SOW 154 Kris Gilbertson: Podcasting for Business

Kris Gilbertson is the creator of the Lifestyle Academy and the Inspirational Podcast. She joins the show to discuss the art of podcast and how it fits into anyone’s lifestyle. She also discusses how people can launch and monetize their podcasts.

Kris Gilbertson is a leading expert in how to partner with iTunes to create your own world class podcast. Her clients praise their podcast enables them to reach their ideal customer, create a thriving tribe, increase their traffic to their website from over 40%-5000% and do what they love by simply using the power of their voice.

Listen to the Inspirational Podcast at www.inspirationalpodcast.podomatic.com.

Visit the Lifestyle Academy at www.lifestyleacademy.com.

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Start of Interview with Kris Gilbertson

Jason Hartman: It’s my pleasure to welcome Kris Gilbertson to the show. She is the creator of Lifestyle Academy and the inspirational podcast, and she’s been profiling lifestyle entrepreneurs who are turning their passions into a business. Sometimes that’s a portable business, but either way it allows them to do what they love. Kris, welcome. How are you?

Kris Gilbertson: Fantastic Jason, thank you so much. I’m excited to be here.

Jason Hartman: Well it’s good to have you. Just to give our listeners a sense of geography, where are you located?

Kris Gilbertson: I am in Denver, Colorado today in a snow storm in May.

Jason Hartman: Wow, I did not know that. That amazes me, but I do love Denver. Great city. Tell us about Lifestyle Academy.

Kris Gilbertson: Yeah, definitely. Well, as an entrepreneur I think we all have a kind of crazy path to how we get started and actually launch our real businesses that we’re really excited about. I actually started a real estate, Jason. I was actually helping people sell luxury homes through auctions. And I did that for quite a few years, but I was traveling on the road for about 6 days a week. So it was very, very frustrating for me. And I didn’t have a life. If you’ve ever been a road warrior, you know what that’s like. So I started to dive into online marketing. One of my really good friends had built a solid real estate business and said you can start looking at online marketing, and learn how to be an expert for your knowledge and learn how to turn that into a business.

So I was really excited about that idea and so I took a deep dive. I bought a lot of different programs and services and products out there. And what I realized is that there’s a lot of ways to drive traffic and actually build a funnel online, but a lot of people are teaching different aspects of it. So when I found out about podcasting and how you could actually just jump on a mic and start to really connect with people, it was amazing what started happening for my business. I started getting leads, I started getting joint venture partnerships, people asking me to speak. And that’s when I realized that you could really take your ideas online and really create a solid business.

So Lifestyle Academy is based on that principle. My podcast is The Lifestyle Entrepreneur, where I interview top experts that have created a lifestyle business and they share their tips and strategies that are working for them online to do so. And that’s how that evolved and what I do today. So I help entrepreneurs take their ideas, turn them into a thriving business online, and use podcasting as a vehicle to create that epic engagement for their customers.

Jason Hartman: Well give us some examples about these ideas, and some of the lifestyle entrepreneurs that you’ve been profiling on your show.

Kris Gilbertson: Yeah, so what’s great about today with technology at our fingertips is that we can take ideas, for example Jason for you with real estate, you can take ideas of how to flip homes, how to do different aspects of real estate, turn that into a digital product and actually create a product that you can sell over and over and over again that can be an evergreen product. So what I mean by that is once you create the product, it’s done. So your revenue goes way up, your cost of business goes way down. So you have a very profitable business and you’re able to leverage your time and your knowledge now.

So what I try to help people do is see if they can get out of the trading hours for dollars and into leveraging the one to many model. And that’s how Lifestyle Academy came about in being able to use the podcast to drive that traffic into those online funnels.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, that’s certainly a great thing, and I just wonder Kris with the one to many model, how many times can we keep doing this, because the whole population can’t be one to many!

