January 23, 2023 - EyeClarity Podcast
Here is a presentation I gave on how I built my social media community. I shared this with a group of entrepreneurs from Score who are interested in building a social media community. Score is a national organization I’m involved with that helps entrepreneurs build their businesses. So you get to see me in action, sharing some of my secrets about how I built my brand. Enjoy the show.
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SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, podcast, post, brand, create, linkedin, question, products, social media, content, TikTok, money, business, interested, called, happening, facebook, instagram, building
00:05
Hello, everyone, it’s Dr. Sam, I’d like to welcome you to my EyeClarity podcast. This is a show that offers cutting edge information on how to improve your vision and overall wellness through holistic methods. I so appreciate you spending part of your day with me. If you have questions, you can send them to hello@drsamberne.com.
Hey everybody it’s Dr. Sam and I’d like to welcome you to my EyeClarity podcast. Before we get to today’s show, you can always text me your questions 1-844-932-1291 Or send me an email hello@drsamberne.com.
I’ve got a couple of great workshops coming up in March in Southern California. I’ll be in San Diego March 5, LA March 7, and Santa Barbara March 12 doing my famous masterclass. I’m back doing that again in person. This is a great way to work with me one on one, if you’ve got an issue that you haven’t been able to solve. Register Here.
And I’ll be doing some book events. As you know, my new book, Vital Vision is coming out the end of February, we’re in a pre sale right now. So if you want to order the book, you’ll get a discount. And there are also some events happening. You can sign up and we can do an online workshop that’s going to be happening in April. Also, you can get some coaching one on one sessions with me if you buy the book, and I’ll be doing a gathering in Santa Fe in September. This is gonna be a small group at my geo-dome. So if you’d like to register for that, we’d love to have you.
Preorder the book here OR learn about my book events here.
00:46
everybody, it’s Dr. Sam and I want to welcome you to my EyeClarity podcast. So today is a presentation that I gave recently, to a group of entrepreneurs who are interested in building a social media community. In I’m involved with a group called score, which is a national organization that helps entrepreneurs build their businesses. And I was recognized for all the great things I’ve done in my own brand. And so you get to see me in action, sharing some of my secrets, and how I built my brand. So I hope you enjoy the show. And thanks for tuning in. So everybody, I’m really excited to be here just a little bit about myself. You know, I grew up in a middle class, family, and we emphasized education. So I ended up becoming a doctor, I was always interested in natural healing. So I combined the two. And I started to private practices, one I sold, the other I still have. So I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit in me. And in 2016, I started my brand on the internet, and I’ll talk about that. And actually in 2020 is when I launched my E commerce right around COVID.
So I’ll go into more details about that. And I’ve been a client of score for the past three years. So here we go. So when I started, I began to think of myself as a media channel. And the key thing in if you’re going to do social media, in my opinion, is to create value for your audience. And what I did early on is I gave away my best information, like everything for free. And it’s kind of like this idea of give, give, give. And then you can ask, okay, this is a really important aspect in building a brand, and is very different than, say being transactional. And I’ll kind of go into more detail on that in a minute. But if you are going to do social media, my advice would be start with your strengths. Are you better at writing? Are you better at talking? For me, I loved videos, so I loved doing video. I also love doing audio.
And I actually started this. This process called morning walks with Dr. Sam and so I would I love to hike. So I be hiking in the national forests. And somebody would ask me a question. And so I would stop and go. All right, let me give you the answer here. And it became a huge way to build my following. Another thing that I did was I created four to eight content pieces a day and I posted them across all the social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Tik Tok and Twitter. If you’re independent trust, you could do that. You could also do Snapchat. But I was very disciplined about creating content and posting them and people ask, Well, what do you do for content? What’s the best thing? And I would say storytelling. I would also say documenting. So like for an example, in my own case, you know, how did I get to the place of developing my products? How did I get to the place of you know, I might share a story about a client or a patient who had a success story. In terms of documentation. Recently, I did I love whitewater rafting. It’s one of my passions. And I use it did a trip in Central and South Southern Utah. And I documented the whole trip, video audio and then I posted that and so this is another piece.
Your content doesn’t just have to relate to your business. People might want to get to know you. Like for example, you know, let’s say people aren’t interested in my health and wellness brand, but they’re interested in whitewater rafting. So I ended up getting some people who were from now following me, but it had nothing to do with my profession, my professional brand. It had to do with my, you know, personal interests. So you could put your children on if you’ve got animals, I mean, you know, you can just think about not just posting about your business, but doing some personal things as well. So I feel that we are living in a golden age. And what I mean by that is that, you know, if you think about, say, 20 years ago, the kingmakers were the celebrities that we saw on TV, you know, the actors, the sports, celebrities are the people who wrote best selling books. But now the internet is the kingmaker. And what this means is that we can use the internet as entrepreneurs to build our business. And the other thing is, you don’t need to spend a lot of money in creating content. In fact, when I first started, I was the only one in my company I did the videos, I did the editing, I did the posting, I did the same thing when I would write a blog. So I learned how to do all of those things. And if you’re starting out, and you don’t have a lot of money, you don’t need to spend a lot and especially the way the economy is right now, it’s kind of soft, we may be in heading towards a pretty deep recession. You don’t want to go into debt. But you can do all of this on your own.
