John Corcoran 9:34
Yeah. And so an important point is you can do this either with the person’s cooperation and assistance and live there or you can do it for a company that you don’t even know perhaps so in that case, I had a client or a guest who was on my podcast, a while back who the funny thing was, he had done a podcast for a period of time, but had wasn’t doing it currently. And this so frequently happens with people where I go by I asked him about it, like, how was the podcast? Sometimes, you know, they did some things wrong and they didn’t get good results from it. But sometimes they’re like, you know, when I think about it, actually, I got this great client from it. And I’m like, why are you not still doing it. And this particular person, they, did kind of like a tear down format, where they gave advice to different large tech companies. And they actually ended up landing Microsoft as a client, because they did an episode where they just addressed and said how Microsoft could overcome a particular challenge. And they did a whole episode where they went through and gave their wisdom freely how they would do it, and Microsoft ended up hiring them to help them with that particular challenge. Because they, you know, shared it after the fact with them. So you can do it either way you can do it where, you know, you ask them in advance, they come and they participate. And in certain types of professions, you would need that assistance, but in others, you maybe you don’t, you can just do it without Yeah, without that.
Jeremy Weisz 10:55
And I want to say caveat, like we’re talking, you know, I was talking about LinkedIn, we had the guest on but a thought leadership is you’re just doing it without a guest at all. So if, if I were this person, I would probably do a bunch of episodes, just pulling up the feed in LinkedIn and doing a tear, a breakdown of some of the ads. Another example was, I had the CEO of SiteTuners on my podcast, which is a conversion optimization company. And he tore down my website, right? And also, he had them bring up other websites to tear down. So if I was like, conversion rate optimization, or website person, I would be pulling up websites all day long on my episodes and going, here’s what I like, here are some things to improve on. And it’s just delivering a lot of value. And I mean, if he did that for us, which he did on the call, I would definitely watch it and see what advice he had, you know, so yeah,
John Corcoran 11:56
yeah, definitely. What about FAQ style episodes? Jeremy?
Jeremy Weisz 12:02
Yeah, so we talked about kind of origin, which is, there’s a bunch of different questions on the origin category, we talked about the teardown, and then FAQ. So FAQs, we look at ways to you know, when you have an external guest, you build this amazing relationship. When you have a thought leadership episode with you, or your internal team. How do you save your team time, so you’re demonstrating your expertise, but FAQ should save you and your team time? Like John, that’s one of the reasons that he is very meta, one of the reasons we’re creating this episode and other episodes because we get these questions over and over and over every single week. So instead of spending 20 minutes explaining it to 10 different people that week, we could go, Hey, here’s a short answer. Here’s the full episode, where we talk about the types of thought leadership episodes, you should be creating the five types of episodes in general, you should be creating. So it is designed to save you and your team time. So if you think about what are the biggest questions you get, from clients, potential clients, it could be anyone, you can create episodes around that. And then there are other ones where you can talk about misconceptions. Um, as well, and mistakes, which kind of feed into FAQs. I was talking to someone the other day. And there’s like, I don’t know, people don’t really understand, you know, the higher us branding versus design, we do this whole branding thing. And then people show up, they just want the design of this thing. We really do the whole branding. And that’s just like this: the design is one part of the branding. And I go well, you should do an episode about what is the difference between branding and design? Because they end up explaining it over and over again. Right. So yeah, I’ll be an example.
John Corcoran 13:57
And with that, the way that I explained it to people a lot of the time is to imagine it’s Saturday night, it’s 1030. And you’re checking your work, email, maybe you shouldn’t be but you do anyways. And you see an email that comes in. And it’s someone saying, Hey, I would love to talk to you about your services. But it turns out, you’re fully booked Sunday, Monday, you can’t talk until like Tuesday afternoon. Well, you can set a time for that appointment. But you can also send them some resources. In the meantime, say check out this resource, check out this resource, and then they’ll go consume it. It’s not viewed as marketing. It’s not like a pamphlet or something. They’re like, I’m not going to read that people are more likely to consume it and then they’re going to be so much more warm when they talk to you because they’ve learned about your knowledge and wisdom. So I hear that all the time. When I talk to people and they’ve listened to a bunch of our episodes that they’re really a lot further along in the buying process. What about case study types of episodes, Jeremy and how do you distinguish that from actually interviewing a client how a case study persona thought leadership?