Kris Gilbertson: Well what’s great is… I think what happens with a lot of entrepreneurs is a scarcity mindset comes into play. And the internet marketing world is very tiny. It’s a very small niche. So there’s so much more opportunity today. My background, before I was in real estate, I was actually a director of career services and created a curriculum for higher education programs that were online based training. So what’s really powerful is that I don’t think this medium is ever going away. I think it’s just getting stronger and more valuable for people. Because as more people are coming online, more and more people are using their smartphones as their phone, everything is on the internet today. So if you don’t have a presence online, you don’t have digital products that people can download and connect with you, you’re missing a huge opportunity in the market place for people that are hungry for content and hungry for top experts to help them make a difference in all areas of their life, whether that’s health, relationships, money, finance, all the different areas. There’s huge opportunities for that.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, there certainly are. And Kris, I just want to make sure the listeners understand the background because some of the references you made… I want to make sure I just didn’t include them in that. I have a real estate investment company that helps people buy and hold properties nationwide and manage them and so forth. And back in 2006 and 2005, I was doing radio shows and then I started podcasting after I heard Leo Laporte talking about it. I thought, “what’s this new podcasting thing?” It was pretty new back then. Nobody had heard of a podcast barely, not even I.

I started podcasting for the real estate business and that took off like crazy, and it became my one big funnel for my marketing, whereas we used to spend about a quarter of a million dollars a year advertising on the radio, and do all kinds of things like that, and we were just able to ultimately save that money, create better clients, longer term clients, better educated clients that were much easier to work with. And then of course we had the Wall St.’s financial scam crisis where they sank the global economy, and so I started a bunch of other podcast shows and I’ve now got 18 different shows that I do on a variety of topics. So that’s just a little background on that. I wanted the listeners to understand, because we’re not on the real estate show so they may not know what you’re talking about.

Kris Gilbertson: Right.

Jason Hartman: But good. What are some of the things that you see that really separate the successes from the failures in this area? One of the great things about the lifestyle entrepreneurship concept to me, is that the cost of failure is very low. So you can experiment. You can try things and if they don’t work, you can just try something else. It’s not too hard.

Kris Gilbertson: Exactly.

Jason Hartman: But it’s always better to succeed the first time out if you can. And what are some of the things that really make success and what are some of the things we want to avoid that make failure?

Kris Gilbertson: Yes, great question. Well, the three biggest mistakes that I find are one, people wait too long to get their concept to market. So we’ve all watched Shark Tank, and we’ve all seen the people that get the funding from the sharks and it’s people that have actually taken their product to the market and made sales. And the ones that don’t get funded are the ones that haven’t even really, typically for the most part, taken it to market yet to see if it’s actually going to be a viable product. And so in this online space, like you said it is very easy, low cost of barrier entry to get started. But what happens is entrepreneurs, they get too wrapped up in trying to make it perfect and in having that perfectionist mentality.

So the best thing to do is actually to create your sales funnel first and what I mean by that is actually start capturing leads and start sharing the opportunity of what you offer to the market place first. You don’t have to build a product first, you don’t have to make the eBook, you don’t have to make the digital membership site. Because what most entrepreneurs do is they spend months if not years sometimes building all this out and they go take it to the market place and realize that’s not quite what the market’s looking for. They’re not going to pay for that service, that product or that idea yet. So you want to get that onto the marketplace as quickly as possible. And then you’re going to want to tweak that.

So the second thing that most people do then, is they’re not staying consistent with their market online. Often times we see these instant success stories online where people went from zero to hero, and we all know that’s not true. That’s not how success is made, but what happens in the market place…

Jason Hartman: It sounds great in the infomercial and the seminar though.

Kris Gilbertson: Exactly. Right? Any time you hear get rich quick you want to run. But I think what’s happened with social media is that we all have that instant gratification. Like with the like buttons today now, everybody gets those endorphins, they get excited and I think what happens is when people take their product to market and they’re not getting instant feedback, people get deterred and they stop. So even though it is low cost to get started, that can hold a lot of people back because it was so low cost.

So what I say is stay consistent with that and keep testing your ideas. And then the third, which I think is the most important part, is really start to create connections in the market place

that already have a huge following. A lot of people try to go at it themselves, they launch their blog and they start creating all this epic content but if you don’t have eyeballs yet it really doesn’t matter.

So what I suggest is to use… where like, with your podcast being able to connect with other top experts and interview them… in the world of real estate we talk about other people’s money, other people’s time, other people’s idea. It’s the same thing you can use here in your business – I like to call it OPP, other people’s people.

So find people that have built a network, that have trust and a relationship with their audience, you can find top guest bloggers, top podcasters, top content creators, and see how you can share your content with that audience to start building your list and your audience online quicker and more efficiently. So try to work smart, not hard. And those are my best three tips that I see that people are making the mistakes on.

Jason Hartman: It always sounds almost as good as a get rich quick scheme when I hear people talking about how they go and start marketing a product before they created it. And look, I just want to go on the record as saying Kris, I definitely agree with you that one of the things we all have to overcome is perfectionist tendencies which will just stop us from doing things. And since you’ve mentioned real estate so many times, I’ll tell you: the people I see succeed as investors and the people I see fail as investors, the ones who succeed are the ones who overcome their paralysis of analysis. So no question you are certainly right about that. So give us an example of someone who goes and markets a product before creating it? How quickly do they have to create it once they’ve got people who have purchased it?

Kris Gilbertson: Well, here is a great example. It’s my story. So when I first got into podcasting, I was doing private consulting. So I would trade hours for dollars and I would work with experts that wanted to launch their podcast, and I would privately consult them and coach them and that’s when I decided I wanted to go to the one to many model. So I already had the basis of the process that I teach, so I’m not saying just go throw something up, half ass it (pardon my French), and just try to get people and income right away.

What I want you to do is think about what you already are taking for granted. That’s what a lot of entrepreneurs do. They think, oh they look online and they’re like well there’s already 25 experts doing this. I can’t do this. The difference is though, your voice, how you tell it, your personality, and the way you teach is going to be different than other experts. That’s why I love the online market place because there is so much opportunity. There’s so much abundance for everyone.

And so what I suggest is really first, just take a snapshot if you will, of the process that you walk your current clients through. And then what want to do is then you can craft a webinar that’s going to great freebie information on the process that you present, and then you can sell that product before it’s all completely put together.

Now what I mean by that is you’re not selling something that you’re just making up out of thin air, you already have an idea of how you’re actually going to put that together. But what often times happens is people spend all their time in the creation phase and not in the marketing phase. And once you create the product, you’re just getting started. So we want to actually think about the premarketing, getting your message out there, getting the right advertisements, and the right way to grab that hyperactive buyer that you want to bring into your business, and then you can deliver the product second and it actually works out better.

This is where I see all of my clients thriving because they actually even find out before they’re launching the whole product, what their clients really need. So they know what to put in their product to be really successful. So I just suggest to have kind of a game plan, if you will but you don’t have to have it all completely figured out before you launch.

Jason Hartman: Well good points. So definitely do that. Get moving, get something out there, get some feedback from the market place. I think one of the best ways to look at this is to look at the lean start up model, which is Eric Ries’ fantastic book, which is about letting the market help refine your product. And like you said, it’s not putting out a crappy product per say, it’s just putting out what he calls an MVP or a minimum viable product. And he talks about Uber and all of these companies that have just experienced tremendous success and how basic and how one dimensional their functionality was in the beginning. They watched and they analyzed and they really got close with customers and they listened to that feedback very carefully. They kept improving and modifying very quickly as to the changes.

So yeah, good points. What about some of the tools? Do you have any particular tools, software and service tools especially, platforms, products, things like that people can use?

Kris Gilbertson: Yeah. I love this question. So if you’re looking to create your first online product, maybe an eBook, or a digital course, you don’t have to make it complicated. That’s what I was going to add with the lead start up. I love it because it’s so simple. A lot of times we get online and people feel there’s so much technology that it overstimulates them. They get confused and they feel like it has to be so complicated, but really it can be so simple.

The first product that I took to market that I ended up having over 12 hundred people go through in just a few months and creating a multiple six figure business firm, was very simple. All I used was GoToWebinar. That’s how I did my webinar to actually grab people’s names and Emails in exchange for me taking time to share with them a great free training. And then at the end of that, I had my sales link up where people could buy the product. And you can just use PayPal for a merchant account if you want just to get started for very simple.

And then you can just simply have a simple sales page. So what we mean by that is just where you have the information on your product, and then an Add to Cart button. It’s that simple. Then that’s connected into the actual product and there’s very simple WordPress plug-ins that you can use to create your first membership program. Or what you can do if you don’t even want to go that far, you can just send an email with your content.

So Vimeo today is a great resource where you can privately protect your videos and have passwords where people can actually access them. And then I use Amazon as well, Amazon S3 is where you can create your links for maybe your eBooks, your content, anything that you want to have protected. And then another great tool that I love is SurveyMonkey.com. It’s a great way to get feedback in a survey. If you want to refer people to sign up for you to have a strategy session, if you want to sell into maybe your coaching programs or higher end programs. It’s a great simple tool and anybody can do it. They made it so simple – it’s just drop and drag to be able to create a survey tool to be able to start getting really high leads in your business.

Jason Hartman: Great. That’s great. There are so many tools out there, and it just seems like an endless… it is endless. That just goes to show you, look at how innovative our economy and our world is today. Somebody is coming up with a new idea to solve another problem, but then it creates this huge learning and adoption and implementation responsibility to some extent. Any advice on sorting through the clutter?

Kris Gilbertson: Just one step at a time. Get the virtual assistant as fast as possible. There’s so… the Philippines are a great resource to go to be able to find virtual assistants to help you to get those minimal tasks off your plate. Because that’s what happens to us as entrepreneurs. We end up being in our business, and not working on our business. So we have all these additional tasks now. Now you’ve got to learn. You just bought a digital course, and you’re taking time to go through that digital course and you’re trying to figure out how to piece it all together. Find virtual assistants that help you with that. I actually have virtual assistants that go through digital courses for me. They learn the concept and they come back to me with the strategy and the plan of what they learned. So it saves me time, but I’m still getting the knowledge that I need to take my business to the next level.

So that’ll help you a lot. Then, keep it simple. I know I say this a lot, but it’s so easy to overcomplicate things but if you can keep things as simple as possible… I like to do mind maps and just drop my ideas down on a white piece of paper with a pencil and then map out what my plan looks like and then stick to that. So take your one idea, your one concept and take that to six figures and seven figures first, and then you can add more onto your business. What I find entrepreneurs doing is trying to launch five products at once and they have all these audacious awesome ideas, but pick your best one and just focus on that. I love the book The One Thing because it helps you focus on exactly one thing that’s going to move your business forward and it’s amazing. So hopefully that helps a little bit.

Jason Hartman: Yeah it does. Now I’ve got to add The One Thing to my reading list though.

Kris Gilbertson: Get the audiobook. You can listen when you’re running on the treadmill.

Jason Hartman: Good stuff. Well, any particular case studies you want to share, or just anything else that we should cover today?

Kris Gilbertson: Yeah, well the one thing that I like to help people do is get their message out in the market place first and help them get a solid content strategy that’s going to be driving high quality leads into their business. And that’s why I teach podcasting, you being an awesome advocate for it as well. The power of podcasting a day enables to make you message in front of literally millions of people and it’s so powerful to be able to have people really connect with your audio. When people are listening to you, there’s what I like to call an epic connection that’s created. So your sales cycle shortens, and people are able to connect with you faster and they listen longer than any other marketing channel out there today.

So one of my favorite case studies is one of my clients Stephanie Donegan who last summer launched her podcast, and she had no plans of launching a podcast. But what her goal was, was to actually bring in high end coaching clients. She wanted to take her business to the next level, and what she loved about iTunes that I explained, is that the listeners are affluent. They’re hard to reach, and they’re highly desirable.

So what happened for her business in the first 8 weeks of launching following my cross ups, she actually had two high end coaching clients come into her business, shared over 26 thousand dollars just for launching her first podcast, and what’s even more important was she got booked for a TEDx talk, she actually had 500% increase in Email signups to her list, which is awesome. So for her that was an extra thousand to two thousand leads a month. And more importantly, though, she actually doubled her rates because of the positioning that happened from iTunes.

So that’s why I’m such an advocate for podcasting a day. And the opportunity that awaits is kind of like Twitter was 5 years ago. There’s just a huge opportunity, a huge wave that’s happening right now that you can position yourself in front of this audience and it really gives you an opportunity to stand out, be noticed, and be discovered. So that’s kind of my simple case study there.

Jason Hartman: Great. That’s great. Well Kris, tell people where they can find you.

Kris Gilbertson: Yeah, thank you so much. If you want to head over to www.LifestyleAcademy.com, there you can find out more about me, the interviews, the show, the podcast, and then you can also get a free podcasting blueprint to see if podcasting is right for you and your business.

Jason Hartman: Fantastic. Kris Gilbertson, thank you so much for joining us today.

Kris Gilbertson: Thank you so much for having me. It was an honor and a pleasure.

Narrator: This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, all rights reserved. For distribution or publication rights, and media interviews, please visit www.HartmanMedia.com or email media@HartmanMedia.com. Nothing on this show should be considered personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own, and the host is acting on behalf of Platinum Properties Investor Network, Inc. exclusively.

Transcribed by Ralph

The Speaking of Wealth Team
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