Mike Koenigs And The Power of Your Platform

Mike Koenigs knows how to get people noticed. The bestselling author of You Everywhere Now and the Founder/CEO of TrafficGeyser and InstantCustomer, Mike is on the cutting edge of technology and education when it comes to helping business owners build their platform and distribute their message.

He has worked with several global brands like 20th Century Fox, Sony Entertainment, and BMW, as well as notable celebrities including Tony Robbins, Paula Abdul, and Brian Tracy.

Mike is a three-time #1 bestselling author and is also a speaker, a filmmaker, and a philanthropist – simply cutting edge in everything he does!

He joins the show today to discuss the power of having a platform like a podcast, a book, or another medium to build thought leadership as well as the concept of “You, Everywhere, Now.”

In this episode of Bacon Wrapped Business, you'll discover:

• Today’s digital trends people can take advantage of quickly and easily
• How to get any audience in the world and connect with them for free
• What’s coming – Apple TV disrupting cable
• How Mike met and positioned himself to work with Richard Dreyfuss
• The next most powerful thing – starting a podcast
• Ways to move the needle and grow your business
• Getting your book published on Amazon
• Why every business person should have a book and a podcast show
• Mike’s radical life transformation – kicking cancer’s butt and the lessons he learned
• Mike’s key to happiness

For more information on Mike’s programs visit MikeKoenigs.com

About The Guest: Mike Koenigs

Mike Koenigs knows how to get people noticed.  The bestselling author of “You Everywhere Now” and the founder/CEO of TrafficGeyser.com and InstantCustomer.com, Mike is on the cutting edge of technology and education when it comes to helping business owners build their platform and distribute their message.

He has worked with several global brands like 20th Century Fox, Sony Entertainment, and BMW, as well as notable celebrities including Tony Robbins, Paula Abdul, and Brian Tracy.

Mike is a three-time #1 bestselling author and is also a speaker, a filmmaker, and a philanthropist – simply cutting edge in everything he does!

Mike Koenigs And The Power of Your Platform

Mike Koenigs is the Founder of Traffic Geyser and Instant Customer, several powerful software that a lot of entrepreneurs, business owners and digital marketers use to explode their business. Mike has been around the scene of online/digital/offline marketing for decades.

He is a wealth of knowledge. If there's anybody who is going to bring some bacon-wrapped strategies to you, it's this guy. Mike, thanks for joining me in your Digital Cafe.

Nice to be here in my studio.

Let me tell you one of the reasons that I'm honored to be here with you. Years ago, it was 2008 or 2009, I’ve gotten into the world of digital and internet marketing. I was at an event in Dallas, Texas where I used to live.

I remember seeing you speak on stage for the first time about a product that you had then, and you still have, called Traffic Geyser. We met during the show and I told you how much I liked it. I became a customer immediately.

I had a business at the time selling celebrity voice impersonations for GPS called PIG Tones. We used your software extensively to distribute our message out, and it worked tremendously. The videos are still out there all over the place.

I've been a big fan and follower of your work. One of the things I've noticed about you and I've always liked is that you went way beyond entrepreneurial or business education.

You seem to have a real knack for spotting trends, especially digital trends, what's going on, and where the puck is going. You built the tools, software and systems so that folks like myself and other business owners out there can take advantage of this and capitalize.

It has always worked for me when I followed you. I was happy to get a chance to sit down in the Digital Cafe where quite a few entrepreneurial legends have sat. If I'm not mistaken, Tony Robbins has sat probably right where I'm sitting, and quite a few other people that I like, respect and admire.

I want to thank you for having me. One of the reasons I wanted to have you here is because you're so on the cutting edge of everything and because you're such a trend caster.

What do you think is working that the folks out there can take advantage of? We'll dive into some of the rationale behind that.

The answer to the question lies in where the world is right now and what's going on. The answer to the question is you’re everywhere now and that's why I wrote my book, You Everywhere Now.

The big important things are at this moment, there are roughly 220 million internet-connected televisions. There are 1.5 billion regular TVs in use worldwide. The numbers expected to be 300 million. On the surface, it's like, “Who cares about a few hundred million of anything?”

The next thing that's happening, and has already happened, is between two and three billion internet-connected desktop and laptop computers, there are about two billion tablets between iPads, Android tablets, Kindle devices and Microsoft Surface, for example.

You have on the cusp of two to three billion smartphones and at any given time, about 73% of the human race is engaged with social media on a monthly basis. If you look at Google's reach at the moment between YouTube and Google, about two billion people use Google per month.

You've got Apple that has 1.8 billion registered user accounts. You got Amazon that has between 200 and 300 million credit cards on file as well.

If you combine that with Facebook, which has 800 million active users per month, 1.4 billion user accounts that have been created and the hundreds of millions for the other services between LinkedIn and Twitter.

The bottom line is if you know how to create engaging content and distribute it, you can get underneath virtually any audience in the world and communicate with the entire connected planet for free.

We're going to have to explain that a little bit more for folks who think that this is crazy expensive, there's no way they could have afforded them.

We're in the greatest moment in human history when it's possible to have an idea, press a button and broadcast live to a limitless audience. Click To Tweet

Both of us have a mobile television studio in our pocket in the form of our phones. I did a test when we did a product launch where I had a $4,000 camera with a $1,000 lens shooting video and then I held my own iPhone 5s in front of me.

The quality was so good that the untrained eye probably couldn't tell the difference between a high-end DSLR with a high-quality lens and your phone.

