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Demographics and Networking

I also recommend trying to figure out your demographic information. Even if your show is really small and you're not necessarily looking for sponsors, I highly recommend having a demographic responsor page. This is at the top of mine. I have like maybe six of these little square windows. The reason they look like this is it looks good on mobile. Because a lot of people are in a car, subway, whatever, looking at this. I put things like the spread of the men and women, the topics they're interested in, how many downloads per episode, how many per month, countries is optional. It's probably every country except for like North Korea so I just put that. Because after awhile you're going to see that it's global. The only countries that don't have podcasts are countries that don't have Internet. Buton, et cetera. And you can find that in your host. You'll be able to look. You'll count the number of countries on the country list, and this seems quite impressive, or at least it did back in the ...

day. Now I don't think anyone cares as much. But you want the total monthly listeners because that's the metric that people are going to throw out there when they're pitching. And you want to maybe not hide the ball. A lot of people will hide the ball and they'll say I have 80 million downloads. And it's like, yeah over eight years, not the same. Okay, so if you do this, it shows people that you're willing to play with a metric that the advertisers use. This is good for guest booking and it's good for advertisers, which are going to ask about this. So I have a bunch more demographic break down, and you can see it jordanharbinger.com/sponsorship. It shows, I did a survey that was paid, and you don't have to do this because most of us don't have a 25 grant invested in a demographic survey from Edison. But it shows things like household income, car ownership, home ownership, other shows they listen to, how old they are, their level of education. That makes sense when you've got sponsor dollars coming in. For you it won't matter as much. But if you can even do an informal survey that's roughly scientific-ish using something like Survey Monkey. You can say alright, I surveyed my audience. I got 100 respondents, 20 of them were under and every body else was under 50. And they all live in American. That's better than nothing. It doesn't sound like much, but it's better than nothing. Especially if you want to start pitching certain advertisers, and if you have a geographically located type show like oh I do pet shops in Florida. You definitely want to survey those folks because that's a really more valuable niche than just people who listen to podcasts all over the world. Now the best way to get guests is through your existing network. I think I mentioned before warm introductions. You need to feel free to ask other folks in your network if they know somebody who's going to be a good fit, specific people that you know they know that will be a good fit is also a really good place to start. You'll be surprised who you know already that can help you get great people for your show. It's going to be like, well I'm doing a show about business, but I want to do it about corporate business, not just entrepreneurship. Oh yeah, my dad's old neighbor was a C-suite executive at GE in the nineties. Good enough, they still know a bunch of people. They might be a good fit. Somebody they know might be a good fit. Those people are generally hard to reach. But if it's your dad's racquet ball buddy or something like that, that's a good enough in that you can use. Somebody that you don't think is maybe that well connected, you just never know. Maybe the only interesting person they know is a perfect fit for your show. So you want to ask you friends for referrals. You want to ask your family. You want to put the word out there on Facebook, look I'm looking for people who have started a book business in their house where they self publish books. Does anybody know anybody like that? Those kind of hail Mary requests will actually work more often than you think. I actually made an entire course about reaching out to other people, spending minutes per day, not seven hours a week, just literally like five, 10 minutes a day researching and figuring out who's in your network, keeping them in touch, making sure you reach out to old dormant and weaker ties. And that's at advancedhumandynamics.com/levelone. In this handout on page two, you'll see an example of one of the things from one of the drills from advanced human dynamics. It's called the text re-engage, also very creatively titled. And it also is the same as for Gmail roulette, which is another drill that I run. So what these are, what this essentially does, is re-engages what we call weaker and dormant ties. So it's like your college roommate that you haven't talked to for awhile. Or somebody you went to high school with a million years ago. Somebody that you used to work with and haven't spoken to in a long time. You want to re-engage these dormant and weaker ties. The people that you actually didn't think were in your network or in your social