Escaping the Drift with John Gafford - From Drifting Life to Thriving Entrepreneur: Jon Davids on Harnessing Digital Platforms

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

Ready to break free from societal norms and embark on a journey of entrepreneurship? Meet John Davids, branding expert and author of "Marketing Superpowers." John shares his inspiring story of transformation from a life on autopilot to becoming a self-made entrepreneur. Listen as John recounts his pivotal college moment when he harnessed the power of the early internet to launch a successful online magazine, turning curiosity and determination into a thriving ad business—all while still in school. His experiences demonstrate the immense power of taking control of your life's direction and seizing opportunities for extraordinary success.John and I also tackle the critical role of persistence and commitment in achieving entrepreneurial goals. We share personal stories from our college days, illustrating how having no backup plan can drive unparalleled focus and success. It’s all about moving from mere interest to unwavering commitment and adopting a "no off button" mindset. We even reflect on the role of formal education in our journeys, offering a few humorous anecdotes about how people perceive educational achievements and the surprising ways they might discover the truth.But that's not all—John brings his expertise into real estate marketing, community building, and leveraging digital platforms like YouTube and TikTok. We discuss the transition from music to real estate, the clash between industry giants, and the importance of creating raving fans. Whether it's brainstorming "Daily Gaffermations" for TikTok or the significance of consistent content creation, this episode is packed with actionable insights. Tune in to learn how to align your content with core beliefs, use AI tools like ChatGPT effectively, and build an engaged online community that supports your goals. Don't miss this chance to escape the drift and start building something meaningful!💬 Did you enjoy this podcast episode? Tell us all about it in the comment section below! ☑️  If you liked this video, consider subscribing to Escaping The Drift with John Gafford 💯 About John Gafford: After appearing on NBC's "The Apprentice", John relocated to the Las Vegas Valley and founded several successful companies in the real estate space.➡️ The Gafford Group at Simply Vegas, top 1% of all REALTORS nationwide in terms of production. Simply Vegas, a 500 agent brokerage with billions in annual sales Clear Title, a 7-figure full-service title and escrow company.➡️ Streamline Home Loans - An independent mortgage bank with more than 100 loan officers. The Simply Group, A national expansion vehicle partnering with large brokers across the country to vertically integrate their real estate brokerages.✅ Follow John Gafford on social media:Instagram ▶️ / thejohngaffordFacebook ▶️ / gafford2🎧 Stream The Escaping The Drift Podcast with John Gafford Episode here:Listen On Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7cWN80gtZ4m4wl3DqQoJmK?si=2d60fd72329d44a9Listen OnApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/escaping-the-drift-with-john-gafford/id1582927283

Yes. Tell me, how do I build a raving? Tell me how to build raving fans. So I don't have to say right now. And now escaping the drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Back again, back again for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Like I said in the opening, man, the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And how we do that is we bring an exceptional talent to share what they

know with you, to drop little nuggets of gold on your plate. And today I got a good one, man. I got this cat on who is a branding expert. He's an expert at teaching you how to build a brand through digital channels and everywhere else that will make customers flock to you almost like it is a superpower. He is the author of the new book coming out on June 18th, 2024 called Marketing Superpowers. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is John Davids. John, how are you, buddy?

I'm doing great, John. Thanks for having me on. What an intro, man. You're good at this stuff. It's all downhill from here. Like literally every single podcast I have starts the same way with whoever's on saying what an intro and then it just, it's just downhill. So pretty much if you're listening to this, please don't skip.

Stay with us as we talk, because I promise John is in his studio in Toronto. I am here in Las Vegas, but we're going to have some, we're going to have some over the border magic for you today. It's what we're going to do. Let's do it, man. Put together some greatness for you. So first off, man, tell me a little bit about, you know, obviously we have a lot of high level performers on here and kind of the theme of the podcast is, is escaping the

drift is to get you to stop drifting along with the currents of life and start swimming against the current and taking some control of your own situation. Are you a guy that has always been successful? Was there a time in your younger life when maybe you were drifting along? Tell me about the early John. Oh, man. I was definitely drifting along, I think, because all throughout my school years, when I was a teenager coming up, and I'm sure a lot of people can relate to this, I basically believed what every teacher told me and what I saw the other students doing. And I thought what you needed to do is get straight A's and get into a good college. And that was sort of the path. And it never really dawned on me that I was able to do that because as hard as I tried,

I just wasn't all that good at school. And then when I kind of started to chase my entrepreneurial talents, kind of like the first year or so of college, that's when my whole life turned around. And I was able to do things that were just extraordinary beyond anything else I had done before. And it's because, yeah, as you said, I had been going along with the drift and man, a 180 and then everything changed. What was the catalyst that forced you to change? Money, number one, you know, needed cash, came up in a family, didn't have a lot of

money and I discovered the internet. So kind of like early 2000s, I was buddies with this guy who was kind of building websites and getting lots of traffic. And this is like pre-Facebook, pre-social networks, pre-YouTube. And he was creating these content sites and getting lots of traffic. And I thought, well, I'm not that smart, but I'm smart enough to do this. And I had always had a fascination with media, entertainment, magazines, movies. And so I kind of had this idea. I thought, I wonder if I can create a website that can give people content they're interested in, and maybe I can make some money off advertising. And over the course of about six months in my first year of college,

I wasn't all that good at classes. So I went as often as I needed to. And whenever I wasn't in class, I was working on my little web business. And basically, I started a blog, I recruited a whole bunch of students in my English department to write for me and write on topics like pets and sports and travel and relationships and any topic that we could write about as college students. And then through a series of, you know, a lot of hustling, a lot of phone calls, I got my content to be syndicated on the biggest sites at the time, which at the time were Yahoo, MSN and AOL. And so if you can get your content on those homepages back in 2003, four or five, man, that's like Facebook homepage today and managed to go from zero to 2 million readers and launched an ad

business. And yeah, it was, it was over the course of about eight months. And I was, I built a business doing about $300,000 a year in college, all because I was just chasing this, this burning desire to be better than I was. So back to the college students that were writing the stuff for you, were you paying them for it or just saying, Hey, look, I can give you an outlet to be published? Were you leveraging your battery or were you paying them? Oh, I had no money. I mean, if you want to start with nothing and get somewhere, you've got to learn how to beg, borrow, steal, do whatever you can do. So my little hack there was I went to the college English department, journalism English. And I said, Hey, I'm a student at this school and I want, I'm launching a publication, an online magazine, and I want to get other fellow students to take

part in. Well, what can I do? Can I talk to people? What can I do? And they said, Oh, we have this thing called a list serve, which is basically where we can blast an email out to all 5,000 students in that department. And I said, Oh, cool. What do I have to do to get that done? And she's like, oh, just send me an email of what you want and I'll send it out to them. Within an hour, I had hundreds of applications from people. And I just said, hey, it's a student publication. I'll feature your content. It'll be read by whoever. And I had everybody writing for free. Leaning into their 30 writers. And I'll go on. I'll go one step further. You got to show up and buy me with some free content on your favorite episode of Friends.