At this moment, practically anyone in the world can create almost movie-quality or for sure television-quality video with something that they'd most likely have in their pocket.

We could take our laptop, open it up, turn on Google Hangouts or start a YouTube Live and we could be broadcasting all these cameras simultaneously or just one single webcam.

Whether we'd have one person watching or Google will give you the ability to broadcast to millions of people simultaneously for free.

If you think about it, in my opinion, we live in the greatest moment in human history when it's possible to have an idea, press a button and be broadcasting live to an almost limitless audience, either in real time and have a conversation with them at the same time.

In the form of this podcast we're doing, it could either be audio or video. It can even be transcribed and turned into a book and distributed by Amazon.

The new way of thinking is to think of your business and to think of you as being in showbusiness, which means you're responsible for showing your prospects and your customers that you’re the sharpest attack and you're the go-to person and the expert authority in your industry.

It's up to you to show that your products and services work, to show real people getting results with your products and services. In doing that, you can build a tribe of followers. Once you start building that momentum behind you, there's almost nothing you can do to make it go away.

When you're talking about your old videos that you made, they still are probably driving traffic to a page or a site. I get that all the time.

What I like to tell people is, “There's an easy to follow, easy to understand formula that you can rapidly create content that can be presented in the form of a live show, a recorded podcast and you can be seen, heard, found, read and noticed in any device anywhere, anytime.”

Whether that's on your tablet, on your phone, in your car, on your television set. Not to mention the fact that what I believe is about to occur is Apple will most likely to be the company that does it. They're going to completely disrupt cable. They're going to unbundle all the channels.

You'll be able to say, “If I got it, I'd get HBO Showtime and I don't even know if I'd get anything else.” I have HBO GO, which is awesome. It's on all my devices. In a way, I already have that. I don't care about cable.

I would pay half as much as my cable bill for four channels instead of twice as much for a bunch of junk I never watch. That's a lot of noise. I want to read it, view it, see it anytime, anywhere in any device.

To the average young person, they gather their information, their knowledge, they get entertained from their mobile phone. They don't differentiate between what they saw on YouTube or on broadcast television. It has the same value.

The future of You Everywhere Now and being in showbusiness is a way to frame the business you're in. When I ask someone, “What business are you in?” they'll say, “I'm a chiropractor.”

I'm like, “No, you're in showbusiness.” That starts a conversation. I’ll say, “I've got an idea about how you can grow your business.”

We were sitting down together and you were telling a story. I believe you met Richard Dreyfuss. This is remarkable and I noticed it was also in the book. If anybody hasn't picked this up on Amazon, go grab it. Let’s revisit that.

Here's the way the story went. As I was on my way to South by Southwest, I was flying and I notice there were some people in front of me.

 

They're talking and whispering and one of them says and starts pointing, “Do you see that over there?” He goes, “What?” He goes, “That’s Richard Dreyfuss, the guy from Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

I saw him over there, and he was chitchatting with his seatmate. I grew up around Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Wars. I love those movies. Mr. Holland's Opus was such a great story.

I had been following Dreyfuss for a while because he's opinionated and he knows how to hold court. I found out a little bit later why as I got to know him a little bit better, but he has a fun personality and he's interested in everything.

It's because he comes from a family of lawyers and he thinks like one, but he's also a great historian and he loves American history. He knows everything about American history, going back from the earliest days until modern times and also how our legal system works.

What he did a few years ago is he dropped out acting. He went to Oxford and studied there. He is interested in civics, civic-mindedness. In other words, how can you participate in your society, in your city, in your town, have a massive impact and do the right thing? It's not a popular topic.

It's not very interesting until you learn about how important it is in the sense that a lot of young people and most people these days feel completely powerless in their government and also apathetic. He has a vision for life, liberty, justice and what the founding fathers originally created.

He's also developed a curriculum for teaching some of these ideas and also teaching what he considers Media Responsibility. He's not a big fan of lobbies, lobbyists or politicians for that matter. Gaining traction with a non-profit is incredibly difficult.

He has this thing called The Dreyfuss Initiative. Here's what happened. I heard that conversation and I knew I had been paying attention to him. Years ago, he is on Bill Maher’s show and I love Bill Maher. He's interesting. He loves to stir things up and I appreciate that mindset.

Whether you agree with him or disagree with him, you can't not pay attention.

He knows how to stir stuff up. While we were on the plane, thank God for internet access, I did a little bit of research. I found a podcast and I listened to it. I looked at his website and I could tell that it had been hacked together and needed some help.

I thought to myself, “It turns out my wife has a foundation. I've raised quite a bit of money for her. She builds schools and hospitals in Africa. What does Richard Dreyfuss and his foundation need more than anything?” He needs money.

He says, “The difference between a movie star and an actor is about $15 million a movie. I'm an actor. That’s the work for me. It's a job.” He goes, “I don't get paid like Brad Pitt. I'm not Brad Pitt. I'm an old guy.”

What wound up happening is as the flight was ending, I walked up to him and I said, “Mr. Dreyfuss, my name is Mike Koenigs. I love what you're doing with the Dreyfuss Initiative and teaching civic-mindedness. I have an eleven-year-old son.”

“What this country is about is something that I'm very passionate about sharing with him. My wife has a foundation that I've raised a lot of money for. I have an idea about how to raise money for your foundation.” It's a variation on the theme.

