Marketing is influenced by sales and people act positively when they are influenced positively. Dustin Matthews is on an interview tour, going from one podcast to another, showing entrepreneurs that this is a good and fun way to promote sales and marketing. Podcast guests have this dilemma of sounding like a robot when they put their same message out again and again. Dustin’s simple solution is to customize your message. You can do this by knowing who your audience is and what kind of dialogue they want to engage in. He shares that the best podcasts he’s been on are the ones that made him feel like he was having a conversation with the audience.

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We have such a fun interview for you. This is one our favorite people, Dustin Mathews. He’s a brilliant marketer, author, and speaker. Dustin has all this useful digital marketer energy but he bases it with these great genius marketing gurus. Dan Kennedy is his mentor. They also authored books together. He’s got such strong bases in great copywriting and marketing and just the principles of it that are the foundation of everything that he does. He’s got this great tech mind that then takes it and figures out how to make it faster, better, more powerful, and more impactful, and he does that so brilliantly. When I first met him, I’m going to tell that story because it is a fun and interesting story. I write for Inc. and I get pitches all the time from PR firms, from independent people. I’m constantly getting emails about it. I ignore about 99% of them.

Note to self, if you’re a PR agent or you’re trying to market your business, having a PR agent to send blind pitches to a columnist is not necessarily the most effective method. Email is not a good way. You have to build a relationship if you want to move that forward and have a journalist write about you. I had a relationship with a PR firm that had sent it to me where they’d sent me a couple of good people before, so I opened the email. That’s the key there. I read it. I did know Dustin. I knew of Speaking Empire of which he was a part of at that time. I did know of Speaking Empire because I had met Dave VanHoose, who’s his partner at that time before, so I did know his name. When it came across my desk, that’s what I saw. When I opened up the email, I was like, “A speaker or trainer,” like that was what I thought about it. I was like, “I don’t think I can write that. This is innovation. What’s innovative about that? It’s mostly marketing.” It’s not about product and visual branding and things like that, so I was like “I can’t write it.” I pretty much rejected it right away. Before I did, I Googled him to make sure that he was the person that I thought he was. That was a mistake on my part because I normally don’t do that.

This is a long story but the 101 of being a columnist is we check your website and we Google you, but I normally don’t. I was doing it quickly and I normally Google someone and do it by private browsing. If you guys don’t know what that is, you can go right up in your browser window and you can select private browsing. In the world of Chrome, It’s called an Incognito window. Private Browsing used to be Firefox which at our company used to be our standard browser until a few years ago when we switched over to Chrome.

I use it all the time in Chrome. I click Incognito window. The reason for doing that is because when I do research on someone and/or something, when I’m researching products for our product design business, even when I’m doing those things, the last thing I want is to have this feeling that they’re everywhere, and that’s exactly what happened with Dustin because I failed to do that because I was in a hurry. I was getting retargeted on every other website. That’s where Dustin is brilliant at marketing, they retargeted me. What popped up the next time I got on was a YouTube video of him talking about visual branding and how a copy direct response marketer has shifting to a much more visual imagery-based style of marketing. I thought, “That’s interesting.” First off, I’m interested to know more about that and secondly I could write that. I reached back out and said, “I would love to write this article,” introduced me to Dustin and we ended up with this fabulous interview conversation where we hit it off and had a lot of mindshare. His brain works brilliantly, and so I got an opportunity to pick it. I enjoyed it so much and we started establishing a relationship after that. He sent me materials after about his course and about how they do it and all sorts of details and stuff. When I said, “This is cool, I tried it out,” he also gave me a free critique back on how it was, so we built up this ongoing back and forth that doesn’t usually happen.

You over-simplify the part of that there. I want to paint a little better mental picture for our audience in this, which is that Dustin sent you, at his own cost, a large box, volumes of written course material. You’re a voracious reader, so you got through it quickly. You read it, and you applied it to an upcoming presentation that you gave. Was it a webinar?

