TEST: RockStar Jam Session 001 – Replacing Your Income and Getting Reviews

Transcription:

Tony: 00:00 All right then, so hey there folks. Welcome to this RockStar entrepreneur jam session. My name is Tony. I’m your Mc and we’re joined today by Dr Dan. He’s in the house. He will be taking the stage with me today and we’re going to be talking about how would you get an extra four grand a month if that’s what you needed coming in on the regular and if you knew you had about 60 days to make that happen, what would Dan do in that situation? Also, how would you find people to connect with to do the business with and what’s a really sneaky but easy way to get loads of testimonials and recommendations and reviews for your business? That’s what we’ve got coming up.

Tony: 00:49 All right. Let’s say somebody’s bills, their outgoing bills for the house and to lead the comfortable life, you know, just for them as they are now, they need to cover $4,000 a month and they know that in 60 days they’re going to be unemployed or something. That’s their deadline to set up a system, some kind of a, some kind of an asset or a collection of assets. They’re going to bring them $4,000 every month recurring.

Dr Dan: 01:17 So they need, so they got 60 days until they can match their income is what they’re trying to do.

Tony: 01:22 Bingo. Yeah.

Dr Dan: 01:24 Yeah. I mean, I, I can speak to that because personally for myself, I went through that. I mean, I tell so many parts of the story of my life, it’s kind of like when somebody says, “Oh, you know, you were an overnight success” while I’m like, yeah, but you didn’t see the 10, 15 years that I freaking hustled and tried so many different things and pushed forward and hit obstacles and got cars repossessed. You know what I mean? You don’t, you don’t see that stuff. So just to you, it seems like, “Oh well, you know, he struck it quick”, you know, mainly because a lot of people don’t want to sit around and listen to a two hour story about your struggles. They just, just want to know how they can do it as well. For Myself, I actually had that. I was in a business. Actually, the most recent one was in the real estate business in the mortgage industry and some real estate investing and stuff. And as many people know, the market actually crashed in 2007/ 2008. And, people were like, “Oh man, you’re so smart for getting out before it all happened”. But the truth was I just, I wasn’t happy what I was doing anymore and I wanted to get out. So I wanted to get out before I even realized that it was going to crash. I was about like six to eight months ahead of the curve and not because I saw it coming even though, you know, people talked about it. I was looking for something else and I knew the same thing. I knew basically in the next 30 to 60 days I had to match the money I was bringing in.

Dr Dan: 02:59 Fortunately I had a little bit of money saved, but I knew that was going to run out really quick and it actually did really quick. And for me, I mean I tried all these different things that people talked about like, Oh, you could do all this affiliate marketing, you can create your own products. I created my own course and I sold it. I made a little bit of money on there and I when I say a little, I made like a $1,000-$2,000 doing that at first. Then I was like, okay, well I’m going to do what my good buddy Tony does, right (Tony Robbins). And I was like, okay, well I’m going to go speak at events. Even that’s not what I really wanted to do. I wanted to do it all online and back then, Goto Webinar wasn’t what it is today – it wasn’t really there.

Dr Dan: 03:42 So there wasn’t really an easy way to do it online. So I started speaking at local events and I, I was living in northern California at the time and I traveled to southern California to actually do an event that had like, I think like 12 people show up and it was a small room, so it was filled to capacity almost haha. And I did that and made another like $800. And I’m like, dude, there has got to be something else and I was taking on coaching clients and making some more money. And then I kind of fell into the local marketing where people are like, “Hey, I see you do Internet marketing for your own business and, uh, you know, can, can you do that for me?” And I was like, sure. Because there was nobody else really doing that.

Dr Dan: 04:26 And they’re like, Hey, I’ll pay you $1000 bucks or $2,000 to set some stuff up for me. And I’m like, Oh wow, this is actually taken off. So for me, I needed to make money really quick. So what I did was I started reaching out to everybody that I knew – that story about there’s diamonds in your own or gold in your own backyard – and that’s what I did. And I started asking everybody who do you know that owns a business that would like more leads and more business online? And I started reaching out to people and got a couple of clients that way. And then I was like, okay, well I want to speed this up. So I started using some of the, the mindset and strategies that have worked for me in other industries and other businesses that I did. And I was like, okay, cause you know, I mean once you have the recipe for something and you buy and you have the utensils and you know how to do something, you know how to bake, you can bake pretty much anything.