“I have an idea about how you can grow your business,” instead, “I have an idea about how you can raise money for your foundation or how you can lose weight.”

How you can get what you want. I commend you for your knowledge, background. Business has probably went to this, but a lot of folks might not have been so keen on this. You did a little research. You paid attention prior to this.

You found out what was important to him, and then you led with that. Often in business, people lead with, “Can I get your autograph? What can you do for me?” It's the easiest way to turn somebody off.

That and you don't stand out. You're another scrounge looking for a free thing. Here's what happened. I got to answering the question in a roundabout way.

This happened very quickly where I walked up to him, “Mr. Dreyfuss, my name is Mike Koenigs. I love what you're doing with your foundation. I have an idea about how to raise money for your foundation.” He stopped, looked at me and says, “Call me Rick. I need you.”

You're responsible for showing your prospects and customers that you're the expert authority in your industry. Click To Tweet

He says, “Why don't you come over here and sit down with me.” I said, “Where are you heading next?” He goes, “I've got to check. I’ve got another flight intake and I'm heading to Austin.” I go, “As a matter of fact, I am too. What’s your flight time?” It turns out I'm on the same flight.

“Here's what we can do. We can sit down now. We can chat for a couple minutes. I'll make sure that we get seated next to each other.” I said, “We’ll figure out a way.” We sat down and for about ten minutes, I literally told him the You Everywhere Now story.

I said, “What's your biggest struggle right now?” He said, “I had back surgery. That's why I put on this weight.” He goes, “It's horrible for me to travel.” He says, “I need to get in front of these senators, these people, get the message out and get the word out, but it's hard to travel.”

He says, “I've lent this foundation my name and some startup capital, but I can't be responsible for all the money. I got to find a more effective way to raise money.” I said, “Have you written a book?” He goes, “I've been working on a book for three years and I'm about third of the way through.”

I said, “Here's my book.” I pulled it out. I have Multicast Marketing which was before You Everywhere Now. It was about some of these ideas before they gelled. I pulled it out and I signed it for him. I said, “I wrote this book in seventeen days.”

Here's the best part of the story. After I told him about this, he says, “When can we get started?” I said, “I'm going to be back on X, Y, Z date.”

He opened up his calendar. He got his assistant on the phone and he says, “Jocelyn, I met this young man at the airport and he's got an idea about how to raise money for the foundation.” Nine days later, he was sitting exactly where you are, and I was interviewing him for his first podcast episode.

I love what he's doing, that's the more important thing. None of this would have happened and I wouldn't have pursued him if A) I didn't think this worked and B) if I didn't genuinely love what he's doing. There's another important part of the lesson in this.

You can find and make your way into and connect with virtually anyone when you've got a couple resources at your disposal. The first one of which is when you do your research on a prospect, you know who they are, what they're passionate about is and what their pain is.

The wedge that can get in there is I have an idea about how you can blank get what you want, which is grow your business, get more viewers, be seen, heard, found. It could be whatever it is, whatever the pain is, lose weight, gain confidence, meet women, start your own business.

You've got this podcast and we're in a mastermind together and we've known each other for a little while but you said, “Would you like to be on my show?” If you walk up to someone and say, “Can I pick your brain?”

“Can I get an hour of your time?”

I'll be like, “No, you can't. For $15,000, you can. That's what. I'm not going to give away my time.” It's like, “What?”

If someone is essentially saying, “I’m going to give you an opportunity to become richer and more famous than you already are, build your visibility, gain additional access to more people, I would like to introduce you to someone who can grow your business.” That's effectively what it is.

The next most powerful thing is, start a podcast and identify all the people you'd ever want to connect with, who could be actually your perfect customers.

Figure out who they are and contact and say, “I'd like to interview the CEO of a corporation to be on my show, to talk about management, growth,” or whatever it is. You could literally introduce yourself and be brought into someone's professional world by interviewing them.

When you're done with the interview, you can say, “I've got an idea about how you can grow your business.” We've spent an hour together.

That's been so integral to my business. I've done everything from building and selling businesses to a lot of consulting in the past couple years. I love the consulting part because I get to be the marketing geek in other people's businesses and get in there and move the needle.

This is another thing that you've taught extensively in your career with your Author Expert Marketing Machines. I did this as well, which is I created a private publishing company that I worked. I started off with people that I knew. I was successful at it.

I used my marketing knowledge to push their books, to get their books published on Amazon. I've always espoused the benefits of jumping on Amazon and using the tools that exist.

In the past, you never had the ability to publish yourself. If you were a self-published, you were a pariah of the publishing world and you had to go get the blessing of a mainstream publisher.

Now, the tools are out there. Not only can you do it, but you can do it literally for free. If you have a 25-page PDF, you literally could upload it to Amazon. It may not be any good, people may not read it.

Or it could be awesome. It might be that 25 pages could be the perfect length.

A good friend of mine wrote a book. I believe it was about 25 pages. It took him about a day to write it down and he submitted it to Amazon, Kindle only, and he called it a report.

The sales copy for the description goes, “This 25-page report will teach you how to do X, Y, Z.” Six-figure earner, he's a world-class marketer. He knows how to do things, but he also was able to in one day get something out there. He put very little attention on it.

Once you get a little momentum in some of these areas like Amazon, like podcasts, iTunes, YouTube and piggybacking off of their built-in audience, success becomes sticky. The more people you want to find you, the more people will find you.

You build that beautiful guaranteed momentum. That's hard to shut down.

