Young and Profiting with Hala Taha
43:01 Share

How do you see social media now as a platform? Because obviously we both have our different platforms that we use and like and love. So how do you see it as a landscape? Yeah, 100%. So when I first started podcasting, what I noticed is that the people who would listen to my podcast, I have a self-improvement business podcast.

I would post something on Instagram and people would only like it if it was fashion related, if it was me like in a cute outfit. You know, it's just a different vibe. People were interested in different things and got entertained in different ways. Then I noticed on LinkedIn, people actually cared about what was in my brain. It wasn't just about what I looked like, what I was wearing. And so I thought that

My name's Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week.

If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life. Guys, what's up? Welcome back to another episode of Living the Red Life. Super pumped for this one. We are going to dive into another ads and marketing masterclass. Hal has joined us today from Yap Media. We've become friends recently online. And as you know, I'm one of the kings of advertising. And we've got a queen here that's going to dive into LinkedIn. So welcome. Thank you for joining us today.

I am super excited to be on this show. Thanks for having me, Rudy. Yeah, my pleasure. And obviously, we connected recently. Like I explained to you offline, we're always looking for other experts that have figured out a platform, right? And also figured out the personal branding. And obviously, you've got a lot going on. But a lot of my members, you know, we're mastering Facebook ads. I've spent millions and millions and

having LinkedIn's like this secondary platform I'm always asked about, and we've never really gone too deep into it. So I know hundreds and thousands of my members and fans are going to love today because LinkedIn's like this, I still feel in this early phase, even though it's been around a long time. And obviously you've mastered the podcasting side, the personal brand side, got an amazing story. So maybe we can start there with the story and tell the members and fans and listeners about

How you got here today and built something so great? Sure. So just to quickly introduce myself in terms of where I am now, they call me the podcast princess. I'm a top female podcaster in the business and entrepreneurship space. I'm also one of the biggest influencers on LinkedIn. Right now I'm running a company called Yap Media. We reached over $5 million in less than two years. Then I have 60 employees around the world and I manage most of the LinkedIn influencers. And I also have a podcast network.

where I manage five out of the top 20 business shows and several other shows and help them grow and monetize. So that's where I'm at now. Wasn't an overnight success. I started my career in radio at Hot 97, the number one hip hop and R&B station. I actually dropped out of college and took a three-year internship, worked for free. Then I started a blog site called The Sorority of Hip Hop. Had 150 female bloggers under me. Almost had a show on MTV. Got rejected from MTV. They pulled the plug last minute.

And then I went into corporate. So I had a corporate stint and I really thought my entertainment career was over and I'd never get back on a mic. I worked at Hewlett Packard, then Disney Streaming Services, had a great corporate career. And four years into it, I decided to start this podcast. I thought, you know what? I have all the skills. Podcasting is going mainstream. I can crack this code.

I hacked Twitter when I was younger, I figured out how to hack LinkedIn, and then I hacked podcasting and here I am today. Good element. So, and welcome back to that. I like the, you know, hacked part, right? You like see a channel, see that it's growing, see that it's performing then like reverse engineer is success. And that's kind of how I went with Facebook. So where do you see, like, obviously podcast has been great for you and

and you've grown so much. Where did you see that opportunity with social media and how do you see social media now as a platform? Because obviously we both have our different platforms that we use and like and love. So how do you see it as a landscape? Yeah, 100%. So when I first started podcasting, what I noticed is that the people who would listen to my podcast, I have a self-improvement business podcast.

I would post something on Instagram and people would only like it if it was fashion related, if it was me like in a cute outfit. You know, it was just a different vibe. People were interested in different things and got entertained in different ways. Then I noticed on LinkedIn, people actually cared about what was in my brain. It wasn't just about what I looked like, what I was wearing. And so I thought that

you know, my audience is really here. And I noticed that all the podcasters were really sleeping on LinkedIn. There was only one other person, Lewis Howes, and he wasn't even doing that great of a job at the time. And so I was like, you know what? There's a real avenue here for me to be the number one podcaster on LinkedIn. And that could give me a lot of leverage. And it did. It really was the thing that set off my whole career. It wasn't the podcast.

I started my LinkedIn journey to blow up the podcast, but it was really LinkedIn that set everything off for me. That's where I blew up first. So essentially, I realized that there was a gap. You can not only stand out with your content and in your visual identity on social media, you can also stand out with your topic. And I thought nobody else is talking about podcasting. And so I was just consistent every day, figured out the algorithm, experimented.

experimented, grew a community, figured out the engagement hacks that you need to understand on LinkedIn to win. And people don't understand that LinkedIn is like any other social media platform. Of course, people are going there to get a job. But at the end of the day, it's like any other social media platform where their goal is to keep users engaged and entertained on the platform and not take users off.