Dr Dan: 05:20 You just needed to kind of know the right ingredients and kind of test some stuff out. So that’s what I did is I said, okay, well let me replicate some of this. So what I did was I reached out to some people that, that I knew had an “in” in an industry and that was actually real estate. Cause it had been years since I’ve done any kind of real estate stuff. And I spoke to a mortgage broker that I used to do business with and, and I asked her, who do you know? I think at that time it was somebody else’s title agency that does all the paperwork and the contracts and stuff when you do a real estate deal. And they had changed the law where they couldn’t do any kind of referral type, you know, paid referrals and stuff like that anymore. In the past they were able to do certain stuff like that.

Dr Dan: 06:10 So they agreed, and I said well who do YOU know that could maybe help me, that has a large Rolodex of people. And they put me in contact with another mortgage broker who actually had a huge database of realtors and people that either they worked with or they wanted to work with. And I met up with them and it was a great meeting and it was kind of like, “hey man, this this would be a great thing for you and for me because I’ll get business, but you’ll look like a hero and you’ll get more business because you’ll be helping these realtors get more leads online and set all this stuff up”. So, I actually said, hey, let’s put together an event. And just so you know; I’m freaked out to be on stage.

Dr Dan: 06:57 I was always like, scared I would if… put it this way… and a lot of people don’t know this about me. Number one: I’m a huge introvert, you know, people are like, “what? No!” I’ve had people say, how do you become a people person like you? And I’m like; “dude, I’m an introvert”. You know, I’d rather just sit on my electric recliner, binge watching some Netflix with family and stuff. But I forced myself to do it because if I don’t do it, who’s going to do it for me? I can’t be like “Hey Tony, go over there and do some events for me and get some money and pay me money”. You know, it’s not going to happen. I had to do for myself and I did that.

Dr Dan: 07:40 I said, hey, I’ll, I’ll put together some events. I created my first a slide deck, which is create a presentation. Because I didn’t know what I was doing, there was no real guidelines back then – no guidance -there was no courses on, here’s how you create like a PowerPoint or keynote presentation. So mine was like over 300 slides, 400 maybe. But they looked really good. I was really proud of them. And for my first ones, especially! So that was supposed to be an hour, hour and a half presentation, and I think it took like four hours and 80% of the room actually stuck around! And if you know anything about realtors; they don’t stick around for much. I mean, they’re like, constantly, “I gotta go, I gotta go”. But they stuck around. So I had probably like 20 or 30 people come to that first event.

Dr Dan: 08:35 And mind you, I didn’t have to do any marketing for that event; the mortgage broker did it all for me, because he wanted people to show up – he actually had a room that we did the event out of. So they had their own little meeting room in the back where they stored files and stuff. He had his own screen and projector so I just had to bring my slides on my computer and he set that all up and had everybody show up – 20 or 30 people – and that led to over $100,000 in my first year. I probably collected in that first week, probably collected maybe like $10k – $15k. And then every week after that I just kept accumulating more and more clients because even ones that didn’t come to the event that couldn’t make it to the event, they started hearing about “hey, so and so did this event it was really awesome! I’ve got these tips and this advice”.

Dr Dan: 09:27 I offered a service it was actually setting up people for Hootsweet, which was a social media management tool. Now back then it was pretty new, so nobody kind of knew what it was. But today it might be, “hey, let me create you a Facebook page or an Instagram page” and I’ll throw some quick design on there and some stuffs and some information on there. And I gave those away for free. It took me maybe like 5/10 minutes to set up. At one point I started hiring somebody else to do those for me. But what ended up happening was, the mortgage broker that put all this together for me, he was actually contacting me all the time saying, “Hey, June wants you to set this up for her too, for free”, and I was like, “okay, cool”.

