm. Chris Hogan - And the brand is in shot, and there happens to be another brand like in the background or emblem on the shirt or something like that, that doesn't want to be associated with that brand. Tegan Boorman - Can be a problem. But I mean they're in a photo and it's difficult because they've created, the owner if the copyright is the person who brings that piece of content to existence. So it might be the photographer's taking the photo. They own the rights in that photo. If you've got an issue with being in that photo. I mean these guys could have a problem with this. Like it's you know-- Chris Hogan - They don't. Chris Hogan - Livin rock, if you haven't heard of them, livin.org mental health, charity. - So yeah, I don't think there's much behind that in terms of issues. I mean there are businesses and we have a client for example that is in the business of creating content that uses multiple brands. So it's a, you know, it's a situation where she will have five brands approached her and they're related products. And that they, you know, work well. They will cross promote each other and she will take images and those images are then shared by each of those brands which increases, you know, it cross pollinates their audience and increases their followings. Chris Hogan - That's why we love collaboration. Tegan Boorman - That's right. So it's all about collaboration and then you know having the agreements, we did all the agreements for her that underpinned all that to make sure that she could do that and that, you know all the parties are on board with that. Chris Hogan - That's a very good example when you need to contract. Tegan Boorman - That's right. Chris Hogan - Yeah, real real important. Tegan Boorman - [Tegan] Yeah. Chris Hogan - Excellent advice Tegan. So how do people stay across what Social Law Co are up to? What's the socials and what's the web address et cetera? Tegan Boorman - So where we've got a business profile page on LinkedIn. All of the socials, so TikTok, Instagram, Facebook all the usual ones. So it's actually a division of former lawyers so when we spoke last time I mentioned social lawyers, this is a specific sub-brand for that firm that caters specifically to this market. We made the decision that it really needed it. So in branding around it and it's got a very specific audience. So that's the rationale behind the change of the names in that scenario. Chris Hogan - Cool, so we have no contract with Tegan. So you could use this content. But Tegan has-- Tegan Boorman - Voluntarily. Chris Hogan - Voluntarily, sat herself down and spoken on camera for MeMedia and for you. So thanks very much for your time Tegan. Tegan Boorman - That's okay. Chris Hogan - I really do appreciate it. Tegan Boorman - No problem. Chris Hogan - And we gonna share this out across the social. So keep sharing guys. We've got plenty more coming to you from MeMedia Studio. In fact we're ramping up again. We've been a little bit quiet if you've hit our website. But there's actually some excitement in the air so. As it heats up for summer, woo-hoo. Chris Hogan - Cheers. Tegan Boorman - Thanks.

Published Jun 14, 2019 CORE UPDATES: WHAT THEY ARE, HOW THEY CAN AFFECT YOUR BUSINESS, AND WHAT YOU CAN DO TO STAY AFLOAT. Next time you’re feeling run off your feet at work, have a think about the poor data scientists and web developers of Silicon Valley, the tireless cogs of Google and the internet at large. You may not know it, but on average these guys roll out multiple updates to the Google algorithm each day, amounting to what is thousands of changes each and every year. Designed “to improve results” and usability, the vast majority of these updates go unnoticed by both the general public and those monitoring the SEO climate, being too small in scale and calibre to have any tangible effects. However, every couple of months, Google will roll out a significantly larger update known as a “Core Update”, and the effects of these can be felt to varying degrees depending on the nature of your business and/or website. You may not be aware, but such an update was actually released at the start of June 2019, and the extent of its effects are still being gauged. “When Google say core algorithm updates, it means it's going to be big – and people will see major jumps in their rankings”. In essence, what we are seeing now is an extension of Google’s August 2018 update, that has come to be known colloquially as the Medic Update. Though described by Google as a broad (i.e not market specific) and global update, the Medic gained its medical moniker due to the fact that it seemed to disproportionately affect websites and businesses that sat within the health and medical spheres, as well as the “Your Money Your Life” type sites which deal with cryptocurrencies. At present, it seems that June’s update is everything that Google promised the Medic would be: broad, global and cross-disciplinary. Operating in much the same fashion as the Medic, the new algorithm update is prioritising content on the merits of quality and authority, thus changing what businesses rank higher in the SERPS in accordance with how quality Google deems their content. In order to gain an understanding of what this means for your business and to learn what you can do to continue steering a straight course with your SEO marketing in the ever changing changing seas of Google’s algorithms, it pays to revisit the Medic Update as an explanatory case study. HOW UPDATES CAN AFFECT YOUR BUSINESS: As stated, the Medic Update seriously impacted a broad range of businesses within the health sector including hospitals, nursing homes, pharma companies, informational medical web pages and websites selling health/medical products. What we are seeing now is a cross-disciplinary extension of the Medic, but fear not; it’s not all bad news. After the release of the Medic Update, what followed was that businesses or websites that had been steadily appearing a certain position in Google’s SERPs, would suddenly jump any number of positions, or sometimes even pages, in either direction, resulting in some serious ramifications in terms of traffic and e-commerce. Those negatively affected were businesses and websites with what we call low E-A-T scores. E-A-T stands for expertise, authority and trustworthiness, these being major factors that google’s algorithm now takes into consideration when identifying relevant and reliable search results. As a result, businesses with low scores lost positions in the SERPS, and those with higher E-A-T were – inversely – promoted. “I've seen people jump two, three pages in either direction”. At the end of the day, the change that Google’s latest algorithm update has brought to the SERPs is a positive one for the user, though it has definitely forced businesses and marketers to work both smarter and harder when it comes to content creation. People are now more likely to find search results that are notably more authoritative, trustworthy and well reviewed, and this is a good thing. With this in mind, we in the digital marketing sector need to reconsider the way that we think about SEO and content creation. In response to the effects of the update, Google Spokesperson Danny Sullivan stated that “there’s no fix for pages that may perform less well other than to remain focused on building great content. Over time, it may be that your content may rise relative to other pages(2018)”. In essence, Google are saying that in order for businesses to weather the hypothetical algorithm storm, they need to be producing both onsite and advertising content that is well-researched, comprehensive and comes from a background of relative expertise. It’s not that you need a PHD in your field in order to rank higher on Google’s SERPs, but those in business and the digital marketing sphere do need to put a little more time and effort into their websites and content creation. Google wants to promote pages that seem legitimate and informed, so it has become important for us to objectively analyze our sites and content in order to find ways that we can improve in terms of expertise, authority and trustworthiness. WHAT YOU CAN DO: To boost your scores for trustworthiness, you need to rethink the substance of your content. Google wants to see that you're actually producing meaningful and useful content and not and just taking up space on-line for the sake of boosting your performance in the SERPs. It also helps to have readily available contact details on your website and online content. As for expertise, well, this doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a lot of research, hard work, originality, and recognition. Rather than just hashing out another top ten list for your monthly content quota for your client’s, Google wants to see that you have delivered clearly researched and informative content. So, next time you are writing and article or producing a video, try to cite some reputable and peer-reviewed sources, share information that you have learned from trial and error, and write to fill some sort of lacuna in the literature of your particular niche and not just regurgite the same old information found on every other blog in your sphere. “If you look at the update from a holistic point of view, from a fairness point of view, it’s a good thing. It means everyone gets a go to be in search results”. In summary, it seems like Google is trying to level the playing field in the search results and simultaneously up the quality of their search results, a sentiment that was echoed by spokesperson Danny Sullivan who stated that “As with any update, some sites may note drops or gains. There’s nothing wrong with pages that may now perform less well. Instead, it’s that changes to our systems are benefiting pages that were previously under-rewarded” (2018). There are no shortcuts here, and no quick fixes. It seems that in order to achieve the best results online, we need to be striving to create the best content that we possibly can. SOURCES: Sullivan, D. (2018) 12 March. Available at https://twitter.com/searchliaison/ status /973241540486164480?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1024691872025833472&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fsearchengineland.com%2Fgoogles-august-first-core-algorithm-update-who-did-it-impact-and-how-much-303538 (Accessed: 13 June 2019). 
 

Published Jan 29, 2019 VIDEO TRANSCRIPT Chris Hogan - G'day world, Chris Hogan and Grant Mayo from Nutrition Warehouse coming to you from Me Media studio here in Burleigh Heads, for episode 107 of Get Fact Up! Thanks very much for joining me Grant. Grant Mayo - Chris, it's a pleasure to be here. I know we haven't caught up for a few years, so it's really nice to see your pretty face this morning. And shout me this beautiful coconut coffee. So yeah, I'm real excited to be here, I'm pumped! - Good, mate, and I wouldn't expect anything less from you. Mate, honestly it's been a journey and I've known you for, must be coming up, what, 15, 16, 17, 18 years, something like that. Grant Mayo - Absolutely yep. - And I've seen you on your journey, for all of that, for all of that time and also joined you for part of it. So, 2007 was when Nutrition Warehouse was founded, correct? Grant Mayo - Nutrition Warehouse was founded in a one bedroom apartment, in Southport in 2007. - Yes, and I remember sitting there, with you, actually talking about, what are we gonna call this thing? Grant Mayo - Correct. That was one of my, one of the biggest goals at the time was what will we call this new supplement company, - [Chris] Yeah. Grant Mayo - that's gonna take over the world. - [Chris] Yeah. Grant Mayo - And, I think for months and months, I really had a lot of variety of different names. I still remember asking all my close family, friends, relatives, anyone that would listen to me. Pick a name, which one would you call it? And I do still remember walking down Wallsend with my mum, and my dad at the time, and we were walking through, and I went, Chemist Warehouse, wow, what about Nutrition Warehouse? And mum went, that sounds like a good name. So, I quickly raced home, checked the domains, and I couldn't bloody believe it. - [Chris] No. Grant Mayo - It was still available. - I got the text message, I remember, and I checked too, and I was just gobsmacked. And part of me, we were no newbies to eCommerce, cause we'd been doing it for years prior. Both of us. Grant Mayo - Yes, yes correct. - And so, when we saw that Australia hadn't caught up, and created nutritionwarehouse.com.au, and that it was available, it was almost an element of disappointment in Australians, and their innovativeness, if that's a word. But, lo and behold, you got the name, and you haven't disappointed anybody by what you've done with that brand, so. Grant Mayo - Ah, I appreciate that. - [Chris] Yeah. Grant Mayo - Our team has been wonderful along the years, I mean we've, it's been a great journey, you know? But picking that name, I knew the name was really important in the beginning. Obviously, with my previous startup, and selling that, and obviously going in competition with them, I knew that the name was everything and I knew that it couldn't be a silly name like, Grant's supplements, or Mayo supplements or like Big Bob's supplements or, you know? It had to be something strong that would conjure up images of, which we created, which always was a vision and big brands, warehouse prices, all of the greatest brands in Australia and across the world, and the synthesised warehouses that we see today that no one had previously done. - Hmm, yeah. Grant Mayo - So I knew the name was paramount to its success. - [Chris] Yeah. Grant Mayo - So, and that's why I toiled and sort of had a lot of sleepless nights coming up with that name. - Yeah, I can see how really important it was to you, yeah. Grant Mayo - And we actually trademarked it as Worldwide Sports Nutrition, and that's what it's actually trademarked as. Take a look at the trademark now- - Oh God! Man, I remember. I remember playing with that logo. Grant Mayo - It was, it was Worldwide Sports Nutrition and I had other various names which were probably just as average as that one realistically, 'cause it's such a long name. Imagine typing worldwidesportsnutrition.com.au falling asleep by the time. So yeah Nutrition Warehouse although it's a little bit shorter, thank God is a much much better name. - [Chris] Yeah Grant Mayo - And it's proven itself over the last decade. - Yeah, yeah far out. So 2007 yeah you're in the 12th year. Grant Mayo - Well, yeah. We didn't open the first store until April 2008. - [Chris] There you go. Grant Mayo - So the first, you know obviously if you remember obviously you know when obviously had Me Media helping me at the time and yourself and you obviously built the first website for Nutrition Warehouse and I still remember being in that one bedroom apartment and entering all the brands and the products myself and I wake up at six in the morning and my partner would go to work and I'd wake up and be at that computer at 6am. I would give myself to about 1pm so about seven hours of just adding brands, products etc and be ringing you every half hour. How do I do this? How do I do that? And really just teaching myself how to obviously you built the skeleton and the look and the feel of the website and I added all the products and I'd done that for weeks if not months. - [Chris] God! Grant Mayo - Whilst I looked for you know a viable location - [Chris] Yeah. Grant Mayo - To open up the first retail bricks and mortar store. - And was the first location Underwood? Grant Mayo - It was Underwood, yeah. - [Chris] Yeah. Grant Mayo - Still there today, just celebrated its 10th birthday. - Unreal. Grant Mayo - Yeah, so same store and I still remember opening that store and look, when I first opened that store back in 2008, it was right next door to a company called The Supplement Inn. Now The Supplement Inn