It was a webinar. I hadn’t done a ton of webinars. I’ve done a lot of presentations on stage, but I have not done a webinar before. In this packet had a webinar PowerPoint presentation format. What slides do you do and what order is a part of their blueprint. I was like “Wow, it’s ready made the order of things.” It allowed me to plug in my stuff, and mine was pretty because I had to make a visual, because that’s who I am. I finished it and I had sent him a thank you saying, “I used it. It was valuable. Great Information. I had already written the article before I used it, but I hope you enjoyed the article,” and that was what I had sent back to him. He said, “Send me your presentation,” and then he gave me a critique back. It was lots of give, give, give.

This is what you’re going to get from this interview, from who he is, from following him on social media, which you should, and from reading his book. He’s a generous giver of his information, his knowledge, his experiences, his references, and referrals of people, and that’s amazing. He has such a good heart, so that is one of those why we like to bring these kinds of people to you because we know you’re going to get so much out of it. There was one more reason why we wanted to invite him on and that is because he’s also been a prolific podcast guest. He went on well over 40 podcasts at one time, in a short period of time, to help promote his book. We thought, “He’s gotten a view on a lot of podcasters,” so we thought we’d bring him on and have him share his experience with us.

We could go on talking about Dustin for hours. Let’s go to the interview. I know we’re going to have more to say after that.

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

 

Know Your Audience And Customize Your Message with Dustin Mathews

Dustin, I’m so glad to talk to you.

Tracy, I am super pumped to be here. I’m thrilled.

How many interviews have you done?

I lost track after 40. I was thinking in podcast realm language of 40, but when had interviews across all channels, definitely.

You got to have some cool best and worst stories about hosts and shows. I would love for us to tap into there. First, I want to talk about why you went on this interview tour.

I became motivated when I wrote a book and the publisher said, “The book is done. Now you need to go out there and you better sell a bunch of these.” I told him I got all these followers, and so one of the ways we deployed the message was through email and social marketing, but one thing missing big time was podcasting. It was a big gaping hole. I’m like, “I better do this,” and so I did a ton of interviews to get the word out.

You’re talking about the book, No B.S. Guide to Powerful Presentations, right?

Right. It comes from my background of writing a ton of presentations with people from all walks of life, with the emphasis to help people get more leads or get more clients or raise money for their charities, action-driven speaking or presenting.

I read the book and I found some fascinating things in there. This is a co-writing situation. Is it your second book like that with Dan Kennedy?

Yes, it is.

You have a chapter in which Dan Kennedy talks about how he does it and then you. It’s interesting because you’re both actually very similar in personality, you’re nitty-gritty and how-to guys. You both know how to do stuff and you have strategy. It’s an interesting combination of both.

Dan was my mentor. He set me on this path of entrepreneurship and marketing because I read one of his books early on in my career. I was, and still am, a computer nerdy-techie guy, and I embrace that more so nowadays. When I started, I know I need to learn more about business, sales and marketing. I came across one of his books, read it, implemented it, and got results. I planted the seed that one day I’m going to work with him, one day I’m going to do something with him. Ten plus years later, we ended up writing a book together.

Dan is old school in marketing and you’re the contrast of that. You’ve got this very tech edge to you, and yet the principles are exactly the same.

Writing the book was fun because it was so old school. Collaborating on the book was not even on the phone, nor was it emails, because Dan doesn’t use email, so I used FedEx and a fax machine. We wrote the book cross-country that way.

His principles though still uphold. If you follow those principles, and I know you do because you have a strong marketing basis in what you do, and then you apply that to technology, you get an interesting, more advanced and less hacked way of going about it, something that’s more sustainable.

Sales influence marketing. There’s influence of persuasion to get people into action. Going back to the facts and understanding the foundational principle of copywriting and influence is critical even before you bring it to the tech. I always think about how marketers and entrepreneurs did it back in the day when all they had newspaper. That was their mechanism for response. I think about that and it set a great foundation for whatever technology comes next.

We call it serving your brand well. Too often it’s not that people don’t who they are as a brand, but they also don’t know who they want to talk to. This connection between what we call producers and consumers, because it doesn’t matter whether you’re producing content or producing products somewhere and who is consuming them, someone who’s buying them or listening to them or reading them, it’s all the same thing. When you have this conversation that your brand enacts between that, both things get refined. The consumers get what they’re looking for and you produce a better product, content, or book at the end of the day. That can only happen if you dive deep into those principles from the get go instead of dive too deep straight into the tech.