And as the internet using the internet and social media, you can start to build your community. So as I said, social media reduces or eliminates spending money on ads, and, you know, hiring social media agencies, I don’t recommend any of that. But the thing that you want to consider is whatever product and or service you would like to sell, using organic reach is easy and possible for all of us. And this next point, social media is underpriced attention. So what do I mean by that? Well, when I started, my philosophy was I am going to give, give, give, I’m not going to ask for anything in return. I’m going to create value for people, I’m going to answer their questions. I’m going to, I’m just going to give away the information and start cultivating a relationship. And as I did that, people started to follow me this was the underpriced attention, I wasn’t paying anything except my sweat equity. And in doing that, over time, what ended up happening is, I started to grow my social media. I remember when I started my facebook live shows I would do those every Wednesday night. And for the first three months, nobody tuned in. It was very humbling to me. And so I would write out questions.
And I would say, Oh, hey, Johnny asked this question. Let me answer it. And so that’s how I started. And then after a few months, a few people started trickling in. And one of the aspects of give, give give is that number one, you’re going to have more retention of your customers as opposed to hitting them up. And you know, asking them to buy something right away. And the other thing that happened is word of mouth on on social media. This is really amazing. In fact, I just did a a post. This is very interesting because I was up in the mountains on Saturday, and I was hiking in the deep snow and I had this idea. Oh, well. Let me do this video pulled up my phone. 20 seconds. I I shared my idea. I posted it on Tik Tok Saturday night, and I just looked on Tik Tok and I have 300,000 views of this 22nd video that I had. I didn’t prepare for it. There was no script. It was just something that came to me. That’s the underpriced attention. It can happen. You can go viral in a nanosecond and that’s what’s exciting about this for all of you.
09:52
Okay, in this webinar, I want to share the following. Number one, how to build a social media community Number two, how to integrate selling products and services using social media. You know, in my case, I spent about three years, just cultivating my community, I didn’t sell anything. And it was actually at a mentor meeting, a score meeting that I had in March of 2020. And one of my mentors said, Well, what do you think about starting your E commerce business? And I went, Oh, that’s a great idea. So I actually launched it June of 2020. And it exploded. And of course, it is so robust now just like a year and a half, two years in, but I have the community first, and then I launched my products. And this is also another key point, people will come to me and say, Hey, I wrote the best book, I’ve got the best product. And I’ll ask them, Well, how many followers do you have? And they go, why don’t really have any followers? I said, you know, it’s kind of in reverse, where Why don’t you spend the time building the community first. And then you can launch your product or service. So it’s just a another way to think about it. Alright, number three, is, in this webinar, I’m going to share what it takes to obtain results. And number four, what are the time management things that you may need to do in order to make this work for yourself?
Okay, so in building a social media community, I get these questions. What are the tactics? You know, how do I use YouTube or Facebook? And you can go on Google or YouTube, and you can google how do I post on Facebook? Or how do I start a podcast, it’s all there for you. It’s free. You know, you spend 10 to 15 hours doing that, and you’ll find that you become an expert like me, and you’ll be able to do these things quite easily. Now, in creating ideas for content, I talked about storytelling, I talked about documentation. Another thing that I like to do is, depending on the social media platform, I make content based on who’s the customer who’s following. So let me give you an example, on LinkedIn, which I think that for some people that are doing b2b business to business type of things. LinkedIn is the place where you want to be posting, if you’re more business to consumer B to C, then you want to be focused on say, Facebook, or Instagram. And so I’m creating different content based on the social media platform. So in LinkedIn, I like to talk about, well, here are the new industry discoveries, or, you know, I might get in a conversation with another business owner or somebody in the health and wellness blant brand, I might even invite them on my podcast, and have them talk about themselves. And then we cross pollinate. So there’s a lot of ways that you can create ideas for content.
In the end, I’m going to leave my my links for all my social media. Just as an example, you can look at some of the content pieces I’ve created. And by the way, our q&a will be at the end. So hang in there, you can put your chat in the chat box, and I will get to your question. Okay, now, when you create ideas, create a schedule or a calendar for creating and posting, so you’re organized about what you’re doing every day, there are scheduling programs that you can get, which can automatically post your content, so you can actually schedule for an entire week. And then finally, study the different social media platforms and create appropriate content based on their platform. That’s kind of what I was talking about. And then finally, just get yourself a phone, a good phone with a camera and a microphone, start there. You don’t need to go out and spend a lot of money on fancy microphones, or you know, other things like that. Get started and save your money. You know, in my social media content, it’s so interesting because a lot of my videos are raw, you know, it’s just like I’m in a car. I’m in a public space, and I have a great idea and, you know, I shoot the video, and it goes viral. That’s kind of what happened for me with Tik Tok last weekend. So don’t over don’t worry about overproduces They are doing post production that can come later. But for the beginning, people will love it that you’re more authentic, you just come on. And either if you don’t want to do video, then just do audio, or write, but you don’t need to spend a lot of money initially getting started. Okay, this is a big one, how does integrate selling products or services.
One of the things that really worked for me and continues to work is in this community where I’m giving and giving and giving, I’ve established trust with people. And so now when I launch a new product, and I’ve launched a lot of new products in the last three months, what has happened is because people trust me, they actually will buy my products or services, because what they’re actually really buying is my expertise and my experience, but we have developed a relationship with each other. So they trust me, and I’m not hugging them, I’m not, you know, selling them on a transactional way. What’s happening is, I’m developing the community. And then I can start, you know, talking about my, my workshops. And by the way, if you want some help on how to do online workshops, they are so lucrative, because in the online workshops, there’s no overhead. And with COVID, I did a ton of online workshops, and they were really well attended. And I made a lot of money from them, they were really a great way for me to sustain my my process. So it’s all about brand. And that takes time.