That's what you have to do. Exactly. And then I had one of those writers become my editor. So I wasn't even overseeing like from day one, I had an editor overseeing 20 writers. So I was able to focus 100% of my attention on just how do I get distribution for this? How do I find an audience? And that's what I spent 100% of my time doing. Oh, the power of college kids. And that editor probably just wanted to be able to tell somebody he was the editor for this site when he applied for quote unquote, a real job, not realizing you were banking 300 grand a year selling advertising for this. High status, man. High status titles definitely motivate people.

And so especially if you can tell a 17, 18-year-old college student, hey, you're going to be an editor and a writer, put it on your resume. That means something to a lot of people. And I'm sure they use that to move forward in their career also. And here's an interesting question though, because one of my things, because again, I am very, very big on, do not build it unless you know, people want it, but you kind of took a leap of faith there and just said, I'm going to put this out there with, cause there's no real way to test this unless it's just out there, especially at this point of the internet, there was no Kickstarter, no AB that you didn't really have that. So what was that decision? Like, was it like, I can do nothing? So pretty much, I mean, when you're that age, you don't know what you don't know. So if you're

talking to me today, and yeah, you're way smarter than 20-year-old John, me. Of course, back in the day, I should have done it backwards. And I talk about in my book, Marketing Superpowers, one of the things I talk about is you should build a community first before you even launch a product or a concept, have that community from day one so you can test these concepts. In my case, it was actually the easier part of the equation to get the website built. I paid a guy in China 100 bucks to build the website, and then I got a bunch of writers to make content for free. So my sunken costs were like a hundred bucks. So that was okay, but you're right. Proving demand first is the way to go. Well, let's talk about scaling there because obviously you scaled to 300 grand first.

So at what point did you go out looking for your first advertiser? Do you start with a local? Do you start with somebody local? Are you going for national advertisers right out of the box? How did you scale that up? Yeah, I'll tell you. I have a funny little story there, but the real hack was getting people to see my content and get on the website. So that piece of it was the hardest jump of all. And that was about six months of just literally cold calling a few emails, but it was phone calls every single day for six months to the guy who ran the msn.com editorial team. And so once I got to the point where they agreed to syndicate my content, all I did, because literally overnight, I went from zero to about I think it

was like 24,000 unique visitors a day. And that was over the course of a weekend. I just grabbed the Google AdSense JavaScript and slapped it on my site. So Google AdSense is people, you go to your site, you click and Google pays you. So I didn't even have to find advertisers. So you were leveraging that network to get that done as it started. Now, obviously, the lesson in that story is persistence because if 100 people started websites just like yours, 99 of them are going to stop after the first week of phone calls. And you did this every day for six months? It was six months and then a time before that also of actually, you know, of getting to the point where I even had something to make a call with. But yeah, no, your, your point is, is actually a very good one. The reason I was successful hands down

in first year of college was because I just didn't give up when all the signals should have told me to give up. And going back to your first question of how I escaped the drift, I persisted because I knew that there was something here. And if you had asked anybody else, they probably would have said, what's this kid doing? You're getting writers to make a website, make content. Like it didn't make any sense, but I had that little edge, that little insight, because I had a buddy who was kind of doing this and it wasn't popular at the time.

And that I think is what drives a lot of entrepreneurs to success. They have an edge. They know something others don't. They trust their gut and they're able to stick it out even when all the external signals are telling them, hey, maybe this isn't a great idea. Maybe their friends aren't vibing. Maybe they're getting a little made fun of, all that kind of stuff. Put it to the side because when you can get over that hump, that's where success is. Well, Tim Grover always says,

people always look for, they look in these high performing athletes, the Michael Jordans, the Kobe Bryant. It's like, what does that guy have that I don't have that makes him successful? And he said, it's not what he has or what they have. It's what they don't have, which is an off button. They don't have stop. They don't have it. So my question is, so my question is, obviously you're somebody that's got that because you made six months worth of phone calls on something that you didn't even really know was viable yet. You just believed in it so much. So my question is, where did that come from on you? I think a piece of it is honestly

just nature, DNA, all that kind of stuff. But really, it's having no other choice. And I think a luxury that a lot of entrepreneurs have, at least a lot of the ones that I know, is they don't have an alternative that's easy to get to. So if you have a second choice, this is always why I find it really puzzling when people are like, have a backup plan. I completely agree that having a backup plan is the smart thing to do, although it's not the thing that's going to increase your likelihood of success. Likelihood of success comes when your back's against the wall. And I've seen this multiple times in my life. That story when I was in college, a story from when I sold that company years later when I raised venture capital

and did it. But there's like six or seven milestones in my life where I can look at and say, the reason I was successful there is because I had no other choice. It was do this or take five steps back and be in a place where you really don't want to be. So I think not having another choice or at least psychologically telling yourself there is no alternative, that can really push you in life. I think my favorite way to put exactly what you just said is whenever people that are working with me are failing at something, I always ask them the same question, which is, are you interested in this working or are you committed to this working? Because if you're interested in it working, you know, hey, everybody gets lucky, right? You might have a shot, you know, luck might smile on you and the pieces might align. But in most cases, to move an

immovable object and make something really happen, in most cases to, to, to move in a movable object and make something really happen, you've got to be absolutely committed to doing it. And like you just said, you can't do that unless you burn the boats. You gotta be like, we're not, we're not sailing home, buddy. We are conquering this land or we're dying on it. That's, that's, that's how the, that's how this works. So next question obviously is, so you've got a business doing 300 grand while you're in college here's the here's a fun question because a similar situation happened to me i was in school for hospitality administration and i owned my first bar when i was 20 so smart ass me felt the

institution had nothing further off of me so did you finish school make it 300 grand did you finish school making 300 grand? Did you finish? I finished. You're a better man than me. I wish I would have. I wish I would have. I was going to say I finished, although I wouldn't say that if I look back now, man, I coasted through. I finished with C's and D's and all that I could to just graduate with a diploma and not necessarily any bragging rights. But here's something funny, though, and I'm curious to get your take on this, being in the same boat. What level of prestige does it have for you today when someone says, I have a diploma, I graduated this and that? I tell this story in my book. I tell this story in my book, and I'll tell it here. So so for years, right, like, like coming out of that

situation. And then I, you know, I had a lot of, a lot of cool jobs out of some pseudo success, but I, you know, I always told people I went to school, but I never told anybody I didn't finish, right. That's the part of the story that I was clipped out. And people just assumed that I had finished. There was always just that assumption that I finished school. And this is how people found out I didn't. So my sister says, oh, we should go out for a reality show. So we go out for a reality show and I get cast on The Apprentice, right? And of course, I'm honest with them because they can find out I don't have a degree in like two seconds, right? They just find out. But like, they never bring it up. I mean, you just do your stupid tasks and