What I’m super fascinated in and fortunate for is being born in a time like this. If you think back in the day, you have to send direct mail or newspaper. You don’t get live interaction. You don’t get engagement to become better.

It’s the speed or your time to get the information back. Let’s touch a little bit about what this tour did for you. How did the tour work-out for you in terms of book sales and what did it do?

The publisher told me we sold 5,000 books in 90 days. For what I understand, most people won’t sell 5,000 books in a lifetime. They were thrilled that we were able to move as many books doing that. That was an interesting ride. There was a ton of activity in a short window which I was accustomed to doing product launches. It was fun, sometimes three or four interviews in a day.

Let’s talk a little bit about what was some of the best and worst out of going through those interviews. A lot of times when people, especially someone who goes on from podcast to podcast, you tend to hear the same thing again and again. The successful ones are those that don’t do that. That is hard to keep track of.

I would always ask before I went on to tell me about the audience. I want to customize the message. I pretend that I’m having a conversation there in the audience. I know we can’t do that in podcasting, so the way to do that is ask those questions. Sometimes people will tell me weird answers, but I would do my best to customize or make it different.

What were some of the best practices that they had that helped you out?

You are one of the top people. The reason why is you make it feel like a conversation. When I recognize the podcasts that were awesome, I felt great. It was like a dialogue. It was like a conversation. I prepare. I got a little sheet that has all of my questions and all of my answers. However, I’m clear. I say, “Review this, pick the questions and the answers that you like, and then add some of your own to make this different and unique.” The ones that prepared, the ones that took some of the questions and though of what their audience want to hear, those were the bests.

We urge our podcasters, both our clients as well as on this podcast, to make it like we’re having coffee together. We don’t invite anyone who we didn’t research before we invited them, and that’s a big difference. We already knew you so I knew what I was getting when you come on the show. I had an intention in mind from the get go on why we want to have you come on. We actually discard those questions very often, but what is the one question I asked you before we started? I asked you, how can I serve you? That’s one of the things that I feel as my job as a host. We’re in a service-first model. We are borrowing your authority and your incredible story and your personality to help boost our show. In return, we owe you for that. We owe you something that would serve your brand and your business and you personally well. When you come approach it that way, that’s always the question I ask because sometimes those one-sheets are outdated. What are you working on now and what is the best way for us to serve you? That’s our model of doing it. When I have that in mind, that helps us to guide the whole topic.

That’s good advice in life overall. I feel like I’m doing a ton of that now in this time of my life. All I do is come in and I ask how I can serve, and what I can do to build value for you. Great advice, beyond the podcast, for life in general.

You were always like that. I’m curious to know how you came to be that. Why is that so important to you?

I grew as an only child in a military so I always move around and lose friends. I desire to have connections with people. I know at the end of the day we have all this tech and cool automation, but what’s missing or what people like to forget about is the connection. Whatever’s going to happen in life is going to happen, and it’s the people that you hang around and associate with and the stories that you collect, those are the things that make a difference.

 

I’m picturing in my mind, because I’m one of those people that have had a mentor or a coach in business that I’ve worked with who subscribes to the Herman Brain Dominance System. It’s basically personality profiles, like DISC. Basically it says there are four major personality types in most people. They color-code these. Creative is yellow. People that make more of an emotional connection or more social is red. Those that respond only to the numbers are blue. Those that are very organizationally capable and minded are green. I’m hearing you describe yourself and your upbringing, I’m seeing a very strong green, yellow and maybe even a red, it could be all four. The interesting thing is that you would notice that CEOs of companies tend to have qualities of all four pretty equally matched. I went through it myself. I’m a triple dominant and green is my Kryptonite. I am not the most organized person in the world. I am much more creative and relationship-based and also have a pretty good grasp for the numbers. In terms of organizational, I am not. I know from working with you in the past, I certainly agree on the relationship side. I could see that coming through. On the organizational side, you are very good at detailing out a plan of execution and organizing it. I also think as a marketer, you probably are creative. You’re at least a triple dominant, if not all four.