circle, but still are, you just haven't spoken with them in a decade. And so I have an example text here, and it's very similar to what you would write in an email. And so during, let's say, the Starbucks line, where I'm usually scrolling around on Instagram, you'll probably find that you have four or five minutes. Instead of just wasting that time, I'll go all the way to the bottom of my text messages on my phone. So I open up that app, you go all the way to the bottom where there's people you had lunch with once in San Diego at a conference three years ago that's still in there. So you find five of those people, four or five, whatever you have time for, and you essentially send a script that looks a little bit like this. And I'm going to read it for the benefit of the audience at home. And again, you can get this by purchasing the course, right? Okay, great, so this handout is also in there, but the script goes a little something like this. And I'll break it down piece by piece because each piece is important. So I say hey Adam, instead of just, hey man or hey person. Because we want it to be tailored enough where the person knows it's for them. Remember they haven't heard from you in awhile. Maybe they don't have your number. Maybe they wonder if it's a mass text. You don't want that, so you tailor it to their name. You say, it's been a minute since our group lunch at Cafe Gratitude in San Diego during FenCon. Weirdly specific, but again, who are you? Oh right, I had lunch with a group of people at that cafe in San Diego during that conference a couple of years ago. He must have been that dark haired guy. His name I forgot. So you want to be as specific as you can if you remember where you met them. You say I realize I could have done a better job keeping in touch since then. So you take the blame for falling off the map or the radar. Something reminded me of you so I figured I'd reach back out. Yeah, that's true, something is the fact that you have the text thread still at the bottom of your phone. Now I might say, I'm in San Jose for most of the summer, then off to Australia and Hawaii, have you ever been there? True story, you don't know where they are these days or maybe they're going to be there, maybe they have been there. It gives them something to grasp onto, instead of like, hey yeah that cake was good at that place, the end. You want to give them something to talk about. And you can say, what's new in your world? This is a good lead in to illicit a response. Nothing too complex there. What are you working on these days, is something that I throw in a lot as a business owner because a lot of the people that I know are always working on something. And usually it's something they have to promote, like a book or a new podcast for example. So I want them to tell me about that. And then, and this is very important, no rush on the reply. I realize you're probably really busy. The reason we put that in there is because when you hear from somebody that you haven't heard from in two, three, five, 10 years, what I think of is I go great, is it going to be Herbalife or Scientology? Like what do you want man? And so I want to make sure that I break urgency. Because say people were selling something, an idea or some kind of mlm or whatever it is, they're like get back to me as soon as you can, I have an exciting opportunity for you. And you're like, no thanks, I don't want to be excited. What we do is destroy that urgency, where we go hey look, if you don't have time to get back to me, that's fine. I've tested this hundreds of times. My response rate went from about forty something percent, less than half, to about two thirds, by telling people they don't have to get back to me. Weirdly counterintuitive, but I think it's just they know something's up. We've all had that blast from the past. Whoa, my old college, I'm so excited to talk to you, yeah let's go out for a quesadilla. No I don't want to buy this. When can I leave? Right, so we want to destroy any sort of salesy urgency that the person might even build in their own head. And the way you do that is say, no rush on the reply, it doesn't' matter, I know you're busy, just saying hi. Plus some people are really busy or they're not feeling up to it. And maybe they don't want to tell you that they just got divorced, their dog ran away, their life is basically a country music song. Maybe they don't want to talk to you right then. So instead of making them feel guilty, you let them off the hook, and I find that a lot of people say, actually it's good to hear from an old friend, what's going on? And that keeps the conversation going. Then sign your name. I know that seems maybe obvious. A lot of people forget to do this, but the problem is if I get a text from a number I don't know, I can either say like new phone, who this? Or I can just go crap, this person totally knows how I am, I don't know who they are. If I admit I don't know who they are, I look bad. But what I can do is pretend I never saw this, delete. Right, it saves me the trouble. It saves them any embarrassment. So if I don't sign my name, my response rate goes into the toilet. So make sure you sign your name. For Gmail roulette, which