Convince and Convert to Online Success with Jay Baer

Founder of Convince & Convert, hype-free marketing strategist, speaker, and author – Jay Baer

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Jay give hype-free strategies that work for him and his clients in social media. I drill him with question on promoting his books (and making them bestsellers!), and find out how he gets everything done with his insane schedule.

Resources Mentioned on this Podcast:

• Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype by Jay Baer

Check out JayBaer.com, and ConvinceandConvert.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy, and today we have Jay Baer on the show. I'm really excited. I see him at pretty much every single conference I go to. He's the president of Convince and Convert as you can see in the background from him. He's also coming out with a brand new book called Youtility which comes out on June
27. And I'm sure, oh perfect, perfect. Jay Baer: Looks just like that.
Jaime: So we'll have tons of information and talk about that book for certain. The other thing that I want to say, I mean he's worked with crazy brands like Nike and Allstate. We'll talk about social media. He has a podcast so check that out too. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Jay. I really appreciate it.

Jay: One hundred percent, my pleasure. Delighted to be here.

Jaime: Yay! Okay, so first I see in the background, Convince and Convert. I don't know the story, so I'm curious to know. How did you come up with the name Convince and Convert because I love it? It's very good.

Jay: Thanks. I appreciate that. Convince and Convert is my fifth professional services firm that I have started. I've been in the agency business since about 1994 and I tend to start agencies and then sell them. And so this is my most recent one, but I'm not going to sell this one because I'm having too much fun. My previous company was called Mighty Interactive, and I sold that to an umbrella marketing agency in Arizona a few years ago and when my "er-not" was up, when I was done with my contractual obligations to those guys, my plan was to take my money and go teach at a university which I still would like to do someday but the simultaneous sort of real estate and stock market collapses of the approximate 2008 window, I said maybe I need to get back up on the merry-go-round here, so I started yet another agency. The original plan for Convince and Convert, the reason it's called that, is I was going to do conversion rate optimization consulting, so landing pages and multi-variant testing and those kinds of things, the kind of work that someone like Site Tuners does, if you know those guys out of San Diego. Tim Ash and his company, so that kind of very science and math driven campaign optimization work that's why it's called Convince and Convert. My wife used to work for a law firm, and I just thought it was kind of funny because it almost feels like a law firm name, and one of our original logo concepts was this sort of seventies kind of script it would be two guys names, you know, like Trading Places. But it ended up when we moved into social media not long after, we realized there was a lot more demand for that than conversion rate optimization. It totally works, right? It totally works for social content marketing and
 
the things that we do now are the new wave of marketing, and so it is an accidentally good name.

Jaime: Oops! Now that's great and it makes perfect sense because I had no idea that that's what it was for. That's great. So tell us a little bit about what you do in social media.

Jay: So our company, Convince and Convert, is fairly virtual. We're all over the country. Everybody works from home, very Skype and Basecamp kind of thing, but we are social and content accelerators, so we work with medium size and large companies on social media strategic planning and content marketing strategies, kind of helping them tell their stories. We don't really do much in the way of tactical execution. Almost all of our clients either have in-house staff and or other agencies that who are doing the sort of hands-on keyboard work, so we are sort of social media whisperers.

Jaime: Okay, that's good. Well, it's funny, you talk on your website and all, there's a bazillion times it says "Hype-free" and I think that's really important because it does seem like you're just a real person. On your bio, it said a "tequila loving realist." Who puts that on their bio? You're a real person that can actually give really good advice that's sort of hype-free. Is that all planned? Is that part of your bio, all a part of it?

Jay: Well, it's intentionally the bio, of course, but we say that we're hype-free. I say that I'm hype-free I think because we really try and embrace that principle. And here's the thing Jaime, I've been in online marketing since '94, so what we're doing today in social and content marketing is the same thing that we were doing with web design fifteen years ago, or email after that, or SEO after that. It's just another cycle in the continuous cycle. The way I look at my role is I'm a business person first, a marketer second, a digital marketer third, and a social media marketer fourth, I would be doing... We happen to be a social media content consultancy but we could just as easily be an outdoor billboard consultancy. You know what I mean? I mean, certainly social has some different dynamics because of the nature of the power of your audience that didn't used to exist. That makes it different and transformative, which is what my first book was about. But, you set that aside, it's just another marketing tool, right? So, I don't see any reason to apply a lot of hype to it. It's not like you're going to stop doing the rest of your
marketing just because of social. You'd be crazy. People who say you shouldn't do any traditional marketing, you should just do social media marketing have never actually run a company.

Jaime: Twenty year old social media specialists.

Jay: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I actually feel like sometimes we talk our clients out of more stuff than we talk them into. And I think that's a good thing.
 