This is why I said I think you’re all four, is because we get into this position where when you’re an only child or you do a lot of moving. I had the same background. I’m not an only child, but we did a lot of moving into foreign countries. I lived in South Africa for two years when I was about eight and nine. When you do that, you have to develop skills at relating to people and getting people to like you quickly. You learn to talk different languages. I know that you can talk tech in a second and you could talk relationship in another minute and communication. Being able to speak all those languages is a great benefit.

In areas of my life, I have been focused in one or the other, then I’ll develop a new skill then I’ll think back.

The person who I ended up taking on as my coach and mentor actually would speak from stage at big networking business and networking events and have everybody in the room, sometimes 200 plus people, stand up. He would say, “There are four corners of the room. If you believe that your strength is creative, all you people are yellow, go into that corner. After that, what do you think is the next one?” You’d move around the room and you’d see where all these people would go and have different orders that they would tend to think are their preferences in this regard, or their capabilities or skills. It’s quite an interesting thing to see how all these people are grouped together, and who would tend to communicate well with each other, and then who would need to work on the area where they’re weakest or get help in that to advance them.

You’re freaked out by the idea of speaking on stage, and you dive right into those scary situations. Why is that?

I was fortunate. I read a book early on and I joined a startup company. That led me to read the classics of personal development: Napoleon Hill and Dale Carnegie. Somehow I realized that if I put myself outside of my comfort zone, that’s where I’ll grow. I was young. I was introverted at the time. Once I did it, I realized I learned a ton. I feel better about myself or I feel more confident. Public speaking is one of those things, so much so that in college I found a loophole to get out of it. Then I went on and found a company in training people and writing a book on it. It’s funny because I find myself outside of my comfort zone right now because the last of couple of years has been comfortable in doing what I have been doing, and it’s another opportunity for growth.

Time to challenge yourself again. We were both at Podfest, which was an awesome show. Talking about your journey right now and the changes you’re going through, my grandfather would have called that an agonizing reappraisal. That is such a great way of putting it. Is it time to shake things up completely and up-end the business model? You’re at that stage and you decided to take a break and shift completely. Tell us about how that came about.

For nine years, I ran a company called Speaking Empire. I founded it and I was the CEO of that business. In the 8th year, my grandmother passed away. That caused me to analyze life. Oftentimes it’s a big life moment that occurs that shakes you up or makes you question things or investigate. It caused me to slow down and take a look at life. I ask the question, “Is this the right path for me? Do I still want to be on this path? Is there a different path? Am I supposed to grow in a different area?” I said yes and I didn’t plan, I didn’t scheme. Then I started to be antsy, because I am a builder and creator. In the early part of the year, I said I need to find the next thing. That was interesting because I need to check back in my world. Even though I was building empire-making relationships, I was focused and my head was down, so I neglected a lot of relationships. Now I’m out beating the streets and showing up at people’s office with appointments. I have learned a lot of stuff that I wish I had known at the Empire when I was running it. I learned so much in 90 days.

That’s one of the reasons why it was probably a good timing for you to have done all of those podcasts interviews and get relationship exposure and thought-provoking questions thrown at you. It’s one of the reason I love podcasting. It fit me well because I felt isolated in my business. We were doing lots of great work for our clients and they were happy, but it didn’t feel personally fulfilling when we weren’t doing the creative part. There is that moment of creativity and that was awesome. There was 90 % of it that was execution and it wasn’t as much fun anymore. Once we started podcasting, I learned something new every week. I spoke to someone new I’d never met before. That broader exposure helped to give me more time in my business that I had expected. It actually gave me more longevity.

I haven’t thought about that in a way, but you are right. I met 40 plus people in a 60-day window, and every now and then some people will do a good segment on getting to know you, not the tactical stuff and your expertise, but what makes you tick and what are you doing to make yourself better.

Which do you like better, writing or speaking?

Speaking. When I first started copywriting, I thought that every answer to a problem that anyone is having was write a sales letter. Speaking and doing podcasts is a lot easier for me to give my ideas. I always say to transcribe it and then edit that. If you are a speaker or if you find it hard to write, do that, because it’s so much easier.

