Avijit Arya from Internetmoguls has 200 different keynote presentations. He’s never had a standing ovation till today, so Ricky encourages us to give him one now.
How many in this room find ourselves struggling with what content I should use, what community should I share it with? But we don’t give up. I will leave you with a strategy to build a successful online audience.
Backstory: At the age of 21 I only wanted to race street cars, which was illegal, so I got into 9 major car crashes. One day my dad asked to speak to me, and it was serious. He had two landline phones off the hook which meant he was serious. I couldn’t look at him, I was looking at the floor. And he said, Son, I’m going to give it to you straight. Start working in the family business from tomorrow morning, or get out of the house. I didn’t want to be kicked out. Next morning I made a choice. I found myself behind my dad’s hotel reception. Learned all of the jobs, met lots of people.
Google was just coming on the scene. Facebook and Tripadvisor,e tc hadn’t been born. I met some people at Google, and we paid a ppc program to run ads for my hotel. We got so much business, we built another hotel in one year. It took forty years to build the first one. We had five successful hotels built in five years. By then, everyone else knew about Google, so we had to do something different.
We set up a small team and called ourselves the Internet Moguls, built on a small business owner increasing his business 500% in five years. Now we are doing this for communities all around the world. We work with small businesses to Fortune 500.
The first thing you need to do is to discover your own story. We all have a story, even if they think they don’t, or it’s not interesting. It sometimes takes a marketer to find your story, but everyone has a great story. I was staying at a resort in Goa, and this guy said let’s have breakfast, and he talked about how his cuisine reflected the travels and research they’d done, etc, etc, and I was charged up to work with these people. We get to the conference room, the owners sit there and say here’s the branding…and none of it was special. None of it was interesting. So we revised their story and got them to tell their real story to their guests. The story is extremely important; it can be a tagline or paragraphs. But you MUST develop your own story. Marketers can just polish it.
Sharing #SMMastery gold from stage! Thanks #AskAriArya pic.twitter.com/75U3sNeZ1u
— Dai Manuel (he/him) (@daimanuel) June 4, 2016
It’s like going to the gym. If you are talking about how to build a global audience, you must have a ritual for that too, like the gym. If you are putting in the work and the results aren’t happening, there’s a problem. 60-90 minutes a day.
Have you done the steps?
- I have created an amazing piece of content today? Video, blog post, whatever. The most important, time consuming.
- I will initiate a dialogue on two linkedin groups and two google groups or Facebook groups. Leverage the power of community.
- I will reach out and send a personal message to three people every day. Reach other people you want to connect with. Make a list.
- I will meet two new people IRL. Combining IRL and online is incredibly powerful.
- I will help someone else promote their content today.
The Six Circle Plan: This plan has worked for over 1150 clients. We do a story, we do the rituals, we have the six circles of success. Put in: Your first six domestic audiences/geographies. Then your top six international audiences/geographies. Google studies will tell you which demographics will buy which products, etc. Then when are they looking? If it’s a seasonal business, you need to know that. So now you have 12 answers to fill in. When are they booking? That’s different from when they’re looking. Most campaigns fail when you find out when they’re looking, but not when they’re booking. What are they booking is the next key piece. And finally, what offer/price do you need to give them?
50% of the energy of a rocket launch is just getting off the launch pad. That’s where most of the energy is expended. Avi is giving out five gifts: the first five people who reach out to him here will win a month’s In Orbit coaching at #AskAviArya.
I keep flashing back to that day in my dad’s room, thinking “what if I had not made that choice? I’d probably be dead by now.” I hope and pray for all of you, that you will make the right choice as well.