is essentially the same drill done with email. I'll be in that same airplane or Starbucks line, I've already sent my texts for the day. I'll open up an email program and I'll type a couple letters and I'll type like b-l or b-a. And it's like oh this person, you mean Barry, oh I haven't talked with him in awhile because it's suggesting all these different people. Some of whom I know, some of whom I don't know. And I'll pick the person that I haven't spoken to in awhile, and I'll write them a very similar script. I'll also make sure that my email signature is in there so maybe you don't have to sign your name, but the rest of the components of the script are the same. And the reason that we do the texting and the email is for a lot of us we don't have everyone's phone number in our phone. But for people who's numbers we do have, those tend to be more intimate or closer connections. Why do I have your phone number if we're not friends at all? Right, it's pretty rare. Logistically it can happen, but it's pretty rare. For email, those are even weaker ties. They're people who maybe I never really got their contact info. Maybe we hung out for a little while or are only business contacts, so it is actually important to do both. Don't just say I hate texting and only do email. And don't just do the texting and then never do the email. Because you feel like it's less important. They're actually equally important for different reasons. So that's all, by the way, at advancedhumandynamics.com. And you can find all of those drills and a bunch more. Furthermore, the way that we introduce people to each other or ask to be introduced is also in this particular handout on page two. It's called the double opt in introduction script. Does everybody see that? So this is important because a lot of people will send emails like this, hey John, meet Mary, she's really great. You guys should totally do a podcast together, and then Mary's like, I've been avoiding John for like six months. Now he's in my inbox. Now I gotta be like, sorry really busy. And now this monkey is on my back. And you're thinking, thanks for the favor Jordan. I really don't appreciate that. And I lose a little bit of social capital in Mary's mind. Also what might happen is I might get that intro and she goes oh okay, I know, I guess I will reply. Yes I want to talk to this person, I'm on a plane, the door's about to close, I'm going to Greece for three weeks. But if I don't reply, I look bad. So really you're throwing a monkey on this person's back if you don't ask for permission before you make that introduction. So you always want to make sure that you get permission from both parties before you make an introduction. And I've got scripts here that will help you do that. You might say, hey John, Mary's really interesting. She's a biologist. I think she'd be great for your show. Are you interested? And then when he says yes, then you can go to the other party and say, hey my friend runs a show. He has a lot of scientists on, would you be interested? Here's sort of his demographic and the number of people that listen. Then you get permission from them as well. Then and only then do you make that introduction to both sides. That way you have double opt in. You have permission from both sides. That script is in here. I don't need to read the entire thing with you. The reason is it's written right here, you can use it. And if you buy the course, you'll get the script as well. Don't even make any other intro ever again that's not this. Unless somebody in rare cases says, any person you think I should meet I will take that introduction. Those are your close friends. Those are people where you've made 15, 50, double opt in introductions over the last few years, and they just know that whoever you're introducing them to is good. But even then, you don't know. They might already know each other, and then you've just wasted both of your, everyone's time really. So it's really just better to do it this way. When you get a mutual yes, it's a thing of beauty. And when you get a no from one side, and this is the important part because this it the question everyone always asks. When you get a no from one side, then what you want to make sure you do is not make it their responsibility. So if I ask Ben if he wants to meet Jane, and she says no, not really, for any reason, it doesn't really matter why. You always let him down easy by saying it's not the right time. You don't have to be like, actually she hates you, funny story, you're a terrible person, I had no idea. You don't have to do that. You don't want to make any sort of friction between them and their relationship. What you say is it's not the right time. It doesn't matter why it's not the right time. If they ask you, the answer is I'm not really sure, I guess they're slammed. You don't want to feed any drama. You don't want to let in any sight into any reason that that person says no. It's really just a function of, we want to let them assume that it's because the other person is busy, which is fine. It's frankly none of their business why they don't want you to introduce them. Maybe they don't like each other. Maybe they're busy. It doesn't