Trump gives somebody the Cobra and you move on to next week that's what happens right so the very first day of filming dude i'm sitting there and we walk into the boardroom and trump's like how you doing our buddy whatever bob bonnie goes this year we're doing something a little different he goes uh separated the teams by this half of the room has college degrees and this half of the half of the room is high school grads and i was just like holy shit i'm like i hold i was like i i was like i'm sitting there smiling but inside i'm going oh my god everybody i know on the planet's gonna see this and now they're gonna know and long story boring at the end of it when i would go back and it aired, nobody gave a shit. Like nobody ever

even said anything about it. Nobody ever mentioned that to be a, to be a point ever. Nobody said a word about it. So yes, it was something that I built up bigger in my mind than anything else. But I also will say this, if somebody that has college, you know, soon to be college age children, I have told, you know, my kids, I'm like, look, the way that I view college anymore, I think it's a great place to grow up. I really believe it is. I think it's a great place to learn how to be an adult. I don't think there's any rush to try to go get a job or, you know, even though the internet says if you don't have a Lambo by 20 and, you know, you're making it rain, a strip club, you're a loser, right? No, I don't believe that. I think that there is a reason to go to college. And I think those two reasons are this.

Number one, I think connections are very important. So I think if you're going to go to, you know, some shitty school, that's not going to give you long connections. I don't know that that's worth it. But also in my opinion, I think if you go to school and get a finance or an accounting degree, and then if you get a law degree after that, whether you're ever a lawyer or not, with a finance degree or accounting degree and a law degree after that, whether you're ever a lawyer or not, with a finance degree or accounting degree and a legal degree, you can literally get any job on the planet. You can be a COO, you can be a CFO, you can be a CEO, just any job on the planet, you can do with those degrees. Now, if you want to go get a degree in pygmy studies, yes, that's an absolute waste of money. As we were taking the underground tour in Seattle two

days ago, and our tour guide announces that she had a theater degree, which was no shock because it was a very boisterous tour, if you know what I'm saying, to the point where it was annoying. But my point is,

yeah, you're a fucking tour guide because you got a theater degree. That's on you. So that's my opinion. What's your opinion? I think you're bang on, man. I think going back to the earlier point you said is that there are so many things in life that we view under a spotlight and we say this is important and if someonecribe prestige to actually holds us back. I mean, if you think about things in your life, whether it's a job you took or

the choice to start a podcast or where you live or whatever it is, applying for reality shows, there are so many things where there might be a complete mismatch between prestige in your mind and prestige in someone else's mind, high class, low class. So that's one point. And on the other point, I completely 100% agree with you. So full disclosure, I have a music degree, which is completely useless. And then in my second year, John, I went ahead and got a bachelor of business as well. And I guess that's more useful, but I definitely apply the skills from my marketing and my finance courses more than I apply the skills from my Baroque era music courses. Yeah. Because dude, were you going to be a music teacher or were you going to make it? Which one was it? I was going to make it, but ultimately what I realized

is, man, it's just the business. There's the entertainment business, music business. I just love the business side of it. Yeah. No, no, no. Okay. That's fair. That's fair. I love that. I love that side of the business too. I have actually can say on my resume, I have owned a record label. I can, I can have that on my, I can have that on my, on my resume. My buddy who's in a relatively famous band found a kid in New Orleans and call me up and say, Hey, I want to sign this kid. I want to make a record. We're getting them on a 360 deal.

I said, what's the deal? He goes, well, you just put up the money to produce the record. If it hits, if it hits, somebody wants to buy it, we'll make a shit ton of're getting them on a 360 deal. I said, what's the deal? He goes, well, you just put up the money to produce the record. If it hits, well, if it hits, somebody wants to buy it, we'll make a shit ton of money or we'll lose it all. I'm like, but I get to say,

I said, well, my name be on the record. He goes, yup. It was a producer. I said, I'll bet just cause I could mark it off my bucket list of things I wanted to

do. That's awesome. Is it still around? No, it was, it was one record. Uh, rival sons,

right. Rival sons was the name of the of the of the out of the record label out of new orleans and uh we did the one uh six track ep for the for kid and uh and yeah nobody wanted to buy it so there you go another story in in the music business mo most stories do end like that but at least you have it on your resume. Yeah. But I could say, I owned a record label once and I'm not full of shit about it. I can say that, which is good. Well, let's talk about this book, dude, because I want to kind of walk through it because your whole thing is using marketing to create raving fans that would create your crowd. And I can tell you this, right? Like as somebody that's in real estate and I own a very large real estate brokerage, it's what I do, but it's my trade.

So I get to see how a lot of people do what they do. And I can tell you this, that I have agents here in the office that have wildly monstrous YouTube followings that they have spent years building over tons of content. And they're making $15,000, $20,000 a month of views from their YouTube channel. And that is now feeding their lead source. And that's, you know, obviously they're getting paid to get leads. So that's obviously the way to do it. On the flip side of that coin, you have people that have been doing paid ads forever. Facebook, Google ads, all of those things. And I can tell you that there's a clash of the titans going on in our space right now, if you will, and it's causing collateral damage amongst everybody. I mean, me included. It's hard

to generate leads online right now for the simple reason of CoStar, which if you know real estate, this will mean nothing to you, but I have a lot of real estate listeners. CoStar purchased homes.com. And you've probably noticed when you turn the TV on, now there's all these, we'll do your homework for you, homes.com, right? All of a sudden, it's gotten to be this huge thing. CoStar is a massive company with a shit ton of money. And they have come to just space to say, eh, we want to put Zillow out of business. So you got CoStar now fighting with Zillow for eyeballs in every arena where there are eyeballs. And in digital marketing where a smaller player can compete with a larger player just by niching down and doing long tail keywords

and doing smart things, all of a sudden we're getting squeezed across the board because these two guys are trying to beat each other up. So yes, tell me, how do I build a raving fan? Tell me how to build raving fans so I don't have to- I'm okay right now. Yeah, and I'm obsessed with the real estate space. We have so many clients that are brokerages, home builders, realtors,

