The Influential Personal Brand Podcast

Getting up on stage and mastering your delivery is so important, but how do you know that what you said actually sunk in? This is one of the many key questions Connie Podesta posed during our interview with her and today we sit down to do a debrief of the best parts. We talk about how Connie has no grand backstory but rather sells herself by focusing on her will to transform the audience. Another major takeaway is the fact that she uses no slides, opting rather to give the impression of spontaneity which she uses to engage more directly. This is so admirable because it means she trusts and owns her expertise enough to manage any unexpected situations that may crop up as a result!

Many of the best speakers use slides or a personal success story as tools to help them leave a lasting impression on audiences. However, there is a certain type of intimate chemistry enabled by a level playing field and a sense of spontaneity that this method fails to accomplish. Connie Podesta, our guest for today, falls into a more niched group of speakers, one that prefers to ditch the crutches and approach their keynotes as full-blown conversations. Connie is perhaps the queen of this method, and as a Hall of Fame speaker who has written seven books and worked with clients like Microsoft and Harley Davidson, her lengthy career stands as testimony to its effectiveness. In our conversation with Connie, we get into the nuts and bolts of the method of planned spontaneity she practices, where it came from, and how she teaches it to her students.

Amidst the stress and strain that COVID-19 has placed on businesses across the globe, we must remember that some companies are in fact, booming! With every challenge comes opportunity, and we have to learn to adjust our skillsets and services where necessary if we are to survive! One such way is tapping into resources that you may have not ordinarily considered, like selling your business to the government perhaps. When it comes to recession-proofing your business, this is certainly not the go-to consideration for most people. But what if we told you that maybe it should be?

While many businesses are suffering hugely at the moment, we can also think of this as a time that is begging for people to innovate, a time during which huge success can be found. Our guest for today, Jack Siney, joins us to talk about innovation in crisis, and he shares some unique content on the matter because he occupies an unusual corner of the market. Jack is the nation’s leading expert on selling to the government, having completed over 1.5 billion dollars in government sales through GovSpend, a company he co-founded. GovSpend is a database that displays comprehensive lists of government purchase orders so that businesses whose products the Feds might be interested in can find relevant agencies and assess their competition. In our conversation with Jack, he gives listeners an idea of just how big the demand in the government is for a wide-ranging set of products, especially in the current climate.

In today’s special recap edition of the Influential Personal Brand Podcast, we are diving into a debrief and summary of the biggest takeaways from our interview with John DiJulius. John is a successful entrepreneur and authority on world-class customer service. When John is not running the daily operations of both his businesses, he is also a keynote speaker, international customer experience consultant, and best selling author of four books. Our number one takeaway from John’s episode is to practice what you preach. We are not teaching people ideas that we’ve learned, but rather principles that we’ve practiced. The second lesson is to make price irrelevant, and finally, learning how to operate under one message through multiple modalities. Stay tuned as we dive into these three concepts and how it applies to your business and brand building journey.

All businesses place some degree of value on customer service, but the few that take it to the next level create something very special in their clients: emotional equity. In their customers’ eyes, these businesses are so good that the price they charge becomes irrelevant. Today’s guest is John DiJulius, AKA the guy who dominates the customer service vertical, and he joins us to talk about how his consistent devotion to this one thing made him so successful. John has written all the main books about customer service, runs coaching masterminds on the topic, and provides his services to some of the best companies in the world as a consultant too. John tells the story of how he and his wife aimed to focus strongly on customer service with their fledgling company, John Robert’s spa, and how this led to him getting asked to speak at events about his model thereafter.

Today’s episode acts as a recap of our powerful and technical conversation with Elizabeth Rider about social media’s underrated cousin: blogging. We discuss all the ways blogs generate traffic in far more effective ways than social media. While the prospect of having many social media followers can be alluring, hardly any of them see your posts and the platform algorithms are always against you. Blog posts, on the other hand, have incredible lasting power. We also speak about lead capture and SEO optimization strategies such as naming your blog post something that would get typed into Google.

You can think of the yields generated through social media versus blogging in golfing terms, you drive for show but putt for dough. People tend to get hung up on the glamour of Instagram likes and followers, but the truth is that a blog post wins hands down when it comes to generating continuous and sustainable traffic. We were blessed to speak about this and other related ideas on today’s episode with OG health blogger Elizabeth Rider! Elizabeth is a health and business expert and coach, and recent author of The Health Habit. Blogging has taken her to the point where she owns a seven-figure business, has over 100 000 people on her email list, and gets 700 000 to a million views each month on her blog!

If you’re still doing the same thing that was done in the 80s or 90s, how can you expect to have any influence? Having a loyal audience is definitely contingent on the provision of a service that they find useful, a service that is relevant. This is one of the major takeaways from our most recent interview with Bill Cates, which we will be recapping in today’s show. We also highlight how neuroscience can be put to work in marketing, the value of clarity over intelligence, remembering not to try and serve everybody, and a whole lot more!

Having a personal brand and message is exciting but there’s a big difference between that and being followed by an actual audience, let alone making money out of one! In fact, getting new clients is one of the main challenges to building your brand and it was an honor having Bill Cates on the show to share his wisdom in this regard. Bill is a Hall of Fame speaker and author of six books, the most recent of which is called Radical Relevance. This new book of his is all about sharpening your marketing message, cutting through the noise, and winning more ideal clients.