I get asked all the time why did I start a podcast and Bacon Wrapped Business was born for two reasons. Number one, I thought about it for years, but I was always too busy and I never wanted to have a show, the Brad Costanzo show, the who-cares show.

For me, that's maybe a limiting belief, but then I came up with the idea for the name Bacon Wrapped Business. I was like, “That's fun. I can give me permission to go have fun.”

I had some ideas. I decided to do it, but the main reason was to build my platform so that I can connect with other business owners, entrepreneurs, celebrities and other folks. I realized the power of the social proof, that having a platform gives you whether that's a book, a show, a podcast.

A lot of folks out there may not know how much my production costs are for the podcast, but it's amazingly small and anybody can do it if you have the most basic budget.

We could sit here. We literally could take an iPhone, put it on a little portable stand and have a conversation with one shot. It worked fine.

Some of my shows are done by me talking into my computer microphone or calling up somebody on the phone. It’s not the perfect audio quality, but it doesn't matter because people out there, if they're your tribe, they tune in.

They want to hear quality information and connect with people they like. It's been tremendously successful. You said you had a golden nugget or a bacon bit.

Here's the basic idea. I'll tell you one of the most powerful foot-in-the-door strategies that I've been using. In fact, it blows people away how cheap it is.

If I said, “I know how to get you into almost anyone's home and get better attention.  Here's how you can get yourself into anyone's home and attract attention for under $10,” first of all, I have to frame this up and sit and talk about how easy this is.

One of things that we've been teaching this You Everywhere Now philosophy is we can open up a laptop, we could be broadcasting this show live to one person, a million people or no people, just recording it and it'd be question and answer. Some content and that live show could be interactive.

We could do interactive Q&A if we wanted to as well. That could be saved, turned into a podcast. Now, you got a nice podcast episode, literally answering questions or you could do it solo by presenting and answering questions back and forth.

You can find and connect with virtually anyone when you've got a couple resources at your disposal. Click To Tweet

That same content can be transcribed, turned into a book format and from the time it's transcribed, edit it. You can get a book cover made on Fiverr.com for $5 to $25, upload it to CreateSpace and not only make it available on Kindle in about four to eight hours.

Amazon's going to pay 70% of the money, give you an Amazon Author Page that will allow you to schedule events as well. The next time you're doing your next live cast or you've got a live event for your speaking or you're doing an online book report or whatever it is, you can schedule it.

You can schedule digital events. By the way, the search engine value of an Amazon listing is extraordinary.

Proactive reputation management can't be better. I have a friend who is in sales and he's looking for a sales job. He's had a hard time. He's good, but it's tough out there. I googled his name and it’s unique enough to where it's not like John Smith.

Nothing pertinent comes up, his LinkedIn profile, nothing else. He'd been in sales for years and I said, “Why don't we get a sales book written which I could literally interview you?” It could be called Attracting and Closing Customers or whatever, by his name.

You could pay somebody a few $100 to ghostwrite it if you need. Otherwise, you do it exactly like you said, ask questions and you've got a wonderful formula that you've used for years, the 10x10x4 formula.

I'll take the liberty to see if I can remember this exactly right for everybody else but if you can answer, you can take the ten most frequently asked questions that your customers ask or your prospects ask you, the ten questions they should be asking you if they knew better.

If you answer these questions, you can have a book or enough for it even if it’s Kindle. In this day and age, if you get a resume across your desk and somebody's googling you, you want something like, “I wonder if I should hire John Smith or Bill Jones. Bill Jones wrote a book on sales.”

“He’s the number-one best-selling author.” You can use the strategy that I'll share here. Let's say you do a live cast podcast, transcribe it, so now it's a book cast, publish it on Amazon. It's literally up and running available for sale in 24 hours.

Now you've got an Amazon listing as an author which if you posted the same content as a podcast, Apple gives you a free website as well which also ranks high. All those work to your advantage for as you would say proactive reputation management.

Here's how to get your foot in almost any door. Find out that person's address. Pretty easy to do. You can find almost anyone's home address by searching online or you can ask for it and say, “Is it okay if I send you a package?”

What I do is I go on Amazon. If you have Amazon Prime, I buy my own book from myself and I ship it as a gift and have it giftwrapped. I would present this, “If you receive a package from Amazon to your home, do you open it up?”

100% of the time.

Let's say you had a gatekeeper who opens your mail for you, but then discovers that inside the Amazon package is a special giftwrap.

She's not going to open that one.

It's going to go to the intended recipient. Inside, what I've been doing is I'll sit down with my mobile phone, I'll record a video from me to you. What’s a famous person that you'd like to get in touch with that you want to connect with?

Maybe you want to interview or maybe your audience would be interested in meeting and knowing all about them.

Let’s say Mark Cuban.

Most people, what you do is you’d make a video and it would be something like, “Mark, this is Brad. I wanted to give you my number one best-selling book. I'd like to know if I can interview you for my show. We're going to talk about this, that and the other thing.”

“I've also interviewed people like so-and-so, and such-and-such. My email address is blank, I'll follow up in two days. Hope you enjoy the book.” All I do is in the gift card, I say, “Hi, Mark. This is that book I promised you. I made a special video for you. Check it out at www.shortdomain.com/mark.”

Total cost, the book, shipping, packaging is under $10. You talk to any business owner, getting someone’s attention is almost impossible and here, Amazon is a trusted brand. If you get something, it doesn't look fishy, it feels as real as real gets, and it’s giftwrapped so it’s an appreciation.