at the time was one of the biggest supplement chains, sorry I shouldn't say chains, supplement store - Yeah, Grant Mayo - in Brisbane. - Yeah. Grant Mayo - And I was like, everyone's like, why are you opening right next to the Supplement Inn? That's crazy, and obviously I sold my previous company which I started as a startup and I'm happy to talk about that, obviously for those listening, you know, back in 2002 I was the co-founder of ASN, Australian Sports Nutrition, which is still around today and doing a good job, not as good as us, but a good job. And look, I founded that with a friend at the time, and we started that startup together. Initially I had the idea of being an X world champion body builder, like how can I create a job for myself, what am I gonna do after I've retired from this sport for body building. And I really looked to different avenues, I was doing security, and I was working at a plumbing store, and none of them lit my fires, it's just a job, I can't see myself doing this forever. And when I moved to the Gold Coast in 2000, there was no supplement stores around there. I started working for a supplement company as a sales manager, and at the time I said to the CEO, John, I said where's all the supplement stores on the Gold Coast? And they weren't big back then, we're talking 2000, 2002. - You were still educating people on what supplements were. Grant Mayo - Exactly, yeah, people were sort of frowning on supplements or even the gyms back then, don't go to the gym you'll bulk up, and now look at it. So yeah, I was travelling around Queensland, you know, seeing other supplement stores and health food stores. Now just from everyone's memory back in 2000, there wasn't very many supplement stores. - There wasn't. Grant Mayo - There was probably two in Brisbane, nothing on the Gold Coast. So I just thought, well, you know that light bulb moment, I went, I reckon I can open a supplements store, and I've always loved helping people train and reach their goals, maybe I can open up a little store that will sell supplements, create a job for myself, people will come and see me and get the advice on how to train, how to look a certain way, and I'll obviously sell them the supplements. So we founded ASN in 2002, and that journey took us to 2007, where we soon realised although we were good friends, my partner and I, we were really bad business partners together. And realistically, I had a vision from the beginning of what I really wanted Nutrition Warehouse to be, and although ASN at the time was the industry leader, and everyone said do not get out of that, you're going places, and everyone was supporting us, and we had five or six stores at this time, plus online, and we were doing really well. I knew that if I stayed at ASN, I would never be happy. And I've never ever done anything for the money, it's always for the goal, you know what I mean? Although, the money is nice. So when I moved on from, when I realised the vision I wanted to trade was never going to happen, because my business partner was probably the alpha, you know what I mean? I decided that for me to be happy, I need to move on. So we spoke and we both agreed that we were clashing, and this was never going to work, so I decided to sell my 50% of the company to my business partner and move on, and basically that's the story - Yeah. Grant Mayo - Of how I got into Nutrition Warehouse. - Yeah. Grant Mayo - I started from scratch again of how to build that oneral vision of how I really wanted to trade that company. - Mate, yeah, and so many lessons in that whole story. So coming back to the start of Nutrition Warehouse, I think the great lesson for everybody to learn was no-one's coming to save you, it's up to you, and you know, even though you had capital coming your way from your split from ASN, there was no staff to help you, you know you wanted to limit your outgoings with Me Media to make sure that you could use that capital to obviously open a store, buy the supplements, and resell, create accounts with wholesalers and whatnot, and so you actually put in the hard yards and you sat down, and you entered the product, seven hours a day, and that lasted for a bloody long time, until such time that you were able to start hiring people, and to be honest it must have been, how long was it before you actually hired your first person to work on the website? Grant Mayo - Stupidly, it was six months. - Oh it was six months, was it? Grant Mayo - Six months, so, yeah look, from the get-go at Nutrition Warehouse, I was the salesperson, I was the bookkeeper, I taught myself how to do the books, I was the eCommerce manager, I was the web packer, you know back in Underwater, create a little room out the back of the store, I can still see it now with the little curtain, and I'd be behind there and someone would come in to the shop and I'd be like I'll be with you in a minute. And I couldn't get sick, you know what I mean? - No. Grant Mayo - It was impossible. - Yeah. Grant Mayo - And I was still living on the Gold Coast so I was commuting to Brisbane - Yeah. Grant Mayo - And you know, realistically I just had a newborn baby. - Oh far out. Grant Mayo - Ruby who's now nine so it was a bit chaotic back then, but like it's, you have to do what you have to do. I had set aside so much cash to obviously make this venture work, and that's why I did not hire anyone until I knew that first store and that model was going to be successful. - That's right 'cos the person in the first store actually helped with the online stuff didn't they? Grant Mayo - [Grant] Yeah, Paul. - Yeah, yes. Grant Mayo - Paul Edmonton, I love him he only just left recently - [Chris] Aw! Grant Mayo - And Paul was with us for nearly a decade. - Far out, yeah. Grant Mayo - Yeah. - Yeah, is he gone to create competition for you or? Grant Mayo - Paul's out there doing his own thing and he's got a range of strength accessories. - [Chris] Okay cool. Grant Mayo - Yeah so he's good and - Oh he's created his own brand? Grant Mayo - Yeah he's got his own brand of accessories for the industry. - [Chris] Awesome. Grant Mayo - Now they're Australia's leading accessories. - That's great. Grant Mayo - So they'll be able to, obviously, Paul came in and saw the value in what we were doing, but still hang on there for a lot of years, and then decided to go out on his own, yeah. - Yeah good on him. Grant Mayo - [Grant] Yeah. - So, bodybuilding. How has that actually set you up to have the correct frame of mind to be, I guess, the business owner that you are today? Because something that you said before we started was you know, people often ask you when are you gonna stop? When are you gonna take a back step, or when are you gonna say that enough's enough? What has the sport of bodybuilding done for your mental state and your drive? Grant Mayo - Yeah, sure, good question. Look when I started bodybuilding I was around 20, I think it was my 21st birthday I got some dumbbells you know, I mean I was sort of interested in the gym around 21 but if you see photos of me I was like 50 kilo, I'm only short, I'm only 5 foot 7, so I was a really skinny, small kid. And a few friends of mine started going to the gym and like would you wanna come Mayo? And I'm like what would I go to the gym for man? Like back in those days, we're talking the 1990s, I mean early 1990's, you didn't have the privilege of having World Gyms, Anytime Fitness, Snap Fitness. - Did you wear the leotard? Grant Mayo - [Grant] I did. - [Chris] Ha, the uni-tard. Grant Mayo - I did, the little short ones with the stripes - [Chris] Beautiful. Grant Mayo - They were the go-to shorts. - Aw beautiful. Grant Mayo - [Grant] Quite embarrassing. - There's photos out there. Grant Mayo - I'm quite sure there is, it's quite embarrassing, but that's what everyone wore back then. - [Chris] I know. Grant Mayo - But look yeah, I was invited to the gym with a good few mates and I started going to Viking gym in Newcastle, where I originate from, and it's probably as big as this room, the gym, and there was a lot of sweaty guys and heavy weights, and at first I thought what the fuck am I doing in here? Like seriously, but before long, I actually loved how you know, my body started to respond. And before long, people started to say you should compete in bodybuilding and I'm like get the fuck outta here, I'm not getting up there in my little skinny underwear and flexing on stage, like seriously you know? But my body did respond quite quickly, and before long of course I'm on stage, with my little skinny underwear. And in my first comp in Wollongong, cos I wanted to escape and get away from Newcastle and not embarrass myself. I went down with a couple of great friends, and look I won the novice and the under 70's in my first comp, and everyone was like wow, who is this kid, you know what I mean, that's like I think I was 23 at the time, so I'd only been training two or three short years. And yeah that made me feel good about myself, and obviously I kept competing and thought well what else can I do if I can win that novice comp? But to answer your question, what that done for me is in the business is taught me that goal setting is the most important attribute of any business. Obviously you've gotta have a vision, you know what I mean, of what you want to create, you know? But then setting the goals along the way, and then actually actioning them goals, and not just having all those goals and sitting there going who's going to do this? Who's going to do that? So setting those small goals along the way, and my first goal was obviously one retail outlet, an online business, ensure that it is profitable, making money, make sure we're on the right track with the look and feel, the customers love it, and add a value that no one else is doing. Back in those days when we first opened in 2008 in our first store, a lot of supplement stores, including the one I used to own, were doing a pretty average job. To me they were creating, you know, putting up images of the bodybuilders and stereotypes, and really making it hard for mums, dads, and like-minded people to want to come in and even talk to those people. So I had a vision of turning it around. Although I was a bodybuilder and I was heavily muscled at the time, I wanted to create something completely different. - I remember, I remember that conversation, because we chose the imagery for the front of the store, the front of the website, that reflected the everyday person and that wanted to get fit or look a little bit better or tone up as we used to call it. Grant Mayo - Yeah, yeah. - And I remember the imagery that was chosen that was plastered consistently across every store, and that helped invite those people in. Grant Mayo - Yeah, absolutely. I think we were just trying to turn it on it's head, the whole industry. I think that back then it was really the foundation of the supplement industry growing in Australia, although stores had been around for you know, like Ager Street and so forth for like a decade, no one had really grown a chain of supplement stores, except for ASN with five, six stores. - Yup. Grant Mayo - You know so our goal from the beginning was obviously to make sure the business was going to work, y'know what I mean, and put those hard yards in, and that's exactly what we did for the first three or four years, we really kept our costs low, we opened up stores in areas we thought were going to obviously kick straight away. I guess when the business really took off was when we opened the Ashmore store on the Gold Coast, cos the first two stores were pretty much like every other supplement store in terms of size, so like 80 square metres. Now at first I didn't want to spend this huge enormous rent, I wanted to make sure the business was right, all that was called Nutrition Warehouse so my vision was always to have these big box retail, 200 squares minimum, to conjure up that same image, all the biggest brands, the best products, the advice, but we couldn't really do that straight away cos it just wasn't relevant to the money we had in the bank to actually do it. So we started small, like everyone does. And I still remember standing in front of Ashmore, it just celebrated it's ninth birthday last weekend. - Yeah Right. Grant Mayo - So we went down there and sort of reminisced about how I stood there and sort of went wow, nine years ago I stood here and looked at this store, and I went this is a big ass store, it was 300 square metres - Yeah. Grant Mayo - And I'm like, what the hell am I doing? But my vision was to have these big box retail, to have a presence that everybody wanted to come in to look at. - How risky did it feel making that decision to do Ashmore and warehouse stores? Grant Mayo - It was life or death, realisitcally, if it didn't work it would have ruined me. - Yeah. Grant Mayo - It would have ruined the brand, it wouldn't work, I put everything into that, the last pennies basically. - Yeah. Grant Mayo - So when - And that was a huge store, and that's where you transitioned all of your eCommerce, your pick and packing, you obviously had the space and you also have a bit of office space there as well. Grant Mayo - Yeah so we turned that into head office realistically, and we cut the shop in half, we put a, well probably two-thirds I guess, made the shop like two-thirds and made the warehouse out the back, and we put a deck upstairs and put all the staff upstairs for the accounts and everything, finance. And that store really blossomed. - It did. Grant Mayo - And it became our number one store, even probably the number one store in the country within like three months. - [Chris] Far out. Grant Mayo - As we were setting up that store people would just, we done more sales in the first month of that store than the other two stores we had at the time combined. - Yeah. Grant Mayo - So we knew we were on a winner, and that might of, was starting to kick goals. - Was there a sense of relief when that happened? Grant Mayo - Absolutely, absolutely, every business owner would be like yes. But look you gotta go out there and take those risks if you wanna have great wins, and that's exactly what we did. That gave us the confidence to push forward and go okay this is working, you know, let's reset the goals. - So how does it feel beyond that? What was the next sort of biggest risk you felt you were taking that maybe gave you that same sort of feeling, was it the warehouse purchase maybe? Grant Mayo - The warehouse purchase was like five years ago, so we had about 25 stores by then. It was really just going, it was really like, just saying hey, we're gonna open five stores this year. You know, where are we gonna find them? And then the next year we'll open up seven, and the next year we'll open up eight, and last year we opened up 15 in one year. - Holy cow. Grant Mayo - Which - So Grant Mayo - Phenomenal effort from the whole team. - What's the number now? What's the total? Grant Mayo - We're at 66 stores today. - Holy cow. Grant Mayo - Yeah so. - 66 sores, are you across every state now? Grant Mayo - Yeah, yeah we're national now, so. - Far out. Grant Mayo - We're not in Tasmania, but. - Yeah. Grant Mayo - Sorry Tasmania. - Sorry, yeah. Grant Mayo - One day we'll get there you know. - Yeah, yeah. Grant Mayo - Is that a state? Is Tasmania like? - I think it's considered a territory actually, yeah. Grant Mayo - So yeah we'll eventually get there, but yeah we're in every state, you know, and have been for quite some time. Again, when we set goals in the beginning it was like hey lets conquer Brisbane first, and the Gold Coast combined and we really didn't skip over to Sydney until about four years in, wanted to make sure the model was going to work in a cluster area rather than going hey let's spread ourselves thin, because the cost of sending someone to Perth, or Darwin or Adelaide etc didn't make sense to me. - So in essence, starting in the smaller, I