Jaime: And it's so funny, because you're talking about the principles and you've also had five other firms that probably talk about very similar things, but probably different in a way, they are probably based on the exact same principles. So can you give us maybe some of those principles, those things that are hard core that have not changed throughout the years?

Jay: I think partially because my background is in politics. I was originally a political consultant. I tend to put everything through a behavior prism, right? I feel like we over- emphasize eyeballs and audience and under-emphasize behavior and action. As I've said many times the goal is not to be good at social media; the goal is to be good at business because of social media, and those aren't necessarily the same things. We try and create strategies that really make your customers or prospective customers do something, maybe not immediately, but eventually. I feel like especially right now with where social media has evolved to, where it's all about engagement, and how funny is your photo and all that. I think we're sort of in a weird place where a lot of individuals and companies are
creating engagement for engagement's sake. You can't, you can't eat likes. I mean, you can't run a business on that.

Jaime: Thank you.

Jay: That's what we're trying to think about, right? Okay, work backwards. What is it that you need people to do? What do they need to know or have in order to make that action a reality? So to sort of work backwards from there, but instead, the way most people are thinking about it is top down. How do we get more shares? Well, I can get you more shares, but to what end?

Jaime: Thank you! Okay. That's exactly the point. Right, that's what I need people to talk about, what we need to talk about right now. I have so many people who are like "Look how many ?likes' on Facebook I have" but there's no revenue coming from Facebook. Is that really worth your time? They don't really know the other end pieces of it. How would you, step-by-step, I know in Youtility you have step-by-step. So give us sort of the step-by-step process of what especially a smaller business, a lot of the people are sort of small or starting out on this that are listening right now. What should they do, especially if they don't have a ton of resources like a whole inbound team that does that?

Jay: Yeah, well the sort of core principle of Youtility, why the book is called Youtility, is that it's about marketing that is so useful people would pay for it. Now you're not actually going to charge them because it is in fact marketing, but it is so truly and inherently useful that if you said "Hey, could you guys kick in a couple dollars for this," you'd say "Hell, yeah!" Because it's so useful, and there's tons and tons and tons of examples in the book. I'll give you one from a small business that I think will resonate with your audience. There's a guy in Banff, Alberta, up in Canada. Banff is big tourist town. There's lakes and skiing and bears and pine trees; it's majestic. Tons and tons of
 
tourists and tons and tons of restaurants and tons and tons of taxi drivers, but only one taxi driver in Banff is a Youtility, and his name is Taxi Mike. Once a full quarter, Taxi Mike publishes the where to eat guide in Banff. It's super low budget. He just goes and does it on his computer and gets it printed out at his local copy center. It's very yellow, this super yellow paper you can get at Kinko's, or FedEx. It's like that. He folds it up in a trifold, and he hands it around to all the bars and restaurants in town. When you're in Banff, you see it everywhere. You see it in all the bars and the restaurants because it's super useful. He's a taxi driver, so he knows everything. He categorizes the town, okay, best places to eat before the play, best sports bars, best discos, best cheap beer whatever. He's like a one man Yelp pretty much. Right? So at the end of the night, when you've
been to six bars in Banff, and you're like "I'm drunk, I gotta find a way to get back to my hotel." You're not going to call a taxi or have the bartender call. You've got this guy's map. It's got a map of downtown on it too. You've been looking at it all night. In big letters on the front, Taxi Mike and his phone number. He's a Youtility. He's not in the dining business, but he's made the story bigger and created something really useful that you would theoretically pay for, and so that's what all businesses need to do. You've got to realize that you're competing for attention against everything. Not just your competitors, against everything. It's not are you more interesting than your competition. It's are you more interesting to me than my wife and my friends and other people that I actually interact with on Facebook. The only way you can succeed in that environment is to be super useful. You have to sit down and not think about not how can your products be useful, your services, but what can you do for your consumers' lives to make their
lives better. It's just a different way of thinking about marketing.

Jaime: And how do we do that? Say we have a good product, service. We're like this is amazing, this will help people. How do I even come up with the stuff that's really useful?

Jay: Yeah, and again it's not so much about your product and service. It's usually about making the story bigger. Let me give you one more example, then I'll give you some process steps. Columbia Sportswear is one of our clients, and you know they make
jackets and pants and all that. They have a mobile application, iPhone and Android called
"What Knot to Do in the Great Outdoors." It's K-N-O-T. It shows you how to tie knots. It gives you animated demos of how to tie different knots. Which is amazing, right? I don't know; I wasn't in the Navy.

Jaime: You know what's funny? I looked that up on YouTube two days ago to tie a knot. I didn't find the Columbia app, but I was like "Oh my gosh, I know how to tie an
amazing bow knot now." This is insane.

Jay: But here's the thing, right? Columbia Sportswear doesn't sell rope. Right? Jaime: Yeah.
 