So I just was thinking about ways, how can I become a valued content creator on LinkedIn so they reward me and help me go viral while also helping them keep users entertained? So that was really my logic in terms of focusing on LinkedIn. Yeah, I love that. And we have hundreds of members we teach marketing to, and I always say, figure out a unique selling point, go a little nicher when you're starting. And then generally what I teach and I've seen is when you get into your first sort of

five ten million it's good to be niche and then you're like okay now i'm at 10 i want to go to 100 mil it's like okay i gotta go a bit broader right so you kind of and you'll live improved right as you just said that really helped expedite that right and then you're kind of like i i don't want to answer for you but now you've grown you've got 60 staff and you're doing a lot of amazing things do you see now that you're trying to expand out and go beyond there as you go to i don't know what your goals are but you know going bought

broader and bigger? Do you feel that niche in the start worked and now it's going a little more expansive or not? Yeah, 100%. So when I first started out, even though my podcast was niche in a sense that I was talking about my podcast, my topics were always broad. And by far the number one way to go viral on social media is to be as shareable as possible.

And there's really only three things that are shareable. It's educational content, motivational content, and interactive content, right? And so if you want to go as viral as possible and grow a community, you want to stay in that motivational, inspirational lane. That's the thing that gets shared the most. That's the more broad, relevant to everyone. And so...

People think of me on social media as this inspirational mentor. They don't necessarily think of me as a podcaster because I'm always sharing positive messages that people can relate to. So to basically answer your question is I am going super broad because I know that's what's going to be the most shareable and

is going to go the most viral. Great. Yeah. And I think, you know, I want to talk, dive into the podcast side because obviously I've launched mine more recently after many years of thinking about it than actually acquiring a podcast agency, as I told you. But one thing I've learned, even with all my clients through my agency for the last five years, is people that listen to podcasts become the most loyal, raving fans because they're spending so much time with you, right? So an amazing, you know, vehicle and you've obviously done a great job of that. So we'll circle back. But

I would love to dive into LinkedIn. Like I said, we have hundreds of members that there's an opportunity there, especially if they're more B2B or certain niches and high ticket, etc. So can you give us like the 80-20 of LinkedIn? Well, you know, for someone that's maybe thought about using it, how can they strategically use LinkedIn to grow a business? Okay, so first off, there's lots of opportunity on LinkedIn. Only 5-6% of people on LinkedIn are

actually content creators, right? So huge opportunity. Most people on LinkedIn are actually consumers, which is very different from Instagram. And so as soon as you turn on content creator mode on LinkedIn, you're instantly ahead of the game because like I said, there's only five to 6% of people were actually creating content. So on LinkedIn, you really want to think about the feed and DMs as two separate things.

The feed is really how you go viral, grow a community, get shared, position yourself as a thought leader, provide value with educational posts, motivational posts. That's how you grow. You don't really want to do too much selling on LinkedIn in the feed because actually LinkedIn's algorithm will deprioritize that. And I'm happy to go through the entire algorithm with you guys today if you'd like. And then selling is really for the DM. So if you create an educational piece of content,

It gets shared. The way that LinkedIn works is when somebody shares your content or even engages on it, their following actually sees that engagement and you actually attract people who are like-minded to that original person who engaged on your post, which helps grow your network. Then anybody who engages likes or comments on your posts, you can then retarget in the DMs and say, hey, I noticed that you engaged on my post. I would love to provide you this valuable message.

like more valuable information. And then you can like go on and have some sort of drip campaign in the DM that will ultimately lead to a call or taking them to a lead form, whatever it is. So really like long story short, feed is to grow. DMs is where you sell on LinkedIn. Yeah. And so, and you're saying you can actually take that, run ads to the DMs for anyone that engaged, right? Not ads. You can actually retarget people

People on the DM. So basically looking who's liking and commenting and then direct messaging them with more information.

Okay, but that's you outbounding as like a person, you know, yourself. Exactly, like having like a VA or something like that. Yeah, yeah. I've been waiting for so long for an ad platform to let you run ads in the DMs, right? Like I actually bought a Facebook group of 80,000 people because I do believe at some point they will let you do some sort of retargeting in the DMs and Facebook groups in these communities because

they'll run out of ad space eventually and they'll be like, "Hey, we need extended ad space." But yeah, I see. So we have a lot of coaches, consultants, agencies. So let's talk and dive into that. So say I'm a high ticket coach or a consultant or an agency owner. Give us a bit of a step by step on LinkedIn if you don't mind. I'm like, "Hey, start posting here, then do this, then do this." What would the play be if you were trying to summarize it in a few minutes?

