In The Trenches with Tom Morkes provides behind-the-scenes look into the life and work of entrepreneurs, writers, artists, warriors, and leaders.
Episodes
Friday Jul 27, 2018
Friday Jul 27, 2018
Tom Schwab is the founder of Interview Valet, a podcast booking service. So if you’ve ever wanted to get interviewed on a podcast, Tom and Interview Valet can help. In today’s conversation, Tom and I talk about the art and science of podcast - specifically in terms of how we can use podcasting to market and sell our products and services.
First, we begin with the state of podcasting. This includes what's happening in the podcasting space right now, from the types of podcasts people are listening to, to how people are consuming podcast content, and more. Personally, I view podcasting as a subset of content marketing. Content marketing, as the name implies, is using content to get traffic, leads, and sales. For instance, if you're an author, you'd want to use content marketing to build an email list so you can grow your exposure and book sales. There are big changes happening in the content marketing landscape, including a big shift toward audio and video content in the form of podcasts and video consumption on YouTube (thanks, in large part, to the increasing speed of connectivity and proliferation of cheap technology). So we discuss these macro trends and how they’re impacting the value of podcasting from the perspective of being a podcast host, as well as being a guest or interviewee on another person's podcast.
Second, we talk about how podcasting can be used as a lead generation tool. Specifically, if you want to generate traffic, leads and sales, what do you need to do to make that happen? Tom Schwab walks us through his process, including types of landing pages you need to create to turn traffic into optins, why we need to think about mobile optimization, and much more. The best part of this conversation: Tom brings a bunch of interesting statistics and analytics to support (and challenge) common opinions about podcasting and it's value as a marketing medium.
In this broadcast, Tom Schwab and I talk about:
- The state of podcasting (what's happening in the market place as of 2018)
- What the future of podcasting looks like (and trends you'll want to take advantage of if you want to grow your platform)
- The power of small 'yeses'
- How to find the right podcasts for your message
- How to turn podcast listeners into sales (warning: it has nothing to do with selling!)
- Why podcasting can be such a powerful tool to grow your email list (just make sure you don't screw up this one very important thing...)
And much more.
Useful Resources from my Conversation with Tom Schwab
How to connect with WHITNEY JOHNSON online:
TOM SCHWAB on SMART SELLING:
"I don't go online to have people sell me stuff. I go online to find solutions to my problems...you have to use this same framework with podcasting." - Tom Schwab
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Did you enjoy today's broadcast of In The Trenches? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.
Monday Jul 23, 2018
Monday Jul 23, 2018
Whitney Johnson is a speaker, podcast, and author of "Build an A Team," published by Harvard Business Press. In "Build an A Team," Whitney explains her "S curve" framework - a methodology for understanding competence and mastery in the context of personal and professional development. Whitney Johnson developed her "S curve" framework and methodology when she co-founded the Disruptive Innovation Fund, along with Clayton Christensen (author of the one of my top 11 books for entrepreneurs). Using the "S curve," you can better facilitate the development of employees (and yourself) - and it's even a great tool for identifying and hiring amazing employees. The following are four recommendations from Whitney on organizing yourself and your team to reach a state of optimal challenge:
- Are you taking on market risk or competitive risk? Be willing to play in the spaces where others aren't playing. Taking on market risk is good; taking on competitive risk is bad.
- Are you playing to your strengths? Discover what you do great and focus on what you do well.
- Is the work you do hard but not debilitating? If you're scaling the 'S' curve and it's hard, but you love it - you're in the right spot. If you dread the work you do, or have anxiety around the next day or next week's work, perhaps you need to shift roles or responsibilities.
- Are you gaining momentum? Is your rate of growth increasing? If not, you need to shift your frame and your focus, otherwise it's a matter of time before you burn out. Momentum is critical.
I brought Whitney Johnson onto In The Trenches to share her process for hiring, firing, and developing an organization that keeps employees improving and growing.
In this broadcast, whitney johnson and I talk about:
- How the 'S' curve impacts your business, whether you know it or not
- Why you should hire for general competency, not mastery of a particular subject matter
- Before you hire your next employee, do this (starts at 10:30)
- How to use the 'S' curve to evaluate your own drive, passion, and motivation
- The most fundamental unit of disruption (hint: it's not an idea)
- 4 questions to determine where you or your team members exist on the 'S' curve
And much more.
Useful Resources from my Conversation with whitney johnson
- Diagnostic Tool - to see where you are on the S curve
- Build an A Team
How to connect with WHITNEY JOHNSON online:
WHITNEY JOHNSON on personal and professional growth:
"Every day, say 'I'm going to do an experiment to see what works and what doesn't,' and know that it's totally okay if it doesn't work. That flexes our muscle of getting really comfortable with failure." - Whitney Johnson
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How You Can Support In The Trenches
Did you enjoy today's broadcast of In The Trenches? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.