and I know the space personally. So I can tell you, I'll talk about CoStar for a second. When you're dealing with the giant, you can't play the giant, you can't play the giant's game. And the problem is that a lot of people, so I have this framework that I use called rent to own marketing. And basically it goes like this. You start with renting your audience and then you at some point have to own your audience. And a lot of people start with

renting their audience. In other words, they're buying ads on Google, they're buying ads on Facebook, they're buying ads on TikTok. And that's cool when you're starting out. But at some point, you've got to transition to owning them, owning them in a newsletter, owning them on a podcast, owning them on a social media channel. And so the example you gave of your, you know, agents that have YouTube channels, and YouTube is the absolute monster in this space, because as you said, they literally get paid to run commercials, quote unquote, because YouTube pays you via the ads that they are able to generate off your channel, they share the revenue, and then you can run content that is kind of a commercial for your brand. Obviously, it's good content. Now, those people will have a total, a method of marketing that recycles and rejuvenates

itself because there's really smart ones can take all the ad revenue and then also run paid advertising and it just continues to compound and compound. So that's where you want to be. Though going back to the renting side, I think buying ads on Google and Facebook and Instagram, that's all cool. The problem is that is never sustainable. You will always run into a crunch and there's a whole list of reasons. Ads get more expensive. Competitors can copy you. The big guys can come in and start bidding up the keywords on and on and on. And so you never want to live in rental land. You at some point want to move over to owned land and you've just got to make

that transition over time. Oh, I love that. So how do we do that? Let's build a digital marketing brand type plan for real estate agent A on day one. What do we do? What do we do? So what I say is if you're already in business, awesome. And anybody listening who is going to get into business at some point, but doesn't even have that business yet, this is important for you too. So listen up. You want to build a community as fast and early as you possibly can. And it comes down to a very simple formula I give in the book. In Marketing Superpowers, it's really based on one single formula. And that is the movement formula. And every movement has three things. You have a unifying belief that you can rally people behind. You have faith builders, faith in that belief,

and then you have action. And I'll give you a very clear example. So a unifying belief is something that you believe. If you're a real estate agent, you might say, hey, listen, if you're renting, you've got to own. If you live in Boston, you've got to move to New York. If you live in California, you've got to move to Vegas. Whatever it is that you can get people behind, this is what you stand for. This is what you're saying. That's the belief. The second thing is the faith builders, all the different proof points that you can bring to bear that convince people of what you're talking about. So studies, articles, books, data, research,

experts, influencers, rituals, all the things that we do that we see that convince us of the thing that we're being told. And then the third piece, the action is, hey, here's how you do it. You buy my product, buy my product, buy my product, work with me, et cetera. And that's the action. And when you have those three ingredients, if you look at anything, any brand, any religion, any political movement, any sports team, everything follows that exact three-step formula, and it works like magic. Dude, you know what's so funny?

I spent the weekend in Seattle at one of my mastermind groups. I'm a member of several mastermind groups. And one of which is my buddy Kent Clothier has one called Boardroom. And it's exclusively for very high dollar real estate people. I mean, there's some serious players in there. And I brought as a guest this time was the person that actually got me into real estate, which is Kendra Todd, who won my season of The Apprentice. She came as my guest. Kendra and I have been friends now for 18 years since the show. And she was laughingly telling me, she goes, dude, you got to check this out. Look at what I built. I go, what is it? And she had, I wish I could

remember the name of it so you could look it up. I can't remember the name of it, but she had built a website. Essentially the idea was move to red States, right? So, so there's your philosophy of, you don't want to live in these dystopian nightmare leftist States with, you know, dodge the crackhead downtown. Like I just did in Seattle for three days. So there's your rallying cry, right? There's your own great. And then you go to the website and it has like every state that votes read on a map and then you can click on it and then she was like she's like check it out i got the freedom scale on each thing and it was the data so it had like the gun laws it had like property rights taxes all of these things which would give every state every area a freedom score. Right. And so there's, there's your data, there's your rallying cry. And it all just led back to

her being able to refer out these deals all over the country. And I thought that was so well done. And it literally is the exact formula that you just laid out. And I didn't think of it. Dude, you're giving me chills. I'm trying to find this. So I'm trying to find the name of it, but, but that's exactly, so let's, let's break that down, John. So the rallying cry, the unifying belief, as I call it, is move to red state. So clear. So crystal clear to, to that target is, um, the faith builders. Yeah. All those things, the gun laws, the freedom, the mask mandates, the schools, the regulation, all that stuff. And then the action is work with me to move to a red state. I mean, be brilliantly executed. And you could build Instagram channels, podcasts, YouTube channels all around that exact movement. Yeah, it was really well done. I'll give her

credit for it. And she was like, yeah, I mean, dude, because right now, especially going to election cycle where Trump is going to be everywhere, it's like, this is really smart to do this. It's a really smart deal. And she can just hammer out 30% referrals all day. Easy. So smart. Wow. That's amazing. And if you think about the versatility of that, I mean, you just said red states. Someone could literally, a listener right now could take that exact playbook, do the same thing for blue states. There there's a 50 of the market that will follow you and and like and so these things are so versatile and they work consistently i'm just trying to think of what you would put on the blue state like you can get an abortion on every corner you can buy like no prosecution for drug possession

yeah i don't man That's it, man. That's it. It would be a little crazy. I mean, listen, there are some blue states out there. I mean, you might have been to some recently. Yeah. No, no, no, for sure. And look, that was my thing.

Like I said, when I was leaving Seattle, I jumped on the old Instagram. And I normally don't talk politically at all on my Instagram. And I just said, look, if you're on the fence of how to vote, here's my advice. Go to a city anywhere in the United States. I don't care where it is. Go to a city that votes heavily one way and then go to a city that votes heavily the other way and just spend the weekend there. Just hang out for the weekend. Walk around downtown. Just cruise around and see what those policies in real world activities have produced i was man i got seattle was shocking to me this weekend like i would never go what what surprised you the most dude people doing drugs in the middle of the day not in the cold

not huddled in the corner sitting on the sidewalk smoking meth off of shit in the middle of the day, not in the cold, not huddled in the corner, sitting on the sidewalk, smoking meth off of shit in the nicest parts of downtown. And I'm not talking about it. We saw it once I'm talking about every 10 feet that was happening to the point where I like, like, dude, you know, I, I'm not, I'm a big dude. So I'm not a guy that's weary in public. I was like consciously watching the windows of the banks and stuff behind me. So I could see who was walking behind me the whole time with my family in front of me. Tell my wife, I said, nah, I had meetings. I'm like, you guys are Ubering.

Don't walk around here. It wasn't good. It's insane. I, I, I had the same feeling, you know, I was in, I I've been going to San Francisco for years and the last year or two, San Francisco, even Los Angeles, you know, some, some areas you walk down, you're like, I don't want to be walking here alone. I definitely don't want my wife walking here. So yeah, I don't know.