Jay: They made the story bigger. It's not about "Buy jackets." It's about "let us give something of value to people who do buy jackets." Right? So it's sort like marketing sideways, instead of marketing head on. You get at that. You find those ideas a few different ways. One is looking at search engine data. What are people searching for? That gives you some clues as to what they need. Look at your web analytics, right? So what stuff do you have today that people are consuming disproportionately? If you have a search box on your site, what are people typing in that box. That's a very good clue, and that report is almost never looked at, which is a shame. Mine social media chatter data, so use a social media listening tool, even a free one like Mention.net or something like that and see what people are talking about in your category. Then the best way, Jaime, to figure out what your customers' needs, the best way to create a Youtility is to actually talk to your customers.

Jaime: What?

Jay: I know. It's an amazing thing. To say, "Look. We're going to make a commitment in this organization or even as an individual sole proprietor to have conversations with customers on a regular basis, whether it's phone or let me buy you dinner or whatever the deal is." I kind of feel this is the old man in me, now that I'm middle-aged and broken down. I feel like we've got all this data now, right? Big data and API's and all this stuff. That's awesome, but sometimes I feel like we're using that data as an excuse to not actually have conversations with people. And if you really want get insights from your customers, you have to actually talk to your customers. We've sort of lost our way in that regard, a little bit.

Jaime: Thank you. It's so funny because this week I've had I don't know how many clients actually that their action item for this week is to call up and talk to customers.
I've had "Why don't I just survey them?" I'm like "NO, NO." Because, yes, the massive amount of data is really good, but talking to somebody and asking what problems you're having is something you can't necessarily get. You can't get deeper on that. So what sort of information are we trying to pull out? Say we've got a customer on the phone, what sort of stuff should we be asking them.

Jay: It's mostly, because again it's not necessarily about your product per se, it's mostly around life stage things. If you are, for example, a hospital, so Phoenix Children's Hospital has an amazing Youtility which is a car seat helper app. It's a children's hospital, all for kids. Well, if you're young enough to be in a children's hospital, you're
probably in many cases young enough to be in a car seat. Well, here's the problem. Have you ever tried to buy a car seat? You probably haven't, but...

Jaime: I have two small children, so yes, I have.
 
Jay: You have. It is. It is unbelievably complicated. Right? It's like buying cereal, the paradox of choice. You go into the BabiesRUs or Target or Wal-Mart, and there's a whole aisle of car seats. A whole aisle. And you're like (frustrated sound.) The blue one, right? I have no idea how to make this decision. The hospital figured that out.
They were surveying parents and talking to parents when they came in, their kid is in the hospital. How'd you get this car seat? I don't know. We just got whatever hand-me- down or whatever. They said, "We got to help people make a better car seat decision." They created this app which is how heavy is your kid, how tall is your kid, what kind of car do you have? Boom! Here's the car seat you ought to get. Right? Super simple, but solves a problem that their customers have which is related to their business. They don't sell car seats, but they're a hospital. It is within the boundaries of reality. I had a, I gave a speech recently at a conference of automobile dealers, and I showed an example of a locksmith that was doing some really great infographics about how to make a good used car decision. I said, "Look, this is ridiculous that you guys are being out-marketed by a locksmith." This is crazy. Right? You're car dealers. You have money; you have budgets. I said, "The first one of you that can make me a good infographic, I'm sending
you a bottle of tequila. So I got one yesterday from a guy in Utah, Toyota dealer who did a great infographic on what to do when you get locked out of your car. I'm like, "Yaaayyy!" Right? That's the idea. Right? What problems do your customers, your prospective customer have that you can solve? And if you do that, then they'll figure it out, they'll connect the dots. They say I should give these guys money eventually; they'll figure it out. You don't have to take your Youtility and drop a coupon in it. That's a mistake that people make.

Jaime: Okay. That's what I was going to ask about. We have this thing. It's very useful. You're like hey, look at this. Maybe the people that are reading it don't need a car right now. They're like that was cool. How do they not forget about you later? How do they follow up and make sure they actually buy your stuff?

Jay: That's a great question. The idea is that Youtility is a process, not a project. Right? That it's not about making one thing, and bop, we've got that covered.

Jaime: Infographic done! Get my tequila done!

Jay: That's totally how people think, right? It's like okay I've checked the box of Youtility, and that's not it. You've got to stay on their radar. Customers' needs change. Competition changes, and you have to be continuing to create new things in different ways. It can't just be a one shot deal.

Jaime: So that's difficult to try and constantly come up with this stuff. How do we do that?
 