16:57
Okay, I want to give you an example. So I’ve written books, five books, I just wrote a new book, it was an interesting idea, because what I decided to do was take the transcripts of a lot of my q&a on my podcasts and Facebook Live. And I had them. So I had the the transcripts written out. And then I had a ghostwriter work with me to write the book. And so basically, the book is based on what people are asking what they want. And so I had an idea, well, maybe I should do a book tour. So I hired a publicist, and nothing was happening.
First of all, the bookstores are in big trouble for a lot of different reasons. And so for a self published published author, they’re not really you know, interested in taking the risk of maybe doing a book tour or hosting a book tour. So I dropped that idea. And instead, I emphasize my brand. And I put out some workshops, and bang, everything went the other way. So I had some amazing sales from it. And so I shifted out of my transit transactional idea of selling the book. And I brought in my brand, and attached the book to that, and all of a sudden, things really took off. In another example, I look at a lot of research and, you know, the love of my customers and patients, their eyesight is deteriorating, they’re in the 50 to 75 age range. And so I’m always looking for things to help them regenerate their eyes. And there was a study that came out of the University College of London, the scientists discovered that if you look through red glasses, for so many minutes a day for so many weeks, there was a 22% increase, and a person’s ability to see clearly, that was amazing. So I was looking for a way to to, you know, refer people, so where they could buy the product, and the only place you could buy the product was in the UK and the people that were promoting it, they were a little flaky.
And so I went back to the drawing board, I talk to my manufacturers, and I develop my own red tinted glasses. And the thing is, is I made a couple of posts on Instagram. And the whole thing went viral. And my fulfillment team, my webstore manager, I mean, they were really upset. They called me and said, What are you doing? You know, give us some advanced notice if you’re going to do this, and I said, I have no idea. I had no idea that this was going to go viral like this. Fortunately, my manufacturer got right on it. And we were able to fulfill our orders within a week. And so another example it was because of my brand, that people trust me, they looked at the research, they went, Oh, I want to buy these. It’s going to really help and I want to make another point that’s not on this Slide.
And this is really important for small businesses. And I learned this the hard way. You know, in small businesses, one of the things that we’re always battling is cashflow. And if you have products that you are going to be selling, one of the best techniques to use is something called a pre sale campaign. So I’ll give you my example. Recently, what we started to do is bundle our products together. And each each eye condition was based on the bundle, okay, and it was going to be a ton of inventory that I was going to have to buy, and I didn’t want to tie up all that cash. So what I did was I said to my customers and my community, I’m gonna do a pre sale here, you’re gonna get 15% off all my products, if you take advantage of the pre sale price. So I did that for about two weeks. And I got the number of orders, and we got the money up front. And then I called my manufacturer and I said, Okay, this is the amount of inventory I need. So it saved my cash flow, I actually made money by doing the pre sale. And I would recommend this for any small business who has to pay payroll, who’s got personal expenses, by doing pre sale, you’re not tying up your your money on inventory, especially if you don’t know what the sales are going to be.
Okay, let’s talk about results. Because results were very important for me, very important for, you know, my colleagues and people that who are interested. So the number one thing I’m going to say here, this is probably the most important thing I’m going to say today is patience. If you can be patient financially, and emotionally, you are going to make better decisions, not only in your business, but also it’s going to help you have a better work life balance, you know, without having that pressure of, you know, whatever, you know, I need to have it now, if you can have patience. Look, this is a marathon, it is not a sprint. And so as I shared my story in 2016, I just started posting, I didn’t have products to sell. I was like, Well, let me see what happens here before I, you know, start investing hundreds and 1000s of dollars into products. And I actually built my community for almost four years before I launched my products. And that’s why I’m doing so well. Now, the other thing is persistence. You know, this can sound kind of glamorous, you know, I’m saying well, I’ve went from this zero to 120,000 followers, but it was a lot of hard work. It was a lot of daily just following through.
And, you know, continually doing the consistent posting, answering questions from customers that they would write me questions based on the post I would do. So patience and process persistence, stay the course. Another thing I want to say and you know, I’m guilty of this, too, is that the focus should not be on how many views you have, how many followers you get, whether you go viral or not create daily content that gives people value that you’re helping them. This is not about you, or me, this isn’t about my Well, I made this amount of money, and I drive this kind of a car, and I buy this kind of a watch. You know, that’s a real turnoff. And I see that a lot on Instagram, especially. My whole thing is how can I serve my community? And this is also with my employees as well. You know, one of the things I think about with the people that work for me is I’m actually working for them. And I listen to them, listen to their what are their needs, what do they want, we have regular communication, because they’re part of the fabric of whether this is going to go or not for me. And so the whole idea is creating value. And once you create the value and you give, give, give, then you have the leverage to begin to ask people, Hey, I’ve got this seminar, I’ve got this book, I’ve got this product, you have leveraged yourself where you’re going to have a greater success. Last but not least, I am going to say this very humbly. Be willing to make course corrections. If something doesn’t work. Try new things you Learn from it, and you keep going. And even if there’s money involved, and you’ve lost money, and believe me, I’ve made many mistakes financially, I’ve made many errors and judgment, but I just do a course correction. And I learned so much from it. And that’s going to be part of the process for you.