This is how I write every single one of my articles, and this is how I wrote the article on you. When I do those interviews, I have them transcribed, and then it helps me focus and write the story and outline them and move it around. I also do have an intention when I start a conversation and when I start that interview, but it’s sped up the article writing time for me from what was an agonizing four hours because I wanted them to be good, to 90 minutes, including fully editing it and getting it on Inc. They’re better for it.

I know what it’s like to look at that blank screen. Often, the clock is ticking in the business world. For me, recording it and using the words that come back as clay and editing it down is so much faster and enjoyable for me.

It preserves our voices, and that’s what I find as so much better. Your personality comes through more genuinely when you do it that way. That’s being a responsive style right now, whether it’s in articles or blog posts or anywhere right now. People are responding better to that more personal style coming across, rather than that tight journalistic process that we all learned in college copywriting process, which seems a little too static. It doesn’t seem lively enough. If I can geek out slightly for a moment, the reality is that we know from the experts in the field that we deal with, that Google actually recognizes those written posts that come from human speech and it ranks them higher. It ranks them higher for this exact reason that we’re talking about. It can tell from the word order, the language, the imperfect grammar that may be used a lot of time in a written post that came from a transcription of human speech. It knows it’s more original, and they rank them higher than ones that you think and type. I think because of this conversation and what we’re saying about the quality of what comes through from your personality and the natural and subconscious reality of you coming through in that speech, that’s why Google recognizes it and ranks and higher. You are no doubt a digital marketing genius, and you have got to be seeing some of the things. Where are things falling apart in conversion, and where are things innovating?

I am super pumped about chatbots. Right now it’s in its infancy. I am excited by it, not because we are having fake conversations, but the logic behind it is insane. It’s making an amazing experience. The bot has humor, and it’s all programmed in there. Eventually, it gets transferred over to a live human. What I think about is Alexa and Siri. What’s Google’s?

It’s called the Google Home Device, and you say, “Hey, Google,” instead of, “Alexa.” My opinion is that Hey Google has created Frankenstein. I wrote this paper back in college way too long ago. The whole problem was that a Frankenstein had actually named his monster, he wouldn’t have been a monster. Hey Google’s problem is that it doesn’t have a name. We have no trust in something that has no name. It doesn’t matter how funny Hey Google might be, the mere fact that it doesn’t have a name is problematic for us as humans. It hasn’t earned our trust.

Where I see this going is right now you say, “Hey, Google or Alexa,” and then you ask something. In the future, I believe it’s going to be a conversation. Chatbots are setting the path and bringing in more people into the space that is going to develop that more out. It’s going to be more conversational and it’s going to be funnier and quirkier. It’s going to make for better user experience, and it’s going to feel less one-way. That’s why I am thrilled about.

I am experimenting with AI over in LinkedIn. It’s like a chatbot, but it’s not that cute, it’s much longer. It’s AI messaging. It’s like Infusionsoft on steroids, within that system. It’s actually being developed by Microsoft. What I’ve found is that my skill in it has how has come across because I worked hard to craft the messages. I probably took weeks and weeks to craft the messages, so that they sounded like me. When you take the time to do that, that makes a difference, because the reaction to those become much more natural and they attract the right person. It’s great if people respond to it because they think the chatbot is cute, but at the end of the day if you’re not that, it’s actually not going to serve you very well.

One of the things that I talk about is choreography and designing. Whether it is a sales funnel or you do live events or webinars, are you choreographing it down to every detail? I think there’s hug opportunity for people to be thinking about that and maybe this will help them realize that.

Isn’t the whole chatbot system that you would set up analogous to an Infusionsoft decision tree?

It is. Infusionsoft can be hacked and you can plug ins to add. This one is more organic. It feels more like a conversation. Infusionsoft may say, “Send an email when this person has this tag,” whereas in live time, we are now telling it to give a response. There’s no having to wait. We are doing it at live time if we designed it properly. It was impressive. I remember the live demo at Podfest of the chatbot. He had us pull out our phones as a part of this demonstration and enter in responses for a code to a number or word to a number. It’s like you were having this conversation.