Tuesday Jul 10, 2018
Tuesday Jul 10, 2018
Kim Walsh Phillips is the CEO of Elite Digital Group, a direct-response social media agency. Kim has helped her clients bring in more than a billion dollars through direct-response marketing. She is author of “No B.S. Guide to Direct Response Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate No Holds Barred Guide to Producing Measurable, Monetizable Results with Social Media Marketing” with Dan Kennedy. I met Kim at an event we both attended last year. At that time, she shared a way to rapidly grow your Facebook Page to more than 10,000+ 'likes.' Normally, I'd ignore this advice because I'm not a big proponent of social media (I think it's fleeting and doesn't produce ROI near what you can get with email marketing or content marketing, but I digress). However, Kim showed me how she then turns these new fans into customers. And she backed it up with numbers. That piqued my interest, and I decided to dig deeper. What I found was that Kim has a system for building an audience on Facebook and then generating sales from that audience. So while this is a more 'tactical' broadcast than is typical, I wanted to share it because I figured some of my readers and listeners could find value in this process.
In this broadcast, Kim Walsh Phillips and I talk about:
- Kim's step by step process to grow your Facebook audience
- How to get Facebook likes for pennies
- How to turn your Facebook Page 'likes' into customers and clients
- When and why you should use this strategy (and when you shouldn't)
- Big changes happening to FB and how to take advantage of this tactic today
- Why Facebook is not dead (Kim will explain why)
- One thing you're probably doing right now that is killing your organic reach on Facebook (and a very simple solution that doesn't require you to pay for exposure)
- A simple way to find topics to talk about Why you need to use the 'open loop' framework
And much more.
Useful Resources from my Conversation with Kim:
- Sumorank.com - how to find what content is being shared
- Answerthepublic.com - how to discover questions people are asking in your industry
How to connect with Kim Walsh Phillips online:
Kim Walsh Phillips On Social Media content sharing:
“Create and share content that turns you into a publisher, or entertainer, or a clearing house of content versus just someone whose reposting promotional crap that no one wants to see ” - Kim Walsh Phillips
Get the Latest Broadcasts of In The Trenches
Subscribe to In The Trenches on iTunes
How You Can Support In The Trenches
Did you enjoy today's broadcast of In The Trenches? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.
Tuesday Jun 05, 2018
Tuesday Jun 05, 2018
Hey everyone, welcome back to another broadcast of in the trenches. I'm excited to have on the call today Jack born who's the CEO and founder of Deadline Funnel. Deadline Funnel is automation software that lets you add urgency to your marketing funnel so you can sell more in less time. In today's call, we talk a about Jack's origin story (how he got into software in the first place as a non-technical founder) and how Deadline Funnel software works. However, the majority of our conversation is focused around this idea of adding urgency to your marketing funnel, and how you can do so in an ethical and honest way. I've written a lot about urgency and scarcity on this blog and via my newsletter, often in the context of launches. I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that you need to leverage these psychological principles if you want get the most out of your launch or any marketing campaign you run. However, one of the questions that always comes up is how can we introduce things like urgency and scarcity, especially when dealing with digital products or productizes services that are not, by their nature, limited. So this gets into the realm of business ethics. How can you and I use urgency and scarcity in an authentic and transparent way, and still reap the big rewards? Well, in today's conversation we get into that and much more.
In this broadcast, Jack Born and I talk about:
- How Jack got his start in software
- How Jack made $20,000 in one week using the elements of urgency and scarcity in his launch
- Why email marketing works, and specific techniques to get a lot more out of your email list than you're getting right now
- Why deadlines are critical if you want people to buy now, and not later (and how to implement deadlines in the most effective way possible)
- How to create urgency outside of the last day of your launch or open cart sequence
- How to structure a sales funnel to get the most out of any launch or campaign you intend to run
- How to ethically deploy urgency and scarcity, even when offering digital products
And much more.
How to connect with Jack Born online:
Insights from Jack Born:
“It is your obligation to move as many people as possible from the prospect category to the 'I love your stuff; you've changed my life' category.” - Jack Born
Get the Latest Broadcasts of In The Trenches
Subscribe to In The Trenches on iTunes
How You Can Support In The Trenches
Did you enjoy today's broadcast of In The Trenches? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.