That's yeah. That's, I like your analogy though. Go to a city that votes heavily in one area or the other and decide where you want to live. And just, yeah. And just see that. And remember like, dude, and here's the problem. Like we have this in Nevada, right? Like we have a lot of blue state folks moving here with progressive

ideas and thoughts because they don't like where they just left where the reason they're leaving is because their vote got it that way and it's like please don't bring that here i think you're seeing a lot of that in austin texas right now they're like please please please don't bring that here um there's a reason that you wanted to come here we'd like to keep it kind of like it is you're more than welcome but just you need to assimilate to what we're kind of doing. I think we're getting off track here. I want to get back to working. So let's talk more about this. So you've got your formula. You want to do it. Where should I start doing this? How should I start building a community? Yeah. So the starting point is whatever platform best suits you, you being the main character.

So the main character, I always talk about this concept of the main character in any brand. Now, if you're a solo founder, an owner operator, an individual, then it's going to be very simple. It's going to be you. And if you're running a larger business, maybe it's going to be a spokesperson, a cartoon character, one of the co-founders, whoever it is. But there's got to be a central character to every brand or every movement. That's what we've seen works best over the last

hundred or even thousand years. So you start with the character and then you think about what is the best channel for this character to speak to this audience. So for example, if you're talking to a B2B audience selling software, maybe it's LinkedIn. Exactly. If you're selling real estate, maybe it's Instagram, maybe it's TikTok. Exactly. If you're selling real estate, maybe it's Instagram, maybe it's TikTok. But you've also got to think about the format. So am I doing written photo or video? And what is the kind of content that I'm producing? So generally speaking, content must do three things. It must entertain, educate, or inspire, ideally all three. And so when you put all those pieces together, you come up with a formula of what works best for you. And then you just got to try and change and

try and tweak as you go. Well, so here's one of my thoughts that I have, which is this. So I actually had a thought yesterday because I haven't been using... Tell me if this is terrible or it's great because I think it's funny, but I don't know if it's good or not. So obviously, one of my goals is to drive as much traffic as I can to this podcast. And, um, you know, I, I mainly I'm, I'm big on Instagram, big on everywhere else, but I don't even use my Tik TOK at all. I've not used Tik TOK hardly at all. I've had the account. I think it's got 1400 followers. I never really post there and I'll do anything. So I had an idea yesterday where, cause my name is John Gafford. I want to start posting every day, just on TikTok though. Cause I think it would screw the brand that I built on the other platforms,

but just on TikTok, we don't have a brand yet. I want to build a brand called daily gaffermations, right? But where I want to give the worst fucking advice possible that I can give. Just, I made like a fifties jingle through Senio. Like I use AI to make like this terrible jingle that goes in front of it and just literally give terrible advice. Like, like motivational advice,

like, like as you wake up and I'm just looking like I'm half asleep and I'm just like, ah, you know what? You have the power to change the world, but I think we can agree it's probably not going to be for the best. So just do nothing. And then that would be a daily affirmation. And then at the end of it, be like, this was terrible advice,

but for great advice, go to escaping the drug podcast. So I think that's funny. I think I would enjoy doing it, but you tell me, would that screw up my brand? Is that good? Does it matter? Because I think it's, I mean, you tell me. You can be so wacky, man. I mean, first of all, I love that. I don't know if I would do that as the theme of the entire channel, but definitely as a pillar. So if you think about building out, whether it's a YouTube, an Instagram, a podcast, whatever it is, you've got pillar content that's recurring. And I love that as an ongoing theme. And yeah, that the you know, the hashtag is bad advice only bad suggestions only. So I love that as a concept. But what you can think about also, especially because you've already got an established podcast, you're big on Insta.

So you can think about using different platforms to touch different audiences in different ways, different sides of your personality. So a good example here, when I first got onto TikTok, I remember I was on pretty early, but Gary Vee was on before me as he's usually super early to these platforms. And I remember a lot of his earliest content on TikTok was like just garage sales. It was the thing where he goes to garage sales and that content's interesting because it basically just lets you watch somebody haggling over, you know, $5, no $4, no 350. And so it's very funny, it's very interesting. And even if you have no idea who Gary V is, or what he's talking about, or what his deal is, it's just fun to watch. So what the way I think about it is, short form video content works best when you don't need any context.

And so I wouldn't worry about, oh, my brand is this, my brand is that. We manage TikToks for a whole lot of brands, a whole lot of people. And at the end of the day, if someone's interested in you, they're going to go deeper and they're going to learn more. But as they're driving on the side of the road, which is the equivalent of swiping with your thumb, you just want to get their attention in three seconds. Yeah. So, okay. Then daily Gaffermations it will be.

I thought I would build the whole page like that, but I guess I won't, which is good advice. Yeah. Which I just want to have good advice about giving terrible advice because I think I can really, I mean, I think I can give terrible advice. Hey, this is Steve Sims

and I'm a proud partner of Escape the Drift Podcast with John Gafford. And I've got something for you for Simms Distillery, the community that is based on you, the entrepreneur, giving you the tools to be a better version of you. Visit simmsdistillery.com, use the word escape to get a $694 discount off of the community that you need to be part of when you want to demand a better version of you thanks a lot skate the drift and see you in simpsons delivery.com all right so where were we so we were talking about daily affirmations you said i i love that you said it's just making a pillar so we're gonna go from there all right so back to

daily affirmations do you think i should do that on Instagram, TikTok, everywhere? Where do you think I should do this? I like it for TikTok a lot, although I think what will happen, and you can tell me if you do this already, do you repurpose content? If you make a short form video, let's say for Instagram Reels, are you posting that everywhere else? Yeah, we do. Like this podcast will be cut up into however many shorts we can get out of it.

And then from there it will go, it'll go off on its merry way to all of our different channels. Yeah. And that's something else people have to think about because a lot of people don't want to take the time because they just think about it as an overwhelming task. I've got to start making content. The reality is,

you know, someone like me and you're in the same boat, I'm sure you make content, you set aside whatever it is, two hours a week're in the same boat, I'm sure. You make content, you set aside whatever it is, two hours a week, three hours a week, and then you make enough content for the entire week or the entire month. So you've got to think about economy of content so that you can actually get a lot done without putting all your hours into it. I know what we were talking about before we cut off, which was this, which was, if I'm looking to build a community, where do I start? That was the question right before we went in the crapper. That's it. That's it. So where you start is you start by coming up with

a content strategy and you start early and often. So I know people who have started building communities long before they ever got into business and they thought about what it might be they want to launch in a year or two years. So if you're a real estate agent, or if you want to be a real estate agent, start creating that content early on. And it all starts with one channel, one type of content, one voice. So don't think that you need to be creating content for six different channels and different formats and going all in. In my case, I started creating content for LinkedIn and just LinkedIn. Before I was anywhere else, it was just LinkedIn written content. And then it was video, and then it was audio, and then it was short form, and then it was long form. So if you want to start, make it

something digestible that you can do. Because like we were saying at the beginning of this whole conversation, John, when people start something and then stop prematurely, what's even the point? You've got to do something that you're willing to stick with for a very long time. Yeah. This podcast took years before it got the traction it has now. So Mike, I think I want to clarify something, which is when you talk about creating a community, do you mean, I mean, are we talking about followers or are we talking about like a Facebook group? What are we talking about?