It absorbs you. It gets you into it. We’ve been seeing a lot of declines with a lot of our clients in funnels, in funnel effectiveness and email list effectiveness. Have you been seeing that as well?

Totally. Things aren’t converting. There are a lot of philosophies that are shared out there. What has to be done is it has to be more conversational. At the end of the day, people want an experience. They’re getting entertainment and education potentially, and so if you are not bringing the value, at the end of the day, you’re in trouble.

That’s where we so often get caught up like. “We have to follow the formula exactly.”What we’ve learned over time is that when we hack the formula a little bit to be more personal and be a little more like us, then it works better. That’s when you start to see a much higher conversion, when you’re more yourself. That’s why for us, podcasting has actually been the best for us because we’re comfortable in this continual free service.

We all talk to people, we consult, and it’s challenging, because what may work for me might not work for you. Maybe it does work for you, but it takes you three times as long because you are a green and not a yellow. When you hear a formula, say “Does this work for me? Does it serve my style? Do I get the most out of it?” I think that’s the challenge. What I have only recently realized is that there are different strategies for different people.

Whenever we’re creating any marketing message, I approach it from that mindset now that, “I can see this is a beautifully visual presentation. The yellows are going to respond to that, but where is the hard and fast facts? Those blue people are not going be even looking at any of this fancy stuff. They want to know what’s the bottom line.” You can structure a marketing message regardless of what medium it’s being communicated with, email, funnel, maybe even the chatbot at some point. You’ve got to either realize that this message is only going to appeal to this type of person, or we can weave something into it for everybody, in how many times they needed to see it or how far they have to scroll down, and what’s going to work. It’s tricky.

 

I want to add one thing, and it is segmentation. Back when I started, it was like spray and pray. If you can segment your list and have as closer conversation to that person and to their interest, you’re going to win. In conversations, we segment all the time. Any time you can segment, you win big time.

That is why we see such great success among the people we work with who are podcasting. There are certainly exceptions to shows that are more general and are not necessarily segmenting themselves, but for the most part, podcasters, their mission, their show’s intent and what they’re doing is segmenting a discussion to a certain core audience. Generally, it’s a pretty narrow focus. Response to calls to action that happen within a podcast or information that’s shared tends to be a very high conversion rate. Podcasts have such a focused audience so you have a greater chance of having messages, calls to action and even advertisements that appeal to that audience. Podcasting is a natural selection of media. It’s a self-selection on top of it because somebody has to subscribe. You can’t push to them if they choose to unsubscribe. It’s ideal from that perspective.

The three things that are happening in podcasting and what you may have experienced when you did so many at once and you found which ones work better than others and possibly which one’s sold more books than others, was that the ones with that built their audience trust by serving clearly do better. The ones that don’t have actually extremely large audiences, the ones with 100,000 or less actually have higher action and take more action than the ones with a million and more. That is nearly because they haven’t advertised as much. Their sponsors or their calls to action feel like you should support them, because they’ve been giving and giving, and there’s someone who’s offering the sponsor and pay for them. It’s like a donation, and the audience wants to help there. The third thing that happens in the successful is the improv. That’s what I think you were referring to as that segmentation, that chatbot world in which you are customizing when you’re able to switch your conversation up, do what you learned young to do, which is talk to all these different peoples and different languages. When you improvise that way, you get good at it after a while on a podcast if you don’t follow a formula for your show.

The best shows are when you’re on the edge of your seat. If you’re scripted and canned, that’s though. When you’re personally engaged both as the interviewer and the interviewee, people want to hear it. They want their ear up to the door and hear in on what’s happening and the cool stuff to be entertained at the same time.

I am so excited you came on our show today and shared your wisdom with everyone. When I first met you, I was resistant to that presentation template that you sent me because it was a formula, but the more I used it, the more brilliant I have found it. I highly recommend everyone to grab your book because there’s a lot of why that’s brilliant in that book. There’s a lot of how you use it. That is the brilliant part of it. I am so glad you share your wisdom so often with the world.