25:22
Okay, another thing that that people asked me is about time management, because a lot of people maybe are working full jobs, full time jobs already. And this may be a side hustle to start off with. But the thing is, is that if you organize your time, you can do this. And so you have to take a look at maybe the morning time is when you post, or maybe it’s on a Saturday, you create your content. So you have to figure out when you’re going to do this. And there are also some interesting things to note about optimal times to post where you can get the most attention. And I’ve created this, this chart here, which talks about the different social media platforms. So one of the things that I did early on when I started to do workshops, is I created a private Facebook group. And this is a group with your fans, that you might give them premium information or content. And I post on my private groups all the time. Now the duration of how long it is.
So we’ve talked about duration and posting times, probably the best times to post would be either in the morning or in the evening, where you’re going to get the most traction. But the thing about social media is, it’s a 24/7 cycle. And I have a very big international following. So people in Australia and New Zealand people in India, so that even doesn’t matter as much. But you can notice that these are the times when it’s best to post. And then these are the duration times. So let me go through this a little bit. Facebook private group, you know, that could be just your premium content. Something that’s come out of Facebook right now is something called Facebook reels, which are small, short, kind of like tick tock, where you can post something for 18 to 30 seconds, maybe an idea, and it can go viral.
This is happening on Facebook reels. It’s also happening on YouTube reels. So you know, the attention is still there on Facebook and YouTube. But it’s a little harder to get that kind of virality that you can still get on tick tock and LinkedIn. So the reels are the short videos, and on YouTube, you can post anytime on Facebook again, morning and evening or grain, tick tock. This is ever changing tick tock is is kind of amazing in what’s going on with it. Because even though I right here, durations 18 to 30 seconds, my best videos are about 22 seconds, because I’ve done enough of them. If I do a little longer, sometimes I start losing people, I have to really hook them to keep them engaged and tick tock, the attention span is not not so good. However, what’s happening with tick tock is now some of the longer videos are getting traction. Again, these are the times when you can post LinkedIn. Again, this is more of the b2b. If you’re talking to professionals, or you’re marketing to other, you know businesses.
Again, I do a lot of LinkedIn posting, even though my brand is mostly B to C, every now and again. It surprises me when I get a business owner or somebody that contacts me who found me on LinkedIn. And so under seven minutes is is what you do with LinkedIn. Again, I do maybe a one to two minute video or audio or even posted one of my written blogs. So these are some of the things that you can start to do. And when you start, you know posting, okay, brand versus selling. Selling is transactional with no long term growth. There’s also a very low or no retention time, and there’s probably not going to be a lot of word of mouth referrals. Whereas in building a brand, it insulates you from competition and the ups and downs in the economics. Again, it is like playing the long game be patient. So my talk about building brand through social media is the key Now when you create your brand, you want to be able to define your brand and about two sentences. So I’ve put my mission statement up here and my brand. So you can take a moment and read that.
30:26
So I’m going to go back to this one, creating a website that expresses your mission statement and your brand. So if you go to my website, Dr. Sam berne.com, you will see that my brand and message are lined up with the website. And you don’t need to spend a lot of money on a website, you can get somebody to help you, you can even do it on your own, just get maybe a landing page or two up. Again, I’m very concerned about you spending money that you don’t have or going into debt. In starting this, you don’t need to do that. So start small, and get yourself a nice website, you can see what I’ve done, there’s other people as well. And that’s a way that you can really support your brand and message.
So as I said, building brand takes patience and persistence. When you’re starting avoid debt, keep your expenses low, go slow and steady. Your mentors of score can really help you looking at the finances. There are amazing these are such successful business people, that they can help you in these areas, so that you have the time to start building your brand on social media. So one of the things that you could think about is which social social media plan platforms, do you frequent? And the second question is, what is the best way you’d like to receive content, audio, video, or written? I know for me, I love podcasts. So when I’m driving, I’ll download a podcast. I love that. In the evening, sometimes if I’m on YouTube, I’ll look at some videos or tick tock, I get some great information from that. And I also love to read. So sometimes if there’s a written blog that I really like, that’s also really helpful to me, and I can go back and refer to it. So for you what is the best way you like to receive content.
And then when you’re posting, learn about the different platforms again, you can go to Dr. Koop Google and that will that will kind of guide you on the duration when the post how you know what kind of content works the best. And then the other thing you can do is you can get a podcast going, and I’ll talk a little bit about that in a minute. But I think each and every one of you, at least in phase two should start a podcast, and then you can put it up on Apple, Spotify, Amazon. And once you start rolling, you will begin to see engagement. So working with score, I have found every business is different when discussing social media. And this depends on the following key elements. Your current use of social media, which social media platforms, you’re comfortable posting content, how much time do you have available to create content and up up date and upload your social media platforms? And you know, you can base that on? First of all, are you on social media now? And if you are, which social media sites do you frequent and if you don’t, why now there’s all kinds of political reasons and people have, you know, personal things against Facebook or Tik Tok, or whatever. And so I appreciate that. But basically what I’m doing is I’m using the internet to promote my business and I’m using them. I’m in control of what I’m posting what I’m doing. And it’s a way that creates a kind of a balanced playing field. Because it used to be, I could never do something like this. So that’s why if you’ve got some feelings about social media, like I’m not sure, see if you can figure it out, so that you use the social media platforms to further your passion, your dreams and your business.