Dr Dan: 10:17 So I did a little call with her and got her information and set it up, and the cool thing about this – and I’ve spoken about the so many times – the cool thing about it I didn’t really know this was going to happen, because I was kinda like, “Whoa, man, my close rate is so freaking high on this”! It was like 85-90% of the people that I would set up with this free service that took me 5/10 minutes to set up; they hired me! And I’m like, “how/why is this working so well?” As I started thinking about (well this is how I teach it now), when you, when you ask somebody to house-sit, or if you’re like, “you know what, I need somebody to Babysit”, right?

Dr Dan: 11:02 You’ve got a new baby. “I need somebody to babysit”. And you find somebody, you can get a referral and you hire somebody to Babysit your child and water your plants and watch your dog. Right? So they got a key to your house and everything. The next time you go out of town and as long as that person didn’t burn your house down and do anything bad and fed your baby right and your baby didn’t cry nonstop, who are you going to hire the next time? Are you going to go, “you know what? I feel like finding somebody new!”.

Tony: 11:35 Of course, the same person; you know them, you like them, you trust them.

Dr Dan: 11:41 Yeah. You already gave your keys once. I mean, why would you want to risk trying to find somebody else again?

Dr Dan: 11:45 And that’s exactly what happened because somebody gave me the keys to their “house”, which was their passwords, their email, to set up Instagram or their Facebook or whatever, so I can connect it all together. They gave me the keys, they trusted me and they’re like, “oh wow, let me pay you now.” And plus you’ve done this for free. And while everybody else is like, “Hey, I’ll get you on the first page of Google”, but they haven’t given you anything, and they haven’t even shown you anything, they’re going to trust me now. Plus I was a referral from somebody they either heard of or they knew, which was this mortgage broker. So this can be replicated in pretty much almost any business you can think of because there’s going to be connectors, we call them connectors in every industry.

Dr Dan: 12:32 So long story into the short story. The short answer is find connectors that have a rolodex of people in either one industry or multiple industries. Cause you’re gonna have like insurance companies, insurance brokers, you know, you’re going to have people that do real estate or mortgage broker or house inspections, things like that. They’re going to have a Rolodex of other people that they refer and they recommend. You’re going to have pool builders who have people they recommend as a roofer or a deck builder or build fences. So there’s going to be somebody that’s a connector in different industries. Look for those people and have them give you referrals and you can either give them a kickback, which I never had to do, or you can just offer them free service, or it might just be enough for them to recommend because it makes them look like a winner and more people do business with you, right?

Dr Dan: 13:33 Every industry you could think of. Even dentistry! Dentists have somebody coming into their office pitching them to buy something, whether it be like dentistry tools, right? Like those little picks or x-ray things – they have all kinds of things – they have people coming in, trying to sell them stuff. You get ahold of one of those people with a Rolodex, that one guy probably knows 200 dentists within a 50-mile radius that they can actually refer you to, or an event, right? Dentists have events and workshops. I’ve done that as well too.

Tony: 14:15 Excellent. So when it comes to what you offer them – what are good ideas? So we’ve covered how you get in with people. To make the $4,000 a month, what would we do for them as a service that’s easy?

Dr Dan: 14:44 it’s gonna really depend on what service you really want to offer. I mean, part of it might be, if you’re somebody brand new, then yeah. It’s like, okay, which one do I offer? But if you’re somebody who’s like, “oh, well I already do video marketing”, well then yeah, offer them something with video, right? So if it’s something you already do, then do that. If you’re a total newbie and you haven’t done this before, then it might be just creating a lease site, which we call the landlording strategy, right? Where you create a site, and some web properties like videos and things like that, and you get them ranking on the first page of Google. You show that as an example and then say, “Hey, I can do this for your city as well”. Or if you ranked that city already and say, “Hey, I already have this asset, how would you like it? Put your name on there and your picture and you just pay me a set amount” – pay me $200 to $500 to $1,000 a month depending on the industry.