I had blast too. I am here to serve and build massive vales and see that spark off and I know you’re in the hunt for it, too.

Dustin, I can’t thank you enough for coming on our show today and being an influence in our business and our lives. It’s always a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Know Your Audience And Customize Your Message – Final Thoughts

That was such a fun interview as any conversation with Dustin always is. This PR company that he was using to pitch him to get publications, to get in articles, started with a real push marketing email message. What Dustin did is transformed what was a minor lead initially because you opened the email and you looked at it and you reached out after you watch that video. It went from a push marketing to a conversational marketing experience to then something much, much more. Because Dustin recognize that you had enough of an interest in what he was doing that you took action on his course that he gave you. He’s like, “Send me your presentation.” I bet you nine out of ten people that he might say that to, “Send me your presentation,” probably wouldn’t have sent him the presentation or certainly not as quickly as you did. When he saw how much you had tried to apply what the lessons were in his course material, he decided, “I’m going to give back to you.” It became this different relationship mutually beneficial to the point that you were like, “I’ve got to write about you.”

When you recognize mindshare with someone, when you recognize someone who can not only help influence and move your message forward. When you recognize that you also have a shared interest and a shared passion and a level of intellect at that and you don’t nurture it, you’re missing out on an opportunity to build a great relationship and a friend in the process, which is what we’ve become. It also goes to point out why he was so much more successful with his book launch was because he’s good at that conversational marketing. He’s good at that relationship building. Passive sending out press releases just doesn’t cut it nowadays. It’s not a good way to go. Don’t get me wrong. You want to try to get written publications, written blog posts about it, but if you can get on somebody’s podcast who already has a blog, you’re doing just as much power. That’s one of the criteria we use when we screen through, “Are we going to be a guest on something?” I always check and say, “Do they not only have a YouTube channel or wherever their video, Facebook live, wherever they’re going to be, but are they also blogging this?” If they are, that’s a plus and I apply or I’ll send my information or have my team do that. That wasn’t Dustin’s criteria here. He just wanted to be exposed to as many influencer audience as possible hoping that that would translate into book sales, which worked. He sold more books than anyone else who had partnered up and done one of these programs with Dan Kennedy.

He has become a friend. I would say we have mutual admiration for each other that is genuine. It was Dustin who connected us with Chris Krimitsos of Podfest and then gave me an opportunity to speak at Podfest. That’s a whole other relationship that’s come out of that, and we’re going to be getting much more involved with Podfest in 2019. Those types of things keep happening.

If there’s anything that Dustin has taught me in the whole process that is probably the most valuable is that when you find someone who has that quality of referrals or quality of information that they provide for you, if you don’t take the time to read it, try it, pick-up the phone when they say you should meet someone, you do it, and you follow up on that email immediately. When you have those people where they’re constantly referring you to great, great people, you need to take action on that all the time. That’s the one thing. If Dustin says I should check something out, I do and that’s the kind of relationship we built. That’s what I hope I try to give to people including my audience here, all of you out there, but to people that I meet, I try to do the same thing, “I read this great article or I read this amazing book.” I hope that people take action on it or they start to develop a “When Tracy says that this is a good thing, check it out.” That’s what I aspire too. 90% of what I read is junk and because I’ll read anything to see if there’s something there, and so when I do say it, it’s the cream.

Talking about putting yourself out there on other podcasts for whatever you’re trying to get attention for, to market, to do a launch of, Dustin certainly has shown us how successful that can be. Dustin tells the story many times I’ve seen him speak on stage and he’ll tell a story. It basically forced himself out from behind the computer to getting out there in public and speaking. He mentioned how he avoided speech class and did everything he could to avoid it in college. That to me is when you’re pushing also the edge of what you’re comfortable with, podcasting is a little bit easier because you are behind the mic, you’re on your end, it’s not like you’re standing and you’re doing this live interview. You can do it and break your own comfort zone and help yourself out in that process. That’s one of the things that I do like about podcasting so much is that it’s accessible for a lot of people to feel comfortable there.