Jay: One of the best ways to do it... certainly if you're continually having conversations with customers, new things will bubble, new things will definitely bubble up. The easiest way to get started with Youtility is to just answer every question. To literally write down every question that your customers have ever asked you and just answer those questions. With a blog post, with a video, with a vine... Lotus has got a great program right now; where they're doing vines. They call them improvement vines. They're awesome.
That's the best way to start. You will always have a new supply of customer questions. But the other thing to keep in mind is that Youtility is a process, not a project. It's also a skill, not a job, right? Everybody in your organization has knowledge that your customers can benefit from. You've got to unlock that knowledge. This shouldn't be okay, Bob is going to be in charge of Youtility, and that's his job because he's the marketing guy. Everybody in the organization can answer customer questions, can come up with ideas, right? It needs to be part of everybody's responsibility, not one person's responsibility. That's how you continue to get more and more ideas. Because one person's going to run out of ideas. For sure.

Jaime: Okay, that's really helpful. So this is almost talking about a content strategy, just about. Because it seems like we have to keep continually coming up with knowledge and answers and stuff like that. What do you tell people for content strategy? Do they do calendars? How do we make this a process that's ongoing?

Jay: Yeah, I mean that's absolutely it. And really what Youtility is as a premise is a reason to content marketing, right? It's a strategic scaffold because we've written a lot of books and had a lot of conversations about you should do content. What I tried to do
here is say and here's why?

Jaime: Okay. That's huge though. I hear it all the time. Content marketing is good.
Yay. And people are writing articles and going I don't really get it. I have a blog; it's not really doing anything. Okay, so this is sort of the framework that goes around it, the why, the what's the point of it all? Give us some tips or strategies on making it a process. Yes, everybody is supposed to be coming from, say we have a really small organization, and you're trying to tell everybody what Youtility is. How do we continue this forward?

Jay: As I said, the easiest way to start is with the customer questions part. You say, "Okay." Let's say we have three different small organizations; three different sorts of customer personas; three different sorts of core customer types. We have three different stages in the buying cycle, right? I'm making this smaller for small companies. We've got awareness, we've got sort of interests and we have action. Well, for somebody to do any of those things, they have to have some questions answered. They need to know
what it is, they need to know what it costs, they need to know what happens if they like it, they need to know who else likes it. There's questions that customers have to have answered either explicitly or implicitly to take action. You need to take an inventory of that, and say okay, do we answer those questions? Do we provide that information? So
 
the way it looks, I can actually draw this in real time. You've got audience A, B, C; you've got stage 1, 2, 3. (drawing noises) So that's how it actually works. You've got a grid. You've got audiences on one side; you've got stages on the other side. Then you actually fill in the questions.

Jaime: This is all in your book I'm assuming. That way people just buy the book, and they have that?

Jay: Okay. Jaime: Okay
Jay: Then you have the questions in each box. For audience B, to get them from interest to action the questions they need answered is boom, boom, and boom. Well, have we answered those? If you haven't, do that first. Once you get all those answered, which
can happen, then you can say how else do we do that? The issue becomes then, Jaime, all right, well, what's the mechanism for answering those?

Jaime: Yeah.

Jay: Is it a blog post? Is it an infographic? Is it a whatever? One of the things I talk about in the book is there's not always a right answer or a wrong answer when you're creating utility like that, when you're mapping customer needs to Youtility execution. There's not always a right or wrong, just righter or wronger. In that hospital application I was telling you about, the car seat thing? So, they could have done that a bunch of different ways. You could have had a car seat blog. You could have had car seat video blog that reviewed the car seats. You could have had a downloadable e-book about car seats. You could have had an actual printed book about car seats that you gave out to pediatricians that handed it out to young parents. You could have had an event. Come on down to the hospital; we're going to have face-painting and clowns and popcorn and buckling your car seat right. All of that could work, right? It's all, I can get into that.
But in that case, they made it a mobile app because young parents over-index for smart phone ownership. When do you really, really, really need to know about car seats?
When you're buying a car seat. The chances of you having that information in a store on your phone is better than any of the other ideas I mentioned. I can make a case for any of those other options, but that one was the righter idea, right? That's the way you have to think about it, right? It's not necessarily about should you do this once a day, or once a week, or once a month. That's a decision that every company has to answer based on what their customers need and what their own resources are. But you need to keep feeding this beast and vary the types of utility. Some people want to read a blog. Other people want to watch a video, right? People's media habits are different, and you have to vary it up a little bit.
 
Jaime: That's one of the key pieces that I get asked a lot and that I need to know from you, which is, I think, really important. Because a blog post will eventually go away unless you have a repository of all these questions, and then they have to search through the questions. How do they get to that information that they need at the time that they actually need it? That's a really big question. They did it with the app. Of course, it's not always that easy to try and figure out. So what are some ways that we can really work on that to figure it out? Do we have to vary our media and have YouTube videos everywhere in order to do that constantly? Because that seems a little impossible.