Would you suggest doing that to somebody that you have never met but you want to know? In your example there, you said this is the one that I promised you. You've never talked to them.

You come from an authentic place obviously.

If anybody has ever read any of Influence by Cialdini, it’s anamazing book. They talk about having a reason why.

The reason why I'm sending you this book is because I wanted you to have it.

You could literally say something like that and you're probably going to get somebody to open it. This triggered a tactic that I've used in the past and I love this. Facebook gives you the ability to send an ad to one person. Were you familiar with this strategy?

I didn't know it still worked, to tell you the truth.

I tried it. If you know somebody's Facebook profile, you don't need to know their email, you don't need to know anything else. There's a little code you can get, and you can upload it in the Google Advertising Manager and do what's called the Custom Audience of one person.

We have a mutual friend in the market business. I did it to him as a test and it was a picture I had of him with his arm around me and I uploaded it. I said, “Give me a call. Better yet click this link and I'll tell you what this is about.”

He came to the page and I said, “I know you saw an ad on Facebook that looked like it was for you. It was. This video is by the way for you. Do me a favor and shoot me an email when you get this.” I said, “Never mind, I'll know. Facebook will tell me.”

What was great is I uploaded this ad and once more, this is all the particulars. It didn't cost me anything and I saw the statistics. I saw that he viewed it three times before he clicked on it because it says three views, one click. He emailed me and he's like, “I saw that. How did you do that?”

It was a way to sniper in on one person. You don't even need to know their address. You could do something like that, deliver a video, a heartfelt authentic video that says, “I've got this book. I'd love to deliver this to you. Maybe I need your physical address. Maybe I need something else.”

“I'd love to interview you on my show. I think you're amazing.” There's so many cool out-of-the-box ways that people can accomplish their goals.

The bottom line is, not only are these strategies of live casting, podcasting and book casting a great way of broadcasting your message and getting paid at the same time. I don't market You Everywhere Now. They're selling an average of between 25 and 50 copies a day.

Inside every single chapter, it says, “Register this book and get free updates and free videos.” I've got a QR code, a phone number, a short code to text, or a page to go to. Every single chapter of the book has a call to action.

Are they all different?

They're all a little bit different. They end up going to the same place. This book is intended to pre frame the viewer on this notion of being everywhere on every device, but also about how Traffic Geyser and Instant Customer can make that happen.

It's got great content. I explained the 10x10x4, how to pick your perfect audience, how to feel comfortable on camera. You can see an example of the video that was shot between an iPhone and the $5,000 camera.

The biggest advantage a publisher can give you is a certain degree of legitimacy and extended distribution. Click To Tweet

It's driving people to the Traffic Geyser sales funnel which then educates them on our programs or services and then gives them an opportunity to try out service. It's a sales letter. It's designed and engineered that way.

Author Expert Marketing Machines was the first one I wrote. I wrote it while I was recovering from cancer in my bed.

I answered questions in my phone, sent it out to be transcribed and edited, had the cover made by a designer. In less than 30 days, it was published and the number one bestseller in its category in three categories.

I believe the statistic was something like the lifetime customer value of a customer who comes in first through a book is two, three times higher they're going to spend more with you over time because of the credibility that a little book provides you, maybe more so than anything else.

If this is the first thing they see, this is instant credibility. We're used to big publishing houses, giving us their christening seal of approval, uniting us. If you read a book and you like it like, “I want to know where I can get more information on this person.”

I give you a chance in every chapter. Every chapter is a call to action.

I had a friend asking me if he should shop his book to big publishers or if he should do it himself. I said, “You should do it yourself. If you think you can do it with a big publisher, that's great.

They do a lot less for you than you think they do. They don't market it for you unless you're one of the top people.” I've taken a look in some of mainstream published books and there is a call to action to sign up for a newsletter. It’s the publisher’s newsletter. It's not the author's newsletter.

They’re using your platform to build their list.

It's a big advantage to do it on yourself, build it from the ground up like this.

These days, what I can tell you is unless you have a substantial platform of your own, meaning about 40,000 in your email database and 20,000 or more followers on Twitter, Facebook and a substantial following on LinkedIn, no publisher is going to give you a deal that involves an advance.

The biggest advantage of publisher gives you is a certain degree of legitimacy and extended distribution. Beyond that, I wrote five of my books in over a period of about eighteen months. I got two more coming out. There might even be three.

The point of that isn't to show off, but it's you can get up in the morning with an idea, come up with your 10x10x4, answer the questions and the meat and body of your book is done in half a day. Beyond that, it's a few days to a couple weeks to have someone do your cover and edit for you.

Those are services that are easy to find, very affordable. Where else can you have a multibillion-dollar company promote, market you, give you a free website and then pay you 70% of the revenue and do all that for you for free?

It's crazy. What we find is about 20% to 40% depending on the book, of the readers. Because I can track how many people buy this book on Amazon, that's I get 20% to 40% actually do one of the calls to action in the book.

Because you can track that, you know where they’re coming from.

I know that for every 100 books that gets sold, I'm getting 20 to 40 leads and they are already buyers. They spent money on an idea on a topic. They're willing to invest.

Going from $0.99, $7 or $10 book to $100, $1,000 or $2,000 sale is a matter of providing them with the right information to overcome objections. To be an author, you don't have to be a writer. Be an expert on a topic who can answer questions and you were willing and interested in helping people.