guess, suburbs, the suburbs, and being successful there, allowed you to refine your model, allowed you to get better at business, and if you could make it work in those places, then essentially why wouldn't they work in the higher populated areas? Is that kind of the theory? Grant Mayo - Yeah, absolutely, that's the model we sat down and worked out and said hey, this is what we're going to do. Grow it in Brisbane, refine it, make sure it works, and then obviously when the time's right, roll it out to Sydney and Melbourne. - Yeah. Grant Mayo - And we got really lucky rolling it out to others in the state because we had so many amazing team members that we offered some really good packages to go hey Chris, why don't you move to Sydney and start Nutrition Warehouse in Sydney? Y'know what I mean, and that's what we did, you know. - That's great. Grant Mayo - Yeah, like we had some great team members, June McKillet moved to Sydney and start that, now we've got like 14 stores in Sydney. And the same in Melbourne, Rowan Philips went down to Melbourne and started there, and got 14 stores in Melbourne as well, so. - A good team, you've had a great team then too. Grant Mayo - Because of those team members, they really helped the brand grow in a state, it's a lot easier than going down and finding a brand new person, getting them to understand the vision, our values, our goals, and a lot harder for us to do that when we're a thousand kilometres away. - Yeah. Grant Mayo - So we got really lucky, or we hired the right people to make that leap of fate and help us grow the brand throughout Australia. - So many questions came to my mind then, there was a flood of them, I actually didn't know which one to ask first, so you mentioned values, how important have values been in your company growth and culture? Grant Mayo - Yeah definitely, look, I think values are everything for a company, you've got to have the right values when you're hiring people, they've gotta sit with your values in life, y'know what I mean? And a lot of our values for the company really come from those first initial 12-18 months of starting Nutrition Warehouse, you know, hard work, honesty, reliability, all these values that we have that we're looking for in you know, not just our teams, but our customers, and our brand partners, y'know what I mean? You know, one of our values is doing more with less, cos I grew up not with a silver spoon in my hand but you know obviously started the first company with nothing. I honestly didn't put one cent into that first company, I actually borrowed it from my business partner, cos I had no money, I had the idea but I had no money. - You had the body though. Grant Mayo - I had the body, and it's pretty face. So yeah, not grown up with a silver spoon in my mouth, I still today, even though the company's quite successful, still have that mentality to do more with less. Like if you go to our offices they're not shiny, brand new furniture and the warehouse or the support office is not painted with the Nutrition Warehouse or whatever. It's a building, it's functional, it's got desks, and we get in and we add value for the customers. - So is that almost no ego? How do you Grant Mayo - Ego's a killer, I mean there's a bit of ego here look at this. - I know there is, but you've been able to laugh at yourself and not take yourself too seriously, especially on the Nutrition Warehouse journey. I remember you at ASN and to be honest you were far more, yeah more ego then. Nutrition Warehouse was a different ride for you and so, how has your, how have you kept your ego in check with regards to, is it constantly referring to those values? Is that how you've done that? I've got so many questions sorry. Grant Mayo - Yeah, I love questions, love 'em, not that one but, look, we always want our team members to align with the values, we want our team members to understand values and know them off by heart. But look, when I was younger, when I think like for me personally, I can't speak for anyone else, bodybuilding had to be a little bit of ego, maniac driven, because bodybuilding is a sport where, it's unlike any other sport where you have to, it's a 365 day a year challenge, where you're waking up in the morning, on all day eating the right foods consistently, 6, 7 meals a day, you're training once a day, cardio once a day, you can't go out drinking, you're really pushing back your lifestyle for many years. So for a decade when I was bodybuilding from 20's to 30's I really, although I had great friends, I still didn't have a great lifestyle theoretically. I was realistically training, eating, sleeping, working, and repeat for a decade. You know I didn't go out, I didn't party, so you get very tunnel visioned, but that's what it takes I think to be a great athlete or a great champion you know, you really have to push forward and know exactly what you're going after and set goals and keep going. Now I wanted to be the best that I could be in bodybuilding and I'm really proud of myself that I achieved more than I ever thought I would so. - I'll stop you there, that was a fantastic answer, 'cos I want to get on to the goal setting. Grant Mayo - [Grant] Sure. - Now goal setting is considered almost the be all and end all for curing depression. Very simple. Putting goals in place and actioning them. So have you ever experienced depression at all? Grant Mayo - I probably experienced some with the breakup of my relationship with my first fiancee, and obviously happened to lose my daughter, not completely, but sharing my daughter and having limited time, you know, we've got this two year old child now I have to see her two nights a week instead of seven. So yeah I think whether you call it depression or whether it was painful, it's definitely a period of my life there where I was like you know, trying to create this great company and then there was this separation which personally affected me. - And how did that affect work? Grant Mayo - If you ask people at work it probably didn't. I was very good at like - [Chris] Keeping the two separate? Grant Mayo - Keeping the two separate and going hey, I think my mindset back then was, hey this has happened, it's out of my control, if I let it affect me at work, I could lose this business, and then I'm really back to square one again, you know. But, I think probably about a three or four month period that I was sort of like down and out. - So did you apply goal setting in that, in your personal life as well around that? Grant Mayo - That's a good question I mean you're talking seven years ago. - Sorry, sorry. Grant Mayo - That's okay, no no. - It's a hard question to answer. Grant Mayo - I honestly would be lying if I tried to answer that one, - Yeah. Grant Mayo - Cos I'm not too sure. I know that I came out of it and obviously - Now you've got a great relationship with your daughter. Grant Mayo - Yeah. - And now you have a new relationship. Grant Mayo - A great, new, beautiful relationship, I've got a one year old little boy named Max. - 15 months though. Grant Mayo - 15 months, 14 or 15, I'm gonna get in trouble for that one he's really crazy man, so Max Mayo, yeah. - And we said earlier if you could have called him Mass Mayo you would've. Grant Mayo - [Grant] I would've called him Max Mass Mayo. Because my nickname's Mass. - Mass. Grant Mayo - Cos I'm only short, you know back in the bodybuilding days my nickname was Mass, and my Instagram is MassMayo, so I've kept that. - Whoa, whoa, you couldn't give him Mass then mate, you had to call him Max. Grant Mayo - Well this is true, and a lot of people from the old days still call me Mass, they'll call me, hey Mass what are you doing? Which I still like, I still like that. - Yeah. Grant Mayo - But yeah look, goal setting's very important throughout your life whether it's personal aspirations, business, whatever you want to do in life, you gotta have a plan. - Is it, what are your goal sets, are they three months, are they seven days? Grant Mayo - Quarterly. - Quarterly goals? Grant Mayo - Yeah we have a yearly one, and then we try hit 'em quarterly. - Yeah. Grant Mayo - Y'know what I mean. But normally we sit down and work out how many stores we wanna open and try and push the boundaries. You know, like I have found over the years that you gotta have some audacious goal too, y'know what I mean? - Yeah. Grant Mayo - Like I could sit here today we're gonna open up 30 stores this year, and everyone would go you're crazy. - I remember you saying 50 stores. I remember you saying 50 stores. Grant Mayo - [Grant] Correct, yeah. - And I honestly went whoa, okay if anyone, like I actually believed you, I thought if anyone could do it you can, I just didn't know how long it was going to take. Grant Mayo - Neither did I. Neither did I. But I think if you want to set a goal like I could say today hey we're gonna open up 30 stores this year and my whole team would go you're fucking crazy, but then you've got to hire the resources to make that happen. Now if I sit here and go ten stores, we can do that quite easily. - So how does this, how does this sort of quote, I don't know if I'm, I'm definitely not getting this right and I don't even know where it comes from but how does this quite resonate with you? We overestimate what we can get done in a day, but we underestimate what we can get done in a year. Grant Mayo - Yeah, absolutely, yeah, it needs a long time, you can achieve the luck, but if you don't have the goals and if you're not following the, you know, my role is to make sure to set the goals within certain teams, whether it's eCommerce or chain management, or customer service and make sure that they're getting done. - And how often are you reviewing those goals? Grant Mayo - Well it depends, it's different timelines on different goals but. - Weekly? Grant Mayo - We have weekly huddles each week. We sit down, refine everything. What are we doing, how are we going? In business, everything seems so beautiful on the top, but underneath, you know it's the old saying with the duck underneath, and that's the same as Nutrition Warehouse, because you know we've got eCommerce for instance, you know like we're trying to achieve these objectives, and then there's server issues. There's been a lot of server issues lately this year. - Oh far out. Grant Mayo - And yeah, it can take two weeks out of our time to fix and change servers and that puts everything back and that has to be taken into account you know, I can't go in there going why isn't this done? Oh well, because we've done this. - Yeah. Grant Mayo - You know so you have to obviously change the goals to suit external issues out of your control you know. But yeah we try and push, we wouldn't have got to where we are now in ten years without setting strong goals, we wouldn't have got there without the team, hiring the right people. - Absolutely. Grant Mayo - The right team members. - [Chris] Yeah. Grant Mayo - Because also, although I'm the founder and the CEO, if it's not for the team, we wouldn't be anywhere. - [Chris] Yeah. Grant Mayo - Now you gotta hire the amazing people. - [Chris] Yeah. Grant Mayo - I'm always one of those people like get the right people on the bus, get the wrong people off the bus, - Yeah. Grant Mayo - Which is easier said than done. - Is that a Jim Collin's book? Grant Mayo - That is from Good to Great. - Good to Great, yeah. Grant Mayo - Yeah, building a world class company. - Yeah, yeah yeah. Grant Mayo - And yeah it's a true terminology, because the best people will make the best company, the worst people will make the worst company. So you gotta decide which ones are good and which ones are bad. I've always a saying to my team leaders, if we were closed tomorrow and we opened up a new company, who would you put on the bus, and who would you leave off the bus? - Right yeah. Grant Mayo - And the people who you leave off the bus, work out now how we can move them on in a professional manner. - Free up their future. Grant Mayo - Yeah, because it's best for them as well. - Absolutely. Grant Mayo - If they don't have a long term, if we cant't see them working out in the long term at Nutrition Warehouse, we wanna help them get a new role that suits them. - That's right. Grant Mayo - You know we might have hired the wrong person. - No. Grant Mayo - Sorry, the wrong person for the role. - Yeah. Grant Mayo - So it could be on us, it may not be their fault. - No, exactly. Grant Mayo - And we've done that before. - Yeah. Grant Mayo - So you gotta see both sides of the business. - It's best for everyone. Grant Mayo - It's best for everybody. - Yeah. So one last question, you may not be able to answer this. Grant Mayo - [Grant] Sure. - What do you think has been the, maybe the best thing you've done in marketing for your business? Grant Mayo - Hired Me Media. - You're a naughty boy. Grant Mayo - [Grant] Well. - I know that's not, hasn't been your role for some time because like you said as you've grown you've had to hire people, hired agencies, all the rest of that so. Grant Mayo - I think, I enjoy the marketing side of it more now than I ever have. - Yeah. Grant Mayo - Because you know, marketing is wonderful where you can actually do something today and see results in minutes. - Yeah. Grant Mayo - You know where in traditional marketing, you throw it out there and go, did that work? Oh we can't measure that. So look, I think in Nutrition Warehouse, we've got the brand Nutrition Warehouse, but integrating to that brand we want to create different things to add value for our customers, so we've created the 60 day body challenge, which is a challenge to help anybody that doesn't understand supplements, the mums and dads, you know, anyone, ladies that have been pregnant who want to get their body back, or you've just had a family, you haven't trained for ten years, and you're like, hey now it's my time. - Is 60 days too short a period for people? Grant Mayo - Well no, because - Or is it too long? Grant Mayo - If you go to 60daybody.com.au, you'll see the before and afters, and there's some amazing ones, like sensational efforts. - But is that almost expecting results overnight? Like 60 days, that's pretty short a period of time. Grant Mayo - We've had people lose 20 or 30 kilo, the transformations are amazing, go there and have a look, because we give them everything. We give them the plans, we give them the training, we give them the supplements, and it's free, not the supplements. They can buy the supplements, but everything else is free, everyone else is charging so we decided to give back to the community and offer something to help other people. - Beautiful. Grant Mayo - So we have the 60 day body, we have the supplement awards throughout the year which obviously helps people choose the best supplements voted by - The public. Grant Mayo - The public, yeah the customers who use those supplements. It's an unbiased marketing. - Yeah an unbiased review yeah, it's great. Grant Mayo - Yeah review, you can see that on our website too, and along the way we've created all these different things that add a lot of value for the customer so I think that's probably our best wins, we're not just a supplement company sitting here going hey buy this, you know, we're trying to add value - Absolutely. Grant Mayo - To our customers along the way, which we love to do. - Going above and beyond your actual product, you have to have this service, and you have to have the advice, and the advice has actually been there from day one as part of your biggest brands, warehouse prices and best advice. Grant Mayo - Our mission is to help others achieve their own individual health and fitness goals, it's that simple. We wanna help others achieve their goal. Whether it's bodybuilding, swimming, karate, UFC fighting, how are you gonna get better at that, and train, recover, or look a certain way? That's really what we're about. - Yeah Grant Mayo - And we feel like we've achieved that.

