Full show note for this episode can be found at https://jakehower.com/how-to-build-a-highly-engaged-audience-with-chris-brogan/

We have got Chris Brogan from chrisbrogan.

com and human business works on the call today.

We're going into something which I feel is incredibly important to building a

presence online and multimedia marketing.

Now the purpose essentially of all of our marketing.

For A's is essentially to build a community and to make sales or

generate sales in your business.

Now, the best way I feel to do that is to build an engaged audience.

So rather than focus on any of the different forms of multimedia

marketing, I thought it's really important to get a good framework

about why you're doing this.

And that's where I thought of Chris Brogan.

He's a.

A published author of a of a number of books, and he's an

expert in building an audience.

He's got a huge audience, and I thought bring him on this episode

to discuss how you can go about building your own audience and how

you can stay engaged with them.

Tune in to that in just a second.

And after the episode I'm going to run through a couple of different sites and

apps that I've been using lately, which I think you would really appreciate.

We've got Chris Brogan from Human Business Works on the line.

Chris, how are

you?

Thrilled to be here, Jake.

Thanks for having me.

No, and thank you very much for taking the time to

come on the episode and to share your knowledge with our listeners.

Oh, I'm so glad to be here.

And it's really cool that more people are getting interested now in doing different

kinds of marketing via multimedia.

Absolutely.

Now that's certainly the premise of this show is generally we'll

interview or bring on a guest each week to discuss a form of multimedia

that they're really dominating in.

I could obviously bring you on and discuss just about any of those forms of media,

but I think before even doing that, there's one really important aspect.

To, to doing this type of marketing and it's about engaging with

your audience and this is where I really think you shine through.

Very you to say, I think that is in a lot of ways,

that's where everyone falls down because they'll work really hard

on making something really good.

And then I think that the opportunity is a little bit that, you make great

media, but then you have to follow up with it or it just goes dead.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

So what's what we're trying to do for our listeners is essentially lay a very

strong foundation so that any of their marketing endeavors that they take that

they roll out are actually going to be, yeah Going to have the maximum effect.

Chris, what I'd what I'd like to do is for those listeners who don't know a

lot about you, if you could maybe give us a brief history of what you were

doing leading up to where you are right

now.

Sure.

Thumbnail sketches that I was back into the land of bulletin board

services way back in the eighties.

In 1998, I started blogging in 2005 or so I started a podcast and then

in no six, I ran an event called pod camp with Christopher S pen.

And from that, I really started to realize that there's just so

much more business opportunity.

And I left my background in telecom and wireless telecom and joined the circus

and started running some events in the space of Media making a video on the net

was the first one I did with Jeff Pulver.

And then since there I've, I started in sold a consultancy and now my company,

human business works does courses around helping people do the work they want to do

only better, mostly in the digital space.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's fantastic.

And so essentially so for the last few years you, you've got a fantastic personal

blog, which is is it still it's top five in the ad age marketing blogs, I believe.

Yeah.

Usually it bounces around with a few other folks in the top five, top 10 or so.

Let's just take a look at the time of our recording.

I'll probably be way down bottom or something and be miserable.

Hang on.

I'm three.

I'm ahead of shoe money and copy blogger, but I'm behind ads of the world and PSFK

both, by the way, who have something like, a dozen or more people writing for them.

Excellent.

So what we're going to run through in this episode is that

we're going to, I think, first, I'd love to ask ask you some of your your

experience in how you've gone about building your own community and how

you're engaging with your own community.

Then we are gonna deliver some some action points that our listeners

can go away and roll outs in their own marketing endeavors as well.

But before we do that, I've got a quick question going back to the

heyday of the internet and you said you've you were playing around with

some some journaling and stuff online.

How did you, was there any interaction with your Raiders?

Did you know you'd

had any Raiders?

No, because there weren't comments back then and there weren't

really very easy ways to do that.

So I, way back when I had like a guest book I don't know if you even

remember that technology, but it'd be like, come sign my stupid guest book.

And that was like as close as we could have to like any kind of

human interaction and truly it just.

It didn't even make sense to me that there should be interaction, but that I, I think

like a lot of writers and authors, I think there's that thing where we're really

craving feedback and, we're just sitting around as like needy as people could be.

And so I, I kept really abreast of those kinds of tools, what sorts

of tools would allow us to do better interactions with people.

And that's how I.

Made it roll.

Yeah,

absolutely.

And that's it's amazing how quickly we've come so far in the

last few years in terms of that

as well.

Oh, truly.

It just every single day seems to bring us something new to to add to the potential

for connectivity as well as to give people the set of tools that will allow them to

disenfranchise their community as well.

Absolutely.

All right.

Let's let's lay the foundation for our listeners.

I want to get your experience in how you've built your community, but

before you do that, can you give us some stats or some some information

around what your community now entails?

Sure.

So on my blog, I get around 200, 000 unique monthly views.

And that took me a really long time for anyone who just blocked out that number.

It took me eight years to get my first 100 readers.

So don't forget that.

On twitter, I think I have 227, 000.

About 22, 000 on my personal newsletter, which comes out every Sunday.

My favorite thing, by the way.