That's a great question. So a lot of people get really hung up and some people I talk to think about a community as only it has to be a physical community. Like people have to get together every Thursday night for two hours. And that's not what it is. The definition that I would give it to a community is a group of people, an audience, a followership, whatever you wanna call it, that self propels. So it can self propel if you have a following,

if you're on Instagram and you have a following. If you're on Instagram and you have a bunch of followers and every time you post something, literally maybe you get some likes, but it kind of dies with you, that's not a community. Because if you are the only person that cares, everyone else is just passing by. That doesn't count. I would think of a community as something that self propels. So in the case of a podcast, when you put something

out there, does it get shared? Does it get discussed? Does it continue on without you having to actively fuel it? And that can be in all kinds of forms. It doesn't have to be a Facebook group or a WhatsApp group. Yeah. I think that's when people hear about community building, I think they look at it like my friend Pace Morby is probably has the best community I've ever seen built around his sub two idea, which is a way to purchase real estate subject to. But he built just an army of people and nobody works harder at it than he does, dude. This guy, I've said it before in this podcast, he goes to meetups, like physical meetups with people and he probably will go to 150 of them across the country a year. And if he never posted anything within their Facebook group for sub two, if he never posted anything again,

that's that site would still just be churning all day long with members of that community talking to it. I mean, to the point where he, he sells a ton of merch with the logo on it. I mean, people are so invested in that community. And I think the smart thing that he did was he built it around the name of the concept and not so much around him. It's not Pace Morby Group. It's Sub2. That's the group with the finger. It has nothing to do with, it's not him. It's not Pace Morby, but yet everybody associates that logo with him. Conversely, where you have a guy like Gary Vee that built his brand around Gary Vee. What's easier to do? What's better?

That's the billion-dollar question. So I do agree with you. It's much easier to remove a founder when the founder is not inextricably linked by name to that thing. Although even in Gary's case, Gary will joke around that he's got Gary Vaynerchuk and Gary Vee. And Gary Vee is the character, is the community, is the center of the community, the builder, if you will. I would say that someone like Gary Vee

has a community. I mean, there's just no question because he's actually taken it to the point where he's actually got VCon now and he's got the merch and he's got the products. And when he launches something, it will sell out. So I think, again, I go back to my definition of a community has to self propel in some way. And the real distinction is, if you have a brand, where you put something out, and maybe you can make some sales, but no one's wearing your logo, like a badge of honor, no one's standing outside and getting any sense of status or belonging, because they're a part of this thing. And that's very different from sub two, which is they actually are taking part in that even without

the founder, without the leader. I think that's the distinction I draw. I think a lot of people get egoed out, right? And they're like, oh, I want to build this around me, especially in real estate. Everybody's like, I want to build my name. I want to build my name. And it's like, dude, that's all well and great, but businesses are built to be sold. And if you're building a business around a name that's yours, I ain't going to sell that business. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Like right now I'm back in the process just because I've been focused really on our business forever and spinning back up my personal luxury brand in the home selling arena. And rather than spin it up about me, I'm spinning it up luxury homes of Henderson

because I can sell that one day. Once I build that, I can step away from that and add more players and push them to the forefront when I'm ready to be done with it. But if it was trading as John Gafford luxury real estate broker, I can't resell that. I can't package myself out of it. A hundred percent. I have this conversation with creators all the time. So at my agency, Influicity, we work with tons of creators and we pair them with brands and we do a lot of influencer marketing. And one of the conversations I have with creators is ego is at the center of all of this stuff. So it's like, I want to be the name on my makeup brand. I want to be the one that people think about. And it's like, that's cool for your ego today. But what happens

in seven years when you're burnt out and you want to sell this thing? What are you going to do? Are you going to sell yourself? Forget about that. It's always better to build a brand. You can be the star of the show personally, but the brand must be unrelated in some way. If you want it to have true equity value that you can sell it. You can get rid of it. As I'm going through my channels, which channels would you say starting out would be most important for me to focus on?

So let's separate it out B2B, B2C. So the trifecta in B2B, if you're selling to businesses, or, you know, expensive things, it would be LinkedIn. Yeah, newsletter actually is very big, and then podcast. And the reason I say those three is because LinkedIn is where you get attention, especially these days, LinkedIn is doing so much. Obviously, you can do written content, you can do video content, they just launched a tick tock like scrolling video in their feed, who knows if that'll be around, but that's up there right now. Then once you

get people's attention there, you can bring them down the funnel to your newsletter and or to your podcast. That's kind of the b2b trifecta in b2c. In b2c, it's Instagram or tick tock. It's those two for sort of short form content. That's your billboard. And then for long form, I love YouTube. And I love YouTube for the same reason you mentioned that your brokers are on there. YouTube literally pays you to make content. And as you build an audience, you get paid more and you can promote your products like crazy. So for consumer, I love Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. You know, you said something

in the B2B, actually B2C too, I think it could go, but I made a commitment at my mastermind group. One of the things we have to do is make commitments to what we're going to do before we go back in the next quarter. And one of the places where the room felt me lacking was in the newsletter department. They were like, you got to get a newsletter going. You got to get it. It's a great way. So now that I have to do this and I got you on here, Mr. Expert, what makes a good newsletter? Wow. So a newsletter can be as brief as you want it to be. Some are longer than others, but a newsletter really can be recycled content of your best content. So the way to think about it is if you're a content creator, you're out here making podcasts every week,

you're making short form content every day, you're doing tweets, you're doing all this stuff. And yes, your audience is seeing it, but most people are not seeing most of the stuff you post. So my newsletter where I get a lot of traction is actually just the best stuff from that week that I posted. And I'll do like a little blurb at the beginning.