You could have an idea for a topic and hire experts to write it for you. It's an old strategy called ghostwriting. You can very easily and cheaply do it. You can piece it together if you don't want to and you get all the benefits of it.

 

Some people feel as though they don't have the ability to write or to share the information although it's stuck up in their head. There are so many ways to do it. That is a perfect segue. You mentioned both of these tools that you have.

We've talked a little bit about Traffic Geyser and you’ve barely mentioned Instant Customer. Going back at the beginning, your business has all always been about distributing your message far and wide, whether it's how to build the product or how to promote the product.

It has been about how to get massive distribution, at least from the, outside looking in. You've built these amazing tools. Can you touch on what maybe the difference is and the benefits and who Traffic Geyser and Instant Customer are most likely to help?

This is definitely a team effort and overtime evolving this platform. Traffic Geyser and Instant Customer are now one platform. We integrated them, but Traffic Geyser is your tool for uploading your content.

For example, if you made a video, your 10x10x4 video or a marketing or promotional video, you can upload it and Traffic Geyser will distribute it to multiple video sites like YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo and then it'll grab the links to those and post those on all your social networks.

It would grab that that video link and you can say, “Immediately, one day later, one hour later or however much later, post the link on my Facebook page, maybe on multiple pages. Tweet it, put it on LinkedIn, post it on StumbleUpon or Tumblr.

It’ll go out to over a dozen networks. If you think for a moment that if you recorded three, four or ten videos and uploaded them, you can schedule your content to be delivered a video a day, a video a week. It can save you days or weeks of time of doing all this manually.

Setting up, spidering and creating that web, it makes your brain hurt. The idea has always been one place to put all your stuff, tell it where to distribute and when to distribute it, click a button, schedule it and it's going to get out there.

What happens then when someone reads, listens to or watches your stuff, you have to have a means of capturing leads and the thing that Instant Customer does that no other platform in the world does, is it allows you to build mobile responsive websites that work on any device.

For example, in You Everywhere Now, one of the chapters will say, “If you want to watch and see more ideas and case studies about creating podcast shows and monetizing your knowledge, visit TrafficGeyser.com/bookbonus or text YEN to 58885 or text your email address to (858)-866-8812.

I did this a little more extensively than most people would, but the whole point is Instant Customer captures leads with voice. You can call a number and say your email address. You can text, short code, capture with the QR code.

It literally builds all those systems for you by filling in a form. It integrates with practically any system out there. If you're a plumber, for example, you can have a QR code and a phone number on a vehicle so people can actually see.

If it's your financial manager, for example, you had a tradeshow. It says, “Text your email address to get the financial how-to kit for free.” The system not only captures the lead, but it follows up with email with mobile text. It can follow up with a podcast. It has podcasting built in.

Every podcast episode, you can have what we call a trigger so you can tell someone to text pound or hashtag Mike for example to your show phone number. Let’s say, it's 555-1212. It would trigger a message that would maybe be a behind-the-scenes tour of the studio.

Every episode becomes a lead capture opportunity and every episode has its own hashtag so you can see and measure how effective every episode is.

There are a lot of different tools and software that you can cobble and Frankenstein together if you want to do this.

If we do it about five or six programs, you'd have to pay thousands of dollars a month and we do it all in one place.

It distributes your content, captures leads, follows up and it'll integrate with practically anything you have. If you have Infusionsoft or AWeber or GetResponse, we integrate with all those.

You've built these major platforms. Are there any ones coming down the pipe or are there any big other trends that you see?

A podcast is a mechanism to get introduced to more people and to get your word out. Click To Tweet

We've got a great tool to distribute your content and get your message out there. We've got a tool to capture leads in more ways than any other platform. I would argue that trying to do that with multiple systems, it's a nightmare to integrate them.

In that regard, we're unique and then we've got training programs. What I do is I write a book for all of our products. These become lead generators. This system shows you its Author Expert Marketing Machines so I give away a book when people opt in.

They also buy them too because again I don't care how they hear about me. If they buy it, great. If I give it away, I got an email address. Every businessperson should have a book to position themselves as an expert authority.

I believe every person should have a podcast show now, even if it's a mechanism getting introduced to more people. It's also a way to get the word out and you can do things like John Lee Dumas does where he'll record seven episodes in a single day.

He does a daily show, but he records all of them all at once. Not everyone could do that, but once a week is fine, but you could record four in one day and have a month's worth of shows done. It's a great investment of your time.

We have another product called Make Market Launch IT. It's how to turn your knowledge into products. You're selling your knowledge instead of your time. Same thing, we've got a book for that. This is the book that teaches the process of again the You Everywhere Now strategy.

The direction we're heading in is always about the fastest ways to create engaging content on as many platforms as possible. I believe, the big opportunity that we have ahead of us when you look at the trends are, cable is going to start being disrupted and broadcast already is, just as radio has.

The music industry has been completely disrupted by iTunes and Apple. When Kazaa and Napster came about, everyone could steal music.

What happened was Apple said, “We believe that people would be willing to pay $1 per track if they got what they wanted, they got quality music, and if they could distribute it to all their devices.” They proved it and they won.

There are other services that you can subscribe to, but the ownership experience is still important to people, the idea that they own their music. The same is true with movies, the theater business. Go to a movie theater. What do you see? Empty seats.

I still love going to a movie theater. To me, it's worth $30 a ticket frankly if it's a good movie, but I don't think most other people feel that way. The same thing happened with video game parlors. I grew up playing video games. Now, you can get an Xbox One.