Published Dec 21, 2018 VIDEO TRANSCRIPT Chris Hogan - Good day world, Chris Hogan coming to you from Burleigh Heads here on the Gold Coast and I'm here with a special guest today Ben Southall, who you may know as the Caretaker of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, won that competition. Was it The Best Job in the World in 2009? Ben Southall - Yeah, nearly 10 years ago now, so that was I suppose my introduction to Australia. That was back in the days when Tourism Queensland were trying to market the Great Barrier Reef to the world and I'd just gone around Africa in a Land Rover and run a website and a blog and that was the criteria they needed to do that job and 34,000 people later, I was the winner. Easy isn't it? Chris Hogan - So, hopefully you're not best known for that anymore because you've got some cool stuff coming up and you've been doing some really cool stuff ever since. So, bensouthall.com is pretty much the old placeholder for the old biography I guess in the life before now and now you have bestlifeadventures.com which is about to go live, probably go live by the time we actually launch this. Ben Southall - I've fingers crossed if it goes and be up by the end of the week, that's the plan. Chris Hogan - So, what is Best Life Adventures? Ben Southall - Okay, so I suppose the whole Best branding started nine years ago with The Best Job in the World and ever since then, we've tried to sort of encapsulate my passion for travel and adventure, sharing physical challenges in the great outdoors with, what started as a local audience, has become an international audience now. It started off at first, I suppose, a spawn of Best Life in the World was the Best Expedition in the World, which was for me getting in a kayak for four months retracing Captain Cook's route all the way up the east coast of Australia through the Great Barrier Reef all the way to Cooktown, that was a project for Tourism Queensland, so that was The Best Expedition in the World. And then in 2015 my wife Sophie and we drove from Singapore all the way back to London in my old Land Rover. That took a year, and we called that The Best Life in the World. And that was to go and find people on that journey who had smiles on their faces every single day, love what they did whether they were a taxi driver or a CEO of a company, what are the criterias in life that give people a smile on their face and make them want to get out of bed in the morning? That was The Best Life in the World. And we have these lovely theories about what it is. Whether it's family or friends or money or the best job. Whatever it is, what are those things that give people that recipe for life. And a lot of it will revolved around interaction with family and doing great things in the great outdoors. So every time I've come back from one of my various adventures, there always is at least one, maybe 10, maybe 50 people that say. I would love to go and do an adventure like that. What do I have to do to go and do it? So I knew there was this gap in the market. There was a niche there were people, they've got cash, they're time poor, they wanna go on these adventures. So why don't I start curating them, making it from scratch, making them left of centre for anything you're gonna get from a standard travel brochure and do the extremes of life and the extremes of the world because people like entrepreneurs are adventurous in their mindset, they love what they do, they love challenges, they love innovation. So I can find innovation in the adventure space, package it up, market it and take people out there, small bespoke groups of people, there's a gap in the market that means there's business opportunities there. And hence, Best Life Adventures was born. Chris Hogan - Fantastic, so one of the common things I see run through all of your adventures is building resilience. Ben Southall - Absolutely. Chris Hogan - Why is that so important and how does it transcend from going on a holiday or an adventure back into business? Does it actually, is there a crossover? Ben Southall - Well yeah, I mean we deal with a range of clients now. We deal with government clients, we deal with corporate clients, we deal with private groups and all of them, all the people that come on these seem to be people that want to achieve the most that they can out of life. They wanna prove to themselves that they can do the best that they can in their personal life and their business life and they can go out there and suck as much as they can out of this short limited time that we get on planet earth. They're people that wanna get up and do things. They're not people that lay in bed until 11 o'clock in the morning on the weekend, they're up at sunrise, they utilising their day. They're making the most out of it. They're building great friendships. And that sort of reflects from the personal development into the business world because what we're finding and I believe this is the truth is that the people that really wanna achieve lots in their personal life are the ones that are gonna achieve a lot in their business life. So, the world of adventure and entrepreneurship I think are very closely entwined in the fact that adventurous people love to get out there and do things and entrepreneurs love to get out there and do things. We started off Best Life Adventures really with the Advance Queensland Initiative of the Office of the Chief Entrepreneur. So Mark Savey and I, good friends, sat down and talked about the idea of going and proving to yourself that you can achieve something with a physical adventure in the great outdoors, makes you realise that you're able to take on these hurdles that you think you're gonna struggle to clear but by the time you've gone out there and given it a go and you've cleared that hurdle and you've realised, I didn't think I could run a half marathon and you sit down at the end of the half marathon and go, wow, I'm a lot better that I thought I was, maybe I'll do a marathon. And you set your goals and you move those benchmarks and you keep going further and further and further. And so the idea of resilience is if you can develop a strong mindset as an individual, based in the great outdoors where you've got no distractions from mobile phones and you can take people's laptops away and you can stop notifications. If you can focus on being in the moment and concentrate on achieving something for yourself, you can translate that back into your business life. When you get home and realise, okay, we've got tough times coming up as a business. I know that I can go through the shit and come through the other side and be better off for it. And that's why The Best Life Adventures' theme is all about building resilient individuals in the great outdoors to make them better people in life and ultimately better business people. Chris Hogan - Fantastic, is it just through their experiences and I guess, those tough times that people learn through these adventures or is it actually a bit of a classroom scenario? What's going on on these adventures? I mean, I've read Aaron Birkby's blog from the Everest Base Camp Trek. Ben Southall - He went through the ringer. He really did go through the ringer. Chris Hogan - He totally did. He kind of scared the pants off me a little bit. Ben Southall - And off himself quite literally. if you read the blog. Chris Hogan - Yeah great blog, actually we'll link to it in our comments but is there a classroom scenario? Is there time to sit down and share with other entrepreneurs? Ben Southall - Absolutely. Chris Hogan - Do people just dump on each other, you know? Ben Southall - It's different horses for different courses, it really is because we are running a very different catalogue of experiences, really. If you're on a private group and you wanna go and trek to every space camp that's all about the experience of meeting new people. Walking through a tough challenging environment, seeing some beautiful landscapes. But at the end of the day, at the end of what could be a six to eight hour trek for a day, sitting down and having those conversations with people. So that's the sort of private group side. The idea of the government programme, the adventure programme that we do through the Office of the Chief Entrepreneur is very much about building community. It's about not just building the resilience of the individual, but about building the resilience of the Queensland Startup Community because better connected people have better opportunities and can problem-solve a lot easier. If I know that 11 o'clock at night on a Friday, I'm trying to punch through to a deadline and I'm thinking, how the hell do I get 3D printing done to get this product off the line by Monday? Oh my God, I remember Chris, I was sitting with him by a campfire in Tasmania, we had that conversation, I now feel comfortable enough to pickup the phone, call Chris and ask for some advice on it. So, for the government programmes, some of the best parts that we have, we don't push people to 110% of their physical abilities during these programmes, we push them 99%, but we leave space that in the evenings, the campfire conversations that people have are the biggest benefits to the individuals and the community as a whole. Those open networks that are formed through using adventure as an engine and as a medium for breaking down I suppose the barriers that sometimes normal networking events might have. You know, you stand there with your glass of beer and you say hi, what do you do, and what's your business all about, what do you study? It's very shallow, single dimension. If you put someone through a physical adventure as part of a group, so and so, maybe Cody will pull John up the hill cause he's really struggling that day. Or John will turn around the next day and say, okay Cody, I saw you had some emotional issues but can I help you through this? The community that is built up through this programme is so much deeper and longer lasting than anything that I've seen in terms of networking. I think there needs to be a study in what is an effective networking tool. And I will put my hand up to say that shared adventures are one of the best ways of really connecting on a much deeper level than I've certainly ever seen before. I think that's what we're really trying to do. We've built up out of the back of the venturer programmes that we've done, we've done four now. We've done the Whit Sundays, we've done Tasmania, New Zealand, we went up to the far north Queensland to Wujal Wujal and we're off to another one in the end of March in Mongolia. The people that have been through this programme all are natural members to come into the society of extraordinary adventurers. So what that does is that open up other events that we go and do, so we might do walks up in Springbrook National Park, we might do a sunrise sup down at Burleigh, we might go and do an evening drink session up in Fortitude Valley. What it does is it opens up that group of 20 people that came on one trip to this whole cohort of 80 to 100 people now that we've built up through the Venturer programme. The longer it goes, the more IP allows you to develop because you're building up that network of friends who down the line, are gonna be not just your buddies and the people that you've gone through the mud and shit with but ones that are gonna help you in your business. That's my theory. Chris Hogan - Sensational, the mission to Mongolia, Mission Five to Mongolia looks absolutely sensational. I've watched all of the shows on Genghis Khan and all that sort of stuff and I've always dreamed about a trip to Mongolia. Is that it's ideal for, people like me who dreamed about that or should people that are dreaming about sitting on a beach at the end of the business year in Fiji to really relax and wash out all the year that's been, are they suited to the Mongolian trip? Ben Southall - Mongolia is a real buzz word at the moment. I think there is a lot of interest in the slightly left of centre destinations. And I think there's an air of mystery to Mongolia. It's sort of that far off land that we know is covered in snow for a lot of the year. We don't really know much about it because not many people go there. To go to somewhere as remote as Mongolia for Venturer programme is a bit of a step outside of my comfort zone as well. I think it's not just about challenging ourselves physically on these, it's about challenging ourselves emotionally and culturally and this trip yes, there will be a physical element to it, not nearly as much as we've done in the some of previous programmes because we're gonna be challenging people culturally. We're gonna be living on the Mongolian Steppe which is at the end of the Mongolian winter. It's gonna be five degrees probably in the daytime. We're gonna be rugged up in reindeer coats. We're gonna have thick winter boots on. We're gonna be moving with the Nomadic herders who herd these vast flocks of reindeers, I don't know what a collective term for reindeers are but it's called a flock for now. Chris Hogan - Probably just a herd. Ben Southall - A herd of reindeer. So we're gonna be moving with the Nomadic herders as they move from their winter pastureland to their spring pasturelands. We are gonna be learning from the eagle hunters out there that use eagles obviously for sourcing their food. We're gonna go and find a local mountain that's at least 2000 metres above sea level so much higher than kosciuszko will be or is. So there's a physical element, cultural element. And ultimately, because we're taking people who've been involved in the Queensland Startup Community from not just in Australia this time, but from overseas. The opportunities it will offer to people from the Queensland Startup Community to network with other people who've successfully migrated their business to say San Francisco, or to London. Those people are gonna come, we've got a really good cohort that we're working with from our own Birkby Startup catalyst. We're recruiting from over there overseas to bring