Jay: Well, one of the things that we have to do a better job of if you're going to embrace this notion of having conversations with customers. It's not just what can we do for you to be helpful. It's oh and by the way, how do you consume information? It's not about being everywhere; it's about being everywhere that your customers are. Which is not the same thing, right? Or making that calculation, saying look a majority of our customers watch YouTube videos, so we should make those. A minority of our customers are on Instagram so while that might be fun and cool and it might totally knock the socks off those people, that's a minority, and we don't have enough resources to do everything well, so let's set that aside for now.

Jaime: What if that is different from what you want to do? It's funny I have a client who's surveyed, and they were like I want to do YouTube videos. And that was the lowest thing on the survey, but I was really excited about that because you can take that content and make it into blog posts and you can do everything like that. What do you do in those situations?

Jay: That's a really good point. The notion of repackaging content and itemizing it, I talk about that in the book a little bit. Ann Handley and CC Chapman talked about it really, really well in Content Rules, that notion of repackaging. Absolutely, right? There's no such thing as an idea that lives in one place. That's wasteful, that's wasteful of your ideas. Todd Wheatland, who's a very, very smart content marketer, works for Kelly Services. He actually won content marketer of the year last year from the Content Marketing Institute. He has this 20 to 1 rule. For every idea, we execute it twenty
different ways. Right? So it's a blog post, it's an infographic, it's a Facebook quote it's a podcast, it's a SlideShare, it's a whatever. Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. That is a lot, but it's really, really smart. We tend to say well, it's an infographic, so it is. There's so many other things that you can do with that. But, to the question of YouTube being low on the list, but you want to do it, I'm torn about that. On one hand, I say look this is about math and so do stuff in the venues where your customers are. I certainly believe that. By the same token, great content and great utility wins. So if you are so passionate about YouTube, that you can kill it on YouTube. That might be better than you doing a half- assed blog post. You know what I mean?

Jaime: Yeah.
 

Jay: That's sort of the Gary Vaynerchuk, Scott Stratten school of life, which is. And I know those guys well, and we talk about this all the time, that I am, that I am probably overly practical because that's just how I'm wired. They're probably overly passionate because that's how they're wired. And hopefully, they meet in the middle somewhere.

Jaime: That's awesome. The other thing too, is I was just trying to tell them that they survey might not have anybody from YouTube right now, but there might be people on YouTube waiting for that content too. You don't ever if your data, if the data is really accurate either. Let's actually move into because you have a book, and I'm going to use you right now because I have a book, and I really want to know how we can use these principles. Because I'm sure that's what you're doing. Your book comes out on June 27. Everybody should get it. But when it, over and over, I have to say that right so that you will help me with my book. So tell me what are some ideas because I'm just getting into book marketing. I've been learning a ton of stuff, and so I love the ideas that you're saying, but how can I use it so that it actually works?

Jay: I think a lot of it is how can you create assets out of the 20 to 1 principle? I don't have 20 because that's a little much, but we have a ton of content archetypes that came out of the book that we purposely created. We have thirty excerpts in guest blog posts that we created from the book. We have a SlideShare presentation full of annotated videos which is the five-minute version of Youtility. We have a trailer, have a music video. We have a slide share presentation which is the 21 best quotes from the book, from all the different people that I interviewed. For each of those quotes, we created a Facebook kind of quote photographic, also for Google Plus which we then merchandised all throughout social media. I have a how did I write and promote the book presentation that I'm working on.

Jaime: Good. Make sure you send that to me when...

Jay: I will. So it's sort of taking the, the book is the, the book is the container for all these different content elements that you sort of charm the world with. That's what I have done differently this time compared to my first book, and it is much, much easier to go that route.

Jaime: See, and I love this. You're giving me all your ideas. What makes these good? So everywhere there's people that do guest blog posts and trailers, the music video actually, I really can't wait to see that. That's really cool. But all those things have sort of been done before, how do you really make them so they stand out and are really amazing?

Jay: So part of it is just sort of sequencing, so not throwing everything out there at once, but time release capsules for each of those things. Some of them aren't even released yet.
 
And then we also did a big pre-release push for the book to get a lot of orders in the can before the book came out where we gave access to some of those content assets in advance and then more as the book releases and things like that. That has been enormously successful. We got lots and lots of, lots and lots of orders put together, which is fantastic. I even have one where if people. You'll like this in terms of being useful. I have one where people pre-bought nine or more copies of the book, I have an interactive on my workbook they get access to, but also I will leave a voicemail to everybody they buy a book for that says, "Hey, Jaime bought you a book. Hope you enjoy it. It's Jay Baer." So...

Jaime: Really?

Jay: I have like, I added it up the other day. I have eight thousand voicemails to do or something like that, and I'm like "Oh, shit."

Jaime: This was successful.

Jay: You shouldn't go do it. That could be a tough, tough deal to execute on.

Jaime: That's all. So what made you decide to do that? Your time's really valuable. It's awesome that I would love to get a voicemail from you because that's so different and unique, but ow!

