Continuing the celebration of International Women’s Day, we talk to Juliet Clark – funnel lead generation and assessment marketing consultant and the host of Promote, Profit, Publish. Empowering women by helping them get their messages across, Juliet talks about creating an impact in the world through a marketing that is about relationship building. She takes us into publishing books, having a podcast, and promoting them.

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Promote, Profit, And Publish Your Message with Juliet Clark

 

I’m on for International Women’s Day with great women podcasters. That’s what I’ve decided to bring you. One of them is my dear friend. I’ve given Juliet Clark a new title. You are an author, speaker, expert, a funnel lead generation and assessment marketing consultant. I gave you all of that because that is exactly what you do. You have a cool podcast that you’re helping people out. It is Promote, Profit, Publish. Welcome to International Women’s Day, Juliet Clark.

Thank you. It’s such an honor to be with you.

I absolutely have so much fun talking with you because you have such deep knowledge about what’s working and what’s not working. I love that we can dive into how stuff works because there are so many podcasts. There are so many people out there who want to talk about stories and other things like that. While that’s important to work that in, especially as an author, it’s also important to get to the nuts and bolts of how stuff work because if we don’t make money, why are we doing this? Because it’s not enriching our lives and it’s not about money, but it’s about making sure that the venture that we’re engaging in is generating the traffic and is doing what we expect it to do. If it’s not engaging people, then we’re not impacting anyone and then we’re definitely not making money.

It is a little bit about money. Let’s get it out there. If we’re spinning our wheels and not making money with what we’re generating, that’s a problem for most of us because we won’t be able to continue. If we want to make a great impact in the world, we have to get our message and everything out there.

I didn’t tell you this. I don’t know if you know this, but I read your books. Because I know you pretty well, it’s insightful to read your books. You wrote fiction books first, which is a lot more challenging.

For a very long time, I wanted to write a book. I was going through a horrible divorce. It was bad. As in most divorces, when it gets bad, we want to kill the other person. I’m blonde. I would never look good in felony orange. I killed him in the book. It was fun. It was cathartic.

When I read it, you could see healing happening through the book. You can read that in the lines only because I know you. That’s the whole point of a book. The whole point of it is to resonate with someone, engage them and move them through something that they’re also moving through. It is also that for the author as well.

If it's not engaging people, then we're not impacting anyone. Click To Tweet

It’s funny because I talk a lot with the writing coach that I work with extensively, Chris Johnson. We talk about writer’s block and why it happens. I truly believe that writer’s block comes up because that is the point at which the Universe or whoever it is that you believe in says, “Halt, it’s time for you to chew on this a little bit.”

You’ve got to deal with you first.

“I’ve allowed you to go on this journey of writing a book, but now I’m going to stop you and let you go through this emotional cathartic journey before I allow you to get back to your senses and keep writing.”

I had Christy Whitman on. Christy’s books all came as a download to her. She literally sat down and wrote them all. I was like, “I think there are a lot of authors out there that are going to be jealous of that happening.”

There were no downloads going on here. I carry a notebook with me almost everywhere. There was a lot of waking up in the middle of the night and grabbing a pen. My family, when we go to restaurants, we’ll play a little game where we’ll see a person at a table and we’ll make up a whole story around it and write down the mannerisms of them. We’re people watchers.

In your journey to write these books, promote them, go out there and become an author, you discovered the number one problem that I find every single day from the authors and speakers I talked to. It’s all in the same world is that they think, “If I write this book, then it happens. I have authority. I get press. The promotion comes.” It doesn’t come after you publish. It all comes in the front, which is why your podcast name is all swished around. Talk a little bit about that.

One of the things that happened when we started our own publishing company is we had nonfiction authors bringing us books. We would ask them, “Why did you write this?” We kept hearing over and over that they had gone to some writer workshop and said, “My products and services aren’t selling.” The writing coach said, “It’s because you don’t have a book.” We called BS on that and said, “No, that’s not why these things aren’t selling. It’s because you haven’t cultivated your audience.” We have a very different system from any other publishing company out there. We’ve ended up expanding into the entrepreneurial world as well because we use assessment marketing at the front end.

Promote Your Message: You’re never going to retire to an island in The Bahamas with your book royalties.

 

Let’s write the right book. Let’s connect with the right audience. Let’s build that audience as we go along and find out what their wants and needs are. Instead of guessing pain points and guessing who they are and barfing your life story all over everyone, which never makes a good book. You’re never going to retire to an island in The Bahamas with your book royalties. That doesn’t happen. Let’s go back and connect with that audience so we can start selling the things that do have an impact besides a book, like those programs, products and services. Let’s go back and tweak them and get them all right or if we start at the beginning with you, let’s get them right the first time.