some more people back, we're all on foreign land. We've all gone somewhere slightly different. We all don't have the ability to just call up our friends in the evening because we'll be disconnected. So to have that cohort learn from each other, from an international community is one of the biggest sell cards that we've got for this. We've got adventure capitalists coming, we've got Leanne Kemp, Queensland's Chief Entrepreneur for this year coming along as well. We've got three or four female founders and it's always been a tough gap to fill. The female founders, sort of age 25 to 35, quite often they're looking after families, so we try to really recruit a lot more from that area now to try and get a level playing field of people. We've got people coming from corporate backgrounds. We'll have two or three coming from university scholarship winners that really have got that injection of life and that youth element to them. So we're trying to build this complete circle of the Queensland Startup Community so that people can learn from each other. And cherry pick who they sit down with that night for a campfire conversation, who they decided to go and do the eagle hunting with. So it's gonna be a really interesting group with between 15 and 20 people. We're gonna have seven days, eight nights out there in the Mongolian Steppe and it's just gonna be an absolutely whack sensation. Chris Hogan - It certainly would, I would love to do that Venturer programme for sure. Bit of a toss up between Everest and that one because they're a month after another. Ben Southall - Yeah they're a month apart, so we now do sets of every space camp trips every year. The next one that comes up over the Easter window, so the seventh to to 21st of April. Yeah, for me it's a bit of time out of the country at that time of year but that's when you've got that wonderful transition in the Northern Hemisphere from winter coming to spring and that's when you really find the people on the ground, this is what we're gonna learn a lot as well, resilience is not just about what we get as a group of people involved in the startup community. For those Mongolian herders to go through the toughest times of harsh Arctic winters and to come through and see spring on the other side, it's that sort of corelation between tough times in business. and when all of a sudden every tree is in fruit, every flower is coming out and the good times are there. I think we're gonna learn a lot from the Mongolian herders when we take people there. And the same with the Everest Base Camp Trek, going there in April, in the tail end of the winter, all of the trees are coming out into flower, everything is looking good, it's getting healthy. It's a lovely time of year to be in high altitude Himalayas just as it is in the Mongolian winter on the Steppe. That's gonna be great. Chris Hogan - Fantastic, we, me media are huge supporters of mental health and sharing I guess experiences and even our own stories around mental health challenges and how maybe we've overcome them. So LIVIN is the charity we choose to support and I wear it openly on my sleeve. Mental health, resilience, they go hand in hand, right? Ben Southall - Yeah, I think the mental health thing, especially the great outdoors, I think that's one of the things these days. And I think I've been guilty of it. The Best Job in the World was all about telling your story via social media and that was the early days. There was no Instagram when Best Job in the World days. It was very much just the early days of YouTube, Facebook was there, Twitter was there. I think the further it's gone social media wise now, I'm starting to back off it more so, just because I'm seeing that it is almost more detrimental. For me, I use it as a marketing tool for my business. But in terms of constantly storytelling, constantly looking at how many likes you've got or constantly having to get that feedback, it is a mental health issue and it's gonna be a stronger and stronger one in the future as people look to stylize themselves based on what other people are thinking online. I think that's definitely detrimental to people's long term health. Using the great outdoors as that disconnection time is our best time to realise who we are as people to build up those real friendships. I'm sitting here looking at you in the eye. I'm gonna shake your hand physically. To be able to help that person up a hill. That sort of thing, that real human interaction is something that is slowly but surely drifting out of our lives as we use up more screen time as we sit there and we double tap on our images to like them. That to me, yes I still have to use it for marketing but I think the more we can back away from that in the future, and the more we can reconnect with our planet and people out there in the great outdoors, the better that is for mental health around the world. Chris Hogan - Absolutely, I'm 100% on the same page. I use it for marketing, I don't use it a hell of a lot for myself, in fact, sometimes I find myself in the scroll and it tends to last about five days for me. A whole week I'll realise that this isn't healthy. I'm spiralling, ya know? Ben Southall - It's very easy to do, it's such a simple, it's almost this scheduled thing of what is the first thing I do in the morning when I wake up? I rollover, I put my phone in my hand and I check what's happened in the time that I've been offline overnight. And that's a really bad habit to be and I've really considering now, putting my phone downstairs in the kitchen and physically walking down to it in the morning as one of the last jobs that I do in the morning. I'll get up, I'll have my run, I'll go for a shower and then maybe I'll come back onto my phone an hour later. Let's see if I can make it stick. Chris Hogan - Well, I kind of do that already, but it's for kids though, right? I think it's super important to teach them the importance of understanding the emotion behind what people say on social media. Why are they choosing to say that there? That they're really stuck in their own mind and actually, it's almost like verbal diarrhoea through thumbs. Not getting no emotional feedback from anybody else on what they're saying so they can say whatever they like and they can be as mean or as nice as they like. And then they hit send. Ben Southall - It's gone and you caused the problems. Chris Hogan - And causes all these issues, right? Ben Southall - So, this is one of the sort of things I used to talk about. When, in the early days of Best Job in the World, it used to be very easy for somebody to come on your blog and leave a comment. And it was a throwaway comment. They could write it in 30 seconds, like you say, and press send and it was done. If you rewind, now I'm gonna prove my age here, if you rewind to the days when there used to be a comments page in a newspaper, if somebody really wanted to have a negative comment they would sit down with a notepad. They would handwrite a letter, they'd put it in an envelope and they'd post it off to the editor of the newspaper and it might be printed a day later. So that was early feedback, that was your comment. So you would actually stylize a letter and you'd think about what you were saying. You'd probably have a rewind, delete, go back again. Whereas now it is so instantaneous. Being able to press send, that unfortunately, everybody and it's usually the worst of the worst will put their message out there, press send. And alienate or give somebody an issue or knock somebody's ego and it's not a great way. Bullying, online bullying is a really problematic thing these days. And with my 18 month old son, I really am trying as hard as I can not to constantly put photos up and publicise it, I don't want him to live life in front of a camera like I had to do for five years. Chris Hogan - It's funny that we got onto this topic. The love and hate relationship with social media and how it affects mental health. I think we're not alone here, there seems to be a lot of people going through the same thing. What I love, I love the reference to the campfire entertainment. Campfire entertainment, there should be more of it. Ben Southall - Yeah. Chris Hogan - If you've got the opportunity to light a fire in your own backyard, I encourage you and all your family to go and enjoy that as many nights of the week as you can. Ben Southall - We did this on Saturday night, exactly that. We had the fire-pit going, we had friends down at our place on Saturday night and we sat around and chewed the fat and it was just wonderful being able to be out there, hear the sounds of nature, looking up and just about see the stars on Saturday night. But it just was a really grounding experience and I think I then felt on Sunday morning like I was more connected to the people I'd sat there with than I would have been if we'd just gone down to the pub or sat on the beach and watched the sunset. We were there, we were immersed in the moment. No one had their phones and you were forced in a good way to be there with your best mates. Chris Hogan - Yup, so if you can't do that, light a candle. Light some candles, turn the lights down. Ben Southall - Or like we did on venturer one, cause it was fire ban on the wet Sunday, everybody got their head torches, and there was one that had a red head torch we put them in the centre and everybody stood around for three hours around a red head torch thinking it was the embers of a fire. And it still worked. Chris Hogan - Beautiful, where do I go from here, you know? I'm on board, I wanna go and do one of these. If I can't do this one, if I can't do that one then I'll plan for the one after. You're running multiples. I know you wanna get tickets sold. I want you to get tickets sold because to be honest, the more people that have mental health clarity around life that are in my community, the better my community is gonna become, so it's absolutely selfish. Ben Southall - I think as entrepreneurs, we struggle with that a lot because we are so focused and fixed and so driven as individuals that we want to make something work at all costs. And that could be we apply ourselves so much in our business that we don't leave time for friends and family and just us and making time and I think Aaron Birkby's Peak Persona Programme is a really good one on that where you take stock of where you are, you look at the things you do in a day and you assess who you are as an individual. You put those building blocks in Place to better prepare your mind, to line your life with the things that are important to you, to take time out. The venture programme is very much about that. That's what we've tried to build. The first one started off as just an adventure. We didn't really do much in the way of mindset coaching or workshopping, and as we've gone on and developed this we realised there is more and more value to be taken from sowing seeds of conversation with people and letting the conversation flow naturally. We're not there as a therapy session. We're not trying to go out there and be a, ya know. Chris Hogan - I like the sowing the seed, though. Ben Southall - It's just literally drop a question in the start of the night, have three or four that you'll populate the night with. Then everybody just takes the conversation from there. And there's no alcohol involved, apart from the last night cause you gotta have a sendoff. So it's just those good natural conversations that just flow and as we've gone from Venture one now through to delivering Venture five, I know that we're gonna have a really good one with this one because actually bringing a group called the Nomadic School of business in to help us with all of this. So, they basically correlate the relationship that the Nomadic herders have with their pastureland and you with your business. So look at the Nomadic herders over the course of 12 months. What are the threats that attack them over the course of 12 months. It could be a lack of pasture ground. It could be wolves, it could be extreme temperatures. They're the threats that they struggle from every day much like in business, you're struggling with your staffing. You're looking cause there's more competition coming around. How do you deal with those threats? Aligning those two mindsets and learning from the Nomadic herders as they will learn from us as business people, is that really interesting journey that we're gonna take people on through Mongolia. So it's gonna be five days on the Mongolian Steppe, five days worth of mindset coaching, of head space engineering so that everybody comes back having had a great adventure, yes. Having gone to a new country for culture experience, yes. But connected better to your community and maybe just a little bit more streamlined in your thought process of what you are as a business, where you want to go as an individual and how the next 12 months are gonna pan out. Chris Hogan - Fantastic Ben Southall - Is that sold? We're done. So, bestlifeadventures.com is the website that will be up by the end of the week. There will be an apply now box in there. If not, if you wanna apply for the Venturer programme, the Office of the Chief Entrepreneur website has got great links in there. Or me, benbestlifeadventures.com is the best place for, we're cycling the world's highest road next year. We're motorbiking the world's highest road next year. We're going to Everest Base Camp twice. We're going to Mongolia for the Venturer programme. There's a whole load of new stuff rolling out. I would love people to get on the Best Life Adventures Facebook page, like the page and we will put some great content out for you. Chris Hogan - Fantastic, thank you so much Ben. Ben Southall, bestlifeadventures.com bensouthall.com if you like. That's it for episode 106 here at me media. You can see that the content is changing, why not? If there's a message, if there's a lesson to be learned, it's factual, we're gonna share it. Keep watching, you can see all the episodes on memedia.com.au, cheers. Ben Southall - Nice one, mate. 