Okay. So essentially one of your biggest priorities on LinkedIn is to proactively bring in a targeted and

engaged audience because that's how you basically play the algorithm. So a lot of people make the mistake. They've been on LinkedIn for seven years. They've been inviting random people. Some people go on LinkedIn, they get a job, they never come back and they've got a lot of dead connections. This is one of the biggest problems that I see with entrepreneurs that ask me for my help. They've got lots of dead connections and that's a really big problem because part of the algorithm when you're first putting out a post is they're going to feed it to a subset of users

And if you have a lot of dead connections and nobody's engaging, LinkedIn's gonna think that your post is not valuable and is not going to warrant future engagements. And so they're gonna stop serving that content. And so it's really important, first things first, to clean up your followers, remove dead connections. If they haven't been active in 30 days, you can find that out from LinkedIn Navigator, then you would wanna remove them as a connection.

Then you want to find your audience in mass and proactively bring them into your network. And so, for example, when I was starting out on LinkedIn, I was thinking that Gary Vee has a following that is just like mine. I'm a marketer. I have a podcast. Everybody calls me the female Gary Vee. So I am going to try to target his engaged users. So anybody who likes and comments on his post is an engaged person on LinkedIn who actively does viral actions on the platform. And you want those people in your network.

So I would basically invite them. I'd say, Hey, what's up? My name is Hala. I noticed you engage on Gary Vee's posts. I'd love to invite you to my network, provide more value on your feed. Nine out of 10 people would accept. All of a sudden I had 10,000 of Gary Vee's fans. Every time I commented on Gary Vee's post, I'd get a hundred likes. More people would see who I am and

Little did I know that I was tricking the algorithm. So when you invite somebody to connect and you have a new connection, they're seeing your DMs at the top of their feed for two weeks. When somebody responds and DMs back to you, they're seeing your stuff at the top of their feed for two weeks. If somebody engages on your stuff, your posts, they're gonna start seeing your stuff at the top of the feed. So I was feeding the algorithm unknowingly until I realized what I was doing and I understood the algorithm and why it was working so well.

So if you can find your lookalike profiles, this is one of the first things I tell people to do in my masterclass. You've got to see who is actually

already has your audience that you want and then you want to pull those people into your network and they will start to see more of your posts once they are connected with you so really big hack right there yeah i love that i know when you say just clarify when you say pull them in is there a way you can run ads to expedite that or you have to start manually doing connections like i'm the ad guys if i can automate it for a bunch of money at it i'm like let's go you know i

Okay, so there's lots of automation tools on LinkedIn and you have two routes. You can either have a VA, and by the way, guys, all of this is not necessarily...

within terms of service for LinkedIn. So if you're gonna go the VA route, you're actually not allowed to have anybody post on your behalf on LinkedIn, but everybody's doing it, okay? And so if you're gonna go the VA route, you need to make sure you have a VPN that's logging in from your city. So it doesn't look like there's multiple people in your account. You need to be pretty careful. And there's different automation tools like Linked Helper and things like that.

And basically you can run automation where you can scrape posts. You can say, okay, here's my lookalike audience, Gary V. You plug in that link. It will scrape everybody who liked and commented. And you can write the boilerplate message, customize it with a first name and send out these automated campaigns. That is like, you know, next level, you know, you like, you know what you're doing. You've got a team. You can implement some rules and some thresholds so you don't get flagged and things like that. Don't do it if you're, if you don't have the expertise or you're not going to,

going to learn about it, I would advise against it. If you're like solo and you're willing to start slow, do it manually. I did it all manually before I knew you could automate it, right? And I got really far, almost 100,000 followers doing it manually, right? So you could just do it manually and, you know, invite people to connect and, um,

And just go from there. Love it. Okay, great. So that's a bit of a play-by-play on the growth side. And obviously, you know, we're going to tell people at the end how they can really dive in, right? So what about more on the conversion side, right? So we talked about growth, second part is conversion. How do we take these people and convert them into, you know, raving fans or customers? Yeah, so if you're looking to generate ROI from LinkedIn and you're targeting a specific business,

person that wants to buy your niche services you really need to focus on educational content in your feed.

And so like I mentioned, the LinkedIn algorithm really doesn't want to promote promotional salesy content. That's why you actually can't link out in your caption to a third party website. You'll get deprioritized. If you use any sort of call to actions that have salesy keywords, you're going to get deprioritized. And so you need to make sure that your feed content is actually pure value, educational, and sort of indirectly relates to what you want to sell. And we'll give you a clue of who may be interested in what you're selling. So anybody who likes and comments on your post,

They're raising their hand. They're saying you have permission to message me and it won't be spammy, right? So you can say, hey, I noticed that you engaged on my post about real estate. I would love to give you some more information about my services. You provide them with some sort of free value. Then you follow up. Let me know what your feedback is and follow up with another message and send them to book a call to a lead form. So basically what I'm trying to say is that create educational content.