Dr Dan: 15:41 We get this question all the time is, what should I charge? Well, you know what, there’s no perfect answer for that. What would I charge? $500 to a $1,000 per month. But sometimes you’re just starting out and if it’s an industry, like, if you’re talking about a hairstylist, they’re not going to pay that much because they get $10 to $20 per haircut unless they’re like some high end in-demand person who doesn’t even really care about the web presence because they’re so in demand. But if you’re talking about a pool builder who can get, you know, a $50,000 to $250,000 deal, then you can charge more – $500 to a $1,000 dollars per month.

Dr Dan: 16:17 But the good news is you can charge whatever you want. You can charge $100 a month just to get it started just to make it real for you. Because when you get that first check in your pocket, you’re like, “wow, this is pretty cool, I actually got money for this! I could do more of this!” Then you can raise your prices with others and just keep doing it. But always get testimonials as well. So if you give somebody a deal, just say, ‘Hey, I’ll give you a cool deal, as long as if you like my service, if you’ll just write me a quick endorsement that I could put on my website so I could help other people.” That’s a big thing too – get as many endorsements as you can. Like one thing that I did when it first started out – and again, this is just a strategy that I learned from either businesses and other strategies that I use that worked really well – was I was first starting out, I didn’t have any testimonials because I just started, right?

Dr Dan: 17:15 So what I did was I created a quick video for different people that I knew that owned businesses. I mean, some were a bankruptcy lawyer another one was a mortgage broker and other one was a Realtor, another one painted houses. I met a guy through my parents’ restaurant that was doing like video stuff, video work for businesses. I created him a quick site that took me like 10/20 minutes to set up. For others I created a quick little video, something like Adobe spark (at the time it was a different service that’s not around anymore), or you can go on Fiverr and pay five or 10 bucks, have somebody create it for you. I created a video with testimonials that they collected off their own website and I did that and they wrote me a testimonial. I didn’t charge them anything. I just say, “Hey, if you liked this video, will you write me a quick little endorsement – a little testimonial – about the service that I gave you?” They’re like, sure. Well I had 20 testimonials in the first week I started to go on my website, so I looked like I was THE go-to guy!

Tony: 18:28 Excellent. I did a similar thing. I was making little animated logo things; little logo videos. And my partner Gemma, she’s a dance teacher and she is in some Facebook groups that are just for dance teachers only. You have to prove your credentials, you know, you have to prove you’re a qualified dance teacher to join. And she posted in one of those groups saying “Oh, I’ve just had this video done and it’s my little logo animation and I just put it at the beginning of all of videos when I’m posting about the kids dancing and stuff. Um, I, I put it at the beginning of this just to brand my school because when people share it, it’s not always obvious. You know, my school’s name, uh, he’s doing a special offer for just 10 pounds each, if you’ll give him a testimonial.” Um, and in fact, the first few, we didn’t even say if you give him a testimonial, we just run it as they’re just 10 pounds each.

Tony: 19:27 Cause I was like, “I need a hundred pounds now”. So I sold 10 of those. And then I reached out to those people and said hey, would you leave a quick testimonial on my page?” and then after that we just ran it again. And we just said, “hey, you’ve got to give a testimonial as well”. And that kind of a launch doing my little video marketing thing that was just using an online video creation thing. And um, and that really got the ball rolling. So that was two things. That was one, asking for testimonials and two: getting a connector, which in this case was luckily my partner Gemma, just to, just to hook me up with connections.

Tony: 19:59 So I think maybe people will have more [valuable] people than they think. Like you said; gold in your backyard. It’s a case of just sitting down and thinking “right; who do I know that knows people?” Dr Dan: 20:10 Yeah. And here’s another little tip when it comes to testimonials (and we can actually elaborate on this at another time as well). One thing that I have learned with testimonials is when you ask 10 people for a testimonial, you might get like three or four that actually reply because they’re just too busy. Right? So what I did to increase my testimonials; I would actually ask for the “endorsement” – I would just say “endorsement” or something or “just write a few words I could put on my website” – I didn’t say “testimonial”, because to me that seems very committal, you know?