 

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Published Oct 30, 2018 Mental Health is a topic which is very close to MeMedia's founder and CEO, Chris Hogan's heart. Why? Because the increase in mental health incidents is clearly on the rise. Many would say that raising awareness of an issue helps people become more educated and potentially more willing to take positive action when it comes to helping themselves or others. We hope that this episode of Get Fact Up helps create further awareness of how to combat mental health, in your school, your family and friends and your workplace. MeMedia have recently adopted the Livin.org clothing range as a part of our work uniform. Putting the Livin brand and message before our own. We hope that others will join us in this change, which also encourages more open communication within the office which really does promote a positive company culture. Take care one and all. Much love from the MeMedia team. We hope you enjoy the interview with Casey Lyons, Co-Founder of http://www.Livin.org

Published Oct 24, 2018

Published Oct 8, 2018 TRANSCRIPT Chris: Hello world! Chris Hogan coming to you live from MeMedia studio here at Burleigh Heads for episode 96 of 'Get Fact Up'. And today there is a explicit words warning, okay. Something's happened to me this week, and I know I'm not alone in this situation. And I have the absolute need to share/rant and–here you go. So the title is 'stop fucking up LinkedIn' people, stop it, okay. Now I know that's not all of you, but there're many of you that are going to share my sentiment here. So this week, just to frame, it I've had nine inbound connection requests, which is good I suppose. And every one of those connection requests has been a pitch–a sales pitch–straight off the bat. So I'm gonna start with–I'm just going to highlight three. Okay that should be enough. I don't need to go through all nine and send you sleep, but let's start with number three. Patrick actually reaches out to me he says, 'hi Chris, I can see you're passionate about what you do and would like to invite you to connect with me and share my connections. If there's anyone you're interested in meeting, let me know so I can help. Regards, Patrick.' Beautiful! On its own, you would think that is absolutely, you know, a nice way to do an intro. And look, he wants to help me–he wants to connect with new people. Fantastic, that's what good networkers do, right? But straight away–connection–and, you know, I accepted this connection request, and then boom! In my LinkedIn message inbox I get the, 'hi Chris, thanks for accepting. I appreciate, you know, having you in my professional network. Then there comes–basically–one, two, three, four, five, six–six paragraphs of everything about him. There is a question in there, but to be honest–you know–we'll talk about that in a second. And then, basically, I'm out. If anyone sends me one of those messages with six paragraphs–one question in it, and it's all about them, obviously heavily weighted about them–I'm out. I'm done. You've absolutely screwed up your relationship and your reputation with me. First impressions count. You're out. So, not to mention, he sends another one. Patrick says, 'hi Chris, this is–what–a week later. Haven't heard back from you in a while, it tells me one of two things: 1) you've already chosen a different company for this, or– 2) you're still interested, but haven't had the time to get back to me yet.' Okay, you know what? Sometimes these softer messages can actually be really helpful because I can just go 'boom one' or boom two'. You know what? We are all very busy people, but in the context of–I guess–the relationship that we've had. With, you know, Patrick and I having developed over three messages. It's been all about him. The majority has been heavily weighted about him. Now, if you haven't learned anything in sales, then the number one thing that you need to learn is, 'build a relationship, never sell on first interaction'. Never. And, 'why do we have two ears and one mouth? It's so that we listen twice as much as we speak.' When you listen to somebody speaking, don't just use that opportunity as soon as they have a break in conversation, then start talking about yourself. That clearly shows that you do not give a crap about me and what I just told you about. All you were doing was waiting for a break in conversation. So, you could have the chance to tell me about your life problems, or your sales problems. So, let's let's look at 'direct connection requests: fail number two'. Working backwards here. Deb says, 'hi Chris, I can see you're passionate about what you do, and I would like to invite you to connect with me and share my connections. If there's anyone you're interested in meeting, let me know so I can help. Regards, Deb.' Whoever heard that before? Oh, that's right–that came from Patrick. Oh, hang on a minute. Oh, there's something going on here. Bit of a cookie-cutter approach, do you think? Oh why's that? Oh that's the corners of the internet to help you create leads–build leads–for you. And they're all using cookie-cutter approaches. So, how is this going to help me, and make me want to use LinkedIn? If I'm getting all of these inbound messages–all cookie-cutter approaches–am I going to even want to stay on this network? The answer is pretty clear, isn't it? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight paragraphs in her message–inbound message–straight after the connection. And there was one question in there, but obviously she was just waiting for her opportunity to speak, so that essentially, you know, it could be all about her. And then the follow-up message is 'I wasn't sure whether you received my message below. If you are concerned that old-school bookkeeping is putting your business at risk, we need to talk. Again, it's all about her. I do not care–no one cares–about your business. Why? Because you haven't shown that you give a crap about mine, okay. You haven't done any research. So let's go on to 'direct connection requests: fail number one' now. This is my absolute favourite. This is pure gold. And Jason says, 'I came across your profile and noticed we both have mutual interests. I loved love to connect if you're open to it. Thanks in advance, Jason.' You know what? Great! He's done–he's actually looked at some of my activity. Oh boy, oh wow, he's showing he really cares. That's really nice. That's cool, I'm getting noticed. He's stroking my ego. Beautiful–nice one Jason. Straightaway connection. No problems Jason–nice to meet–nice to connect with you. You know, that's my sentiment. But no message back to him I haven't sent anything back–and bam! 'Hey Chris, I just had a little deep dive into your profile and noticed you were doing e-commerce,'–okay, yes, looking through my previous thoughts. And then he's going in to the sales pitch. One, two, three, four, five, six paragraphs–all about how he's got all these proven–you know–methods on–you know–increasing sales and guaranteed money back. All this sort of stuff. Sell sell sell. Clearly his own cookie-cutter message approach to actually connecting with people. And how is he doing this? Well, there is such a thing as LinkedIn sales navigator that's–you know–being pushed very hard by LinkedIn at the moment, albeit, everyone can sign up for a minimal amount per month, and they be they can become their own lead generation–you know–experts and use their cookie-cutter approaches to gather more leads on LinkedIn. Guess what? You're fucking LinkedIn up. LinkedIn–you're fucking it up too, by allowing everybody to do this. So yeah, guess what? I'm starting to opt out of LinkedIn, and more and more people are doing that. So I hope you're listening. So I just write back, 'I've had enough by this stage, this is the ninth one this week. For a second there I thought'–this is what I said–'for a second there, I thought you actually had done your research and then I read your cookie-cutter copy. So sick of these bullshit intros.' And then his helms back, 'ah come on man we all have hundreds of lead generations–doesn't mean I ain't going to pay proper attention when we chat. I apologise if this upset you dude.' You know–he's using soft language–friendly language. That's really nice of him, but you know, mate, you've already screwed up the relationship. You can't back(track) now–no–first impressions count, right? And anyway, he goes on and he appreciates my frustration, but basically, he's an agency. I expected him to be better than these cookie-cutter approaches. So peeps, if you're gonna use LinkedIn–simple thing–simple tasks to do–is to actually do some research on people's activity, their bio, what the content they've been writing is, what they've been commenting on. And maybe actually reach out based on those things–produce some content. Absolutely make sure your content on your profile is awesome and you are going to have a much better time on LinkedIn. If you're like me, tell the people who are putting out these bullshit cookie-cutter copy intros–what you think. And let's clean up LinkedIn together. And LinkedIn, maybe you need to do some work yourselves. Thanks for watching. Sorry for the rant. I'm, Chris Hogan from MeMedia. We're a content marketing agency that absolutely cares about how your reputation is online. You can contact us on memedia.com.au and check out the rest of 'Get Fact Up'. Cheers for listening. 
 

Published Oct 2, 2018 TRANSCRIPT Chris Hogan - G'day world, Chris Hogan and Andrew Groat coming to you live form Me Media Studio here in Burleigh Heads for episode 95 of Get Fact Up. We've had a bit of a break all due to an increase in workload from our new clients and existing clients so, that's fantastic but we've learned some lessons from that and we want to share them with you. So, it's always a good time with content marketing that if you don't keep up the momentum, effectively you don't keep the momentum of leads and prospects coming in. And also there's an opportunity for others to steal the lime light away from you. So, for example, we've had a great audience here for MeMedia's Get fact Up and we'll be somewhat surprised if all of them stick around given the two months sort of break that we've had, maybe even three months. So,as you know we normally produce Get Fact Up weekly, so it's a weekly video and it's topical on content marketing, specifically. And we're bringing it back in a new way where, obviously it's Andrew and I, as you've met us before. But the future is bright and there's gonna be a lot of guest speakers. Some great content coming through, which we'll show you a preview to you in coming episodes. So, today we wanted to talk about, I guess, what's happening in the content marketing landscape or in the marketing landscape. - What's going on? Andrew Groat - It's crazy out there. Chris Hogan - It's crazy and it's not getting any easier. Yeah, guys gone are the days of the, well you said it, the wild wild west. Andrew Groat - Yeah, the wild west. Where you can be first in and just clean up. Chris Hogan -Yup. Andrew Groat - Yeah, there's a lot of restrictions now, a lot of updates, a lot of changes, new formats. A lot of legal stuff's happened, too, since with Cambridge Analytica and GDPR and a lot that sort of thing. It's really gotten complicated and a lot of people don't know where they stand. A lot of people are sort of afraid to just touch the advertising side of things for the time being. A lot of the features that we new and loved are gone. Chris Hogan - Yup, and we're decreases in, I guess, social media channels actually promoting that content which has our bound links on it where we both read Rand Fishkin's recent blog, which he's a fantastic marketer, in the industry for many years, and well respected, and has done his own little study on what has been happening with regards to social media channels and each post that goes out with a link in it and how there's been a decrease of virility of those posts, verses posts without links. So, social medial channels are trying to really hard to keep people on their own channel. Andrew Groat - Yeah, everyone wants to own the internet now, especially Facebook, Facebook wants people to stay on Facebook, so it's interesting, we want people to be holistic with their marketing and be on every channel, have a website, bring people back to their website for conversions and leads and things like that but Facebook and other channels are trying desperately to keep you right there, so you have to kind of work with that. You can't work against it because it's changing. Chris Hogan - Exactly, and so gone are the days where I think you would go holistic and go across every social media, and do bits and bobs here and there, and keep your brand and reputation, you know, tip top condition just by doing little bits and pieces. Andrew Groat - Yeah, that's right, blanket doesn't really work anymore because if you're sort of half-assing on every social media channel, it just doesn't look good anymore, people don't like that, no ones gonna follow that on Facebook. You really need to be able to do something that works really well, really good formats for that channel, say Facebook for example, and really be able to nail that content for the right audience for that channel, which is hard to do if you're doing all the socials, you know Facebook, LinkedIn, if you're doing AdWords, as well. Instagram, website, it's a lot of work now. Chris Hogan -Yup, absolutely. Andrew Groat - So what do you do? Chris Hogan - Yup, and you know, the new ad formats that are coming out on these platforms, for example, I've always referred to LinkedIn as Facebook for business, and so they always seem to be travelling behind Facebook in terms of the types of ads that they allow you to do, and they have lead generation ads, you know, now which are quite prolific on LinkedIn, where by, you can actually fill out a form on LinkedIn but not leave that social media platform, therefor not end up on your own website, because why? Well, LinkedIn wants you to stay there and why are they doing that way? Well there must be some reason, you know, viewing research that says well users actually don't want to leave the social media channel they're on, they want to stay in the death scroll, you know? Andrew Groat - Yeah, that's right, just keep feeding them content. And also, they benefit from those leads and stuff coming through there as well. Chris Hogan - Yup, absolutely they do because the longer people stay on their networks, the more chance that they're gonna click an ad or watch an ad, which means more revenue for them and so on and so forth. So, there you go, that's pretty much I guess the theory behind why the social media channels are doing what they're doing. But what does that mean? What does that really mean for marketers? Can you say that, oh your website should be treated differently to your Facebook marketing, if you are gonna go out and pick a social media channel, should you forget that your people aren't gonna come back to your website? Andrew Groat - Well, it's a funny one, I would say, we've always said we maintain that you have all your social channels to get people back to your website and try and build your own thing, you know, you don't want to rely on the socials in case they change something and stuff up the way that you do business. It still kind of remains that way but you have to also respect the fact that socials are trying to do things differently now, so you've kind of got to do a bit of both. You're always gonna need a website because that's where you have complete control and stuff like that, but if you stop resisting what all the socials are trying to do, find the right social that works for you, find where your audience is, it's different socials will always be different and some people just find one works better than the others and it's kind of better to just focus on the ones that work instead of trying to blanket everything, and definitely still need to have a website, that's never really gonna change, but don't expect to be able to drag everyone back to your website now. Start using the new tools, lead forms, new formats of ads, like the HTML5, full page Facebook ads and stuff like that, fantastic. When it comes to content marketing, though, if you're creating content just bare in mind that you're gonna have to create a variation of that content to go on the socials, as well. I think that's more the way we're going now. Chris Hogan - It's absolutely, it's kind of been like that for some time but it's even more critical now. Given the drop off that we're seeing on click throughs and what not. And each social media channel is going for an experience for each social media user. Every channel is an experience in itself and so if you don't create an experience on your own website, then effectively, there's no reason for people to come there. They actually aren't gonna feel like, oh I'm gonna get something out of coming to your website, so content marketing is about creating content, how many times do we harp on that? Video is king and second to that, probably infographics. That's what I would suggest, photography, also up there. And so, if you don't create awesome content and host it on your own website and develop that experience of that content, then effectively you're not gonna get people there and you're not gonna keep people there, and you're not gonna get them engaged, you're not gonna want them to take extra steps, maybe to sign up to download an ebook, even though that's a very quite outdated strategy, but maybe it's a course, courses are huge now. Sign up to, you know, free secret content. Andrew Groat -Information packs, members areas, that sort of thing, yeah. Chris Hogan - Yeah, so that sort of strategy is playing out hugely online at the moment and that's what websites are sort of becoming. I want my users and my potential customers and my existing customers to stay on my platform, 'cause I can't control it, but you're gonna have to create an awesome experience to do that, and so what are we saying? It's that think holistically, always think holistically. Don't think that you're website is separate to your marketing per say, it's not just a functional thing that shows pages and gets Google organic traffic. Andrew Groat - That's right, your website is your marketing in effect. I think a lot of people think of web design and development as an entirely separate process to marketing but it's actually the first step in marketing. The first step in being able to market your own brand. And when you're deciding on the design and development of the website, you have to keep that in mind, that this is just another marketing tool. It's not just a thing that businesses do. Chris Hogan - Yeah. Andrew Groat - You have to design with the experience of marketing, the marketing experience in mind, and everything you do with the website should be pointing towards that, what's your goal with the website? How are we going to promote that goal with the website? It's just a marketing tool. Chris Hogan - Exactly, and so Rand Fishkin's blog again did actually say something pretty cool, and that is that it is entirely possible for, example, a yogi to go out and actually put their entire strategy into a Google my business page. Andrew Groat - So maps, that is, yeah. Chris Hogan - Maps, yeah, and put all the content there, upload photos regularly, even video content and get reviews there and all the rest of it. That could be a strategy, but even he said it. That's a risky one. Andrew Groat - It's risky, yeah. Chris Hogan - So again, don't think that each channel is the be all and end all, it has to be holistic and it has to be content base marketing. - They're pushing you to feel like that a specific channel is a whole solution now. Chris Hogan - Yeah. Andrew Groat - Like Facebook for example feels holisic. It does when you're using Facebook to promote your business. There's enough tools there for it to feel holistic but it's risky. Chris Hogan - Absolutely, given all the changes. Andrew Groat - Especially Facebook, given the changes and the fact there's no warning. Chris Hogan - Yeah. Andrew Groat - They don't care about if you have a problem with it. They change it, it's done, so think of secondary steps and all that sort of stuff, but it's not blanket anymore. Chris Hogan - Well that's all we really have time for today. We know that we can ramble on. We're very good at that, we're very good at talking, especially after a few coffees. Stay tuned to Get Fact Up, we're bringing it back. We're bringing it back in a big way. Guest speakers, regular guest speakers, regular topics that matter and are highly relevant right now and hopefully for years to come. Stay tuned, we're on memedia.com.au, that's where you can get all the episodes, we're also on YouTube and Facebook and we'll be keeping those channels real, as well. Andrew Groat - Thank you. Chris Hogan - Cheers.