That's going to pull people in. That's going to help you understand who's actually interested in your content. Then you re-engage them in the DMs and figure out a track for them to actually go have a call or whatever. The higher the ticket, the more likely you actually need to talk to them or, you know, have some second, you know, conversation. If it's a low ticket, you send them right to your website and try to convert them because hopefully you've made it clear that you're the expert in the space. Yeah, love it. Love it. Okay, great. Play by play. And we'll circle back at the end on how they can dive deeper into that.

Let's talk a little about podcasts because I see they're both great platforms, right? LinkedIn, I think, is still kind of in a way blue ocean, even though it's been around for a long time compared to Facebook and Insta. What about podcasting, right? Because you obviously, you know, you've got a top podcast. Please tell everyone about it. And I'm excited to be a guest on it, too. And I'm excited to be a guest on it, too.

I think for you, I mean, I would love to hear how has that helped you grow the business? What's it done for you as a personal brand? And how did you grow it to so you know, to become one of the best and the biggest? Yeah, so my podcast is called young and profiting. It's a number one entrepreneurship podcast. So I've had Rudy on tomorrow. I've had Grant Cardone, Alex Ramoosey, Matthew McConaughey, Seth Godin, Robert Sheldini, like I've interviewed all the greats on my show. It's such a wonderful platform. And

And in terms of, you know, how I actually leveraged it to grow my brand, grow my business, my podcast was actually the first way that I monetized anything. So I was a huge LinkedIn influencer, number one podcaster on LinkedIn. It wasn't until I was open to the opportunities that were around me and I was really like over my corporate job, wanted to become an entrepreneur. And I realized that all the guests that would come on my show when I had big, big guests from the start because people just believed in my journey and everything that I had done before that.

They would always say, "Hala, how'd you grow on LinkedIn? Your videos are so awesome. Can you do this for me? Can you produce podcasts for me? Can you run my social media?" And I'd always say no. And it wasn't until Heather Monahan, I don't know if you know her, she's my first client. She basically stalked me for months and was like, "Hala, your team is amazing. I had a team of 20 volunteers, super fans from my podcast set, who just volunteer and work for me for two years." I converted them into a team, started running all of Heather's platforms, blew her up even further.

And then just got client after client, billionaires, CEOs, bestselling authors. Really, it's a white glove luxury social media agency for top influencers and celebrities. And it was my podcast and the guests that would come on my show, which is how I first monetize, which is really unusual. Most people monetize first with sponsors and things like that. I saw the way to generate revenue right away was through my guests. And then I use that money to invest and grow my podcast.

And basically what happened is it was almost by mistake. So like I mentioned, I became the number one podcaster on LinkedIn. And so I realized that there was a real problem with Apple and discoverability and all the guys on Apple who were rocking it started

10 years before I did. And I was like, there's no way that I'm going to be able to compete. I'm never getting featured in the Apple app, but there's actually 70 other apps in the ecosystem. And I realized like, I've got a real opportunity with these other apps that want my audience on LinkedIn. And so I reached out to CastBox and Player FM and Podbean and all these other apps. And I said, hey, I'll promote you on my LinkedIn in exchange for you promoting me in your app, for you giving me a banner ad, for you sending out an email bus featuring me on your website.

And I basically traded my audience until I literally blew up. I went from getting 5,000 downloads a month to 100,000 downloads.

and more uh this was like years ago i i get more downloads now but i'm saying when i first started i got on the cover of podcast magazine then i got matthew mcconaughey on the show and everything sort of just accelerated from that point and it was because i got creative and had leverage on one platform back to what you originally were asking me in terms of like why did you focus on linkedin because i knew that if i focused on instagram youtube and all these other apps i would never get any leverage and the only way to grow anything is to have leverage at least

starting if you don't have a lot of money in one place. And so I got the leverage on LinkedIn and then use that to basically grow, blow up my podcast, blow up my business. Then I had two assets, my podcast and my LinkedIn that I'm now using to blow up my Instagram and my YouTube. And so like it's basically getting leverage in little pockets and then moving on to other platforms.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. Before we go into the rest of this episode, I'm gonna interrupt abruptly and just ask you one big favor. I hope you're getting a ton of value, a ton of knowledge. I hope you're getting some breakthroughs from myself and the guests. And I want one thing in return.

What I would love is for you to subscribe and leave a review. The reviews and the subscription grows the podcast. It allows me to bring you even better guests. It allows me to invest even more time and money into this podcast to bring you the latest and greatest, the best entrepreneurs from around the world that are crushing life, crushing their business, and giving you all the tools, the mindset hacks, the knowledge,

and the environment you need to be successful. So do me a favor, if you've got any amount of value from today's episode so far, or any previous episode, or any of the content I've done, it would mean the world to me if you hit a five-star review, give us your feedback on the show, the episodes,

and subscribe and download. Plus, if you do that and send me a screenshot on Instagram @rudymorelife, I will send you a bunch of my free training, marketing courses, sales courses worth $499. Yes, $500 worth of courses.

for a simple 30 second review. It would mean the world to me. Send me that screenshot. I would love for you to leave that review and I would appreciate it very, very much so we can keep growing this show and make it awesome. So let's get back into the episode. I appreciate you guys and let's dive back in.