And then various other places like Google plus I have over a hundred

thousand and I don't much use Facebook or LinkedIn for business.

So neither one of those counts to me.

Yeah.

Okay.

I have no

problems.

That's great.

So that gives us a little bit of perspective.

So it took you a number of years to get your first hundred readers.

How'd you go about engaging these

readers?

Eventually I got smart enough to put my email address on the website before

there were blog comments and so that I could get people to write me and

say, Hey, I really liked that story or I liked that thing you shared.

And when I switched perspectives, the other thing that got a lot of engagement.

Was I first used to write for myself and I learned that's great

if I want to impress myself.

And when I started learning how to write for other people and write to

serve a community, that's when things really lit up because people would want

to engage because I was giving them more tools to do their work better.

So really from a long ways back, once I caught onto that perspective, the life

of, my world just got so much better.

Okay, fantastic.

So it was essentially you're able to engage in by just realizing

that you need to write for the right for your reader or your your community.

Now tell me did you get to, or have you ever felt you've gotten to a stage where.

Your community has grown to a size that you can't actually handle.

No, and again, at 200, 000 or so people, and with the 20, 000 plus

email list, what happens every Sunday morning, which is when my newsletter

comes out, I'll get somewhere between 300 and 500 replies, because I strongly

encourage replies in the email newsletter.

And so some people are like, 300 to 500 mail, what are you doing?

But I love it because what people are, when people are complaining,

I'm saying, wow, that's three to 500 possible impressions.

I can give people of what kind of a person I am, that I'm there, that I'm

listening, that I'm there to serve them.

And then oddly, when I have something to sell, the person will choose to buy it

because one of the laws of influence is that people buy from people they like.

And so by getting the opportunity to show people that I might well be the

kind of person they like, they have better opportunity to go forward.

Yeah, that's that's incredible.

And as you say, it's fantastic that you take that mindset considering how large

your audience is and you're exactly right.

People buy from people.

And here's the thing for, from my perspective, you only need 50.

Engaged customers to run a business and to run a very profitable business.

That's a, it's an incredible way to look

at it.

In my goal is I, my number is a little higher than 50 of who I

really need because I'm hoping not to sell people into the ground.

So what I have figured out is that somewhere around a

thousand, just like Kevin Kelly's concept of a thousand true fans.

So what I'm looking at is, how do I get about a thousand people You know,

at any one time as people who have bought, and then I can keep the larger

community 10 times or more than that, or a hundred times more than that.

So if I had a community of about a hundred thousand that I engaged with as

much as I could, then I have the sense that I'd have a standard steady 1000.

But those are, those are numbers based on the price points of the products and

services that I sell now, which are.

An average price point around 400.

So that's just the numbers I worked out and it's going to be different

for every one of our businesses.

Yep, absolutely.

All right.

So you've built your communities.

Has it been mainly built around your personal

blog?

It has.

The great majority of what has brought me some success was just

building around my personal blog.

And there's a few times I've really lamented that.

I've had three different sale offers on my site.

And I, part of me was just like, yippee, I'd love to.

And the other part was like, how am I going to sell chrisbrogan.

com?

That's my name.

So I have never gone with it.

And so I have a little regret, like I wish that I had thought that through

and maybe made the blog called, amazing, incredible writing guy.

com or something, but.

That, that said, Jake what I've done for a strategy is make sure that

everyone feels like they know me.

And when that is true that makes it easier all the way around.

Exactly right.

And I think potentially you're selling yourself a little bit short there, but

building your own personal brand is very important because You're going to

need it for as long as you're on this earth and you built that personal brand

initially, but you then being able to build out satellite brands around

your own personal brand, I guess I'd assume that's what you're thinking is

a little bit with human business works.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And it's not, my belief isn't that we need a whole ton of personal

brands out there in the world.

What the what the opportunities are basically are that people

want to do business with people.

So how do we teach companies of any size or how do we teach professionals

inside companies to do something new?

Really important.

And I think to me, that's the big opportunity is you can teach

people how to build concierge class service, very bespoke service.

And I think that's a biggie.

So that's where I push people.

Yeah.

Okay.

No problems.

All right.

Let's let's look at then your engagement with your audience.

You you touched on earlier about the fact that you're getting three or

400 emails on a Sunday morning or so.

Could you run us through your process for handling, handling your

interaction with your audience?

It's rather boring and embarrassing.

I start at the top and I work my way down.

It's just as simple as that.

And I would say that The trick of it is, every now and again, there's something

that'll come up a lot of times in a row and I'll use on a Mac, I use this

app called text expander and make part of my response a copy paste kind of

a thing, but more often than not, I'd rather do it, a hundred percent myself.

There's times when a lot of times people ask a very similar question and I think

there's nothing wrong with automating part of your answer, as long as you

personalize it enough that people feel.

Seen and heard that's, humankind's greatest need is the need to feel wanted.

So all I do over and over again is find ways to better express

that through digital technology.

Absolutely.

All right.

Okay.

Let's go back a few years and let's go to You've written a couple of books now.

How did the opportunity come across for you to write a

book?

Oh, Jake, it's so embarrassing to tell this story because it's so unlike anyone

else's opportunity would ever be this way.