The other thing is here’s Dustin and he is going on and he’s looking for new projects, cool new companies, especially ones in the software service business and content and service businesses. He is looking to help them and helping them figure out their marketing strategy, figuring out how to make things work for them, and that is such an opportunity. To have someone with broad reach into the tools and the technology and what works and what doesn’t work across businesses and industries, that’s valuable. I hope he’s so packed with business that he doesn’t have trouble fitting everybody in.

I’m sure he is going to have a lot of options to choose from. He and I had lunch at the Podfest Conference and he told me something about what he was looking for. I was like, “I have a contact for you,” and I have a card in my pocket from someone that you and I had already known and had met with, but I happened to see him again at that event. I was like, “Dustin, here, you got to go meet with this guy. I don’t know if you want to work with him, but he definitely needs to work with you.” That was sort of my feeling about it.

Especially now that we’ve been at Traffic & Conversion and seen how many things are out there that can distract you and suck your energy, “Try this Facebook marketing” and “Try this YouTube strategy.” There’re so many things out there, but what you don’t have is this continuous thread through it of “What are the best choices for your business? What is going to drive you the leads that you want?” Because at the end of the day, if you don’t have traffic and if you don’t have leads, you don’t have a business, you don’t have anything to convert. That is so critically important. One of the areas that Dustin is brilliant at and has always done throughout his career is driving in traffic whether it’s from putting ads in newspapers and sending out handwritten mailers and all of these things that he’s done throughout his career to be able to drive traffic and get bodies in seats if you’re running events and/or get people to your website, to your lead page, to your webinar. All of those things, at the end of the day, he’s always been focused on that. Then knowing that what he sells, what he has, what he’s delivering is of very, very generous and extreme value. That in and of itself is his magic formula, but that lead part is different for every business, what’s working, what’s not working, and there’re so many new things cropping up. To be able to evaluate them against the screen of “This stuff did work before, we should test it.” That’s how Dustin works and that’s brilliant. That’s how we work too, but we work on a different side of things, like “How do you process something? How do you utilize it to streamline your launch?”

Dustin is a brilliant marketer, but again, the key lesson for this particular podcast is look at what a brilliant marketer he is. He has a lot of resources. He could go put Facebook ads out on Facebook to lead gen for whatever he wanted to. What did he choose to do to launch his book? Go on a whole bunch of podcasts and get interviewed and have this one to many reach, and it has worked for him. The lesson there is, there are lots of people who are looking to become guests on your podcast, if you have one, and there are also opportunities for you, whether you’re marketing your podcast or your business or some other course or a book or whatever you have, to go on other podcasts and model what Dustin has done.

I’m so glad we had him on the show and got you all to hear about him. All information about how to find Dustin, where he’s been, what he’s done, how to find this book, because that’s also brilliant, you should definitely check that out. These will all be at FeedYourBrand.co or you can find us on Facebook @FeedYourBrand.

Thank you so much for listening. This has been a great episode. Hope you enjoyed it. We’ll be back next time. This has been Tom and Tracy on Feed Your Brand.

Important Links

• Dustin Mathews
• Podfest
• Traffic & Conversion
• Dustin Matthews LinkedIn
• Dustin Matthews Facebook
• Speaking Empire
• No B.S. Guide to Powerful Presentations
• Infusionsoft

About Dustin Mathews

Right out of school, Dustin helped take a company from $1M to $14M and
#35 on Inc. Magazine’s Fastest Growing Private Companies.
His newest venture, Speaking Empire, is recognized as a disruptive
company in the leadership training and education space.
He is THE mentor and coach to the worlds leading speakers, coaches,
business owners and thought leaders such as Shark Tank star Kevin
Harrington, NY Times Best Selling Author, Robert Allen, infomercial star
Dean Graziosi, X Games Host & Actress Forbes Riley & Entrepreneur of the
Year, Roxanne Emmerich.
Dustin’s company was privileged to be involved with the Get Motivated
Success TOUR which included past presidents and world leaders such as
Bill Clinton, Laura Bush, Ronald Reagan & Mikhail Gorbachev … sports
stars such as Michael Phelps, Joe Montana and business personalities like
Steve Forbes, Steve Wozniak & Kendra Todd.

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