Now One of the things that I emphasize when I talk to people is podcasts. And I love podcasts because you can multitask, you can listen, while you’re walking your dog or while you’re driving. And I would encourage each of you to see if you could start a podcast. And again, I’ll talk about that in a minute or two. But for now, take a look at how you digest content. And then you can start creating content based on what you’re digesting. Now, the following table will help you determine your skill and comfort zone level and time to invest when you’re building your social media community. So for example, on the website, and by the way, I learned how to use WordPress, so I could actually upload my podcasts, my blogs, my videos, and that saved me a lot of money at the beginning. And so I used to do that one hour a week. And then with Facebook, well, I would spend about three hours a week.
Now sometimes with podcasts, you know, again, you can grade yourself, and then how many how much time you think you need to be able to get on these different platforms. Now, based on your responses, you’re gonna get a questionnaire that Lou Sprecher and I came up with, and you can work with your mentors to help you focus on how to get started, because it can be kind of overwhelming. You know, I’ve given you a lot of information today. And you go, Well, where do I start? Well, maybe I would start with your website, and maybe start with Facebook. Okay, you kind of have to look at your customers and your community, the age of your customers. I know for me on Facebook, my age range is between 50 and 75. And there’s a lot of those folks on Facebook. So that’s why I chose Facebook Live, because I was going to get the most engagement. Now another thing that I also did when I was doing q&a on Facebook and also posting, sometimes I would do some paid advertising. So you can do both the organic. And then later on, you can learn about how to do advertising on Facebook or Instagram. And now with my products, when I’m doing a sale, like a Christmas sale or a Thanksgiving Day Sale, I am running both organic content, I’m doing advertising, and then I have my newsletter. So the next thing that you can consider is can you collect emails. By collecting emails, you have somebody you have somebody who’s really interested in what you’re doing. And then either through MailChimp, or Klaviyo, or any one of those, you can then send out a weekly newsletter. I do that all the time. And that’s one of my best selling my my return on investment. On my newsletter, when I’m doing a sale for products is through the roof. It’s amazing.
Another thing that I’ve started is texting that you can actually have people send you texting with questions. And that’s another way that I am now getting collection of email addresses phone numbers. And so you could look into that later on. So not only am I you know, getting questions from my web, my email, but I now getting questions from texting, and texting is one of the things that you can receive. And it’s a great way to start to build your community. Okay, now in stage two, you might expand your platform you might bring in LinkedIn, you might start talking about Instagram and your personal interests. And again, I want to emphasize, you know, the things that you’re passionate about the things that you’re interested in that may be beyond the regular business, that’s going to help you draw a wider audience, who then may discover your products or your services, but they never would if all of your posts were just based on your business. And Instagram is a great platform to do that. You’ve got Instagram Stories, Instagram reels. One of the things I was interested in was having a podcast. And my content was created by asking the community to send me their questions. Now there are a lot of apps available where you can record right on your phone and upload to your podcast pay Ah, that’s what I did. At
40:01
the very beginning, you don’t need fancy audio equipment, you don’t need, you know, the high end things, I wouldn’t recommend that. But by starting a podcast, there’s so many different ways that you can go, you could have, say, say in Santa Fe, your your business was restaurant, the rest of your restaurant owner, what you could do is you could actually invite other people in the industry to come on your show. And that would help you cross pollinate, they get to know about you, you’d get to know about them. Again, it’s part of that giving, where you’re not asking the guests for anything, but you let them talk about themselves. And so they have their audience, you have your audience. And this is how you start building the podcast. And at this point, I’ve got a very large download monthly download, you can get analytics from it, and a very high retention rate where people want to listen to the entire podcast. So I’ve had some interests, interesting guests on. I’ve done a lot of q&a podcasts. And then you can also look to be on other people’s podcasts as well. So there’s a lot of different advantages to being to having a podcast, because it’s that audio channel. And it’s another funnel for you to start to get.
Followers. One of the things I do with my podcasts is i Sometimes they’re very short, they’re five minutes, or they’re three minutes. And I say, hey, everybody is Dr. Sam and I clarity podcast. And you know, I have this great idea, blah, blah, blah, and I’ll talk about it for a few minutes. Well, that’s our show for today. Thanks for tuning in until next time, so I’m posting maybe four to six podcasts a week. And also another thing that you can do is you can take excerpts from the entire podcast, and you can post those on your social media sites. So I do that all the time. I just did a interview with a doctor and we took the podcast, and we split it up into maybe 32nd sound bites, and we posted those on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn. And it doubled the amount of people who actually ended up downloading the entire podcast. So there are different techniques that you can use.
You can even record a pre recorded intro and an outtake at the very end, you know, some something like if you have questions, you can text me, or you can send me an email, or here’s my upcoming online workshop. So there are ways again, that you can use the podcast the audio channel, as a simple, free way to start building your community. Another thing you can do is you can go on Facebook, or Instagram or tick tock or YouTube and you can do a live show q&a. And this is amazing. When you start doing this on a regular basis you will get you will get interactions with other people. And they will get to know you. And this is another great way to develop your brand. Looks like there’s q&a, we’ve got a few questions. So let me let me start with this one. I’m intrigued by the idea of four to eight content pieces per day, but can’t imagine how to do that and still have time to do my other work. How do you budget time for that?