matter. If they assume the worst, that's their mindset. That's not your fault. That's not your problem, that's not your fault. You also want to make sure that the person you're introducing is always comfortable with you continuing to do that. And the way that you make sure that happens is by making it your problem or your burden to either make that intro work or cut it off if it's not going to be welcome. Does that make sense? So what you don't want to do, what you want to avoid is not just making introductions that are unwelcome, but making an introduction and then finding out that the other person blew it or isn't being responsive. And another benefit of the double opt in introduction is that if I ask both parties if they want this introduction and they both say yes, they both opt in, they're much more likely to value that introduction with the other person. So if something comes in unsolicited in my inbox, I know this just from my own experience, I might go, yeah I'll answer this in a few weeks, I didn't say that they could do this and so there's no timeline here for me. But if the person asks me beforehand and then I get the introduction, I'm like well I gotta answer it now because I just told them I was game. It's like, hey you want to go out to dinner, sure, but like maybe next year. Nobody does that, right, it's like right now. You mean this week, right. Yeah, of course. So this is something that brings up the value for both sides in this particular interaction. And so you want to make sure that you create that value. This ABG slide that's not cooperating very well for me right now, there we go. Always be giving or always be generous. This is the mindset that I try to have with every single bit of every relationship that I've ever worked with. This is, this is the way I think about introductions. It's the way that I think about helping other podcasters. It makes you look good to always be giving or always be generous. It makes the other person feel good about interacting with you. They'll want to reciprocate. And so what I'm generous with, there's a lot of things really. But I think introductions is good for our purposes here. This is the kind of thing where if I have a really great guest and you say, hey I would love to interview that person. I don't go, well no, because if you do that then mine is less special now. I'm the only person who got this. There are podcasters that do that. They are not well liked. When you have this kind of behind closed doors talk, it's like yeah, this person has people on, but don't bother ever asking them for an intro. They'll never do it. And so what happens is then that person goes, hey how'd you get Shaq, and you go, oh I'm not telling you, jerk face, ever. Oh it was really hard. I definitely don't have a connection I could totally hook you up with, right. Nobody wants to deal with somebody like that. So I, by default, I'm always generous. Even unfortunately sometimes with people who in my opinion don't really deserve it. I still want to do this because being stingy really only hurts you in the long run. It's a network effect that's positive for everyone if you just help other people get what they want. I think this is one of the those old Zig Ziggler Brian Tracy quotes, you'll get what you want if you help other people get what they want. It's really true when it comes to relationships and connections. And networking is something that I've been teaching for years and you will always, always, always be better off having made a really brilliant network around you that's rich with connections between. You don't just want to be the hub. That's a sort of scarcity mindset. If everyone has to go through you, they're going to start making connections with each other outside of you and they're going to value those connections a lot more because you're being gatekeeper-y. That's not a real word, but you know what I mean. But if you're really generous with that, they don't have to do that. They don't have to work around you because you're going to be stingy or like oh yeah I'll introduce you to him if you wash my car, right. You don't want to have that kind of quid pro quo mindset. If you're really generous, people will happily go through you, which means you know who's talking to who. You know what's going on. Opportunities are flowing around and through you in a way where you're aware of it. Which means that you can latch on to those if you want to. Like oh yeah, you want to interview this person, well great, I have three other people that would be really good for you. And then when they get a guest, they can't wait to help you. Oh finally I get a chance to help you back because you've given me so many opportunities. Or yeah, I am having a panel here at Creative Live about podcasting, I was going to ask you for some other introductions, but why don't you also come and do a segment on networking and show prep, why not, it makes sense. So I've made intros to Jonathan Fields, who's teaching in this class. Sereny Raul, who's going to be here later. Other people taking part in the same course, we're always helping each other out. Very rarely are we like, do I want to make this introduction? And then hopefully