Hey, here's some stuff that's interesting. Here's maybe a long form story. And it's enough that people can be satiated, but people don't necessarily want to sit there and read a newsletter for all that long. So the average read time on my newsletter is about 90 seconds, which means people are going there,

getting some stuff and moving away. I've seen people do newsletters that are just aggregates. So if you're someone who likes to give recommendations and you're reading a lot of news articles, you're spending a lot of time on Twitter, you can actually just aggregate stuff that you like and send that out as something, Hey, here's my recommendations. There's a few ways to do it. But what I would say overall is a lot of the best newsletters I've seen from both sides as the creator of one and as the recipient of one, it's actually not net new content. It's the best recycled content you have. Yeah. I think the one that I get that I tend to read the most often and not delete is Ryan

Holiday's Daily Stoic one. I read that one almost every day. And you're right. It's 60 seconds of reading and there's no images, there's no pictures, there's no, it's just here's 60 seconds. And that's all he does. And it's just to keep him kind of front and center. So less is more is what you're saying. Like you don't need some elaborate, long, mail chimp, awesome, beautiful, maybe winds up in spam because it's got too many images type newsletter. You just need something that's concise that gets to the point. Ideally, zero images. I mean, Ryan Holiday's great at this. Neil Patel's another one. They will all say, do not put images, short text or to the point text and few images, the better. I do one image max. Sometimes I do none because if you start to load it up with multimedia, A, people don't want to read it. It looks like a crappy brochure, but also the spam

bots will get you and your read rate will actually go way down. We'll drop it. So keep that moving. So obviously there's MailChimp, there's Constant Contact. What do you recommend to manage newsletter? What do you use? There's so many. So we use a bunch. So we use Beehive. We like ConvertKit. Those are kind of two big ones, especially if you are a creator. So for a business, you have sort of MailChimp. Send grids of the world are pretty good. I like light and I like things that can connect with other websites and services. So if I'm looking for any new app, certainly newsletter software applies here.

What I'm actually most interested in these days would be price. Don't overcharge me for it. And secondly, how does it integrate with my other tools? So if I'm using Meta, Google, Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, whatever my tech stack is, I want to be able to integrate my software with each other. So I know that those read rates are, yeah, we use pretty much now go high level for everything. That's huge. We have moved over to that. It's just been a game changer for so much of our business, and especially for creating funnels and doing what we do. It's just been lights out good for what we do. So I think that's another problem that people have when they start doing

this stuff is they get overwhelmed with the tech stack. There's like, oh, I need this app. I need that app. So let's say you're a brand new starting out. You get five apps. What are they? You get five, only five. Just five. Okay. And listen, in Instagram, TikTok, that doesn't count. Okay. That doesn't count. So we're assuming. I'll tell you what I use. And listen, in Instagram, TikTok, that doesn't count. Okay. That doesn't count. So we're assuming- I'll tell you what I use. And just one question, is this just for external customer facing or also internal workforce? I'm saying you give five and you're trying to build a brand, you give five. What are they? Okay. You give five. So I would go with an email software. It could be GoHighLevel, ConvertKit, Beehive, whatever you like there. You've would go with an email software, it could be go high level convertkit, beehive, whatever

you like there, you've got to have some kind of CRM, which is essentially built into a lot of these. Something like Apollo zoom info for actually finding your leads and contacts. Internal mess. I mean, that's skip tracing. For those who don't know what he was just talking about. I would use something to, to speak. I know this isn't exactly public facing, but it's essential for me, because we have a remote workforce. And we're constantly dealing with people all over the place. You've got to have really, really good asynchronous communication tools. So I would

use something like Slack. I like loom. I like being able to talk to lots of people and make sure everyone's on the same page. And honestly, maybe an analytics tool on top of that. So something that you can actually track the performance of what you're putting out there. Everyone's a little different. So for LinkedIn, there's something like you can use Shield. That's a LinkedIn app, gives you LinkedIn analytics. For Instagram, you can use later.com. So an app that tells you how your performance is doing, that's really all you need. Should you not trust the app analytics? The app analytics generally won't give you the detail that these third-party apps will. Okay. So next question is I'm sure people wondering, what is, how are you integrating

AI or what platforms have you seen? Cause there's a new one that flows to you every 30 seconds. What are the best AI programs you're seeing right now to use for this stuff? And how are, how are you using AI in your business now? Yes. AI, as you said, it's coming at you fast and furious for me. It's, I's, I mean, I'm old school. I like open AI. I like chat GPT. I'm a power user. I'm a happy paying user.

And so for me, it's using AI, whatever tool you're going to use, chat GPT or otherwise, I'm constantly doing real time research and I'm using it as essentially my writing assistant or my research assistant to figure out what's hot right now, what's changed, what people are talking about. Give me an idea of a prompt you would use to see what's hot right now. So one of the things I talk about a lot, because I'm a marketing guy, I talk about building your community, how is TikTok changing, whatnot. So I'll look up a stat. So I'll say, what are the five fastest growing accounts on TikTok right now? I might do that. And then what I'll say is, what are these accounts doing that is actually tracking or bubbling up to the top? Because what I'm looking for ultimately is just ideas of interesting things to talk about. So let's tie this back in with what I was talking about in the book.

So remember, in Marketing Superpowers, I talk about a core belief, you know, that's your rallying cry, and then faith builders. So what you need to be able to do is have your belief, and then find things to talk about that relate to that. So you could just ask chat GBT say, Hey, here's my thesis on life, I think people should move to red States. Give me 20 reasons why this should be the case. And chat to you, but he'll just give that to you. And then you can make content. Yeah. I'm not going to lie. Some of my, when I was testing the idea for my daily affirmations, I said, give me, I said, give me 20 pieces of terrible advice in the tone of Larry David. And I wouldn't use all of it, but I would use some of it. I'm just going to say, I'd use some of it. It's so funny. I was going to say one thing.

So you just actually brought up a great point in the tone of Larry David. That's a super hack. I do the same thing. I'll say, give me this in the voice of Jon Stewart. Give me this in the voice of Chris Rock, because you want to tell ChatGPT the tone that you want in a shorthand, and that's how you do it. Yeah, I love that. I love that so much. Yeah, wouldn't use it all, but I would definitely use some of it. So if I'm trying to go out, like you said, so I'm trying to make content. Obviously, we just talked about using AI to do that. How often do you think it's important for people to post? Let's talk about the quality versus quantity argument. What says you, John? Yeah. So it depends on the platform. If you

are talking consumer facing platforms, so let's just take them individually. TikTok, ideally, one to three times a day. Instagram, once a day, maybe twice max, and stories on Instagram for sure. YouTube short form is very similar to Instagram. It's once or twice a day. Long form once a week is fine. You could even do twice a week, but once a week is fine. And then LinkedIn I'll do last. And LinkedIn is two to three times a week. But if you really want to make an impact, it's five days a week. It's Monday to Friday. Monday to Friday. Does it matter what time? Not really. I mean, kind of. Here's the answer. It matters what time for your own discipline.