Wednesday May 09, 2018
Wednesday May 09, 2018
Alexa Bigwarfe is the founder of WritePublishSell.co, Kat Biggie Press, a book publishing imprint, and creator of the "Women in Publishing Summit." Alexa began her professional career in counter terrorism and Homeland Security, but due to the demanding nature of the job, she decided to stay at home with her two children. Shortly thereafter, she found out she was pregnant with two twins, who were diagnosed with a rare disease. She lost one of her children shortly after birth, which prompted her to write and share her experience to help other grieving mothers who suffered from the loss of loved ones. Through her blogging, she connected with a community of other writers, and she published her first book "Sunshine After the Storm: A Survival Guide for the Grieving Mother." From this collaborative effort, she received many inquiries from aspiring authors who wanted to publish a book. So Alexa started a book publishing company, Kat Biggie Press, and began to offer book production and marketing services. As things picked up, Alexa decided to run a virtual summit to generate new business. Unfortunately, it flopped financially, only making back 10% of her investment in the entire campaign. So she tried again, with her second summit. This was, in her words, another disaster. But Alexa didn't quit - she knew there was great upside potential if she could get a virtual summit off the ground the right way. So she started to prepare for a third and final shot at growing her business, and that's when we connected. In Alexa's own words: "And then Tom came into my life right as I was getting ready to do number 3 and the results were quite different..." In fact, not only was this summit profitable, unlike the first two campaigns she ran, but she generated 207 sales (and counting, as sales are still rolling in) of her All Access Pass, and launched a group coaching program, all of which led to just shy of $20,000 (which doesn't include additional client work she's received as a direct result of her successful summit). In today's discussion, we dig into her story and go behind-the-scenes of her campaign, including what worked and what didn't...
In this broadcast, Alexa Bigwarfe and I talk about:
- How Alexa got her start in publishing
- Why Alexa decided to run her first virtual summit
- How her first two virtual summits were "disasters"...and what she did different for her third summit that changed everything for her business
- How to get people to buy an "All Access Pass" to your virtual summit (hint: it doesn't happy naturally)
- One tip I gave Alexa that helped her generate over 200 sales from her summit
- Why a "content / partnership" strategy is so important (and how this strategy helped her make just shy of $20,000 from her most recent virtual summit)
- How to deal with trolls and haters (and why they are inevitable when you start reaching any level of success)
And much more.
How to connect with Alexa Bigwarfe online:
Great quote from ALEXA BIGWARFE:
“I have big goals and hopes for the Women in Publishing Summit...it's really sparked something bigger for me...and it's because of an intense strategy.” - Alexa Bigwarfe
Get the Latest Broadcasts of In The Trenches
Subscribe to In The Trenches on iTunes
How You Can Support In The Trenches
Did you enjoy today's broadcast of In The Trenches? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.
Friday May 04, 2018
Friday May 04, 2018
Charlie Wallace is the founder of guitarmasterymethod.com, an online guitar lesson company that supplies online lessons to guitarists all over the world. Through GuitarMasteryMethod.com, Charlie has helped tens of thousands of guitarist around the globe improve their guitar skills.
In this broadcast, Charlie Wallace and I talk about:
- How Charlie got started playing guitar, and his transition into the business space of teaching guitar
- Why Charlie focuses on value and member success first, before anything else
- Why he doesn't use the word customer (member instead)
- How Charlie creates free resources that are so valuable he could charge for them, but doesn't, and why
- How Charlie runs more than 6-figures / month in paid ads to grow his business to multiple 7-figures a year
And much more.
How to connect with Charlie Wallace online:
Charlie Wallace on his "value first" philosophy:
“I changed my thinking from 'how can I make more money from these campaigns' to 'what is the thing I can do to add the most amount of value to someone's life today that will turn them into a lifelong member.” - Charlie Wallace
If you enjoyed today’s podcast, please leave a review on iTunes here. Thanks so much in advance for your support.
Wednesday Apr 25, 2018
Wednesday Apr 25, 2018
Dr. Jordan Peterson is a professor at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist and the author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, and many scientific papers which have been cited literally thousands of times (according to Google Scholar Citations). As a Harvard professor, he was nominated for the prestigious Levinson Teaching Prize, and his classroom lectures on mythology and psychology, based on his book Maps of Meaning, were turned into a popular 13-part TV series on TVO. I first stumbled across Dr. Peterson's work via his Maps of Meaning lecture series on YouTube. Within minutes I was hooked, and proceeded to binge watched more than 24 hours of these lectures, which use the story of Pinocchio to articulate the way in which you and I act in the world, the deeply biological origin of "meaning" and "sacrifice," and how we can better navigate the world through understanding stories, meta-stories, and archetypes. If you had told me two years ago that my favorite videos on YouTube would be a professor's university lecture series on YouTube, I would have called you crazy. But that's a testament to Dr. Peterson; how he can take topics that could be seen as otherwise mundane or cliche, and turn it into a compelling narrative that gives the best Hollywood films a run for their money. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Peterson’s YouTube channel, Jordan Peterson Videos, which features his university and public lectures (including his recent 15-part biblical series), has over 1 million subscribers, with 10s of millions of views.