Well, I would start off with maybe pick one of the social media sites that you know you’re most attracted to you maybe can look at where you think most of your customers are. And maybe post one a day or two a day, I think it’s going to take some time management organization. You know, I always say if you’re really passionate in what you’re doing, you will find the time to post maybe, again, you can get one of these scheduling content programs. And you can take all of your pieces and put it in the scheduling program and you can do it that way. But pick one of the social media sites that you like, and just maybe post one a day or if you can do two a day and see how that goes for a while. And then you know, you might then at that point, if you’ve got the the the budget, maybe you hire somebody to help you in the posting, I mean at this point, I do have employees that are doing my editing and posting, but I’m making enough money now that I can do that when I started doubt, I was doing everything and I was full time in my practice. But I knew that this was the ticket for me to be able to create a brand. And it would create a legacy for me that I could then maybe let go of some of the other things that I didn’t like doing, because I so enjoyed the creative process. So start slow, and just see what happens. All right, can you recommend who to find someone to help with Google and updating a Blogger blog?
Okay, so there are two sources that I use that I tap to great get great talent. The first is Craigslist. The second is a platform called Upwork. And Upwork is a platform, the where there are a lot of freelance people. And you can actually create a post on Upwork, it won’t cost you anything. And I have gotten some of my best talent, I got my bookkeeper, I got my website. People that are that are managing my website, my web store manager, my person who organizes my posts, so upwork.com would be a great place for you to look, if you can’t find anybody on Craigslist. But my goodness, there’s so many writers out there, maybe you can find somebody at one of the at the community college. And that way, you won’t have to pay as much maybe a student, somebody who’s a good writer. So there are ways that you can figure this out. Writing is is hard for me. And one of the things I’ve started to use now is an artificial intelligence
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platform, or actually tell the artificial intelligence, this is what I’m interested in, tell me about this process, in my you know, in my industry, and they will, they will come back with some outline, and you know, it’s pretty good. And so then I just fill in the pieces and make it more personal. Artificial Intelligence is definitely increasing, impinging on our lives, whether we like it or not. But that’s a way that sometimes if I need to do a quick blog, I’ll do it that way. But there are a lot of avenues there. Try those and that should help you. Okay, next question. My business is focused on city management and municipal government. I have been writing monthly newsletters on LinkedIn, and in one year have 315 subscribers. Some mayors and city managers are on LinkedIn. However, City Councillors tend to be on Twitter. And I’m hesitant to join. What’s your experience with Twitter? Can I direct people on Twitter to my website where I can repost my 25 articles from LinkedIn? Well, you know, Elon Musk is really wreaking havoc with Twitter right now. And there’s all kinds of things going on with Twitter that I can really understand where a lot of people have mixed feelings about it.
I post every day on Twitter, I probably do five to seven posts on Twitter, you can interact with people, it’s a great way to have conversations with people in your industry, you know, you could actually spend time looking up, say, in your situation mayors and city council’s or city managers who are on Twitter, and you could engage with them. And then maybe at that point, once you engage with them, if there’s some communication back and forth, you can definitely direct them away from Twitter towards your website. But I, I would say this, that the more you diversify your content, the more followers you’re going to get. And you know, the same goes with LinkedIn, where if you can interact with people by having conversations with them, communications with them. This is another way that I’ve, I have developed my LinkedIn LinkedIn following. It takes time. But I wouldn’t give up on Twitter.
I think that again, you can use it for the highest good for yourself and you can direct people away from it, so that you then put them into an environment where you’re more in control, and they’re going to be more interested in what you’re writing about. Alright, next question. Don’t podcasts require paying for service and editing ability Well, the answer to that is it depends on the service. It depends on how many podcasts you are posting. But if you start at the very beginning, you can get the free part of the service. Now, in my case, because I’m posting so much at this point, I pay about $40 a month. Okay, that’s not a lot. But that’s what I pay.
And editing, again, you could get on GarageBand. And you could have that audio file on GarageBand, I actually hired somebody to help me learn how to cut, you know, where I said, Ah, um, or, you know, if there was, you know, space in there that I didn’t like, and within five minutes, I could edit on GarageBand. I uploaded it to Dropbox, I now had a link that I could then send it off to my, my podcast service. So there are ways to do it. Maybe you find somebody that you hire, just maybe one or two times to show you how to do it. But it’s so easy to do off your phone, if you look at apps where you can do the podcast. And you know, again, you don’t have to over over produce or over edit it. Okay? Don’t worry about that. I know somebody who’s an actress who she spent $1,000 on one video. And I said, What do you do? And she says, Well, it has to be perfect. I need to get the script, you know, I need direction I need production. That’s the wrong way to go. In my view. In my, my posting, the more raw it is actually, the more views I get. Because I’m authentic. I’m not making some stuff up or I’m, you know, creating something that that’s not who I am.
So in your audio podcasts, we just want to hear what you have to say. And you can figure out a way to use a service at the beginning where you don’t have to pay for it, or it’s a minimal fee. All right, next question. Do you take videos with your phone without a microphone, wondering whether the quality is acceptable for Instagram and YouTube? Most definitely. So this video that went viral on Tiktok 300,000 views. I had no microphone, my microphone was my phone. I basically press play, I put the camera in front of my face, I had a great background of the snow. And the microphone I used was the phone’s microphone. I put it up on tic toc. And there you go. So the quality will be acceptable. You know, again, if it’s really windy, or it’s really loud, you might consider again. Okay, I don’t want a lot of sirens going on in the background. Now, I will say at this point in my sophistication. I do have wireless microphones right now. I’m simulcasting this and I’m recording this on my phone, and I have a wireless microphone that I use. That’s excellent. And I have other microphones also, as well. But I’ve been at the six years. I’m making money, I can do it. I want to invest back into my business. But the short answer is just start recording. Don’t worry about it. You can play it back, if you can hear it, it’s going to work fine for your social media posting. Okay, how do you set up a podcast page?