That’s the point. Juliet knows this, but most of you all out there don’t know this. I don’t have a book. I’ve been writing a column for four years and I still don’t have my book. The reason is I have multiple manuscripts sitting behind my desk. It’s three versions of books. Each time I came to the same decision after I got too far into writing it that it’s not the right book for me. It’s not the right book for what my audience wants. They’re tabled. The interesting thing is that over time with my podcast and other things, I have built the audience for one of those books. It’s going to come out. The other one I signed on with you to publish our podcast book is How to Podcast. That’s coming out. You’re going to be a part of that. I’m so glad because I don’t think I could do this without you.

I’m excited too because this is the first book that we’re releasing with a product.

Most people don’t know that. I’ve not made the announcement. Let’s make the announcement. We’re releasing it with a microphone set. The microphone and the book all come together as a set or you can buy the book separate and the microphone separate, it’s up to you. We’re going to do that. That is different because we were going to be able to test out some new things that go on like Amazon cross-selling, things that have never been tested before. I always like to be the experiment. That’s always good for us to experiment on ourselves and make sure stuff works because you and I both believe this. If it’s not working for everyone, then it doesn’t work.

There are tweaks and other things that you’d have to do for industries and different personalities and things like that. If the system itself underneath it doesn’t work, then it’s not working. I want to talk about the system because you could say assessment marketing and some people are like, “I don’t know what that means. What is that?” The short version is called a quiz, but that’s not what it is at all. Talk a little bit about that and why it’s so essential.

The system we use is a proprietary system that someone else developed. I believe they’re about to re-launch as well. What sets it apart from all of the quizzes out there is it has a commitment section. The autoresponder in the background runs off that commitment section. In the course of the quiz, we’re finding out if we’re in front of the right audience. We’re finding out when they answered the quiz questions, when they’re based along the lines of what we teach or what we do. We’re seeing patterns where people are telling us over and over, “That’s where I need help.” It takes all the guesswork out of our content.

When the autoresponder spins off, if someone is very highly committed with the way we ask the questions, then we start a conversation. Here’s the bit I’m going to give you that I truly believe, and I may be wrong, but I don’t see it from the evidence out there. Digital marketing is not the end-all-be-all. You have to have a way to have the conversations begin. You don’t sell big-ticket products without those conversations. What our system does is it brings people not only into those pep content patterns but then it spins them off into who is highly committed, who are we talking to, who are we building a relationship with. It’s basically a qualified lead generation in a sense. We have it all tapped.

Digital marketing is not the end-all be-all. Click To Tweet

You have many different ways. There are ways to use it. If you’re speaking on stage, there are ways to use it when you’re promoting your book. There are ways to use it on your landing pages, on your website or in social. There are all different ways that you can use it. They should be customized and different as we’ve discovered over time. That’s where you’ve refined the system into something brilliantly yours, Juliet. No giving credit to anyone else but you on that. I’m not going to let you. You can see we’re friends, but we also have a mentor relationship as well. Your copywriting skills and your ability to take a look at someone’s funnel and go, “This is what’s broken with it.” It all comes down to the same thing that you were mentioning here, which is that it’s about relationship building. At the end of the day, if I can’t have a conversation with them, then the sales don’t happen.

Many other digital marketers have the phases where they bring them in, they nurture them and then they go into a sale. The nurturing is great, but you can’t do all this with email. You have to have those conversations. You’re unable to sell a big-ticket item just from an email. Nobody clicks anymore. Too many people have been burned. Our consumers are getting much savvier. We see that as things change every year. I talked to someone that told me, “I’ve been trying to figure this all out from reading books.” When you’re writing a book on it, a lot of times the book is outdated almost by the time it’s released because the market has shifted.

I was talking to one of the program directors for Author Millionaire. That’s exactly what he said. He’s like, “I don’t have a book out because every time I go to sit down and write the book, I realize it’s already outdated. It frustrates me.” I was like, “Let’s talk about having a podcast because then that makes sense because it can always be current.” That’s where you can balance those two things where you can have the book, but you can continue to supplement it and invite people in. At least you do have that out there with the basics, with the core or the essence of your program or the system or how you do something. That’s there but you can continue to support them with ongoing and current content.

That’s what we were afraid about with our podcast book. I’ve had to rewrite three sections over the four months that we’d been editing this book and writing it. I had to rewrite three sections because industry things change. We can now go to Spotify and we couldn’t before so I had to add it. Our equipment changed because we invented our new microphones so we had to add that in. These things happen. I do love the ability to have both things go hand-in-hand and so do you. It seems like we send clients back and forth all the time right now.

