The Foureva Podcast
Welcome to The Foureva Podcast, where we break barriers and redefine success!
Join host Jamar Jones, a dynamic entrepreneur, national speaker, and author of "Change Your Circle, Change Your Life," as he takes you on an extraordinary journey of inspiration and motivation.
In each episode, we bring you an impressive lineup of star-studded guests, each with a unique voice and a wealth of insights to share. From industry leaders to renowned experts, we uncover their secrets to success in personal, business, and marketing domains. Prepare to be captivated by their stories, strategies, and experiences that will empower you to reach new heights.
Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, a marketing professional, or simply seeking fresh perspectives on life and business, The Foureva Podcast is your ultimate destination. Discover the transformative power of changing your circle and unlocking your full potential. With each episode, we delve into the minds of the most influential voices in the industry, providing you with the tools and inspiration you need to overcome obstacles and achieve greatness.
Don't miss out on this dynamic podcast that will fuel your ambition, challenge your limits, and propel you toward success. Tune in to The Foureva Podcast and join a community of driven individuals who are ready to make an impact. Get ready to be inspired, motivated, and 'foureva' transformed!
The Foureva Podcast
S2 E47 Secrets to Social Media Success With Over 100k Followers
Ever wondered how AI is revolutionizing content creation for social media influencers? Join us as we chat with a TikTok and Instagram sensation who has skyrocketed to over 100,000 followers. Our guest shares his incredible journey, offering practical advice on harnessing AI tools while keeping your personal touch alive. Learn the secrets behind securing brand deals and crafting engaging content, even in less glamorous industries, all while balancing a structured yet dynamic daily routine.
We also debunk common myths about influencer marketing, shedding light on the true hustle behind the glitz and glam. Our guest provides an insider's take on navigating scams and spam, and the reality of distinguishing legitimate brand deals. We explore the rise of AI influencers and their current limitations in creating authentic content. Plus, get tips on building meaningful professional relationships and the art of purposeful networking to boost your social media presence.
Lastly, discover how to monetize your content on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, and the importance of consistent posting. Our guest reveals his strategies for maintaining authenticity while integrating sponsored content, especially within local scenes like Milwaukee. From transitioning from short-form to long-form video to creating content series for sustained growth, this episode is packed with valuable insights for both seasoned influencers and newcomers alike. Tune in for a wealth of knowledge and actionable tips to elevate your social media game!
I think if you get too comfortable with using AI, I like using it as a creative source. If I'm writer's block, help me prompt some stuff, but I know there's certain AI that will make it so that your eyes are always looking at the camera, even if you're looking at a script off to the side. That's great, but when you talk in person and you're used to reading off a script over here. How are?
Speaker 1:you going to be able to command your presence in a room. So it's helpful to an extent, but it depends on what your goals are as that influencer. If you want to do in-person stuff, you kind of have to have a little bit more of a presence, more of that deliberate approach to things, as opposed to an influencer that just only wants to be online and never really do anything offline, that's totally fine, but I think you can leverage those AI tools a little bit more, because your goals are different.
Speaker 1:I heard once from someone in an industry that would otherwise be considered boring there's no boring industry, just boring content. So it's how do you approach what is perceived as a boring industry and flip that on its head and make content that people would care about?
Speaker 4:If you're struggling to grow on social media, this episode is for you. Are you stuck around that 200, 300 views for each post that you're getting? Maybe you're a personal brand trying to figure out hey, what platforms do I want to post on? What's the best ways to get engagement? What is the best ways to actually grow my channels? Well, this episode is for you, as I get to interview my man that's got 180,000 followers on TikTok, 16.5 plus on Instagram. He collectively has 350 million views and counting.