The platform doesn't care. And the reason the platform doesn't care is because these are billion user platforms. There's people in every time zone at every minute. So it does, it really doesn't matter. All right. Well, next question, let's talk about best practices to work with the algorithm of each platform. Okay. Best practices with each platform. So, uh, right now, and we're, we're talking right now in June, 2024.

So this might be at a date. Yeah. So, um, right now we're seeing, we're seeing on I'll go on LinkedIn first LinkedIn long form is the best thing to do. Don't post short form do not link out the name can be deceiving. It's LinkedIn don't link out in your posts. If you want to link put it in the first comment long form video. Long form written content written content. Got it. Okay. form video long form written content written content got it okay

yeah long from written content um and then links in the comments not in the body of your post um all the platforms i'll just i'll bundle uh short form video together so i'm talking instagram reels youtube shorts tiktok it's videos under a minute tiktok is sometimes and they bounce back and forth experimenting with longer form videos. So you could try longer form, but generally it's under a minute. And the most important thing with short form is get to the point in the first two seconds, always. First frame. Is there a sweet spot for how long it should be? Just under 60 seconds. If you go over 60 seconds, it'll, it'll, it screws with the algorithm.

Okay. Yeah. But that, but the first frame and the first two seconds are important. The thing I keep seeing, I keep hearing about, or I keep seeing on those short forms is where it's almost like a, you know, let's try to, let's try to, it's, let's give you the mystery. Let's show you what we're going to talk about. And then they get to it or maybe even worse. They don't even get to it. It's like, you got to watch part two somewhere else, which I think there's a special place in hell for

those people. Uh, just me personally, because dude, I, you know, I just want to get to the, like, I just want to move on my life. I'm scrolling. I don't want to have to go, what happened to this poor dog that, you know, I don't want to see the after he gets rescued. I just want to see it in the same video. I don't want to see that. Is that effective? Obviously, because I'm bitching about it, it probably is an effective strategy. It definitely is effective, but I will give you the hack there is you've got to give people at least a hint of the payoff in the first one or two seconds. So in that example, it's like what happens to the dog, you show, like you open the video up with two seconds of the dog, let's say falling,

we don't know what happens if it hits the ground or not. And then you start the video fresh. So do not ever do that. If you're listening, and you think, Oh, I'm gonna make a long video. That's cool. But you have to keep me hooked in the first two seconds. So yeah, but yeah, it is frustrating. But yes, it does work, John, unfortunately. And then, yeah, and then long form, you know, YouTube, again, bounces back and forth. What they're saying now is that really long form works on YouTube, like one and a half, two hour type videos. And the reason is because YouTube can insert more ads in there.

And that's relatively new. If you had asked me three months ago, it was like 20 minute video. So that changes. What about captions? How long should captions be on short form? The hashtags still matter. Where are we with that? Captions?

Yes. So, I mean, you should caption everything. And a lot of the platforms will do it automatically for you these days. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Caption was the wrong word. I meant what you write that goes along with the video. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah. So your, your description below that video, there you go. Yes. Um, yeah, it matters.

It doesn't matter that much. Uh, sometimes one of the techniques, you know, I've done this on my Instagram is you actually will write some long form thing. Does that help? Does that hurt? I don't really know. So captions on video first platforms generally don't matter that much because people are either going to watch the video or not. They're not going to read the description to decide if they should watch that video. In terms of hashtags, yes. Again, every platform is different. Three hashtags max on LinkedIn. Three is your ideal number. On the other platforms, you can use as many hashtags as you want, up to 15. I think the limit is 20 on TikTok. And it doesn't even matter. It doesn't change anything.

No, it does. It does matter. The strategy with hashtags is you want to include some hashtags that are very broad and some hashtags that are very narrow. For example, if I'm posting about real estate, one of my hashtags might be real estate. Another hashtag might be new homes in Vegas because you want to go narrow. What about going live? Does that matter or no? Doing live videos. So TikTok right now is pushing live. If you swipe on TikTok, the second or third swipe is actually a live video a lot of the time these days. So yes, some platforms are favoring live, probably going to be a much bigger thing even in 2025. Cool. Now you mentioned that you guys have an agency that does this for people, works with

people. How, I mean, at what point, let's talk about scale, because obviously it's not free. Is this something that you recommend people start on their own fail, come to you right away? Where do you recommend they get with you in the process? Yeah. So, I mean, at Influicity, we generally don't recommend, we don't period, and we don't recommend even inquiring about starting something from scratch. The only exception there is, you know, if you're proctoring Gamble, launching a new

brand, sure, we'll work with you because there's different stakes there. But if you're starting out, it really makes a lot of sense for you to get a feel for what you're doing, whether it's you or your marketing assistant, if you're a small business owner, figuring out what that looks like for you. So that when you walk in the door talking to an agency like ours, yeah, we can do all kinds of things. But we can't necessarily invent your tone of voice. We can't invent your brand essence, what you stand for, you know, something like you described earlier with Kendra, which is like, um, the, the, the red state idea. That's really cool, but that should really come from the company. It would be very authentic. Me bringing that to

someone. What if that's just not what their ethos is? So you shouldn't, you shouldn't, uh, have an agency develop that for you. By So you shouldn't have an agency develop that for you. By the time you get to an agency, you've already got the pillars and then we're going to come in and supercharge it. So a client of ours might already have five, $10 million a year in revenue, and we're going to come in there and take them to 30 or 50 million. Got it. Got it. Good. Well, the book is coming out soon. June 18th, man. Yeah, man. Yeah, right away. There it is. If they want to find you or they want to get the book,

how do they do that? Super simple. MarketingSuperpowersBook.com. You can go there, get the book, get free samples, all that kind of stuff at MarketingSuperpowersBook.com. And I'm at JohnDavids.com, all over social. Give me a follow and I hope I can add some value. Well, dude, I appreciate it, man. It was, uh, it was great except for the point when the, when my computer died, but outside of that, man, it was awesome, dude. Thanks so much. Well guys, whether you're building a brand or building anything, you know, so many people just get sucked along and drift along with the currents of life.

And I think after hearing this story, man, it should motivate you to get up and just do something. Everybody's got a cell phone in their pocket. Everybody's got an idea. You can start building a community right now that's going to help you get out of the drift and start swimming against the currents. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of escaping the drift hope you got a bunch out of it or at least as much as i did out of it anyway if you want to learn more

about the show you can always go over to escaping the drift.com you can join our mailing list but do me a favor if you wouldn't mind throw up that five-star review give us a share do something man we're here for you hopefully you'll be here for us, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.