Yeah, I mean, I teach this a lot more on the business side as well, right? Like leveraging, you know, different, you know, tribes is important. Your following is important. Sometimes it's your offer. So a lot of, you know, the greatest billionaires, they're all about leverage. And it's something that I've used super successfully to get to where I am today. And I love that, you know, we, I think we're similar in the fact of like that creative in, right? And that's an amazing example of like,

hey, this is a creative in to take what I got here, get access here, and then this will compound over here, and then it becomes this flywheel of success. So I love that, and I teach it all the time. It's awesome. Yeah, exactly. And so, for example, I became the number one podcaster on CastBox, which is the third largest player.

And because I became so visible on CastBox and all those people knew why I was, then all of a sudden I started getting popular on Apple because if for some reason they wanted to listen on Apple, they would go find my show. And it was all because I started on CastBox. So basically you can get to where you want to be, but you kind of can circumvent around, you know, what?

What's going on? So what would you say is some like, say, you know, that's a pretty incredible kind of journey and way around about way of getting there, right? And it's like, what would you say if someone was launching a podcast today or has a podcast and it's not going the way that maybe they want? Is there any sort of tip?

tips or tactics you found or is it really it just boils down to hey you need a big brand you need a big following you need an amazing tribe you need amazing guests like any tips or tricks for people that you found 100 100 so there's really too many ways it's

It's you have money or you don't have money ways. So we can start with the I don't have money ways, right? So the I don't have money ways is you need to understand that people who listen to podcasts are in the podcast app. So your number one job is to make sure that you're visible in the podcast apps.

It's not about social media ads. It's not about how big your social following is. There are thousands of podcasters out there that have a huge social media following and who have a crappy, low-ranking podcast that gets no downloads. And it's because they don't understand that people on social media, 50% of people on social media don't even listen to podcasts. And most people will listen to like one or two a month.

You want the rabid podcast fans that are rotating seven podcasts and listening to them every single day. And those people are only found in the apps and they're found in the apps that they're already using. Okay. So you want to think about ways to reach them. So one of the things that you can do is guests on other podcasts and you can do research on Chartable and you can see who's in your niche. You can, there's many different apps where you can kind of see who is on each

at your caliber in terms of where you're ranking, where it would be an equal swap and you guys can guess on each other shows. That's one way to be visible in the apps. You can also run commercials on other podcasts and even trade commercials. So for example, Jordan Harbinger is my mentor. His podcast is about five to 10 times bigger than mine. It's what he's been doing it for 10 years longer than me, right?

And so because of that, we do commercial swaps where I'll do eight commercials and he'll do two for me. And we don't pay each other any money and we can track it and see how many people listened and converted. And we just keep doing that until we don't feel like it's meaningful anymore. And so you can basically coordinate swaps even with podcasters that are bigger than you. You just need to figure out what the impressions should be per podcaster and make sure you guys have equal impressions that you're delivering for the swaps. So those are some ways.

Now, if you have money, oh, one other way, if you don't have money, you've got to have a keyword, a very searchable name. So I've seen a lot of podcasters who are pretty mediocre, nothing special, no social media following and have thousands of downloads.

And it's because they've got a great name. So like self-help daily, you know, self-helping is another one that I just met. Investor, millennial investor, right? These podcasters are not doing any ads. They're not spending any money. They're not good at social media. It's just because they have a good keyword that people are searching in the apps and

And so for me, it was sort of an uphill battle with young and profiting. That's why I didn't see success right away because nobody was searching young and profiting. I should have called it young entrepreneur, right? If I was, if I had known better back then. So, so I think it's important to make sure you have keyword in your name. If you're just starting out, you don't have a lot of money now.

I can make anybody a number one podcaster with investment because it's just like any other game. If you do media buying, you're going to get visibility. So all these apps that I was talking about, CastBox, Player FM, Podbean, Apple's really the only one that doesn't have it. They have...

a featured placements that you can pay for. You can get banner ads in the apps and you can just pay for that and get visibility and they will guarantee you like you'll get guaranteed 5,000 subscribers and there's a specific rate or a certain amount of impressions and you can track which ones are doing well, which ones are retaining.

your listeners the most and then basically pour money into that. And so there's lots of different tactics that you can do with all these players to actually grow your visibility within the apps and then also get commercials on huge podcasts, which basically shortcuts you to the top. Yeah.