that instinct is also stifled because we're doing the ABG, always be generous, and we're trying to internalize that as much as possible. Alright, so I use Contactually, which is a piece of software, to maintain my connections. This is a CRM, it's not something you have to use. It's kind of what salespeople use to make sure that their leads are all in one place. It doesn't sound like you need this, but eventually with the application of your networking skills that you've gained from this course and elsewhere. You're going to find that you're having trouble keeping up with people regularly. The texting drills, the Gmail roulette, the advanced human dynamics stuff, the level one stuff. It's not necessarily going to keep you moving as fast as you want. So when I have, when I open up Contactually, there's 1100 people in there. That might either sound like not very much or a ton, but I assure you, if you're writing to these people every month, two months, three months. That's a lot of people to keep in touch with on a regular basis. Unless you're some kind of savant, you just are not at all keeping this stuff fresh in your head at all. And I also use the Facebook birthday calendar to keep people re-engaged. What I do is I'll download this and I'll put it into my Google calendar. And then it shows the person's birthday, who I'm friends with on Facebook. Instead of just sending them a message on Facebook, I'll send them a text. Again, more intimate. We also know that text messages are read, something like 100% are read within 10 minutes. Not true for Facebook messages. We don't have stats on that, but from my own experience, something like half of them are read at some point ever in my entire life, right. So the birthday calendar, download it. It'll send you a little reminder in the morning when you get up, these five people have birthdays. Text, text, text. Plus it's really good for being like, why am I friends with this person, unfriend, right. Happy birthday, deleted. Right, so I also like to use what I call opportunistic network maintenance. This is Facebook or Instagram. I use the newsfeed for this. If I'm looking at my newsfeed or looking at my Instagram feed and someone had a baby, instead of just clicking the heart or clicking like or leaving a comment, that's like congrats or worse, some emoji thing. Right, I will send that person a text message, give them a phone call, this is a big life event, right. The algorithm has figured out that this is an important life event. It's showing it to a ton of people. You click like, you make a comment. You and 1100 other people on someone's wedding photo. I'm not looking at that. But if I get a text message from you, I'll probably remember you a lot more. So there's this engagement hierarchy that I use, which is essentially a like is less than a comment of course. But all of those fall underneath an email, which far fewer people will do. Which of course falls beneath a text message because not everyone has my phone number who has my email of course. And then above that a phone call if appropriate. And a little asterisk there on if appropriate, because sometimes it's like, hey how did you get, why are you calling me? We're not at that level of friendship, come on. And then in person, really caveated, right. Like don't just show up at their house, hey I heard you had a baby. Like okay I'm deleting all my social media now. Right, that kind of thing is great if it's a friend, family member. It's really good to say like hey, I'd love to stop by at some point when you guys get settled. That's really nice. That's really nice and you'll remember the five people who stopped by after your wedding, honeymoon, when everything was over to say hello to you and your new wife, family, whatever it is. Versus the people who just clicked like on a photo or made a comment. I don't remember any of those people. I remember everybody that stopped by and pretty much everybody who called or texted after that. So I'm actually here, like I said, because I reached out via text to somebody who worked at Creative Live randomly a couple of months ago. And they said look we're doing a podcasting thing. We're finalizing the lineup right now, really good timing on your email. It's a numbers game. Right, some people will just say hey, nothing more going on, work's work. The family's the family, nice to hear from you, the end. One out of every let's say 20, which is one person per week if you're doing five a day, is going to say something like, yeah I have a speaking gig for you in Hawaii. Are you ready to do that? Do you want to do that? Someone just dropped out. It's not really in your niche, but why not, here you are in my inbox. That's why I'm going to Hawaii later this year. Someone was supposed to talk about real estate. They aren't going there anymore, so there's a seat open. The room's booked. And they said yeah, we'll fly you and Jen to Hawaii if you want to do your networking spiel like you did last year. Sure, free trip to Hawaii. Thanks random text message from the Starbucks line at an airport. It's worthwhile. It is worthwhile. Not just for what you can get out of it, but for being generous with other people as well.