Jay: Yeah, you know it seemed like such a good plan. And maybe it still is, but. Jaime: It is. It works.
Jay: The execution of it is a little daunting. It was, we talked about it earlier, right? That I get a lot of asks from authors who say can you review my book or tweet about my book, whatever. And almost invariably, not always, but most of the time, it is a bulk email that somebody send to their 200 contacts or their 200 social media influencers, and I just feel like if you're serious about it, you've got to kind of add a little layer of personal touch there, so when I do those kinds of emails, I always do them one at a time. Then I thought this voicemail thing is a nice way to sort of prove that personal point. We'll see.

Jaime: You did. Good job. Jay: I may live to regret it.
Jaime: So what did the structure of that look like? Especially the pre-orders? Like how early do you do the pre-orders? I'm totally asking these questions just for me. Hopefully everybody thinks it's interesting too. There's so many people doing books now days; it's kind of insane. I'm hoping that will be helpful too.
 

Jay: So we built a store on Shopify to pre-sell the books in packages, so one book, three books, five books, nine books, 25, 50, 100. There's different levels of bonuses for each of those orders and the bonuses in sort of keeping the premise, the bonuses were all different versions of the content of the book. Music video, live Q & A, webinar, so it's not buy the book and get. People sort of have these weird bonuses packages where it's
buy the book, get a case of popcorn. Or buy the book, and get strawberry jam. I'm like I
only need to focus on the book, right? Not all this other stuff, right. Jaime: Strawberry jam, what?
Jay: I had a couple people say well these bonuses aren't really bonuses at all. Well, then don't buy a book. So we ran all those orders through Shopify, we have all those orders and we'll fulfill them all when the book comes out, and we started pre-orders basically the middle of May. May 10th, something like that.

Jaime: Okay.

Jay: I just shut it down yesterday, so we ran it for three weeks. You know emails to me into our audience on Convince and Convert, did some advertising on some social media sites, people that I think probably already know me and my work, and were likely to support the book in an early phase. I had a, like you're doing with your insiders club, had a pre-release fan club for the book that I've been talking about for 9 months as I give presentations about Youtility, and we had a couple thousand people on that list who have actually signed up to get early information about the book, so there's several different sort of groups of people that we invited to purchase early. I'll tell you what, Jaime, here's the secret. When I wrote my first book, I had a long call with Gary Vaynerchuk and he had just finished Crush It, and he'd done really well with it. I said, "You know, what am I not thinking about? What am I not doing that I should be doing?" And he said "Jay, here's
the story. You've already sold the books. You just haven't connected the dots for people yet." And what he means by that, if you are useful in your life, if you go out of your way to help people, if you write thousands of blog posts for free, and podcasts for free, and emails for free, and you're sort of know as someone who was a giver, when it is time to ask them for something, they will do it. Because you haven't over asked, and you've proved value in the past. And so of all the things that we did in the pre-release phase of the book, and there was a lot of tactics. By far, without even any second pace thing close, was a personal email from me to people I know. You know, people that I know in the real world, that I have worked with, that I have helped, that have helped me over twenty
years, right? It's like hey, this is really important to me. I need to sell some books; I need to sell them right now. I need to sell them this week, and that tactic of emailing people, saying I need a favor, and I'm calling in the markers. That's how you sell books. You sell books in the ten years before you write the book. It's really the truth.
 
Jaime: Good. Well, I don't have ten years, but no, yeah. That's exactly what's really funny is when I did the book proposal, I went through all the amazing people that I'm friends with. They all have huge audiences; how amazing is that? They said yes, sure I'll help you. Wow, how easy so far.

Jay: They could have as easily said no I don't want to help you.

Jaime: So tell me though. The book is one thing, so the book does really well. You've done a lot of books before. Do you have sales funnel set up beforehand? Because I'm chatting with people that have done really well with books. They have big audiences. And they're like the book made me no money whatsoever. You know, whatever, you got your first advance, and that was great, but how do you sort of monetize in the end, or create revenue?

Jay: So I think it depends on why you're writing a book. The first book that I did "The Now Revolution with Amber Naslund, we made our advance back, and we continue to get royalty checks, so from that perspective it is a very successful book because most people don't. It sold well, and it created a lot of speaking and consulting opportunities for me. It was very much of a lead generator. This book, because of the success of the first book, and the increase in size of my audience in general, my advance was bigger on
this book so there is some dollars associated with the creation of the book in and of itself. I'll tell you that every dollar I got paid to write this book, we poured right back into marketing. And then some, and then some.

Jaime: Okay.

Jay: And I'll tell you what. Most authors don't do that. They're like, oh great, I got paid. Put that in my pocket. If you want to sell a book, you better sell it because the publisher won't sell shit. That's just not the way this game works anymore. So if you want to sell
a book, then you've need to sell a book which means you take those dollars that they paid you and you put it into marketing.