Tony: 20:48 I say, “leave me a review”.

Dr Dan: 20:51 I still like saying, “can you write a few words that I can put on my website, or in my marketing content, that way I can get some more business and help other people” or something like that.

Dr Dan: 21:04 And what I do though – here’s how I get higher amount of testimonials written back, right, (or reviews or whatever you want to call them) is say, “can you just write a few words, one or two sentences?”, and then I gave them two examples. “Here are two examples to give you some ideas of what other people have written”. And then I wrote those out myself. I just wrote “so-and-so did a great job helping me with this, blah, blah, blah”. And then the second one, or here’s another example, example number two: “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And that’s it. So when I started giving people examples of what other people have written, I increased the amount. I’d probably say like eight out of 10 people actually gave me an endorsement, when I asked for it because of that.

Dr Dan: 21:52 And I think, I don’t even know if I came up with that at first or not, cause it’s been so long since I started doing that. I want to say that I have one person asked me; “can you give me an example, to kind of help me come up with an idea”. I think after that I started adding that. So I don’t know even know if I came up with that before somebody asked me to give them an example. I was like, “Ooh, this is gold”. I like to take full credit for it. But yeah…

Tony: 22:19 Fair enough. There is a similar one that I used when I was in a network marketing or multilevel marketing thing here in the UK. And that was where while you’re there chatting with somebody, you say, “listen, you know, my business is based on recommendations, so, would you write me just a quick Facebook status on your own Facebook page” and, and then I’d send them an example like you just said, and it would say “Thank you (and then the person that introduced them)”, so “Thank you Dan for introducing me to Tony. He’s come round to my house, it took 10 minutes and we’ve saved some money/a big chunk of money” (we never say the exact amount, but “saved me money”) “…if any of my friends want to look at this as well, just comment below” kind of thing.

Tony: 23:10 So the, the person who referred them in the first place, all their friends would see it. They tag me. So all my Facebook friends would see it again because they’d keep seeing it, you know, every, every week or every other day or whatever. However often I closed appointments. And of course their friends would see it. So suddenly that one kind of testimonial or review as a Facebook status. I’d Screenshot that as well. So then I’ve got that, but that’s one great way of tapping into their friends on Facebook and their social media, as well as getting one. And I would give them an example and I would, I’d make sure I wrote it differently for every person, which started getting a bit confusing. But that’s kind of weaving the Facebook into it as well.

Dr Dan: 23:58 Yup. Well as, you know, cause you’re in the industry, in marketing we called them swipe files and we give what is basically just a template, right? It’s like here: here’s the copy. And other well-known marketers that if we mentioned their names, people would be like, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of them, or I’ve bought something from them, or I’ve seen them online all over the place”, and, you know, bottom line is they’re lazy, you know, and it’s not, it’s not a bad thing. So they need swipes, they need swipe files. We need it too! They’re too busy to sit there and come up with their own stuff. So we need to give them exactly what to say. Now they can choose to take that and kind of tweak it or, or however they want to say it.

Dr Dan: 24:43 Uh, most people don’t; most people just copy and paste exactly what we wrote, for us personally, we actually write them ourselves. We just use whatever they gave us as ideas. Uh, many of the times we actually scrub through their content to come up with our own ideas and own hooks. Cause usually, a lot of their swipes aren’t very good. So bottom line is: swipes work, you know, no matter what level you’re at. More than likely, the higher the level you’re at, the more you need swipes. So give people swipes, make it easy for them, give them the the two examples of testimonials they could, they could write, the endorsements they could write and make it easy and get more testimonials for yourself.

Tony: 25:37 it removes friction, doesn’t it? By giving them examples saying, “hey, you know, here’s one you could use if you don’t want to write one yourself”.

Dr Dan: 25:48 Exactly. Yeah.

Tony: 25:50 So that’s it for me, Tony and of course we’ve got Dr Dan with us today. So from me: remember, just keep on rocking and Dan?

Dr Dan: 25:59 Be a RockStar in your life and make the world your stage.