As we move forward, it's possible right now as you've discovered to be alongside celebrities in the iTunes Store and it doesn't take too many downloads to be a number one in your podcast. That's going to get harder soon, because celebrities are going to be like, “I can do this too.”

They don't have to go through the publishing, the permission phase and that's what's important about this is when I say we live in the greatest moment in human history, if you go back to the time of Gutenberg and before, before that kings owned the scribes. They were slaves.

What happened with the Torah. There would be scribes and Jewish traditions who spent their entire lives copying the Torah word-for-word to be perfect. The skills required was extensive. It was being commissioned and then Gutenberg was originally used for printing Bibles.

The church owned distribution. It wasn't until it got a little more affordable that newspapers, but then it’d be the newspaper man own distribution. We moved to magazines, newspapers of today, radio, publishing, television.

Somewhere, there was an old fat dude controlling what the world got access to in the days of Rupert Murdoch and the days of Hearst. There's a lot of evil that's happened and nowadays, one mobile phone video can crumble a country.

Dictators cannot survive in this world any longer because someone will grab social proof of their evil and topple them. Even though we hear bad things, we do live in the safest time in human history. There's more abundance than ever before and there's actually more peace than ever before.

Up until the twentieth century and even the last half of it, there was terrible stuff going on around the world. We didn't have satellite feeds, Twitter feeds, things going on. It was like, “Hear no evil, see no evil.” Now, it feels like it's worse but it's way better.

It's one of my one of my favorite books by, I’m proud to call my friend, named James Altucher. He wrote a book called Choose Yourself. It’s amazing.

 

One of the key premises behind the Choose Yourself is that you no longer have to wait for somebody else to give you permission or to choose you to publish you or to choose you to broadcast you. Now, you can say, “I choose myself. I'm going to publish my own show. I'm going to do it now.”

We have that capability and we have the ability to do it much simpler. When I started off in the whole digital and online world, it was February of 2008. The tools then were still great but nowhere near what they are now.

I feel that when you understand these basic ideas, you have a responsibility to share yourself and to broadcast yourself, you have a responsibility to help as many people as you can and become as wealthy as you can by using your talents and your skills, either as a team member or if it's your own business.

One idea can have a radical transformation on someone's life. It may take decades to develop those ideas and be able to package them and that's the training, education, and implementation process. It doesn't happen overnight.

Any time you hear the notion of overnight success, my favorite story of that is Wayne Dyer. One of his books completely changed my life. It was called Manifest Your Destiny. I listened to the audio tape years ago when it was tapes and cars. It rearranged my brain.

The end part of this is Wayne Dyer appeared on the Johnny Carson’s show 27 times. The question is, “How did he get there?” That launch exploded his career. He became one of the top people.

Here's what happened. Wayne Dyer was struggling. He was driving around in an old VW Beetle with the front trunk filled with his books schlepping him at little shows, events and stuff like that. He eventually goes on door to door, basically penniless.

Every time he ever had an opportunity to do an interview, he took an interview, radio interviews. Finally, he was on a little station. It was like 50,000 watts which is teeny in New England or something like that.

Someone called him up. He thought, “This is pointless.” It was like middle of the night, 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. He was like, “What the hell is the point of being at 50,000 watts? It was probably like 300 people listening tonight.”

It turned out that the person who is listening that night was the producer for Johnny Carson. He loved him, booked him and the rest is history. His overnight success came after spending ten hard years on the road and doing every interview he possibly could.

Now, it's possible to shorten that because of the mobile phone that you have in your pocket of being able to capture and record your video, your audio, or to transcribe your book and be published and be broadcasted and seen, and it's your opportunity to be You Everywhere Now.

You mentioned the words radical life transformation. I know that you had one. It was unfortunately thrust upon you with your cancer diagnosis, as a cancer survivor and keeping on going. How has that transformed your view of life business? What you want to leave?

I was diagnosed with stage IIIA colorectal cancer, which is a horrible place to ever get cancer. I came out of the diagnosis and the doctor walked up to me who had done a colonoscopy. They say you get it when you're 50 or older.

I say if there's any chance at all that you have any digestive challenges or anyone in your family has ever had it, start at 40. I was 46 when I got diagnosed and it had most likely been around for at least a decade. It's slow growing at first but then it'll take you over.

The first thing he says is, “You need to get in for surgery now.” I was like, “Holy crap,” because this could be it, and he says, “You're a walking dead man.” He says, “If we would have caught this six months later, you'd be terminal and I’d be toast.”

The funny thing was I accepted it. Surgery was rough because they're removing a bunch of your parts and stapling you together. Nothing works right for a long time, about 1.5 years. You were constantly searching for bathroom. I had four months of chemotherapy which is grueling.

It's like, “Imagine the worst you've ever felt, and you feel that way for four months.” You feel like you're going to puke all the time, you have no energy. On average, I had about an hour of functional time a day.

Because of the nature and the distance, I had two nodes involved, so once you get to lymph nodes, they want to go in and do everything they can.

One of the things I did do is I interviewed all the nurses and doctors and I asked them, “What would you do if it were you? What would you do if it was your spouse, your son, or daughter?” I asked them questions like, “For people who died and people who survived, what all the survivors have in common?”

Dictators cannot survive in this world any longer because someone will grab social proof of their evil and topple them. Click To Tweet

Without exception, they all said the same thing. They said, “They went thermonuclear on it and they did everything they could in their power.” I didn't hesitate. I ended up going to Duke for 33 radiation treatments and oral chemo and that's where you lose most of your hair.