Yeah, I love that. So, yeah, I'm an ads guy, right? So I actually teach all my members. I'm like, hey, pay to play. If you want to do organic and stuff, great. But I think that takes a lot of time. And I'm like, if you have big goals, time's your, you know, biggest barrier, right? So it's like, if you can pay 10, 20, 30k...

and collapse a year, like you can make that decision. To me, 30 grand to save a year of my life, I'm going to make $2 million from it next year, right? So say I want to pay to play, you know, what do they look, I always teach with Facebook ads, hey, $3,000 a month,

hundred dollars a day is a great test budget. And obviously if it's ROI and you can scale, right? So what would you say on this side, like paying to play on the app side, like for 5,000 or 3,000 a month, can they get some good banner ads or do a sponsored show? Or are they talking like 10, 20 grand? What is a good, you know, a decent way, right? To start. Yeah. So most of the podcast players, they range anywhere from like

$2,000 to $7,000 for their campaigns and they won't let you do it more than once a month. So I would say a good test budget would be like $7,000 and maybe you could do like two players that you're focusing on.

And again, I would concentrate on leverage. It's much more powerful to be like, I'm the number one podcaster on CastBox than it is to have like, you know, 500 subscribers on all these random apps, right? So focus on one app that's working for you and keep buying it over and over again. And honestly, the more money that you have and the more investment that you can make, the faster you're going to grow and the more quicker you're going to monetize because you can only really monetize a podcast once you're getting around 20,000 downloads a week.

None of the agencies or like no one's going to really pay attention to you until you get those sort of downloads. And then, you know, once you're making 20,000, once you're getting 20,000 downloads a week, you can turn around and make 20, 30 grand a month on your podcast. So you can make a lot of that money back very quickly. So for my clients, I usually recommend, hey, let's invest 40 grand in four months and then I'll start making you 20 grand a month after that. And you can keep going with

with growing in or not, you know? Yeah, and I mean, look, the 40K, if it's a business owner like me, I'd probably make 400 grand from the back end, right? From the actual business side, from the people coming in our ecosystem. So it's like YouTube. I see these guys...

getting you know 50 grand a month from the paid ads I'm like hey if I had a following like you on YouTube I'd be making a million dollars right from that so I think there's like ROI from the ad side but even if you have products and services in line with your audience there's way bigger ROI if you know how to convert them and send them right

100% I was just talking about just from a pure CPM sponsorship, you could make your money back. But if you add in courses and stuff, yeah. That's crazy. So you would say a better route just to kind of give options is they could obviously the organic we talked about and then sponsoring it. Would you start sponsoring other top shows or would you try and actually pay for the banner placements on these other shows?

where they can actually tune in, which have you got a preference over those two or? So I like in-app media buying because a lot of the times you get a guaranteed number of subscribers. If you can monitor the retention and you're good at paying attention to your analytics, you can see which ones are really working and lean into that. And that way it's more guaranteed. With the podcasters, if you're going to go test, I would test, right? So my recommendation is always to take like five shows

You've got to do at least three commercials because repetition is really important in the podcast world. So don't just do one commercial. Do three to five mid-rolls on those podcasts. You can use a platform like Chartable to track it and see the conversion rates. And then buy more into the podcasts that are actually converting and pay attention to it because at some point it's going to start having declining returns and you'll want to pick a new podcast. But a lot of people, they'll like pour money on just because, you know, it's Tim Ferriss or whatever it is, but maybe it's not a fit for your audience.

And you don't want to waste your money. So you could do test budgets and then lean into it. Whereas the apps is more like you'll get a usually guaranteed number of impressions subscribers and it's more like less risk involved. And they can just go to the apps and obviously get price ranges there. And what, what like,

a tim ferriss or a top 10 or top 20 are they charging you know hundreds of thousands of dollars for mid-rolls or what are people looking at there if they're trying to go that route so everything in the podcast world is based on cpm so it's cost per 1 000 downloads and usually it's anywhere from 25 to 45 depending on the niche of the show business entrepreneurship shows with like

like higher caliber listeners are going to cost more than like a Joe Rogan, you know, mass audience show, right? And so it really just depends on the size of the show. You always want to try to shoot for the lowest CPM. So if you can get a show, the bigger the show, actually, also the lower the CPMs because it's just so much volume.

So you want to try to get anywhere from like, I say a $20 to $25 CPM, depending on how big the show is. That would be a really good deal. Yep. Yeah, that's awesome. And actually, you know, we do Facebook ads. So you're looking at $50 in the business world, $10 to $30 in like fitness and broader ranges. So it's actually very similar prices. So it's,

Fascinating to try. And we've had some members do well actually promoting their high-sticket services even when they don't have a podcast, actually sponsoring podcasts that have their avatar. So it's fascinating to see all the different ways you can run ads, right, for a lot of my members that are just on Facebook right now. Yeah, there's so many other options out there. I feel like podcast ads are so...

they're so good at converting because people just love the host and trust the host. And if the host is really careful about what they advertise and they're really clear about what their audience likes,

The trust is there and the conversion is there. Good. Love it. So Nick, last part, I just want to know, we've talked about LinkedIn, you're crushing that, you've helped hundreds of people there, thousands of people there, same with podcasts, right? But how did you become successful, build such a strong brand? Our whole theme is the red life and it's built on taking the red pill, building a life of your dreams.

getting out of the norm and society. So talk to us more about the mindset and the decisions and who you are as a person that allowed that to happen and what you'd say to other people that are trying to make that happen. - Yeah, I think the reason why I got so big on LinkedIn and podcasting is because I put in the work. Like I was so consistent. I showed up every single day on LinkedIn. I showed up every single week on my podcast, even when I had no fans, right?