Do you have to pay a service? Or do the post cat podcast page options? Well, again, depending on how many podcasts you do, the answer to that is you could actually have the podcast set up in a way where you don’t have to pay for service that kind of just depends on how many podcasts you’re going to do. Again, if you don’t know how to do this, you could go to Google, and Google will show you how to set up a podcast page. And you could just do Apple or Spotify or Amazon. It’s so easy. And once you have you know the podcast name, and you have maybe a picture of yourself, it’s really easy to upload, there’s nothing to it. So I would go on Google and figure out okay, how do I set up a podcast page? And then you can look at the different options. Again, start slow, you don’t have to do what I’m doing. But just start putting the podcast out. And then you could put the link say on Facebook and say hey, here’s my podcast, or on Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever. And that’s a way you can start getting traffic to people to listen to your podcast. Okay, I have an Android phone does the apple podcast site work for Android? phones? I don’t know that answer, but I’m sure the doctor Google could help you with that. Again, my feeling is because so many people have Android phones, I think that the podcast services will work based on the app you’re using to record the podcast, if you have a sonic kind of like a voice memo, or some kind of an audio recording app. I think it’s very universal at this point, because so many people are doing podcasts. Do you use your email list to make product offerings? Or is that only social media itself?
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No, I actually use my email list to make my product offerings. And the way I do it is I create a newsletter, where part of it is education. Part of it is I’m you know, uploading, like my blogs, or my latest videos, maybe that relate to the product. And then I send that out as an email blast. And then I just watch the sales come in. It’s amazing, it works. So well. Now you have to be careful that you don’t send too many emails out. And sometimes I’ll send a newsletter out where I’m not selling any products, or I’m just educating people. And I use two newsletter services. One is MailChimp. And the other is one called Clavijo. You might not have heard of it. Klaviyo is a little more sophisticated, it’s allowing me to receive text messages for q&a. It also gives me a little more analytics. And it’s expensive, you know, both of those probably run about $500 a month for each. But the return on investment on that is probably 50x. So when I do an email, I know that I’m going to make several 1000s of dollars during a weekend sale, and I’ll you know, give a discount. But even with the discount because of the volume, I’m making really good money from that. How do you handle hostile responses online, I really get this on my business page. But that is a contained group so far, I do encounter it in bigger groups, okay, I get this a lot. So they’re always people, you know, they, what they do is I think about their life must be really miserable for them to take the time to be judgmental of me.
Okay, and so I, I definitely have compassion for them. And either I might engage them and give them an answer if they’re, you know, asking a legitimate question. Otherwise, I just delete and block them. And the social media sites now at this point, are very, very protective of people. And it’s very easy for you to delete and block those people. Now, if you’re in a group situation, you need to talk to the facilitator and let them know what’s going on. Because I know in my groups, usually the people that are in my groups, they love me, they’re not going to badmouth me, I’ve never had that happen. But if you’re in, say, a mixed group, if that’s going on, sometimes I just say I don’t want to be part of the group. But you as the influencer, have the ability to block anybody. And you should not take any grief from anybody. You just delete them, block them, don’t engage them and move on. That’s the best thing to do. In in my experience, Okay, another question. Using your method, when product is a technology license licensing opportunity. For example, We are finalizing a technology and are in need of funding. So this is an interesting thing, because in 2018, I actually got a financial partner, I needed some capital, because we were going to do some products. And it was a nightmare for me because I lost leverage in the brand. And so we ended up dissolving our partnership, but it’s it’s a very interesting thing to start to want to get funding. And then what is the relationship and you need to be very careful that you’re keeping control of the brand, because you don’t want to lose leverage, like what are the strings attached?
Because if you get involved in a partnership, and somebody is giving you money, they’re gonna want results they’re gonna want you know, probably some of the profit and so you have to be very clear if you’re going to go that route route now in and technology, you do need a lot of money, there’s no question about it. And this is where perhaps your score mentors can direct you in places where you might be able to get funding. But you can get it in a way where you don’t lose control or leverage of the brand of what the product you’re trying to put out. It’s not an easy road, but you can do it. And sometimes the upside is really amazing. So that’s how I would answer that. If I’m not comfortable, comfortable with video content, what are some of the options beyond blogging that utilize written word content? Well, one of the things that you could do is you could either speak into your phone, or, or talk into your phone, and you can get a transcript of what you have said, and you can edit it. And you can use that as your written blog. And I really get it a lot of people that I work with, they don’t want to do video, it’s hard. And they even don’t want to do audio, they’re shy. So there are ways that you can get these programs where you can actually get a transcript. And then you can post it that way. One of them that I use is called otter.ai. That’s a good one for transcription. And so that way you can stay away from the video and the audio.