Jaime: See, that's what I've been doing, but then the book, I better have some sort of sales funnel in the end because...

Jay: So then it becomes okay, what is actually your business? Is it writing books? If so, that's an option, but I think it's kind of a dangerous game to play. It's what is the book, the same way Columbia Sportswear doesn't sell knots or rope, I don't really feel like I'm in the books business. I'm in the speaking business and the consulting business. So the books make that happen. So my first book came out, and my speaking fee doubled. When this book comes out, my speaking fee will go up another 50%. We will do a lot of consulting around Youtility. We already do, but we'll do more of it for corporations that need help putting these principles into practice. So it all works together.
 

Jaime: So how big is your team? I know you said you're all over the US. Jay: Six.
Jaime: It's easy for you to take on consulting clients, and it's not just about you and your time. I know, I see you, like I said, everywhere. So...

Jay: I wouldn't say it's easy. Not easy, but certainly if it was just me, it would be much more difficult. I'm still very, very involved in the consulting side of the business. I mean every client we have, I'm still the client contact. My team does a ton of work, and
they're amazing, but I'm still super involved.

Jaime: How many hours a week do you work? Like I said, I see you everywhere, and I
don't even go to that many places.

Jay: You know what it is? I work a lot, but probably less than people think or what a lot of other people do. I've been doing this so long; I've been self-employed for so long that I work really fast. I do stuff really quick, and that really helps. I've also trained myself because I've traveled so much for so many years to really maximize the efficiency of that
20 minute burst. That I'm between meetings, or I'm in between a session or I'm in my hotel until I've got to go speak, but the byproduct of that is though that there is literally
no relaxation or downtime. That doesn't actually exist in my world. So that is starting to annoy me a little bit, but that's how I do it.

Jaime: So, give me some tips on that. I get when I chat with people that I need two hours to sit down and write. I go like you don't have two hours to sit down and write, you have twenty minutes. And they're like, but I can't really get into it by then. But then you
don't get it done, so tell me. Give me your tips.

Jay: It's true. On the writing thing, I have no tips. I just, I've been a writer since I was a kid. I started off with journalism, so I've always been a writer. If somebody said, "What is your, if you could pick any job?" I would be basically Scott Raab's job. I would be
the lead columnist for Esquire. That's what I would do if somebody said "Pick a job." But I realized this not that long ago, but I'm kind of a freak because I can just sit down and write on command. If you said hey we need 1500 words right now. Throw out a topic. I could do it right now, in an hour.

Jaime: Wow.

Jay: So I wrote my book, and my first book, I just said I wrote this book in about six weeks.
 
Jaime: Don't tell me that.

Jay: I just sat down, just sat down and wrote two thousand words a day every night. I would do my job, then put the kids to bed and all that, and from eight o'clock 'til nine- thirty, I would just sit down and knock out two thousand words. Then I'd close the laptop, and the next day, I'd write another two thousand, and on the weekends, I'd do six thousand. I'd go to the law library at the university, and I'd lock myself in, and knock out six thousand. I'd travel and that, so I'd skip some days, but at the end of that six week period, I had a book. There was no second draft. Okay, I gave it to the publisher. This is amazing, great! Put a cover on it.

Jaime: Yeah, super powers.

Jay: I realize that's not normal, right? So I just thought that's how everybody did it, but when I wrote the first book with Amber, Amber is an amazing, amazing writer and intellect, but she is very much of a flow writer. When we were working on the book together, we each wrote half of it. I would do 1500 words a day, like pop, pop, pop. And she was like, nothing, nothing, nothing, and I'm like what the fuck, and nothing, nothing, nothing, eight thousand words. Just like in a rush of unbelievable is how she processes, right? I don't have, you know who else is amazing like that? Even more than me, like a complete robot freak? Mitch Joel.

Jaime: Oh, really?

Jay: I've watched him write a blog post, and it's, it is interplanetary. He just opens the laptop and just goes as fast as you can type. Pow-da-pow-da-poppity pop. Publish. There's not even, he doesn't even stop to think about what he's writing. He's that good. Amazing!

Jaime: And all those people that are going "oh, crap." I mean that's why it makes sense, you guys are content marketers. You can really pull out the content. That's really awesome. Unfortunately, maybe I can get someone on here who's really not good at that, and they can give us tips on it.

Jay: I don't have any, although I keep, you know, I keep lists of headlines. So for blog posts or other things that might become speeches or whatever. Right, I'm always, it's a process, not a project. I'm always aware of ideas, and I jot them down on my phone or whatever. The problem is usually I'm onto the next thing so quick, I don't write them down very well, then I look at them. What the hell? What was this idea? I've got this topic. I've got a Post-It right here. So here's my actual list right now.