And so people were just so attracted to the mission. Like I said, when I started my podcast by episode two, I had my first volunteer. He's now my business partner. By episode eight, I had 10 volunteers in a Slack channel. And for two years, I had 20 people working for free for me. That's how obsessed they were with the mission, right?

And so people just really aligned to the fact that I was raw. I documented my journey, my process. I never held back any information. I just was helping people as much as I could. I never asked for a dollar. Like it was two years into it before I ever sold anything. And I was just all about building community.

And so I have like a really rabid fan base, especially on LinkedIn and my podcast, because I didn't sell anything to them. And I really was just all about providing value and actually monetizing wasn't my first goal. It was really about helping people and being a positive voice for my generation. And so I think a lot of people were attracted to that.

And then in terms of like personal branding, I always just make sure that I tell it how it is. I talk about my failures. I talk about my ups and downs. I talk about if I'm having a problem and I'm really open with my community about what's going on in my life. And that makes them feel like I'm an old friend. And like that's personal branding 101. I've got fans in my comments that are like fighting for me as if they've known me for 10 years. If there's like a troll on my LinkedIn post because they feel like they actually know me.

Because I've done such a good job about like consistent messaging, um,

and making sure that I have values and really aligned to those values. And I've got a certain tone that I use and I always align to that tone. And it makes people like think that you're an old friend, that they know you so well. So really branding is consistency. And that's what I've really focused on over the years. Yeah, I love that. I think it's a great message to people because we've talked about the LinkedIn. What are the, you know, everyone wants to learn the hacks, right? And the step-by-step, which I want to try and provide, um,

And you're saying with a podcast, how do we expedite it? How do we speed it up? But, you know, I've been doing business for 12 plus years, selling online for 20 years, basically since the start of the internet when I was 11 years old on eBay. And it's like, you can't replace that, right? The hacks and the tips and the tricks speed things up. But the consistency, they're not giving up the being authentic, right? And knowing your voice is like some of the foundations that you have to build on. But most people want to skip. Yeah, exactly. And that's...

And that's not how you build something that's word of mouth good, right? That's always my goal. I don't want to do paid ads, right? I'm not... You're a paid ads person. I'm the opposite. Everything that I've ever done, pretty much other than media buying in the podcast world, which there's really no other way to really get to the top at this point. I always just stuck with content marketing, word of mouth, organic reach. And that...

That means it's understanding your voice identity, your visual identity, and also understanding the algorithms and how to work with the algorithms like we were just talking about. Then you can start to pull people in and not have to push ads on them to bring them into your community. People will come to you and tell their friends. And to me, that's like the best way to grow any sort of brand online is for other people to sell you and become your advocates.

Yeah, the ads, I mean, for a lot of, like, the way I see it is it's like that can be the volume and then off that volume you'll get a percent that will become your tribe, right? Long term and organic is much higher quality, right? Like, you know, they're going to stay with you longer now. Don't get me wrong. I've built an amazing, massive tribe through paid ads, but it's like the 10% and the 90% is transactional, right? They come in, they buy a product, they learn from it, use it and move on, which is fine. That's paid ads.

you know, I've always gone a different route because my goal is to be a billionaire and it's always been very big. I do believe like to be a billionaire, you have to, if you're building a massive company, that if you look at every billion dollar company, they run major, major ad spend, right? So I was always like, I want to figure that out and be the king of it because I think like that's the fuel to the fire.

Right. That's, you know, it's the gasoline, but you've got to have the foundations. Right. And you're amazing at that. And obviously done that so, so well. Yeah. Thank you so much. And to your point, like paid ads, there's going to be a point in time where I'm going to have to be like, Rudy, I need your help with that.

We got to take things to the next level. When you get to... I don't know where you're at revenue-wise, but a lot of people, they get to $5, $10 million. And then I'm like, hey, when you want to go to $100 million, you can probably still do it organically if you're amazing, right? And you do have an amazing platform and you can grow fast and you've got an amazing tribe. But it's like...