Published Sep 6, 2018 - [Chris] G'day world, Chris Hogan coming to you live from the Gold Coast, and I'm here with Jack Corbett, who is co-founder of ISR training, and we're here for Get Fact Up!, episode 94, on why, focusing a disproportionate amount of energy on sales and marketing is critical to your business success. Thanks very much for joining me, Jack, how you going man? - [Jack] Really good, really really good. Thank you for inviting me along. - [Chris] No worries, mate. So why is it important that companies focus a disproportionate amount of energy on sales and marketing? - [Jack] I think the reality is that in all facets of business, without sales, you are scheduled to fail. I think that a lot of small business owners, especially people that are in that seed or startup phase, think in the first 12 to 18 months, it's all about R&D, it's all about product development. It's all about message to market. But the reality is that, if nobody wants to buy your product from you, because it's not either fulfilling a void in their life, or alternatively it's not meeting the budget they've got available to creating a solution to that problem, then you've got something that looks beautiful, but you're really the only person that's having a chance to use it. - [Chris] Perfect, so you guys have a sales system, you call it SWISH. - [Jack] We do. - [Chris] And what does SWISH stand for? - SWISH stands for selling with integrity, and selling honestly. After arriving here on the Gold Coast 10 years ago, from Birmingham in the UK, I found that unfortunately we don't have the greatest stigma in terms of the ethics that we have, and the customer-centric approach to our sales mechanisms. I saw that firsthand when I began to recruit salespeople around the Coast, most Gold Coast boiler rooms is the term they like using in mass media at the moment. Had one focus, which was how much money could they make and how quickly. And what I, I'm very much somebody who has the opinion that if you can solve a problem, a lot of money is the natural byproduct of doing so. - [Chris] Absolutely. We have a big belief at MeMedia that we need to create value for our clients. - [Jack] Yes. - [Chris] So we are all about creating value. - [Jack] Absolutely. - [Chris] And solving, I guess, global problems on a local scale. - [Jack] For sure. - [Chris] Global minds is super important. So, what's one tip that people need to do, maybe, I guess in those very early stages of starting a company. - [Jack] - Yep. - [Chris] And, we'll start with that one. - [Jack] For me, I'd really focus on understanding your own price point. A lot of the times, I meet and I train an abundance of entrepreneurs, that have designed a product that fills a void in their life. One thing I will tell you, as entrepreneurs, is you are unicorns. You're very unique. We're not logical people, you know. We're somebody that's given over, 60, 80, 90, 100 hours of our week, to potentially never get paid for doing so. So I need you to appreciate you're not like the average Joe. Now if you want your product to be able to achieve global scale, then it needs to have mass appeal. So what I would do, first and foremost, is take my product to the market, I would give it to people who are not in my friend or family groups, because they will always have a biassed opinion, give it to your demographic of people you expect to purchase the product from you, for free, or for the bottom line expense, and ask them how much would they be willing to pay you for it. How often would they expect to purchase it from you, or with what regularity. And then I would scope my revenue model accordingly. Once I knew that, then I would say to myself, okay, if sales are what are going to help me to achieve growth within my business, how much time should I put aside, or should I actually assign to that task, for me in the early stages, follow the Pareto principle, 80, 20. If you're going to work for 10 hours a day, eight hours of those should be spent in revenue generating activities. - [Chris] Okay. And how does marketing tend to fall in to the whole sales and marketing process for you? - [Jack] For me, it's salt and pepper. They don't belong, either of them, on the plate without the other. So, you can have all the sales skills in the world, I've met these people. I've trained these people. They are guns. But they don't have a single customer's name, email address, or phone number to utilise or to engage conversation about the product or service. On the other side of that, there have been an abundance of businesses that generate high volumes of leads, they have to switch off their digital marketing, because they can't even communicate with the volume of people that are wishing to engage their services, yet, they don't have the customer communication skills, the rapport building skills, to make sure that they turn that lead into dollars in the tin, or dollars in the pocket. So for me, one cannot exist without the other, and there is really no value in disproportionately applying your time. I think they really are salt and pepper, 50, 50. - [Chris] Okay so, you've brought up a lot of points there, which is somewhat overwhelming for many people out there, especially when they're thinking about their marketing. - [Jack] Yep. - [Chris] So, we at Me Media, we're focused heavily on content. - [Jack] Yes. - [Chris] Distribution. - [Jack] Yes. - [Chris] Staying in constant contact, communication. - [Jack] For sure. - [Chris] Which one has the highest priority, there, do you they come in that order, or? - [Jack] I'm about to answer this question like a politician, and I apologise for that, because there isn't a one size fits all answer there. I believe you need to be both recent and frequent, I think if you look at most consumer activity, you will purchase a product or service that was either made available to you most recently, i.e., I've walked through a shopping centre, oh, there you go, there's somebody that does what I need. Go in and purchase it. Or alternatively, you will do it with a company that has communicated with you most frequently. So, I believe you should be adding value to your database, with some content, approximately every three to four days, just to stay recent in their thinking, remain in their conscious thoughts, and therefore they're more likely to take activity against your product or service. But, the other side to that, is, content for content purposes is the quickest way to lose an audience. So, if that content in context to why they contacted you in the first place, or the problem they're experiencing, then you could lose me very quickly. You know, I won't name a business, but, I subscribe to a lot of development and building material, because I like to know, what big buildings are coming up in my city, and how I might be able to invest in them. And when a company then sends me information on their newest retirement village, you have immediately disconnected me as your audience, I'm probably not going to open their next email. - [Chris] Fantastic. So, that can actually come into tagging in sales and marketing automation systems, - [Jack] For sure. - [Chris] So you're only sending out content that's of interest to that audience. - [Jack] For sure. - [Chris] And also, we have the content types. - [Jack] Yes. - [Chris] So, video, obviously text. - [Jack] Yes. - [Chris] Imagery, being photographs, or infographics, case studies, all of those types of things, all of huge value, but if they're out of context. - [Jack] They serve no relevance. - [Chris] Yep. - [Jack] Yep, absolutely. - [Chris] Fantastic. What would be one of the things that, you've had a tremendous growth trajectory in probably the last quarter of this year. What would be one of the things that maybe you would go back and change about your sales and marketing, sales and marketing, that maybe would have made this last three months even better? - [Jack] Yeah, I mean look, we've been quite fortunate in the fact that we've had an abundance of PR. And for me, true public relations are really the most powerful form of marketing, 'cause it's not you telling the world how good you are, from your first-party, biassed perspective, it's somebody else writing a news story on you or having an opinion that solidifies the services or the quality of the service that you're offering. But if I was to rewind the clock three months ago, and we aired on our episode of Shark Tank, aired on the fifth of June, so that's coming up in and around that two and a half month mark, what I probably would have done is been a little more tactical in my spend in the pay-per-click space. I very much targeted the major key words, such as sales training, business coaching, very competitive, very expensive, and hasn't shown to have the best conversion as there's a lot of window shopping in that space. So what we would have probably done is focused more on long tail key sentences, and definitely on search that's done in the spoken word. We're becoming aware that roughly one in every five searches on Google is now done through Alexa, through Google, through Siri, and the average person will speak about 17 words. Whereas when we type, we'll only type 3.4 to 3.7 words, before our Neanderthal impatience causes us to go, I need to search! - [Chris] With that noise. - [Jack] Yeah, I need answers, now! We will get very granular on our spoken search, you know, who are the best sales training organisation in and around the Gold Coast, that can support my call centre of 25 people in the insurance industry. Now what I've found, is that only gets searched three times a month, but there is nobody bidding on that search. So instead of paying 10 to 12 dollars, I'm paying 10 to 12 cents. And my conversions are probably three times greater, because I'm speaking to someone who actually knows what they're looking for. - [Chris] Fantastic, so data backed research, super important, something we absolutely focus heavily on as well. You're looking for those shoulder searches, shoulder niches, in and around your key service offerings. Fantastic advice. Thank you very much for your time, how do people stay across what ISR is up to? - [Jack] Look, with myself personally, I'm not huge on social media, which Chris is riding my back for, but you can always find me on LinkedIn, Jack Corbett, alternatively we're across all social media handles just at ISR Training.