In this broadcast, Jordan Peterson and I talk about:
- Dr. Peterson's morning routine
- How Dr. Peterson creates time to write (and why it's so important to develop a practice of writing)
- How Dr. Peterson uses Twitter to develop content for his blog
- What Dr. Peterson means when he says "Don't let bullies get away with it" (from a Quora response that's generated over 326,000 views and more than 5,000 upvotes)
- The difference between meaning and suffering (and why you should strengthen the former and reduce the latter to lead the best life you possibly can)
- What Dr. Peterson thinks of Nassim Taleb (including how several of their ideas align, including the concept of "skin in the game," and his interest in having a conversation with Taleb)
- Why the hard-right / hard-left dichotomy is an imperfect, if practical way to navigate the complexity of our modern political environment
- How to raise your kids traditionally, without sheltering them (this is an answer to a reader question)
And much more.
How to connect with Jordan Peterson online:
- Jordanbpeterson.com
- The Self Authoring Suite
- 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaose
- The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories (on YouTube)
- Maps of Meaning lecture series (on YouTube)
Great quote from Jordan Peterson:
““Here's something you can do with your life: devote it to making everything you possibly can better, and see what happens. Tell the truth, aim high, and make things better - see where you can get with that.” - @jordanbpeterson
If you enjoyed today’s podcast, please leave a review on iTunes here. Thanks so much in advance for your support.
Monday Mar 26, 2018
Monday Mar 26, 2018
Travis Phipps is the CEO of Battle Bridge Labs; a digital marketing agency who works with several large-scale companies. In this episode, Travis dives into how he built his agency, the various business models he’s tried, some Facebook features he thinks are game-changers, and lots more.
In this broadcast, Travis Phipps and I talk about:
- What led Travis to his current business
- How Travis landed his first digital marketing client
- How Travis grew his business from a one-man shop to a full agency
- Travis’ thoughts on how to best price agency work
- Why Travis suggests every entrepreneur has an assistant
- How Travis prices and sells his more labor-intensive services
- The importance of choosing the right clients
- The various business models Travis has tried for his agency
- Why Travis has increased his Facebook ad spend for his client from 15% to 50% in the past two years
- Why your ads and calls-to-action need to be optimized for mobile devices
- The Facebook feature Travis thinks is going to change the way we create leads in the future
And so much more.
How to connect with Travis Phipps online:
- Battle Bridge Labs
- Email Travis: travis@battlebridgelabs.com
- @LabsBattle
Great quote from Travis Phipps:
“I think that it’s super powerful and it’s going to change the way that we create leads in the future.” - @LabsBattle
If you enjoyed today’s podcast, please leave a review on iTunes here. Thanks so much in advance for your support.
Monday Feb 19, 2018
Monday Feb 19, 2018
David Kadavy is the bestselling author of The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. He is also the host of the Love Your Work podcast. In this episode, David and I talk dig into how his curiosity has led him down some unexpected paths and opened the door to knew opportunities.
In this broadcast, David Kadavy and I talk about:
- Why David felt compelled to write his book, The Heart to Start
- Can we cultivate an action mindset in those around us?
- The importance of creating something of your own even if you don’t want to be an entrepreneur
- Why we need to embrace curiosity and never stop learning
- Why the cliched advice of following your passion isn’t always the best idea
- How David’s curiosity has shown up in his writing and various projects over the years
And so much more.
How to connect with David Kadavy online:
- David Kadavy's Website
- David Kadavy's Book: The Heart to Start
- David Kadavy's Podcast: Love Your Work
- @kadavy
Great quote from David Kadavy:
"If you want to have purpose in your life, you’ve got to do something nobody else can do except for you." - @kadavy
If you enjoyed today’s podcast, please leave a review on iTunes here. Thanks so much in advance for your support.
Monday Feb 12, 2018
Monday Feb 12, 2018
Warren Hogarth is the Co-Founder and CEO of Empower Finance; which includes the Empower app. In this episode, we talk about Warren's time at Sequoia Capital, the criteria he uses when determining what companies to invest in, and how his new app can save people thousands of dollars each year by allowing them to take control of their finances.
In this broadcast, Warren Hogarth and I talk about:
- What led Warren to work at Sequoia Capital
- What the environment was like at Sequoia Capital and what Warren learned from it
- The criteria Warren uses to determine if a company is worth investing in
- Why Warren focuses only on tech companies (or companies that are technology-enabled)
- What is the Empower app and how does it meet Warren’s criteria?
- How Warren is growing his customer base in a market with big-name players
- How entrepreneurs and small business owners can benefit from using the Empower app
And so much more.
How to connect with Warren Hogarth online:
- Warren Hogarth's Empower Website
- The Empower Podcast
- Empower App for iOS
- Empower App for Android
- @empowermeapp
Great quote from warren Hogarth:
"It’s really about breaking down the barriers in financial services." - @empowermeapp
If you enjoyed today’s podcast, please leave a review on iTunes here. Thanks so much in advance for your support.