When I got out of there, I weighed 158 pounds and a third of my hair was gray. I look like hell. The big lesson that I learned is you gain an insight for what it's like to be terminal, what it's like to look at life and say, “This probably could be it.”

Every minute becomes a moment of gratitude and appreciation. What I practiced was nonjudgmental observation. In other words, your body is in so much pain, you learn to disassociate with it.

I didn't take pain meds until the very last month and that masks it, but your body is still in pain. The only way is to become a viewer. I imagine myself being a camera and this is the body and it's like you have to look at the body with compassion and empathy.

When you start seeing other people who are going through it or children, what I can say is, “I thank God that it was me and not my son and not my wife,” because I could not bear to watch that.

In the end, it's certain that I feel more. I would say prior to that, I didn't have a good sense of how powerful emotions are and how useful they are. I don't think I had an authentic relationship with myself. Ultimately, I did and I still regard it as the greatest gift I've had.

I’m normal now, but it's like when you live without a functioning body for a little while, you're so appreciative and thank God. The horrible things that can happen, I walked away unscathed and the fact that my body bumps back.

Every day, you notice you're getting better, but it's like, “It takes a year and a half.” You do not take your health for granted after that. That would be my recommendation, which is right now, if you're fortunate enough to be inside a healthy body, do lots of tests.

If anything starts to go wrong, go to the doctor, run to the doctor, do not ignore it. I ignored the signs. I’m very grateful to be alive. I'm much more tuned and tied to my mission which has been for years is to create a million entrepreneurs before I pass.

I'd hoped that the tools and resources that I create in the training help people create abundant wealthy lives for themselves and their families and allow them to share their message and to be able to connect and cause transformation to occur around and in their immediate lives and also worldwide as well.

I truly believe we live in the greatest moment in human history and that also kept me alive too. It's like, “I don't want to let go even if this is an illusion.”

It's an amazing story of what you went through and the way you were able to come through it and the perspective it gives you. I can only imagine. I try to cultivate that gratitude myself for what I have but then it always helps to put yourself in that moment.

I fortunately have not experienced it and I hope I never do, go through what you did, but I try to imagine if I was. It's the key to happiness, the cultivating the gratitude and then also focusing in on your mission in life and legacy that you want to leave.

You've done a fantastic job of it with everything you've built, with all the lives you've changed. You were a fundamental cog in the wheel of my business early on.

I'm happy to call you a friend and to have me here with you. It was a blast. If anybody wants more information on your programs Mike, what's the single best place to go?

I’d go with Traffic Geyser because what we've been doing is you can get the book for free there and the book is a great way to learn this. I'm transparent about it. The book is engineered and designed to create interest in our products.

It’s of shining example that something has started as a live cast that turned into a podcast into a book cast. This thing from idea to becoming a number one with seventeen days for the second time in a row.

You said this is an introduction of your products. This is not a sales letter. It is the beginning of a sales funnel, but it is filled with content. I read it. It’s filled with actionable stuff that you can do like, “I didn't know I could do that.”

Even if they do nothing else, there's tremendous value in here, but if this does, it should set the spark to go, “I have to know more.”

From there, you'll learn about the programs and the products because we demonstrate them and talk about them but more importantly give away there's three videos. There are four but there are three training videos that go along with the book.

You'll also see how to embed calls to action for your business and how to frame yourself as an expert authority. Also, it teaches again some of the lessons that we talked about here.

That's a great way to get going and beyond that, it's a matter of taking yourself up for launch and doing the 10x10x4 exercise and realizing how much genius is already contained inside of you.

I would hope that would inspire and motivate a reader, a viewer, a listener to take things to the next level and want to implement it for themselves in their own business.

If you have enjoyed any of this, please go visit TrafficGeyser.com, pick up Mike's book, pick up anything he's got. I can fully attest that it has been instrumental in my success.

If there's anything that I can do for you, if there's any way that I can help give you a second opinion on your business, on your marketing strategy or even if you want to share a bacon-wrapped strategy that you're doing with me, maybe we'll feature it on a future episode of the show.

Simply send an email to AskBrad@BaconWrappedBusiness.com. I read every single one of those and in addition to reading those, I also read all of the reviews I get on iTunes. If you enjoy the show, leave a review. Let me know.

Mike, I want to thank you for having me here at the Digital Cafe. It's been a pleasure and I look forward to seeing a lot more what you got in store.

I got a lot more good stuff coming up.

Important Links:

• MikeKoenigs.com
• You Everywhere Now
• The Dreyfusss Initiative
• Multicast Marketing
• Author Expert Marketing Machines
• Fiverr.com
• Influence
• Make Market Launch IT
• Choose Yourself
• Manifest Your Destiny

About The Guest: Mike Koenigs

Mike Koenigs knows how to get people noticed.  The bestselling author of “You Everywhere Now” and the founder/CEO of TrafficGeyser.com and InstantCustomer.com, Mike is on the cutting edge of technology and education when it comes to helping business owners build their platform and distribute their message.

He has worked with several global brands like 20th Century Fox, Sony Entertainment, and BMW, as well as notable celebrities including Tony Robbins, Paula Abdul, and Brian Tracy.

Mike is a three-time #1 bestselling author and is also a speaker, a filmmaker, and a philanthropist – simply cutting edge in everything he does!

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