There's also, as you know, there's a lot of your tribe that don't see your posts every day, right? And it's not your fault. But it's just like, that's the algorithm because the algorithms, the billion dollar brands, the social platforms know that, hey, we'll give them 5% reach. But if they own the other 95%, well, they're going to have to pay us to do that, right? So there's a point where it's like, hey, it makes sense to actually pay now to reach the other 95%.

just so I can keep feeding them the amazing content, the products they want to buy, blah, blah, blah, right? Yeah, 100%. And of course, at some point, I'm going to exhaust everybody on LinkedIn, but I'll have the funds to then go to other platforms and use ads to grow there. Yeah, no, I love it. So we're coming close to time. So I always ask people to finish like,

Again, we're built on living the red life, building a life of your dreams. What would you say to someone that's choosing between the blue and the red pill? They want to make the decision to take control of their life, build this dream life, but they're on the edge or they can't quite do it or they're struggling, they're failing. What's your words of wisdom and inspiration after all these years building something amazing? So I would say, number one, nobody's going to do it for you. You need to take control of your life, right? So one of the biggest things...

my come-up journey that I faced is gatekeepers telling me no you know I'm a young woman you know I got rejected by trusty radio satellite radio TV and it wasn't until I was like you know what I'm gonna start my own things or my own podcast that I blew up and really accomplished my dreams because I kept knocking on doors thinking that somebody's gonna you know if I work hard if I work for free maybe though they'll give me a chance and they didn't because nobody's looking out for you by yourself and so what I'd say is if

If a gatekeeper is telling you no, make sure that you think about how you can do it on your own and take the steps to create your own asset and try to go about it and don't take no for an answer. Figure out how you can do it. The other thing that I'll say is that a lot of people are stuck on the outcome. Like, for example, for a long time, I was like, I want to be on Hot 97, the radio station, when really all I wanted to be was a positive voice for my generation. And there was multiple ways to get there. So it's like always think about what is the...

Not what you want to be, who do you want to be, right? And think about that and go towards that. And there's probably multiple avenues that you can take to reach that ultimate goal rather than being so singular about this is exactly what I want. This is exactly what I want to be. It's more about who you want to be, what do you want to represent? And that's going to always evolve, right? And so I would say that will help you broaden up your goals so that you can go out and accomplish your dreams.

The last thing I'll say is you got to believe that life is limitless. You have to believe that anything is possible. If you don't, you're not really going to get extraordinarily successful, in my opinion. And the other thing I'll say is that you have to believe in yourself, right? So you have to believe that you've got the skills and the talents to actually accomplish what you're trying to do. Yeah, I love that. We have banners all over my famous or favorite saying is,

Everything's possible when you open your mind. And, you know, my backstory is I grew up with world-class athletes as parents. So I got to see that as a kid and my superpower is believing in it, right? As a kid and growing up that way. And I only realize now how powerful that is because I thought it was normal. But then, you know, you meet most people and they don't. So it's like, how do you find mentors, put yourself in an environment, listen to podcasts like this, like yours?

spend time with those people that are going to give you that belief system right not only give you the step by step but give you the belief system that you can be more you can do more and that's what living the red light is all about this podcast is about your podcast is about and it's about taking your life to the next level so thank you so much for coming on this is awesome and inspiring and

super tactical as well in the middle about building everything. So how do they learn more about you? Tell everyone that's going to be geeking out on LinkedIn about the masterclasses and the courses and the trainings you host that I'm going to attend and be taking notes with the team to implement. So tell us about that just to wrap up. Yeah, sure. So I have a LinkedIn masterclass and you guys, I'll actually create a code called Rudy if you guys want 35% off the class. Love it.

And so you can go to YapMedia.io/course. So it's a two day live course with me. It's about 10 hours. And I go through how to create a personal brand, a voice identity, a visual identity. I talk about copywriting hacks, psychology of design, go through the entire LinkedIn algorithm. That's like three hours of class.

engagement hacks. And then you guys can join my mastermind. I put you in my engagement pod. I run most of the influencer engagement pods on LinkedIn. And I really just help you hack the platform. It's gotten like 10 out of 10 ratings. So again, you can go to yapmedia.io slash course and use code Rudy for 35% off, which is going to be our highest discount. The next class is in February, but we're going to be doing it every month. So it's February 22nd to the 23rd.

I also have an agency. So if you're more of like an influencer, you've got a team, you're a CEO. If you're interested in social media or podcast production services, you can go to YapMedia.io. Great. Yeah, I love it. And of course, listen to the podcast. Yes. Yeah, we've got the podcast going on. I can't imagine 10 hours, right? This was 30 minutes of awesomeness. So 10 hours.

next level stuff. I'm excited to send my team and really build it out for us because it's been on our radar for a long time. And I, again, just really appreciate you coming on. I'm excited to be on yours and give some of that knowledge back to your listener base as well. So my listener base, I know they'll really thrive from this and the strategies plus the mindset is what we're all about over here. So thank you. And thanks for everyone listening in. And remember, keep living the red light. Take care.