The Influential Personal Brand Podcast

Welcome to this special reality TV recap edition of the show where AJ and Rory chat about their recent interview with Mike Johnson! One of the biggest takeaways for today is the idea of being yourself, and you’ll hear about how Mike’s authenticity on camera can teach brand builders so many lessons. Other big talking points from today's recap are how one platform can be used to catapult you into others, the connection between reach, results and reputation in the brand-building formula, and a whole bunch more! Tune in for some amazing pointers about the parallels between performing on TV and building a personal brand!

Today's show is all about reality TV and the role that being vulnerable and authentic plays in building a personal brand, and who better to talk to about this than Mike Johnson? If you haven’t heard of Mike yet, he is the man all of America has fallen in love with since his appearance on The Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise! What many people don't know about Mike is that he is actually an Air Force vet, but after he auditioned for The Bachelorette on a whim, he has since fallen into the personal brand-building game and is crushing it! We chat to Mike about the surprising pivot he made from the military into being a financial advisor, and what then gave him the idea to try out reality TV before becoming a celebrity and total heartthrob.

When it comes to learning about paid ads using Google, it makes sense to listen to the man who spent 94 million dollars on it – Rick Steele! Our interview with him pretty much amounts to a course in digital marketing that somebody could charge for and today we recap its most valuable gems. The biggest takeaways are three key concepts that need to be understood to get digital marketing right: intent-based searches, retargeting, and optimizing your website using heat mapping. Rory prophesizes that these strategies will be as important to brand builders as they are to product vendors very shortly – indeed they're already being used – so tune in and get in on the gold rush before its too late!

Understanding SEO concepts like paid traffic acquisition and intent-based searches is easier than one might imagine, and if put to use properly, these digital marketing strategies can yield millions of dollars. Today’s guest is Rick Steele, and he joins us on the show to speak about how his use of SEO strategies has enabled him to build multiple billion-dollar businesses. Rick is not just an incredibly masterful businessman though, he is also a celebrated philanthropist and ambassador of effective altruism who is organizing a movement of high net-worth business leaders, to bring them together to solve immediate humanitarian and environmental concerns. He is a bestselling author, has been featured on the Inc 500 list twice, was named Humanitarian of the Year by Harvard Business School, is listed amongst FastCompany’s most innovative companies, and has been featured in Washington Post, Forbes, Entrepreneur, ESPN, Huffington Post, and Fox News. Amazingly, Rick is also a 13-time IRONMAN who has recently just completed seven marathons in seven consecutive days on seven continents! In our conversation with Rick, he talks about his early adoption of online, direct to consumer sales, and takes us through the entire process of finding a product to tweaking the way you market and sell it on your website.

Our conversation with John O’Leary couldn’t have happened at a more appropriate time. His philosophy of humility, love, and gratitude which we speak about in today’s recap contains many lessons to apply in business but also in a personal capacity during this time where the world has reached a sudden halt. We talk about John’s experiences with people that helped him and how he pays this forward by treating everybody with kindness, no matter their position in society, and how this fits into his immensely positive worldview but has also played a central role in his success. Tune in for some much-needed inspiration and make sure you catch the full length too.

We learn our biggest lessons during our hardest times and it is important to remember and be grateful for this as we embrace our trials by fire. Today on the show we discuss gratitude, humility, and life lessons with John O’Leary who went from getting third-degree burns on 80% of his body after a gas tank explosion accident at age nine to becoming one of the busiest professional speakers in the world. John is the best selling author of On Fire: The 7 Choices to Ignite a Radically Inspired Life, and has spoken to millions of people in over 2000 events across 50 states. John attempts to ‘live in yes,’ and he tells the story of how this attitude led him from his first few years of unpaid speaking gigs to arriving where he is today. Failure has a huge place in learning life’s lessons, and John tells a beautiful story about his grandfather which acts as a reminder that we should not only not forget, but actively practice gratitude for the things we learn in our toughest moments.

If you’ve ever been curious about video courses, our full-length interview with D’Arcy Benincosa which today’s episode acts as a recap of, is an absolute must. In today’s debrief, we focus on the different strategies D’Arcy uses to promote, price, and create her online courses. We touch on what determines a course’s value, using bonuses effectively, and how funnels can actually be really simple. Other big takeaways are how to prep an audience before launch, the value of doing webinars live, and building trust before launching a paid product. Tune in for this and a special bonus topic too, and catch the full-length to hear D’Arcy’s great advice coupled with her amazingly charismatic and bubbly self!

If you have a skill that you can teach, making online courses is an amazing way to add value to people’s lives as well as bring in significant revenue. In today’s show, we discuss the nuts and bolts of creating online courses with D’Arcy Benincosa, a hugely successful online course creator and one of the most sought after luxury destination wedding photographers in the world. We kick things off hearing about how D’Arcy forged a second career path out for herself so successfully. Her creative skills drew people to her work, but it was her gift for storytelling that made them want to learn from her. The law of reciprocity is huge in marketing and one of the big takeaways from today is how well the strategy of adding massive value to your audiences without charging them a cent works.

Mike Dillard went from being an introverted direct sales worker to earning millions of dollars a year using smart marketing tactics and today we recap a few from our recent interview with him. He invented magnetic sponsoring which basically digitized marketing but more interestingly he convinced an initially disinterested audience that they needed his product. Key takeaways include Mike’s use of copywriting to create this market for his product, how he disrupted the field of marketing by taking it digital, and a potentially less tapped AdSpend strategy too. Make sure you catch this one and hear all about how Mike took his uniqueness and applied it with amazing success to his winning businesses.

No matter what niche you are operating in, the value of zagging when others zig can’t be overstated. Just be ready to make a few enemies amongst all the dollars you’re making along the way though! We got a chance to speak about this and many other valuable concepts regarding building a personal brand and business with our amazing guest for today, Mike Dillard. Mike has grown and exited several successful companies, has over five million downloads on his podcast, and his followers and book sales count in the hundreds of thousands. Mike’s main focus at present is helping entrepreneurs succeed, and he really teaches what he lives. In our conversation with Mike, he shares a wealth of expertise on topics ranging from the nitty-gritty of copywriting and digital marketing to high-level concepts of investing and managing a business.