Jeremy Weisz 14:53
Yeah, that’s a great question. So another amazing one is case study. Now you with case studies. You can have your clients on the podcast, which we do all the time to talk about their services highlighting what they do, but of course, you know, they’re gonna say, Oh, yeah, I love John and Jeremy, hopefully. I love John and Jeremy and what Rise25 does, and you talk a little bit about their experience, but it’s going to be focused on a couple things. So you can also do a case interview as this is a thought leadership, meaning you say, in the biggest, I guess I have to say the biggest objection John, I get with this is, well, I can’t mention their name. I can’t mention the company name. I can’t mention the person’s name. You don’t need to, you could say, listen, there was this company in the manufacturing space. There’s lots of companies in the manufacturing space. So you don’t have to specifically if you don’t, you can always ask for approval, can I use your name on the episode and some of the stuff that we did together, but if you don’t just make it general and go in the health I this company that works with the health space, and you walk through the journey, you walk through the journey? You know, I know, John, when we’re doing, when we have clients, we do the thought leadership as those with our clients. So we actually, our team will interview them for this episode. So it’s, even though it’s thought leadership, we’re the guest. Interviewer for that. So it helps those who can work.
John Corcoran 16:18
The reason we do that is that it’s far more likely to get done. You know, people are busy. And it’s far more likely to be done with us, right. That’s why we’re doing this right now, talking to one another, because it’s a lot more interesting and fun than, you know, just having a solo person talking to a microphone. And I think more interesting for the listener too, as well. We’re almost out of time. But let’s talk about the give loop, the give loop strategy, Jeremy and how that works.
Jeremy Weisz 16:44
Yeah. So quickly, just to reiterate the origin, right, the origin questions, the FA Q’s, the case studies, the tear down, and then they give a loop. Really quickly, in the case studies, you can also since you’re doing it, there’s different questions you could ask under the case studies that walk someone through that customer journey from the beginning to end. And so the last one is the giveaway. And this is our favorite. One of our favorites. It may be my favorite one personally. But the giveaway loop is where you can incorporate a lot of different companies and people and do an episode. thought leaders in space. We’ve seen these John, you’ve written some of these for Forbes and Inc, you know, the top 25 most influential connected people or something, right? So you’ve done these in his articles, and we see them all over top 30 under 30, top 40 under 40, top 40 243 I don’t even think there’s probably a million out there. But how do you create a list of the top influencers, people whatever category that looks like? So an example would be, let’s say, I am a paid ad expert for b2b SaaS companies, I would probably say Here are the top b2b SaaS tools that I use that my clients use the top 30, b2b SaaS tools out there. All of those are potential clients. But it’s also a great knowledge for the industry. And everyone wants to be in a top 25 or 30 list. And I’d love for you to tell the story of I think, one of the people that you did this with, even included in their email, I don’t know, we’ll talk about that.
John Corcoran 18:35
Yeah, one, one of the articles that I wrote like this was when I was writing for Forbes, I did a list like that top 25. And for years, some of the people afterwards would have it in their email signature, they had it in their, you know, LinkedIn profile, because people love to be included in those types of lists. But you know, you don’t have to write for Forbes in order to do that you can do it on your own. You can create content in a variety of different ways. We’re, we’re big proponents of doing it in a podcast, because it’s so easy and fast to do, it’s easier to talk out your content than to write a long article, that thing took me a lot of time to write. And so we’re big proponents of that. Any final thoughts on this? Jeremy, any final thoughts on thought leadership episodes before we wrap things up?
Jeremy Weisz 19:19
No, I think, you know, the biggest thing is to just, you know, think about not you know, people kind of think about different ends of the spectrum. When this complex people default to doing all interviews, or sometimes they default to doing all thought leadership episodes. So a good mix is good, but you definitely want to make sure that you’re including this and I’m just going to bring up. I don’t know if you can see my screen or if you could bring up my screen for a second. I’m going to show something really quickly. That’s not it, I think you have to click on click on that tab for a second. Yeah, and so I just want to show like, it’s an, like you said deploying these assets, right? You’re, it’s 10 o’clock or you don’t have time. You know, each of these episodes that we do lives as a separate blog post, it’s written up, it’s got a video component. It’s got audio components going on all the podcast channels and gets repurposed into all of these different places. And you can see, we mentioned some of our friends and other people in these episodes, you can still include other people, just they’re not there. Right? So you can see we’ve linked Ian Garlic and Steve assignments and some other ones. So this creates a really amazing asset that you can use to educate, to produce thought leadership to, you know, be the expert.
John Corcoran 20:48
Excellent. All right, Jeremy, where can people go to learn more about Rise25 and the work that we do?
Jeremy Weisz 20:53
Yeah, they can go to rise25.com, check out videos, go to our about page. And they can obviously check out inspiredinsider.com and smartbusinessrevolution.com. We’re all this content going out and we’re sharing some of our best strategies and tips.
John Corcoran 21:11
Excellent. Alright. Thanks, Jeremy. Thanks, everyone. Have a great week.
Outro 21:15
Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com. And while you’re there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast.