Creating A High Authority Personal Brand That Opens Doors And Increases Revenue With Brian Horn

Can an average entrepreneur get coverage and recognition in the national media without already being a well-known expert? When making a purchasing decision for a product or a service, we always look for the obvious expert, the authority in that particular industry.

For us entrepreneurs, becoming an authority in a particular industry amplifies your message dramatically and converts your new audience into higher paying customers.

To gain authority status in our industry, we would leverage our knowledge with authority marketing, which is the process for positioning yourself as an authority, or even a celebrity, in your marketplace.

Today’s guest, Brian Ainsley Horn is a bestselling author, investor, and entrepreneur. He helps professionals and entrepreneurs leverage their knowledge to gain authority in their industry using authority marketing to get them national media exposure at Authority Alchemy.

In this episode, you will hear actionable steps and examples on how to write for influential online publications to gain authority in your industry.

Some Topics We Discussed Include:

• How Brain got into Authority Marketing
• How Brian got interviewed on the Howard Stern Show
• How to write for Forbes
• How to come up with topics to write about
• How often to submit articles
• How necessary it is to have a social media following to get published
• Building an authority for a brand rather than a personality & Micro-Specialization
• Writing Human Interest Stories
• Realistic time frame to go from zero to published

To learn more about Brian and actionable steps and examples on how to write for influential online publications, visit https://authorityalchemy.com/.

About The Guest: Brian Horn

Brian Ainsley Horn is a bestselling author, investor and an entrepreneur. He helps professionals and entrepreneurs leverage their knowledge to gain authority in their industry using Authority Marketing to get them national media exposure at Authority Alchemy

His unique method has been talked about and covered on the Howard Stern Show, Wall Street Journal, Perez Hilton, CBS News, Forbes, Advertising Age and a lot of other media outlets.

He is the co-founder of the consulting firm Authority Alchemy, and he also regularly writes for the Huffington Post and Entrepreneur Magazine about authority marketing and personal branding. He and his partner Jack Mize also have a fantastic podcast on iTunes.

Creating A High Authority Personal Brand That Opens Doors And Increases Revenue With Brian Horn

We are going to meet Brian Horn from Authority Alchemy. This is a question that he had a post on his website, “Can the average entrepreneur get coverage and recognition in the national media without already being a well-known expert?”

That hooked me. I was like, “We need to get Brian on the show.” Brian is a bestselling author. He is an investor and an entrepreneur and he helps professionals and entrepreneurs leverage their knowledge to gain authority.

You can argue celebrity authority status in their industry. He uses what he calls authority marketing to get them to national media exposure.

His unique method has been talked about and covered on the Howard Stern Show, Wall Street Journal, Perez Hilton, CBS News, Forbes, Advertising Age, and a lot of other media outlets.

He is the Cofounder of the consulting firm Authority Alchemy and he also writes for the Huffington Post and Entrepreneur magazine about authority marketing and personal branding.

He and his partner, Jack Mize, have an amazing podcast and rumor has it that they have got the best episode ever with this guy named Brad Costanzo. You will want to go listen to that as well. Brian Horn, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me here.

I love turning the tables on having me be interviewed and then me interview the person. I did that with Michael O'Neal from Solopreneur Hour and I have done that several times.

It’s neat to go back and forth and record these conversations. I learned a ton. If they want to subscribe to your podcast to hear little old me spill my beans, where do they go?

AuthorityAlchemy.com, it will be right at the top.

We are talking about building this expert authority in the market place and I want to address my readers and I have brought this up.

I could go basic on this and say, “Why is it important to be an authority in the market place? Why is it important to be seen as an expert?” If you don’t already know that, if that is not like forehead-slapping stupidly simple, then go read something else because that is a given.

Reading your bio, talking about where you write for, where you have been on automatically gives you that authority, so we are not going to talk about the why.

I want to dive into the how and some of the stuff that you don’t necessarily reveal out in the open all the time. I want people to walk away from this show, and by people I mean me, with some specific actions that they can do to build their authority right away.

Before we do that though, let’s give them some perspective and tell me a little bit about your journey from being an unknown marketer guy to where you are now. How did you do it? Tell us about the cool things that have happened as a result of it.

You hang some pretty big influential people pretty quickly. I was doing some consulting for businesses. SEO consulting back in mid-2006, 2007. I was answering some questions on a message board.

I happened to help one guy out and he contacted me and said he wanted me to interview him for a job and I ended up getting him as a client. Shortly thereafter, I realized that he was in Dan Kennedy’s Platinum Mastermind Group and he had a bunch of connections.

I got him ranked at the number four spot for the term bankruptcy in Google. Once that happened, then Dan Kennedy hired me, all these other big shots in his group hired me. I immediately became a go-to SEO guy. That was great for a while.

One thing I was doing toward the end of my time doing SEO was using some press releases. That’s big and that is where people were using PR web to rank for terms quickly, but I saw it as using it a little bit different.

I saw some errors in that. It was putting the same footprint out for Google which eventually would stop working.

I went back and created our own press release distribution service, but changed that a little. We are focusing on getting on some good quality sites. Not so much as getting out as many sites as possible, which is what most of them did.

We get on 100 sites and these are good quality sites and have strong backlinks we can put contextual links that will be good for SEO. We did that. It was working great.

One day, one of the things happened where all of a sudden, the answer has been right in front of you that you did not know something big was there. One of my clients asked, “I have noticed this is on all the ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox stations on their websites,” that is where they have been.

We went out. I looked over what their terms of service were. We talked to an attorney and we found out that was honest. It was not showing their endorsement, just that they have appeared to those places.

We put it on her site and she was doing luncheon. She was in the personal development space, more mind, body, spirit space. I’ve seen on her video sales page right above the buy button and it almost doubled sales in a split test.

This is a mind, body, spirit marketing. They are always a little behind what is working. They had never even seen anything like this before at all and it worked incredibly well.

I tried it with my other clients. We did it with Kennedy. We are doing stuff for a whole bunch of other people. We’re putting out there, at least in all of them across the board. It worked for everybody, but these were all pretty big people.

Shortly after that, I was in Kevin Nations’ mastermind. I have reached out to everybody in there and said, “I will do this for you, just report back your results.” I did that for people there, all of them had amazing results with it.

I am onto something and this is a hell a lot easier to deliver than SEO, so completely back away from the SEO stuff and started getting into this and nobody else was doing this.

We start to call them authority marketing, authority positioning, nobody else was doing anything like that. It’s very easy to become the go-to person in that quickly.

Nobody else was doing it, so it was not any competition to be the person providing that service or providing information to the market on that type of topic.

Asking for a couple of quotes is more effective than asking for a full-length interview. Click To Tweet

Can you dive a little bit more on that because I was having a conversation about that and it was some more of a controversial topic saying, “Is it legit to throw a press release out there?”

If it gets picked up on some of these sites that it’s not being published on their main site, it’s one of the little news feeder sites. Is there a little bit more finesse that goes into it? Is that a little bit different?

It depends on the market that you are targeting. The people I care about are the people in IM. I have seen it for a while, digging through it and focused on that, but if you are targeting the average business person, they don’t see the difference and you are not being on their website.

The way media has worked completely changed, the last one. It’s going back into what’s known as citizen journalism.

In the old days, before the internet exploded and was common, the only way to get a news website, a newspaper or magazine was going through a staff journalist. That is the only way. Now, the model for these media companies has completely changed.

I write for Entrepreneur and Huffington Post to bring on contributors. They bring on preferred partners, the entire websites. They will pull over their content. Entrepreneur has quite a few. There is a personal branding blog. I write for them and Entrepreneur pulls over almost all of their articles.

The other point is syndication partners where the news companies say, “We want more content for us, we want news on our sites. We want more stories on our site, but we don’t want to have to pay to have writers write them or editors to go grove them and roll over every piece of content.”

“We are going to find partners out there, they will do that stuff for him and as long as they provide quality news that meets these specific guidelines, we will accept them as stories on our site.” That is what syndication is.

I was arguing it, it’s legit. I have seen those, but this is a totally different subject. I have seen people on the video sales letter and what not saying, “As seen on Google. As seen on Yahoo!” Different story, but that is cool. That is some of the journeys there.

Let’s talk about some of the coolest stuff that either happened as a result for you, and maybe even more fun for some of the people that you have worked with as a result of doing this authority marketing.

You already have said one. Doubling your conversion rate is awesome. Tell me some cool anecdotal stuff like, “Because I had this such and such contacting me or I got to experience this or business went up.” Make me jealous. Make me go like, “I want that to happen to me.”

I am a big fan of the Howard Stern Show for years. I love that show. I have studied it for a bit. I know what days are on, what days are off, I know what their slower days are as far it goes. Stern has entered the news department stoned looking for stories.

I said, “There is an opportunity right there.” I’m already writing for Huffington Post and I said, “I’m going to write an article about what ties in what I do with Howard Stern. Personal branding lessons from Howard Stern.” I wrote it, put into Huffington Post, they liked it, they published it.

As soon as it got published, I tweeted. I tagged in the Howard News, their Twitter handles, and within minutes there arrived multiple people on the news department contacting me over Facebook and Twitter. They told me they want me to come in to be interviewed.

You are going to need to fill in a couple of details. You published something on the Huffington Post then you tagged their producers and their people that you did some research on to say who their news producers are? Do you remember the topic? How did you get their attention?

I wrote the article for Huffington Post. It was The Personal Branding Sequence of Howard Stern. It was the personal branding lessons of Howard Stern. I made a list of things about him like being outrageous and controversial.

I wrote about those and then tied them into how an average entrepreneur can use those same things in their business. I tagged Stern on, he saw it and commented on it on Twitter and told them. They went back, got me in, got to do an interview, was on The Howard Stern Show, has six to eight million listeners.

Howard interviewed you?

His staff interviewed me.

It’s probably much better than getting interviewed by Howard because he does not think people in the perfect picture after being interviewed.

I got to talk about personal branding and stuff and some relatively smart versus going in there and having him interview me and end up being talking about sex. That was cool. That had a huge rate.

I said, “That works, I am going to try it.” I said, “Where is another person that puts out a whole lot of content that is always looking for more stuff to put on online and easy to reach, so which one is it? I know this, I got another good one.”

I went back and did one about Perez Hilton. PerezHilton.com is one of the biggest celebrity gossip sites, and I did one about him, the same exact thing. As soon as I published it, tagged him. I got a contact from him saying, “Thank you.” He loved it, and he wrote a post about it on his site and thanked me on his sites.

I have a screenshot of him talking about me on his show, on his site with a Kardashian right below Drew Barrymore and me right above me. I am right there mixing with celebs which is cool.

It’s funny you say that as I was going over your website AuthorityAlchemy.com. You have done an amazing job on the blog and the site. It has tons of great articles, engaging, good design and everything. I give you a little prop on that.

I noticed in there that you did this several times where you are talking about certain celebrities. You are bringing them up, and you are using them as exactly like you said, like Howard Stern’s secrets to this or Perez Hilton’s secrets to that.

I know this is industry term or whatever, but you have also called it either newsjacking or authority jacking. Things like that where you are tying in. I have also heard it called, “Tying into the slipstream.”

If people are already talking about these people, these issues, especially like these people have influence and you can paint them in a nice picture.

There’s a high likelihood that you will get some attraction from that and then what you did is you used your platform like on Huff Post or any of these other publications to where it’s not like Authority Alchemy.

Because that is nowhere near Huff Post or something like that, they are not going to want to share it as much, but even famous celebrities, “It’s on the Huff Post,” they acknowledge it better there.

Huffington Post has been huge with that. You can get to anybody with that and entrepreneurs are about the same way also. You can literally call it about anybody and say that you are doing a story for Entrepreneur to get them to talk to me and you get yeses, that is amazing.

 

You made me remember a strategy. I can’t remember where I heard it, whether it was Tim Ferris or somebody else, but let me say what it is.

Somebody was saying that they got some badass interviews or at least one interview with somebody by saying, “Brian, this is Brad Costanzo. I am writing an article for Forbes and I want to write one about you. I’d love to get your input on this.” He scored an interview.

He did not have a column with Forbes, but then what he had is he had an interview with this famous person. A famous business leader or whatever, and then he went to Forbes or Huff Post.

He pitched them, he said, “I have an exclusive interview with this person. I would like to publish it with you.” They said, “Absolutely.” It’s an exclusive and so he killed two birds with one stone, but he did it the reverse way. Have you got any insight on that?

The other thing that is cool with this, I’ve got a guy that teaches people how to become contributors in this place and gives the editor’s email addresses and stuff so we can get that out.

The one thing I wanted to say with that though is that aside from reaching out to celebrities to get a cool little piece of news and get some exposure. You can get to any decision-maker instantly. It appears on a bigger consulting package and they are going after larger clients.

It’s anybody. You go up to them and say, “This is Brian Horn doing a story for Entrepreneur about XXX industry. I’d love to get a couple of quotes from you.” You can write on and talk to anybody, get a pass to any gatekeeper.

I love the whole couple of quotes from you because you are not asking for a lot and that could end up being an hour-long interview.

It goes back to one of our principles with all the authority stuff we are doing, also, it’s like, “Believability and achievability.” If you go to somebody telling them, “Full story on you for the Entrepreneur, Forbes,” it sounds a little odd.

If it’s, “Can I get a quick quote from you about what is going on your Facebook via ad changes?” You can get through to anybody.

You did a podcast episode about how to write for Forbes and Huffington Post. You should charge for it. It’s that good. People can go read about some of this.

Let me recap some of the stuff that I understand and then you correct me if I am wrong because then I want to go deeper.

Let’s say I want to write for Forbes and I am not looking at your article, I am not looking at notes, this is on the top of my head. There are contributor guidelines usually, and they will tell you what they want, you give links to that.

There are submission forms and sometimes the straight-up contact of the other that you can reach out to them.

Often times this is easy as reaching out to them and letting them know, “I got a great topic, here is what I would like to cover.” I have seen even some templates in there. That is the easy stuff.

It’s fine if you come up with a great topic or a thought and you want to submit it to them relatively easy. However, what I want to know is a couple of things. Coming up with topics.

I’m creative as a mofo and I am a good writer, I know that. I sat down to do this, I was like, “I have no idea what I would submit to them.”

It was the weirdest little brain block, so then I started looking around a lot of the articles that they had going. How unique does it have to be?

I see these sites regurgitating the same article that looks like the same topic. They are relatively general too, meaning they don’t go super deep. They’re not like this amazing post.

They are relatively general that somebody can read it in a few minutes. How do you come up with these topics that are going to get the attention of some of the editors?

They are a lot of the same ones, they are almost all the same ones as you read for the six habits to be successful people do every morning and they got tons of those, they do not want those.

I’ve heard there are no more listicles.

The list stuff is still okay, they want it tied into a current topic because before they are very interested in evergreen stuff. We want things that are evergreen. Things that are going to be okay forever, and now they exhausted that. They want more topical ones.

The same type of things, like what I was doing with the Howard Stern stuff. Tie them into celebrities or things like the presidential election. Kobe Bryant was in the news, tie it up into that concept. These things where they can hit and they can get those nice surges of traffic popping through when it happens.

That gives me the ability to search the news feed, especially the business news feed because that is what I write about and look for anything that can come up with, “I could create a story around that.”

What I do is use a tool. I love BuzzSumo, it is one of my favorite tools. You can go there and you can look at Entrepreneur, Inc., Forbes, some of those big sites of Fast Company. See what has been shared the most and then go back and work in a current news topic to those and they love those.

Especially with Entrepreneur, they like very short articles. They like things that are broken up, scannable and that is about 700 words max. It’s the short stuff. You’ve got to get punchy with those.

That answered such a big question of mine because I was stumped going, “I don’t feel like I’ve got anything necessarily to add to that.” I was not motivated to write a general article like, “What leadership really means.” Tying it into a current topic.

If we were talking about a celebrity or somebody who is known, especially if they are a current topic, I imagine that fits in perfectly and you probably could.

My example earlier is a little bit in the gray area of ethics, which it tells somebody you are writing an article for Huffington Post or whatever before you’ve ever been accepted. Can I get a quote from you? I am also a fan of asking for forgiveness and not permission.

If your intention is to write an article for that place since that is what you are doing it for, I got your side, you are not being dishonest at all.

Be a fan of asking for forgiveness and not permission. Click To Tweet

Once you do get that article up there and you go in, the more ethical way to do it is to get at least one article up there. Is it true that once you publish for them once, it’s a lot easier to publish for them again?

A lot of them, when you submit some, if you get approved, they are going to create an account for you. At the places that I write for, I have accounts created. I log in to Entrepreneur and submit stuff whenever I want.

They either approve it or don’t?

Yeah. Huffington Post is very fast, they usually approve it within 12 or 24 hours. Entrepreneur’s two to three weeks out, it depends.

Who is the hardest to write for and get approved and all that?

I would say Forbes probably. Inc. is getting more difficult. It’s all doable, but all of the same things have kept coming through and they work for one.

I am guessing they stopped working for them as much because they love those for one, all of a sudden across the board know more what successful people do in the morning type stuff. People share the hell out of those. I don’t know why they stopped, but they completely stopped.

They probably got flooded with it and they realize that they are in danger of getting oversaturated with that. BuzzSumo, I went there as well. I was brainstorming topics on this and tying in the current topics, that is good.

Let’s talk about how often do you submit or do you suggest submitting the frequency of writing these articles. It depends on what you want to do, but you don’t need a ton of them up there.

What happens is you get a big surge of interaction with your list and followers the first time you go to a new place. The first time I worked for Huffington Post, it was huge. The first time I worked for Entrepreneur, huge. The first time I am in Forbes, huge.

As you do it more and more it gets less and less special to people that are following you. Now there are certain benefits to each one.

Entrepreneur saw your article and tagged you on Twitter, so you get a whole bunch of followers and interaction on Twitter whenever you run an article, which is good if you are using Twitter.

Huffington Post has ridiculous SEO. You can rank for anything there. If you go in there with that type of strategy, you can write an article that is ranking for a certain word.

You have links to other resources on your website or other ones and you see the fair amount of traffic getting into your site or those other sites as long as it’s a good resource. You get benefits that way, but even aside from writing from those big places which are a little war to get in to.

If you have not written for anywhere else before besides your own blog, there are these tons of smaller places you can go out to and pitch yourself and start writing content so you start building up a little bit of a profile.

Having a podcast probably is not the worst.

Having a podcast is good. Having a social media following you is good because they want traffic on those sites. When you are pitching yourself, they will ask about your social media accounts, and other insight, “Why should we accept you?”

You say, “I have a podcast and active email list of 50,000 people.” You are going to all of a sudden be a little more attractive to them versus somebody else that does not have that or has no social media following at all.

They want those page views. They want the title shareable and sexy. When you are picking up the person you want to tie it in to, you are going to find somebody who has a passionate following.

For me, I always got a Facebook, I said, “Who has a big faith? Who gets a lot of interaction on Facebook? Who specifically has fan groups on Facebook that you can join that people post and interact with?”

When I had Howard Stern, there is a Stern fan club on there that you can join. You can even post and everybody in the group sees it and interacts with it and you can send a lot of traffic that way.

You want stuff like that, Bernie Sanders or Trump types will be excellent ones. Because whenever you see their name, people either hate them and click on it or they love them and click on it.

When you are talking about the social media stuff, for instance, one of the things that I have not done because I have been so busy is cultivate a large social media following. I have gotten my audience and my emails list, but to the public out there, I almost ignored Twitter.

I got about 1,200 followers on Twitter. I have not cultivated that and I don’t cultivate a Facebook fan page to a large degree.

I am not going to impress anybody with the social media marketing that I personally did and I have a feeling that a lot of readers out there may feel the same. How critical is it in order to get published?

It’s not that it will make or break it, but it’s certainly something that they like to see. With your podcast, your email list, that would override the social media stuff.

They want people that can put on good content that already have some type of following so they can see there is going to give some traffic there.

I am going through my non-linear list of stuff. You have somewhat of a done for you service or a way to speed this process up. We’ll get to that because I don’t know that much about it and I guarantee there are people probably out here going, “This sounds like awesome but a lot of work.”

Let’s say you aren’t trying to build your personal authority as much as a brand’s authority, so it’s a business. Are there any differences or recommendations there? Let me give you an example. I already know how to do this. My wife and I launched a coffee business, Stiletto Coffee.

My readers, if you have not seen this yet, go to StilettoCoffee.com and follow us. You will get a very good education in the real world of what we’re doing, branding and marketing. I am proud of what we have done and some of the attractions we are getting.

This is one of the next big things we are going to be doing, reaching out. Trying to not only get press from other sources, but I started thinking if we can be the source, if I can get these articles written.

 

Maybe by my wife and get her posting on there as the founder of the company, it brings even extra juice to the table. Do you have any suggestions on how Stiletto Coffee and Kenia, my wife and the Founder, could utilize authority marketing?

We do more stuff for specific people. The foundations of authority are being the educator and advocate for the success of your customers and prospects.

That has to be a person, but she could definitely do that by going back to those specific things and being the educator and advocate. Talking about your coffee and benefits of it, whatever your main hook is, to her prospects and customers.

One of the other key things of authority is micro-specialization which is serving a very specific market for any specific service to that market.

That is one of my next questions I was going to bring up so I am glad you did. Let’s explain that.

We call them micro-specialization. It’s about providing one specific service to a very specific market. The example we always love to use on this one, it seems always to clarify it perfectly is Richard Simmons, who has about $16 million fortune in the fitness empire. He is not fit though.

It does not speak to general people at all, he never says, “I am going to give you ripped abs, get your arms cut up, ready for a marathon, new PRs and CrossFit.”

He targets a very specific market that is morbidly obese people that have never exercised before and have no clue how to eat right, and he helps them with that very beginning stage and that’s it.

That’s his micro-special, he targets that very specific market of morbidly obese people, about everybody wants to lose weight. There is only maybe a few 20% to 30% of people that are not out there trying to lose weight or are not buying some type of fitness product.

He targets that very small percentage, maybe like 5% to 10% of people, and then offer that one specific thing. “I am not going to show how to do yoga or how to get super ripped. I am going to show you how to move a little bit and that’s it.” He does one specific thing. He’s a great one.

The other one is Dave Ramsey who has a huge financial advice empire, $30 million-plus. Look at how specific he is. He only gives advice on how to get out of credit card debt. He did not talk about real estate, gold, stocks or anything else, just about how to get out of debt.

He knows who he is talking to and he’s like, “If I can talk to them better than anybody else, then I can help him with everything else.”

He only talks to conservative Christians. Not anyone who has a credit card debt, but conservative Christians. He hosts his training seminars in churches, he brings politics a lot in his show.

It’s very clear where his opinions are with that. He targets conservative Christians that want to get out of credit card debt, that’s it. Suze Orman, and all the other big financial people, they talk about everything. He talks about one specific thing and it has worked for him.

You guys talk about building your authority, that is your micro-specialization and you mentioned you are also a badass as SEO. There is probably a lot of other things that you are good at.

When a business owner hires you, you could help them, but you have your micro-specialization. Especially the thing that you put out there. That’s the sharp tip of the spear that pierces through all the noise.

You can still do all the other stuff. I don’t do the SEO anymore, we do some other marketing consulting, but the main thing we do is the authority stuff.

We have a group called Authority Agency. We help teach local marketers and consultants for online entrepreneurs how to do some authority stuff and sell that on a smaller scale than what we are doing. They use this stuff as more of like a lead magnet.

We teach them how to go out there and offer to do books. Get media placement as more like a tripwire type of thing and then you bring them in and go, “Since you got features of those places, let’s go ahead utilize that and do a full SEO campaign for you.”

After I sold my information product portfolio and that business, I dove into the whole Amazon, Kindle publishing and using CreateSpace.

I did this more for another client as an add on service and then he started talking about it and other people saw what I did and they came to me like, “You know how to run a bestseller campaign and do all the stuff for me, will you do it?” I was like, “Sure.”

It was easy as heck and that led into discussions with them about their other issues and then saying, “I didn’t know you could do all this. Can I hire you?” I was like, “Absolutely.”

It has been great, although I don’t do a lot of the Kindle or Amazon publishing anymore. That along with what you are saying is a great tip of the spear to get your foot in the door and get somebody to give you money for something to tripwire.

We could talk about that more because I am interested in hearing more about that Authority Agency where you let people go sell this. It’s almost like not a franchise, but a business in a box if you would, it sounds like that.

That’s cool for somebody especially if they already have another business to add on to this. One of the strategies that I was formulating for Stiletto Coffee and for Kenia is to get some exposure, to get a guest column on Huff Post and maybe some of these other websites.

Getting the exposure there allows her to even reach out to celebrities and other people profiling them. Letting them discover that she is the Founder of Stiletto Coffee in other ways.

Obviously, I would love to get stories written about her. Her journey and the founding of the company, why not have it both ways? That’s definitely coming. Are you a regular contributor to any of these or do you want down on some of them?

I have it for Entrepreneur and Huffington Post. I write regularly for those for personal branding blog for all business. I write regularly for those and then do a podcast and a blog each week on our own site, so I contribute there mainly.

For Huffington Post probably more than any because they have a wide array of topics you can write on and have more lead way in the style. Entrepreneur is regimen, what it needs to be. These long wait times versus at Huffington Post you can write about anything and you can reference other people.

You link other resources and they let you put all that up there. Entrepreneur’s very strict with that stuff. Not anything against them, but I guess they have other issues in the past.

If you quote somebody, they want to see where it’s online, they can read it that is on a site that person owns and that person actually approved that they said that comment before you can put on there.

Be the authority instead of trying to get people to write about you. Click To Tweet

If I interviewed you and I said, “Brad said this,” then you go, “Link to it.” I want to see that it’s on his site and that is an approved comment by him, so it becomes a whole process.

You couldn’t say that you interviewed me unless you have a recording?

They are strict there. On Huffington Post you can, which I do put stuff up there all the time.

If you interviewed me and you have a recording of it, you could submit that?

They would possibly take that, but I guess it will depend on what it is that they wanted to go for the time of listening to it.

The human interest stories. Let’s talk about that. It ties into the current topic thing and the celebrity, but if you want to write about people who had done some amazing stuff.

Everybody loves a good human-interest story. It’s not necessarily news, but it is. Do you have any experience with those in particular and getting those published?

Yes and you can do well with those also. Those are ones you can tie in clients to want. I had a client who is in the real estate space, it’s a thing he would share where he buys a home for someone in his community.

I did a whole story on him in Huffington Post about that. We have sent that off to other local media people on their social media accounts and what happened, every news station on the town was out there covering it for him.

Little fun things like that I do. My five-year-old son has Down syndrome, I’m an advocate for the kids with Down syndrome. A lot of stuff for those charitable organizations and I have done quite a few stories related to that out there and some have gotten huge.

One that I did was basic lessons for him that entrepreneurs can learn. It led to one of those windfall things also where he was picked up and run by a woman that has a TV show over in the UK about kids, young adults with Down syndrome.

Like the real-world, but all of the kids and adults with special needs, and did some stuff with her and then shortly after that Oprah picked up that show and picked up for the own networks. I did an article about that. It was an article where I was quoted and Oprah was quoted about that show.

I was a cool little tie-in. There is always that stuff out there, so I love doing the human-interest stuff also. There is usually a way you can do. This is the Bacon Wrapped Business show.

There are ways you can tie in business stuff to it and you have some mutually beneficial things where you can get some exposure of it and get some exposure for that charity also.

I understand your approach, it’s authority and publicity. In essence, go as opposed to trying to get other people to write about you, go be the person who writes about.

Be the authority as opposed to trying to get the authority to bless you, but do you do much more general publicity where you are using press releases in order to get published by other people?

We do that. The press release is not as much for that purpose. Once it works extremely well. It’s reaching out over social media. I have such good results with that.

In particular, once you have your first three words or, “I write for Entrepreneur.” Instantly that clicks and people will go, “I will read the rest of this message.” Without you even say anything.

They say, “Maybe if I’m nice to this guy, he can do something for me.” You’re leading them with something like that and going in, right off the bat with something you can do for them. It works awesome and then you get into something else, how they can help you.

You’re like, “I write for Entrepreneur,” and then you go to other journalist, contributors, social media influencers, are we still talking about pitching your story?

If you are going to pitch your story to another journalist, say like a local TV person, there is a business speech for your local television station.

You go there and say, “This is Brian Horn. I write for Entrepreneur. We are doing a story about a business guy who lives in the area that is raising money for this particular charity.”

“I thought I would tell you about it because it will be a good story. Here is the information on it and I’ll let you know when my story comes out.”

This is one of the areas that I have been building up. The strategy before rolling it out is the journalist reaches out and telling the story of Stiletto, but we have been working on all the back-end stuff.

Getting all the branding in place, so we have not done the big reach out process yet, that is about to come.

The way I am doing it is by reaching out to social media. That works better than anything in the past. It’s what we do.

I will start for a few days sharing all of their stories they post like on Facebook or Twitter and tagging them and stuff and commenting, so they get used to seeing me there. It works and then you go in and you hit them up that way.

You know social media, the ability to reach out, it’s crazy that we live in a time where we can do that. I had Jesse Itzler on my show. He is a billionaire. He is a bestselling author.

He’s done some of the most amazing things and it was a Facebook comment that led to the interview and then we have talked multiple times. I have introduced him to other people and it’s cool that we have the ability to expand our networks in this situation.

I finished listening to the audiobook. I read the book. You were posting about his audiobook. You are the reason I bought it. I love the audiobooks if the actual author is the one reading it.

For my readers if they are interested, you can read the show at BaconWrappedBusiness.com/jesseitzler. That came from a social media post.

 

One of the big secrets to my success and my life is connecting with influencers to keep it real basic, but the connections I have made. The network that I have built, relationships I’ve had, it has led to not only opportunities by osmosis being around these people.

It has also led to gaining knowledge that I wouldn’t normally have. It has led to so many things. There is that old saying that your network is your network, or vice versa, and it’s so true.

For the longest time, and I still contend, the single best networking hack is a podcast because of the ability to reach out to somebody and say, “I’d love to interview you for my show.”

When you combine that with, “I’d love to interview you for my show and I am also a contributor. I have a podcast. I write for Entrepreneur, in Forbes, in Inc., and I got a great business show on iTunes. My audience would love you. Can I get a few quotes from you?” That is a powerful one-two punch.

I love asking for quotes. It’s very low involvement, they don’t say, “I have to set aside time for this, just give a couple of quotes and make them feel like a star.” I have seen the quote from you.

Who does not want that extra validation? Everybody does.

I do this stuff and I get sucked in if people ask me that stuff. It works on me.

We have covered the what and the why and we have gone pretty deep into the how. We are giving them more resources on if they want to continue to build up their authority and do this pretty quickly.

I want to go into some of the ways that you have made it easier on them. Before I do, I have one last question addressing all the readers.

From the moment somebody decides, let’s say I decided, “Brian, I drank the Kool-Aid. I want to get published on my first major publication like this.” Assuming I can write pretty quickly, what is a realistic timeframe to go from zero to published that somebody could expect?

Three months probably. The first one takes a little while. Once you get that done and you are set up, you can go or you may jump on if you have a good article and some good hook on it and they happen to notice it.

It could push you up quickly for that one piece, but getting there and getting set up as a real contributor there are a few months on the process.

For one article it could be a lot quicker?

It could be faster, but I generally want to say it would be a few months because there is a process.

The worst thing about people who are, “Gurus,” is they promise you the instantaneous result and then people start to try and then they don’t get the instant results and then get all pissed off. This is real-world stuff.

If you are going to commit to this, it may take about three months, but then once that happens it gets a lot easier and it’s not like you are working full-time on trying to get published.

You’re basically waiting. They get tons of submissions. I was putting it in there and doing some follow-ups and you are trying to get them to notice you.

Let’s talk about some of the offerings because you guys put out so much awesome free information that I was looking around going, “How are they making their money?” What services do you offer to make these things quicker and easier?

You talk a little bit about the Authority Agency which is where somebody can invest a small amount. I saw what it was, get the ability to go out and offer this to potential consulting clients. What is the next level for this?

There is that level to do it if you are a marketing consultant or some type of coach that wants to use this to bring in other people even if you are not a marketing person.

We have people in there, business coaches, and use this stuff to add coolness to their masterminds or other high-level coaching programs. Aside from that we also have our done for you stuff. Where we can help you create a book and get it published and make it the bestseller.

It gets you quoted in some of these other places or if you don’t necessarily want to be a full-time contributor or writer from those places, you just want to get yourself quoted or even profiled on one of those places, we can set those up.

We know people who can pitch you and get a story created for you and do that. We are doing a book. It’s not about making people authors. It’s to raise money for LemonadeDay.org. We’re looking for people to tell stories of their first online business and get some lessons learned from that.

We are going to interview, put it together. It’s based on the book Founders at Work, that is a great book. Taking it back a little, more just the entrepreneurial person. We are looking for people who had been in the trenches. That’s what we’re looking for, people to tell their story in there.

We will interview you, put it up there, we are not charging any for that one. We are only asking each person to contribute a little, buy some books before it opens up and that’s it. Pushing up and creating some awareness, but we want to get this book in the hands of as many young entrepreneurs as possible.

I will make sure to get that out.

I will put a little page for all your people, AuthorityAlchemy.com/brad.

Most of the people reading my show are the types of entrepreneurs who would rather pay for it to be done for them as opposed to doing it themselves. Let’s go back to that done for you service that you have.

I come to you and I say, “Brian, I don’t have time for all this other stuff, I am busy running my empire. What can you do for me?”

One of the best things is if you don’t have a book, we recommend doing a book. It’s not as difficult as people think, you got to readjust what you think the book is.

Everybody thinks that the book as the big hardback, the A to Z guide to everything that you see in bookstores. With Kindle you can create a book, which we call it one problem, one solution book for you to solve.

People buy from authority. Perceived authority or credibility is a powerful marketing tool that makes a lot of other things insanely easy. Click To Tweet

You talk about one specific problem your target prospect has and give your solution to it and those can be short books. We can get all that out of your 45-minute, 60-minute conversation. We could get everything you need for that and publish that.

People tend to like those even better. I am one of them. I love little short books where I can get the whole concept down at one sitting.

This works well, and then tying that in. Getting you featured in a couple of news places, maybe quoted, Huffington Post or Entrepreneur ones, you can have those, and then we build in marketing campaigns around those which is where the real magic comes.

We don’t do that stuff for you and leave you on your own, we show you how to monetize it, how to build those into your existing marketing campaigns. We give you the white files for posting on social media and take the time to do it with the orders and it works extraordinarily well.

There is the book and go over them, what about if people want to do the whole, be the writer. Is that part of the program as well?

That is a standalone one but that is one by itself, we definitely do that. I could put it all on that page AuthorityAlchemy.com/brad, I will put that in there. We do those and we put a few people a month on, get some contributor sales places.

It’s a little bit of work. It does take time, but it is not much you have to do at all. We will help create the topics. Help create the first few articles to get you brought on there. By the end you have a log and access to those sites we had to publish or submit content on your own whenever you want.

That probably is the much quicker process and easiest process than trying to go out and do it on your own?

It’s easier for them but it’s still about the same amount of time. It’s still a bit of work. They have all these channels and I am through with those places.

I don’t think it matters what business you’re in. I see this as being a tremendous opportunity for any entrepreneur professional. It does not mean you have to be an entrepreneur. You could be selling insurance or whatever.

People buy from an authority, perceive authority, credibility. It’s such a powerful marketing tool that makes a lot of other things insanely easy. It greases the shoe.

The whole purpose of this thing is to make it easier for you, for everything else in your business to work. All the stuff we do, we are not asking to change any marketing you are doing right now, this is a way to enhance what you are doing.

It sits on top of what you are doing, makes it work better so we are not telling you to stop doing this, stop doing your paid ads or any of that stuff. You are doing that perfectly right now. This is going to make every bit of that work better.

This is an interesting thought or memory that popped up, but I have multiple friends who are in sales. They have sales jobs and over the past years there has been a whole lot of ups and downs in the economy and a lot of people have lost their jobs.

Especially sales jobs, and they have come to me with recommendations, “What do you think?” I even told my 22-year-old cousin to do this because he is at that cost of about to go look for a job.

I said, “If you are in sales, write a book on something about how to find, close and keep customers for life, as a general sales book.”

I said, “Chances are you could create this book in an hour or you could hire a ghostwriter to do a very basic book for a few $100. Definitely less than $1,000 to keep a very basic one done.” Even a private label writes stuff out there about a general topic.

Get it published, get it on Amazon, become a topic expert on sales. They are always confused, but I said, “Think about this, if you put your résumé out there and somebody is reading it, I bet my life that every single HR person is Googling your name.”

“I am interested in what this person has to say. Let’s google their name.” “If your Amazon listing comes up that you wrote a book on sales or you wrote a book on the topic of the job that you want, do you think you’re probably going to get a call?”

Not a single one of my friends has taken me up on this advice. Granted I did not say I’d do it for him and I told them to go do it themselves. I probably should have offered it to him, but I did not want to do the work for them at that time.

There is probably an entire market out there of jobs, Authority Alchemy for job seekers not just entrepreneurs.

I did an article for AskMen about how to apply these authority tactics to your career if you are not an entrepreneur. If you just want to move up, and a lot of them apply the micro-specialization instead of being a general person.

You specifically work on the one thing. If you are an IT. Instead of being an IT generalist, you are not going to do great, but if you are the one guy. If you are the best person of one specific type of your router, the company needs that router working, it’s going to pay a lot more money.

It applies there also. We do get in that a little bit, we do have many folks as entrepreneurs, but it definitely works for people in the professional space.

If you are in B2B sales. Having this conversation with another friend of mine. If you can get an article or a column on one of these sites, it’s amazing, but you could do this with a podcast or with a book. Let’s say you are going after C-level executives, chief technology officers, or somebody of that nature.

Reach out to them and say, “I am doing an article. I am doing a book. I got a podcast or a business show regarding issues that the chief technology officer is facing. Regarding internet security, whatever it is you sell.” Something based on that, “Can I get a quote from you?”

Ideally you want that relationship. You want to be able to sell them, but reach out to them in a side door, ask for their insight on something, it flatters them. It’s a non-threatening way to start that introduction with somebody and now have got them.

I could say, “By the way, I also work for XYZ company and we provide this.” If you do the transition smoothly, it’s a lot easier than doing a cold call or a cold email, but reach out, ask for quotes from your ideal prospects and you will have a lot more success than going in for a cold call.

Brian, this has been cool. I hope I lived up to my promise early on to pick your brain with some stuff that you might not get asked all the time and not the most basic questions.

There is some stuff in there I am absolutely going to run out and do. I took a lot of notes and I am encouraging every one of my readers to do the same.

I am encouraging them all to go over to AuthorityAlchemy.com and read every post that is over there or at least the ones that appealed to you. I was on there and I was impressed at how much I wanted to read on your site. I was like, “I got stuff to do Brian, but right now it’s good articles.”

 

Is there anything else you like to leave the audience with, any insights, anything that we did not cover?

We hit it all. Definitely go to the site, a lot of stuff in there and links to your page on our site with all specific stuff for your readers.

Once more, if you have any other topics or suggestions, shoot that over to AskBrad@BaconWrappedBusiness.com, talk about it, share it on social media.

Let me know if there are any guests that you think or topics that you think that I should cover that I have not been covering. Brian, I look forward to seeing you at some event or something in the near future and stay in contact with you. Let me know if there is anything I can do for you.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you.

Important Links:

• Authority Alchemy
• Michael O'Neal – past episode
• AuthorityAlchemy.com
• PerezHilton.com
• BuzzSumo
• StilettoCoffee.com
• BaconWrappedBusiness.com/jesseitzler – past episode
• LemonadeDay.org
• Founders at Work
• AuthorityAlchemy.com/brad

About The Guest: Brian Horn

Brian Ainsley Horn is a bestselling author, investor and an entrepreneur. He helps professionals and entrepreneurs leverage their knowledge to gain authority in their industry using Authority Marketing to get them national media exposure at Authority Alchemy

His unique method has been talked about and covered on the Howard Stern Show, Wall Street Journal, Perez Hilton, CBS News, Forbes, Advertising Age and a lot of other media outlets.

He is the co-founder of the consulting firm Authority Alchemy, and he also regularly writes for the Huffington Post and Entrepreneur Magazine about authority marketing and personal branding. He and his partner Jack Mize also have a fantastic podcast on iTunes.

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