Published Sep 6, 2018 - [Chris] G'day world, Chris Hogan and Andrew Groat coming to you live from MeMedia Studio here at Burleigh Heads for episode 93 of Get Fact Up! And today we're talking about Research Backed Content Creation. So, Andrew, why are we talking about this? - [Andrew] Well, basically, this is how everyone should be creating content. And we talk about this a lot, like, why are you even bothering creating content if you don't know what you're doing it for, if you don't know what keywords you're going for, if you don't know what your competition is like. If you don't know if it's going to contribute towards sales or just people visiting, like that sort of thing. That's kind of what I want to talk about today. - I think this is also putting the consumer at the central part of the conversation. - [Andrew] Mmm. - Around content creation. They are the ones that are going to be your customer. They are the ones doing the searching. They are the ones consuming the content. - [Andrew] Yeah. - And if you don't actually know what it is they're searching for? You're just, pissing into the wind really. - Yeah, effectively, yeah. And talking about what they're searching for, that's basically where you start with all this, so, on this next slide here, I've got a bunch of keywords, and I'm using AdWords data here, so it's pay-per-click info. But it also shows the average monthly searches. So I decided we'll use home insurance as an example, here. Because it's competitive as, I mean if you look at the keyword bidding range over there, your minimum you're going to spend on a cost-per-click is 12.67, maximum about 40 bucks, so. - I love home insurance, or I love insurance as a test case. Because realistically, it's a boring topic, and I think we can take this somewhere, so let's have a look. So home insurance top, - Yeah, so. - What top of page bid range, what's the top bid there? - [Andrew] Okay, so that's to get to the top of the first page. - [Chris] Of course. - [Andrew] The low range is sort of the minimum you'd probably be spending to get there. Obviously different times and when different competitors are active, it's gonna change. And then the top of range, sorry the high range, is the most you'd be spending. I would suspect it's probably higher than that as well. - Yeah, so interestingly, $48 per click, on homeowner's insurance. - [Andrew] Mmhmm. - For that keyword, but has a relatively low average monthly search, so that's quite interesting, that that's the most expensive keyword. - It either means people are really not being smart with their ad spend, or that's a really high buyer's intent sort of keyword, so maybe that particular keyword tends to convert better. - True. - It could be one or the other. Probably a bit of both. - Or, or the campaign managers for the insurance company advertising are bidding heavily on the wrong keyword. - Yeah, could be asleep at the wheel. Could be just a bidding war for the fun of it, you know. My point is, it's crazy amount of money you'd have to spend to rank for this, so what do you do next? - Exactly. - What's a better place to look than keywords? Because if you haven't got your funnel tight, and, you know, all the leaks patched up in here, you're basically wasting money here, so, what's a better place to look? - So using, we use this place, this tool as a starting point for our research, and then we take it to a whole another level using various other tools, and our own smarts. But it is an interesting conversation starter for this type of research. And you know, it gives you, just some ideas around average monthly searches, and which keywords are more popular than others. You know, homeowners insurance quote, 30 average, 30 searches on average per month. Homeowners insurance, 140 searches on average per month. Home insurance, 12,100 searches per month. Now these are-- - [Andrew] Australia. - Yeah, these are for Australia, and they're also very high level keywords. - [Andrew] Yeah, yeah. - So let's keep diving in, because-- - So, yeah, moving on, like, obviously you could spend money to rank for these, but you prefer to get organic traffic for these, - [Chris] Hmm. - But, with that level of competition, and if we go to the next screen, we can see the organic competition as well. With that level of competition, I mean, how would you get to rank there? The difficulty here is 60, and that's just looking at the page authority and the main authority for all the competitors on the first page. Which is extremely high. I mean, you're going up against Allianz and Budget Direct and things like that. - [Chris] Compare the market, yup. - Also, if you wanted to rank organically here, obviously you would want to get maybe like your service or listings page, like the page with all your products, to be on here, not an article or something like that. So, how do you make that interesting? How do you get that on there? Well, you kind of can't. - [Chris] No. - You have to think outside the square, and I know that's where we kind of want to go here. - Well, sorry, let's rephrase, because you can, we know you can, but-- - You can't just make that page get there, you have to, just like a-- - Do a lot of stuff around it. - Call it like a hot air balloon method, where you're sort of using a lot of stuff around it to drag it up. - [Chris] Yup. - With everything else, so, the next thing you want to do is find related keywords, related long tail keywords to home insurance, and also what we call shoulder niches, which is more generalised verions of the same keyword. So I collected up a a whole bunch of different keywords that sort of fit in that category, they were related, or you know, very similar category to that but tied in, like someone that's looking for home insurance is also thinking about this. And amalgamated them, and we have a look here. So what we're trying to do next is find opportunities. First thing we see here is the difficulty is much lower for all these keywords. And you can see there's a couple examples down at the bottom I just sort of pasted there. - [Chris] Yeah. Organic click-through, right? Which is the purple one, is pretty high. - [Andrew] So that's good, so low difficulty, high click-through rate for all of these sorts of topics. And then the next thing we want to do is look at SERP features. And it's a little bit small here, but basically what that is, is I've analysed, what, other than just simple text results are there. So is there images, is there videos, is there local pack, is there maps? - [Chris] Yeah, so what are we seeing on those SERP features there, the first two, they're really high. - [Andrew] Okay. - [Chris] Competitiveness on content. - [Andrew] That's AdWords. - [Chris] Yup. - [Andrew] So basically, everyone's fighting in the AdWords space here. - [Chris] Yup. - [Andrew] The next one is there's a lot of maps listings, which obviously, everyone is gonna have Google My Business set up. - [Chris] Of course. - [Andrew] In this industry, one would hope. And then the other two bigger are shopping related. So obviously buying policies directly on Google. There's not an awful lot in the way of imagery. There's not an awful lot in the way of, like rich media articles, which is the one in the middle, that's dead flat. And there's not a lot in the way of video, so, this is where we can see there's some opportunity here. - [Chris] Yeah. - So rich media content, and we always talk about this. - Yeah, absolutely, we do always talk about this. And what we mean by that, is that obviously text content is where we all start. Our previous videos have indicated that a video, a two-minute long video, can actually cover about a thousand word article. You know, you can fit a thousand words into a two minute video, pretty much. - And best of all, it's high engagement, but I'm coming up to this soon. So, some pretty good related keywords I found here, like home insurance tips, why have homeowners insurance, that's not the exact keyword, but it's related enough, and then looking a little bit outside to broader sort of categories, how we calculate your insurance policy, and I like this one, how building materials affect your premium. - Yeah, that's really interesting. - I thought that was really cool, like, that's something people would probably want to read before buying a house or-- - Building a house. - [Andrew] Building a house, yeah building house. - Absolutely. So that's really interesting and I guess this is what I was talking about earlier, is putting the consumer at the central part of your content marketing strategy. What is it that they're interested in? What is it they're searching? You know, I know we didn't put it in here, but I started thinking like, well, the biggest thing that I want to know is how to save money on my home insurance. - [Andrew] Hmm. - You know, how do I hack, hack my insurance to-- - [Andrew] Yeah. - To get the biggest bang for buck. - [Andrew] Mmhmm. - Not just home insurance, insurances across the board, health insurance, am I wasting my money? Or how do I get the most out of it? If I'm gonna pay for it, how am I gonna get the most out of it? And funnily enough, I think maybe, insurance companies might be thinking, no, we, well at least me as a consumer, I think insurance companies are thinking, no, we don't really want people to get the most out of their insurance, because that's gonna cost us money. - [Andrew] Mmm. - Well, regardless of what you think, insurance companies, consumers do want that. - So if you actually deliver content to them that they're really interested in knowing, then essentially, you're going to attract them through organic and not have to pay per click. - Yeah, and something that people are probably wondering is, so a lot of these topics don't necessarily mean somebody's immediately about to buy. - [Chris] No. - So how do we get to that? - Don't worry about that for now. That's sort of in the last step here. At the moment we just want to get highly engaged traffic, relevant traffic, to your website. And then we sort of tie that back in. But moving on, I'm looking at okay, so just a slightly more related keyword to home insurance. We've got home insurance tips. Big difference here, difficulty to rank this organically is 27 as opposed to 60. You're going up against some, just slightly more general stuff, so you can fit in quite easily when you look at you're up against insurance council and finder.com.au. And best of all, organic click through rate for that is 100%. So people looking for home insurance tips are guaranteed to go into something on the first page. And that they're doing their research. - [Chris] We can't get better than 100%. - [Andrew] Yeah. - [Chris] Yeah, this is really interesting, yeah so, insurance council, finder, iselect, all non-insurance companies creating content which we know full well they're making money out of because they're probably doing affiliate marketing or something along those lines, and getting a clip of the ticket when people actually do sign up. But they could actually be selling advertising to those insurance companies or whatnot. - Mmhmm. - Now, insurance companies shouldn't be relying on these third parties. We're speaking-- - [Andrew] That's right, yeah. - About insurance companies as any business. Any business shouldn't be relying on third parties creating a bucketload of content about their industry niche, to then drive traffic to them. - As much as affiliate, an affiliate channel is a good income stream, and channel in its own right, if it's too big, it floods the market with content that just pulls people away from you and your direct brand, so it's an issue. So, slightly better difficulty, slightly better competition here, like it'd be easy to rank for home insurance tips. But how do you do that? So, we have a look at what obviously everyone else is doing. And we've seen that they're not doing much in the way of rich media content, so go for that sort of thing. Video, with subtitles, podcasts, relevant interesting images in your content, infographics, subheadings and sections to your content divided up so it's skimmable, and combine it all together, basically, like-- - [Chris] Combine all that content together. - Video, blog, images, all that sort of thing. Basically, you're looking for engagement. Interactions with your page, time on site, low bounce rate, pages per visit, that's what will get you above finder.com.au for home insurance tips. - And then, as an insurance company, if you actually surpassed all those third parties. - [Andrew] Mmhmm. - And they click directly on your content, you've saved yourself that affiliate marketing. - [Andrew] Yeah, they're not taking your clip at the ticket there. - [Andrew] So. Coming right back to that, how does that relate to you getting your service page, your home insurance page up? This last step is what everyone forgets. That's, - [Both] Internal linking. - [Andrew] So all of this awesome content that you're putting out there, it's getting you ranked for all these relevant terms to your industry, make sure you're linking back. In your content, inline your content, and in the footer with a call to action back to your home insurance service or catalogue page, I guess you'd say. Because all of these well-ranked articles that you're putting out there, they're all going up the Google ranks. They're all linked back to your main one, and that gets dragged up with it. Whoa. It's a little bit hard to do these movements. Your main page gets dragged up with it. So that's how you, basically, would rank a page that's difficult to rank with really high competition. - [Chris] Yeah. - And that's also what other people aren't doing, yeah. - Yeah, so this is tip of the iceberg, I guess, snapshots, of where we would start with our keyword research, you know the actual, I think the half hour prep time that you put into this, we didn't dive into all of the opportunities that would come out. - Aw, yeah, it's huge, and just the research phase in itself, you could do an entire three or four episodes on. - Absolutely. - You know I just, - Got the data ready. - Well, maybe we're geeks, maybe we're not, but I know there's high fives get thrown around the office when we find the, this awesome piece of gold, which is a keyword or phrase that is being searched, thousands of times per month, tens of thousands of times per month, and has super low competition, and/or has no competition for that rich media content. - [Andrew] Mmhmm. - And guess what, we're going to overtake you, as the competitor every time when we see that, every time. - Yeah, like we always say, we find and go for the low hanging fruit first, get results quickly. And we've seen some clients have, like one piece of content drives 50% of their traffic to the website now. - That's the role that-- - Hundred hundreds a week. - Well, that's right, but that's because we haven't just stopped at creating one piece of content. - [Andrew] Yeah, yeah. - We've created bucket loads of relevant, engaging content, yeah? Related to the keywords. - Mmhmm. - That have high search terms. - That we know people are looking for in. - And we're internal linking. And we're driving traffic back to those important pages. What do people want to know after they've started reading every piece of content? They want to know how much it is. If you know, even if they're not ready to buy, they still want to consider it, right, that's really interesting, how much? Wait, what? Okay, is there an opportunity to buy now? Well if I was going to buy now, how much is it? So, what's the details? How do I go through the process, if I wanted to? Tell them that. Link them back to that page, that conversion page, that you want to rank really well. People may not buy now, but they still want to know the process. And in an insurance case, just for example, it's going to be a year-long consideration, or at least half a year. Maybe halfway into the year, I'm going, hmm, where's my health insurance or home insurance sitting at the moment? Where could I save money on that? How can I maximise those costs? - And there's going to be a lot of searching, in between there as well. They're going to be researching a lot, so I'd say this is probably a niche that needs a lot of content out there, and I'm not seeing enough of it out there, to be honest. - Super slow burn, and again, we're just using home insurance, and house insurance, and health insurance, and car insurance as one example. This is the same case for everybody. Everybody is taking longer to consider what their next steps are. They're doing a lot more research. They're getting more educated. They got the resources. - Mmhmm. - You know, are sitting there. The internet is sitting there, giving them those resources as and when they want them or need them. And so, having all of that content, if people are constantly hitting your website on the topics that they're searching, and not somebody else's, for the course of a year, guess who gets considered, is the highest to be considered when buying. - Mmhmm, and who gets ranked the best. - That's the obvious sideline benefit, yeah? And we all know that Google organic traffic converts best out of all traffic. The pay-per-click stuff, it hurts. It actually hurts to pay that, geez, $48 per click. But the reason why they're doing it is because potentially, it's a high converting keyword. But if you get that for a lot less, as in free through organic, you'd take it every time, wouldn't you? But it does take an investment, a front-loaded investment. - Yeah. - To get it to that point. Cool. - Time. I hope everybody got some value out of that. Data-backed research on content creation is super important. If you're not doing it, like we said, you're just pissing into the wind. If you don't understand that, basically you're throwing money away, on your content creation. - Yeah, it's not worth, it's not worth doing it. - Yeah. - [Andrew] Because you could actually be having a detrimental effect to your brand and SEO. - Yeah. - [Andrew] If you don't do the research. - Yup. And you're just putting content up for content's sake. If you're not putting up rich content now, in this 2018. Forget about it. - Basically Google doesn't like trash content. Google is a garbage collector. - [Chris] Yup. - It has to clear out the crap constantly, so. If you're making Google's job harder, then it's going to consider you basically a pollution. - Yeah, and if you're not structuring your content to be skimmable, and you're just dumping that content on the page, copy-paste out of your word processor, with no formatting whatsoever, then essentially, yeah, you're going to lose me as well. You're going to lose the consumer. Yeah, I might come to the page thinking I get this awesome article, and all of the sudden I just see paragraphs of, you know, 12 point text, with no bolding, no headings, no images, no infographics, no video, nothing for me to share, nothing for me to take away, no reason for me to bookmark it and want to come back again. - [Andrew] Mmhmm. - [Chris] See ya later, I'm out, three seconds, you've got three seconds to keep me on that page. You'd better make that content look awesome for to start with. Anyway, let's wrap it up. Thanks for watching guys, MeMedia, Get Fact Up! We've been running this for a little over two to three years now. Two years, a little over two years now. And it's proof that content marketing works. If you want to talk to us about content marketing, you can tell that we've got the smarts, the know-how, and definitely passion to drive your business above and beyond on Google organic search search results, which is what converts the most, so give us a call. Thanks, and see ya next week. - [Andrew] Thank you. 
 

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Published Jun 11, 2018 It’s that time of year again, when Mary Meeker unloads her mammoth internet trends report - a whopping 294 pages of actionable informations for marketers and business owners alike. The report itself can be downloaded here: http://www.kpcb.com/file/2018-internet-trends-repo... In this 90th episode of 'Get Fact Up' we've pulled out the best bits to help you choose the right direction for your marketing in 2018 and beyond!