I was sitting at South by Southwest, which is a big event in Austin, Texas in the U.

S.

And I was sitting at the table with Ellen Gerstein, who at the time was

director of marketing for Wiley.

And she was asking me, hey, where would this book be?

And she named a title that.

It was coming out, where would that sit in a bookstore shelf?

And I said in this kind of bookstore, it would be in business

profiles in this bookstore.

They don't have that.

So it would be in general business.

And she just looked sideways and said how come you don't have a book deal?

I said, because books are horrible.

That takes a long time.

They're slow.

You don't make a lot of money and I'd rather just blog.

And she said, Oh, you should totally have a book deal.

And, my ego got the best of me and there it went.

And so I got a book deal.

I called up my friend Julian Smith and said, Hey, you feel

like writing a book with me?

And he said okay.

And so we, with no better skill or ability than that, just knowing that

Julian was a very avid blogger like myself, we wrote the book Trust Agents.

And by...

Absolute sheer luck.

We hit the New York times bestseller list, the wall street journal,

bestseller list Amazon and ink magazine.

And we're named one of the top books of the year from 800 CEO reads.

So not bad for our first time out.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

It's as I say for she luck, it's that's it.

That's an incredible high run.

Not bad.

I haven't repeated it since three more books later, not once again

on the times list, but whatever.

Once you're that New York times bestselling author, you're the

bestselling author of the crappiest book you could ever write to.

You still get to put that on the cover.

Yes.

They can't take it away from you.

All right.

Let's let's get to the actual item for our listeners for for this

episode let's start with how would you suggest our listeners given I've

got a blank canvas, how would they go about building their own audience out?

My, my opinion is first start with the content itself, which is

start with making sure the content is such that people will be served by it.

If you're speaking, no matter what you're making, if you're making

a podcast or a video blog or.

Blog posts or newsletter or all of those things combined.

If it's all about you and it's all about how great your company is

and how great you are and what you do, then no one's going to care.

That's like when we were little kids and we used to want to play

superheroes together, only one Batman, only one Superman, et cetera.

It's just not as fun.

So make everybody else the hero and you succeed.

So that's.

My first piece of advice is in the content.

Second, really streamline how you present that content to people such that they

know exactly what you want them to do.

Such as, you can make it as easy as possible for them to subscribe.

In the old days, this used to be...

Grab my RSS feed, just it never really caught on tech savvy.

People understood what to do with that, and very few others did.

So what I've done is for instance, in the previous iterations of my

website, I just made it more email.

So I get 60 something percent of my blog readers are in an email format.

I've gone even one step deeper I've eliminated even that and I don't even seek

new blog subscribers, I only seek email subscribers because that's where my gold

is so make it easy for them to get to you.

Three, make it really easy for people to contact you and get

back in touch with them as soon as possible, as often as possible.

And I think that's such a huge piece that gets missed by people for try really hard

to answer the person's question such that it serves them and almost never try to

make it, if you took my special course, although sometimes that is the right

answer, 90% of those stuff that I do, I give away for free and I find that with

that immense perceived Generosity, what people get from that is the sense that,

oh, boy, but if he's going to charge for this, it's going to be gold in there.

And so I think that's an important thing.

And I guess last, in looking this all over, just really keep

working and working on brevity.

Simplicity quality, because it's not amateur hour anymore.

If you go look at video blogs or if you listen to podcasts, the days of

us having really low quality material is just not allowed anymore because

it's so inexpensive to do it well.

And it's so simple with some practice to do it well that it's just not

okay anymore to do it simple.

Wow.

You make the entire process sound so simple.

I love it.

One thing I just want to point out with that as well or add to it one

of my businesses is a travel agency.

And the goal of our marketing is to bring in new clients or bring in more clients.

And there's one thing I've noticed that there's this whole

section of our audience who.

Have never really booked with us.

And at first glance, I thought maybe these guys are a time sap, but we, in

further investigation, I've found that the vast majority of the people who

are really engaged with us who haven't booked I'd call them raving fans.

Essentially what they do is that they refer.

There are a lot of people to us.

So while they're not potentially prospective clients, what they are

is awesome advocates of the brand.

And as a result, they bring in a whole heap of extra clients.

The best way to get that going is to start referring

other people that you consider peers or even sometimes competitors.

The more you can do that sort of generous giving, then reciprocity kicks in and

people are going to want to refer you when the time is obvious and right.

Remember this too, you're serving a community and the community will

always be larger than the marketplace, but don't ever shun the community

for the sake of the marketplace.

Serve the customers who pay you, but love the community who loves you.

Because that's where that gets grown.

So to me, that's the biggest hinge that you can put in this whole thing.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

All right, Chris.

Thanks very much.

It's a nice, short, sharp episode, but there's a lot of gold in, in

that for our listeners, where can

they find out more about you?

I guess the easiest is just come to chrisbrogan.

com and that'll give you the biology of me and give you a

sense of where you can push some

buttons.

All right.

Fantastic.

Listeners, thank you very much for tuning in and Chris, thank

you very much for coming on.

My utmost pleasure thanks so much for having me jake thank