We do and what I love about that too is when you have a book and you have a podcast and you have the assessment, you have the ability within a book that you don’t usually have. You can link to a podcast and people can hear you. They can hear how credible you are. That’s not generally something you can do within a book. The other thing is when a book is on Amazon, like with the podcast, iTunes owns the stats. You don’t know who is listening. It’s the same with the book. Amazon owns the stats. By bringing those tools in, you’re able to catch those off funnel areas that traditionally we don’t get clients from.

You’ve got to own your own authority. That’s what we always say here at Podetize and Feed Your Brand. We want you to own your own authority and you do too. There are some potholes, giant ones sometimes like they’re caverns. That happened in the self-publishing world and in the hybrid publishing world. I know you know it. That’s one of the reasons why we were going with you to publish our book because you understand those. At the end of the day, you subscribe to the same thing we do which is at the end of the day, that authority needs to belong to us, not to some publishing group. Tell us a little bit about those things because there may be some people reading this for the first time and they’re about to go publish their book and maybe make all those mistakes.

Especially in the self-publishing world, that was one of the things that propelled me into deciding that I needed my own company. They sell a lot of promotion that doesn’t serve you as the author. Here’s a great example. When I was doing this, I could have paid $2,000 to have my books out to their list of over a million people. Let’s be clear on that, that list of over a million people. Those aren’t people who like mystery novels. Those are people who want to self-publish. What they’re doing is having you pay them to promote themselves. There’s a lot of that that goes on in the self-publishing world.

Promote Your Message: You got to own your own authority.

 

It’s similar in podcasting too like, “Join this.” In reality, it’s free but it’s not free. You’re being promoted, but they are being promoted is the most important part. It’s the same thing here in self-publishing. How you publish anything, whether it’s your podcast or your book matters for you to take control of that because otherwise, you don’t get your statistics right. You don’t get your audience right. At the end of the day, you’re not getting to the right people who are going to benefit and get impacted by your words.

The one thing that authors consistently miss is your book as a product. You have to approach the publishing every piece of it exactly as if it were a physical product or an intellectual product like the strainer you buy down at Target. It’s a physical piece of product and you have to be able to market it and launch it that way.

It wouldn’t be International Women’s Day if we didn’t talk a little bit about the theme. The theme is #BalanceforBetter and I also threw in there #LifeInHarmony because you know that my philosophy is harmony. What many people don’t know about you is you are extremely athletic and extremely outdoorsy compared to me, totally different compared to me. Is that how you balance things for yourself?

That’s how I balance a lot of things. It’s my stress reliever. I love nature. I love to run. I’ve been told so many times you need to give up running. You’re too old. I’m turning 58 years old. I’m not giving up running. It is being out in nature of the fresh air and clearing your head. It’s amazing when you go out for a run in the morning or a hike in the afternoon. I come back a new person.

You live in such a beautiful area in Utah too. I’ve been lucky to be there both a little bit in the winter and a little bit in the fall, but it was so beautiful. I look forward to coming in the spring so that we can get all the seasons going here. You live in an area that fits that lifestyle too for you. That’s part of it. You made a choice to move there. You used to live out here in California. You made a choice to move there so that you could be surrounded and in a place that fed you.

Truth be told, I followed my children here.

Any last words of advice? Tell us a little bit about the podcast and what people can expect. What else would you like to share?

I’d love for you to listen to it. As exactly as Tracy said, we do things a little bit ass backward around here, but it works. You can expect a lot of experts and a lot of people talking about sequencing, speaking, publishing and the assessment. What it takes to bring all of this together because none of this is one piece. It’s all these moving parts integrated together and just getting it right is a difficult one sometimes. I’d love to have you on board.

Thank you so much. Happy International Women’s Day, Juliet Clark. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you. Happy International Women’s Day to you as well. It’s a great service what you’re doing for women everywhere.

 

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About Juliet Clark

Hi. I’m Juliet Dillon Clark, Founder of Super Brand Publishing and our expertise-first approach stems directly from my own disillusioning personal experience with my first book back in 2008. I thought my background with traditional publishing would make self-publishing easy. I realized that this process did nothing but take advantage of unsuspecting authors, who didn’t know that there was a better way.

I decided to make that better way available, through the creation of Super Brand Publishing. Over the years I brought my expertise to corporate clients like Mattel, Nissan, Price Stern Sloan Publishing, and HP Books. While I enjoyed the work, and was good at it, I felt like something was missing. I realized that what I really wanted to be doing was helping individuals, not corporations, further their success and find fulfillment.

Since then, I have helped more than 600 entrepreneurs and authors share their work with the world and have published more than 60 books, turning more than 190 authors/entrepreneurs into best-selling experts! Let’s cut through the clutter and get your message across so that you can cultivate your fan base, increase sales, and reach a level of success beyond what you thought possible.

 

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