And you can just do your blogs that way. If you want to dive into artificial intelligence, you can actually go on some free artificial artificial intelligence websites. And you can say, Okay, tell me how to bake a cake. And they AI will come up with a written narrative, which then if that’s your interest, or that’s your brand, you could take that AI information, and then you could make it your own. So that would be another way that you could get ideas for your blogs. Another question, you mentioned, programs for scheduling your social media postings, what would I recommend? Will they allow you to post across multiple platforms? So second question first, definitely, they will allow you to post across multiple platforms. I haven’t used them in about three years. So the one that I use, I’m not sure I would recommend for you. Again, that’s something that I would Google and then they have great customer service. So you could you know, inquire what would be the best social media scheduling program for you, based on what platforms you’re using? When you want to post? What are the duration of the of the of the posts and things like that. So that’s readily available on Google, and the support system, the support team there, we’ll be able to help you figure out what’s the best way to go.
You’re very welcome. Your audiences 55 Plus, what platforms do you recommend? All of them, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, tick tock. Now, some people will say tick tock is just for kids. I gotta tell you, I am so surprised. With the Tick Tock response that I’m getting. There are people that are 55 and over that are now on Tik Tok. Twitter is another one as well. So I would do all of them. All of them. And I would create a podcast as well. And target those 55 Plus, is it mostly women? Is it mostly men? What what a geographical location? Are they living in? You know, do you want to start reaching people on an international level? I would say yes. So learn your audience learn who’s interested, you know, in my audience is about 70% women, 30% men. And again, some of my biggest followers are in Australia, Germany, India, the UK. And so you know, it’s very surprising to me, but you can get analytics from that. And then you can target your advertising based on those locations and the socio economics and the type of person listening and why watching. Next question, does your wireless microphone connect to your cell phone? Yes.
And the type of wireless is called the road. I love it. I actually did an interview in a restaurant that was super loud. And it was amazing. Using how that microphone worked on my phone, the person was videoing me. And the other thing is, I’ll hike in the in the mountains, and I’ll put my tripod out. And I’ll be, say, you know, 75 feet away, and I’ll be walking towards my phone. And that microphone is great. So it’s called the road, wireless microphone I highly recommended. It’s maybe three or $400. It’s great. From your experience, what should you not do in social media marketing, or via podcasts?
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Talk about yourself and brag and make everything about you. I wouldn’t do any of that stuff. I would make it about how can I serve and create value for my audience? How can I educate? How can I document and create stories that will inspire them to want to come back for more, and I wouldn’t ask them for anything at the very beginning, you know, you’re dating them, you’re just getting to know them. And they may be shy, so you have to prove yourself. And the way to do that is by offering really good value. And that kept my community coming back, coming back coming back. They tell other people wow, this guy is like he’s giving us really good information. That’s how you do it.
Okay, next question, I’m concerned about mixing my personal and professional life. If I did a video, my feeling is that I would need to be dressed in formal attire, that does not fit with sharing a daily story. During my real life. Well look, as long as you’re authentic, and you do what feels comfortable to you. One of the things that when I do personal posting, I get to control what I am talking about. So for example, my family is off limits, there is no social media, that includes my family, that’s private. Some other things that I’m doing are also private. But there’s some things that I’m really excited about might be activities, and might be interests you get to choose. And I gotta tell you, when you mix the personal with the professional, you’re going to get a wider audience of people who are then may be interested in your professional life. But you get to choose that. And in terms of dressing formally, well, look, I’m a doctor, and all of my posts, I’m not wearing a white coat. Okay? Because that’s not who I am, I gave up that white coat.
Many years ago, in fact, I did a, I found a picture of myself in my white coat when I was doing my internships. And I’m actually giving a lecture to some of the residents. And I have these very funny glasses on, and I have a beard. And it was kind of funny, you know, people love that. So I don’t use a white coat, I don’t wear a tie. I’m out there. And when I’m hiking, Dr. Sam, and you know, I’m on my morning walk, I’m wearing a sweatshirt, I’m wearing a baseball hat. So the thing is, is that you decide what you’re comfortable with. And just be authentic with yourself, the more authentic you can be, the better your brand is going to go. That’s how I would say it. All right, next question. Do you have an easy video editing tool recommendation? Well, if you’re going to do it on your computer, I would probably do iMovie. And if you’re going to do it on your phone, if you have an iPhone, you can do iMovie right on your phone. So a lot of times when I’m doing a video, if I’m in a rush, I’ll just take the video on my iPhone, and I’ll just do the iMovie editing on it and ready to go. So you don’t have to get fancy software. I mean, I movies gonna come or if you’re, you know, on a PC, you’d have to figure out what is the editing software, but I don’t do a lot of editing.
I do some. For example, with tick tock, a lot of times the rhythm of tick tock, I’ll share an idea. I’ll stop the camera. I’ll share another idea. Stop the camera, I’ll share another idea and stop the camera and then I’ll weave those three separate videos together in a very fast way. So again, if you go on my tic toc site, and you can look at one of my last videos again this one that went viral. You can see that the ideas that I get IV, boom, boom, boom. So that’s tic tock on my podcast, it’s a lot slower, you know, people need time to digest. So I’m speaking more slowly. So again, you’ll know based on the social media site, what part of you you’re going to bring. But don’t worry about that. It’s got to look perfect, or a sound perfect. Just start posting. Okay, my last thing I think I’m going to say is that you can do what I’m doing that because of the internet today, this is a great time to start developing a brand. Remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint, and be patient financially, be patient emotionally. And if you can do those things, and you give, give give, you will then have the leverage to be able to present your services or products in a way where you now have a relationship with your community. They’re gonna go for it
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Thank you for listening. I hope you learned something from the EyeClarity podcast show today. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to subscribe on iTunes or Spotify and leave a review. See you here next time.
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