Jaime: That's so funny.
 
Jay: This is my actual blog post list. Here's one. The other problem is my handwriting is really, really bad, so...

Jaime: It's so funny you say that because look at my handwriting. Horrible, horrible! Jay: You have really bad handwriting for a woman. That's terrible.
Jaime: I know.

Jay: This says I think this says, I can barely read it. I think this says sentiment versus opinion. I have no idea what that means. When I wrote it, when I jotted it down, this is the greatest blog post ever. I probably should have taken the time to A, write this more legibly, and B, add just two or three other words. Now I can't write this because I have no idea what I was thinking about. None.

Jaime: Now your wonderful, amazing advice is gone. Thanks. Appreciate that. Jay: That's why I'm hype-free. Works out.
Jaime: It does not work. So give us instead of writing, if you can sit down and do twenty minutes, do you already pre-plan what that twenty minutes is beforehand, so you can just sit down and do it.

Jay: Yes and no. It depends. Because I'm still the client contact, and we're, our agency is primarily on retainer with most of our clients. That means we're on call, right? So I've got twenty-one emails since we started talking, and at least six of them are from clients that need something, right?

Jaime: Wow.

Jay: In the next twenty minutes, I've got to clear up that. You've got sort of a balance of things that have to be done right now, then things that are on the actual master to-do list that are more in the future. I try to balance those every, every down the road thing. The one challenge because of my travel schedule right now with the book is that there's not too many windows that are larger than twenty minutes. When you actually have to make something legit, there's not a lot of time on task, and that can be a little bit of a problem.

Jaime: But it's still really impressive. Twenty minutes like I said, people are like I'm just going to clean my desk for twenty minutes or do something that's very short and small because they can't get into it, but that's the only time you have to do something which is really inspiring.
 
Jay: Well, it helps to have been a consultant for so long because I've worked on so many different projects for two decades that I've trained myself to be able to shift, stop thinking about this client, now thinking about this client with no lag time in that process. Just stop that, and start thinking about this, and be up to speed. That is a huge advantage. Huge. Anybody can do that, but you've got to train yourself to do it.

Jaime: I've heard it's like nine minutes to switch focus or something like that. To go on something, then completely switch.

Jay: I'm like nine seconds. It's like pop, pop. It takes a long time, to constantly, you just stop giving yourself that time. You just start off giving yourself nine minutes, then five, six, no bigger than five, four. You just make yourself shift gears faster over time, and you can eventually train yourself to do it quicker.

Jaime: How important is focus then? It seems like you've sort of got 17,000 things being thrown at you at once. Do you, is focus a big deal for you?

Jay: It is. For sure, and I constantly catch myself sort of trying to divide my attention and to try and be more efficient. It rarely works, I find. Right? You're just not really paying attention to things, and you forget things. It is a challenge I'm continually trying to work on. It's the hardest thing for me, because I'm always trying to do two things at once, but then you end up doing two things poorly. It's so easy now with multiple screens to really be theoretically working on two things at once, but you're not really paying attention to two things at once. I think your overall product suffers. That's something I've got to
keep working. Drinking too much beer. And pretending to multi-task. Those are the two issues I'm working on.

Jaime: But that's it. I've got everything else figured out. Jay: The things I'm going to tell you about.
Jaime: That's awesome. I know we have to start wrapping up. I could chat with you for a very long period of time. The last question that I always ask everyone is what's one action that listeners can take this week to help move them forward to their goal of a million?

Jay: I think it fits nicely into the theme of the book which is transcend the transactional. It's not about selling your products and services. It's about improving the lives of your customers, theoretically because of your products and services, and that's a bigger role for you to play and a bigger story for you to tell. You have to stop thinking about yourself as a purveyor of stuff, and think of yourself as an enabler of a better life. If you can figure out how you can be useful, if you can figure out how you can make your customers' lives better, the product stuff will take care of itself.
 

Jaime: I love that, because that makes us matter so much more than just being salespeople of our stuff. Thank you so much, Jay. Where can we find out more about you, your
book, all that fun stuff online?

Jay: The new site for the book was just launched yesterday, youtilitybook.com. My site is jaybaer.com. B-A-E-R. And of course, the consulting firm is convinceandconvert.com.

Jaime: Awesome. We'll definitely link up to everything. I highly recommend you check out the book. I love the name of the book too. It's very good.

Jay: Thank you.

Jaime: You're very good with names apparently, even when you don't mean to.

Jay: Thank you. It was controversial. I'm glad to hear you say that because it was very controversial. I really liked it; the publisher really didn't like it.

Jaime: What do publishers know nowadays?

Jay: Sometimes I think... We killed it; then we brought it back. There's like this whole process. I'm really delighted to hear that you like it. That makes me very happy.

Jaime: Love it. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Jay. I really appreciate it.

Jay: Thank you.

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Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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