Speaker 4:This guy knows about how to grow on social. He's got an amazing business with hashtag MKE, with his events, and also he's just a good dude. He's a mental health advocate. He is somebody that you definitely want to pay attention to of how to grow from zero to over 100,000 followers on social. He knows about how to grow his personal brand. He's worked with big brands such as Subway. He's also worked with Red Bull, and the list goes on and on. He is absolutely incredible. So if you want to learn how to get brand deals, if you want to learn how to grow on social media, if you want to actually know how to get your content to convert and actually get customers for your business to ultimately grow your personal brand. This one is going to be a banger, so I can't wait for you to get into it and let's go. What's up, man?
Speaker 1:Hey man.
Speaker 4:Welcome to the show man. Thank you. How are you doing?
Speaker 1:I'm great.
Speaker 4:You doing good, it's a lovely drive out to brookfield yeah, wherever this?
Speaker 1:podcast happens to be located at. There's gonna be a lot of wings in this podcast. I was like is this an undisclosed location? Is that the vibe we're going for, or?
Speaker 4:man, that would be kind of cool, wouldn't it? It would be in hindsight undisclosed location that the podcast maybe like. Oh man, like because this has very layer vibes yeah really, this is your layer.
Speaker 1:You think so, yeah, you're a superhero, it's your layer I like that.
Speaker 4:I mean, batman is my favorite, uh, superhero, oh, and also iron man because all it takes is money for either of those superheroes.
Speaker 1:They're both billionaires. Yeah, if I had a billion dollars, the suit.
Speaker 4:And then the batman is my favorite, favorite just because of that, that dark side. You know, I don't know. There's something about him, yeah, something about him. You know that mysterious he's just fighting crime at night, during the days and bored beings yeah, sounds like a very exciting guy.
Speaker 1:I just, I just love. And yet somehow, they made comic books for him. I'm kidding, yeah, he's a great guy from what I hear about these comics. Yeah, yeah, I've seen.
Speaker 4:I don't know the guy, I want to know the guy I want to know the guy. I could be the black bruce wayne, I could like that for you so we got J-Bat in the building. So what does the average day look like for you?
Speaker 1:I don't like having an average day at all. So, I'm very motivated by having just variety in my life. I know we just joked about Batman and that, but legitimately, seriously, I do like to have variety. I know routine's important I'm working on that but it's not necessarily engraved into how I operate. It's based on client work or hired content or just content for myself that I'm like, oh, this needs to get done, and I don't tend to repeat. So, it is ultimately different, nice, so it is ultimately different.
Speaker 4:Nice, and do you find, as you're trying to get that routine? As an entrepreneur, I feel like every time I go into a routine then all of a sudden it gets blindsided by something that I wasn't planning.
Speaker 1:Yeah, deadlines, I thought it was fun. Yeah, yeah, there's like the loose structure of the day of like I generally want to get started by X time. For me, my ideal world I'm not there yet is a 10 am start. That's how it was when I worked full time for other people.
Speaker 1:I was like 10 am start. As long as I get my work done doesn't matter. And now for the first job in like, I think, six jobs I'm not even kidding, I had luxury of, like past jobs, so many in a row. People would keep telling me they're like. You know, jobs like this won't exist.
Speaker 1:All the time where you can start at 10 am, I was like bosses are cool and flexible and it all works out and then I work till six, so it works, but lately I've been getting up before eight, starting right at eight and getting like caught up or trying to get ahead or whatever, and I thought about the other day. I was like what is? I never wanted to start before 10 am before. Granted, I'm sure it's not that I really want to start at eight, but it's like I need to get ahead of where my clients are starting their day. Or if they're starting at eight, eight, thirty, I need to be relatively around there.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's fascinating to me. Honestly. I was like I want to move back towards that. 10 am start, but I'm not there yet yeah, yeah, it's um.
Speaker 4:I I have always uh, for all of our people that worked for forever media I've I've never been like you gotta start, unless, like there's you need to be somewhere or you have a client or there's a call. But never was like, hey, this is the exact, as long as work is getting done right, like I don't really feel like a lot of long as work is getting done.
Speaker 1:I don't really.
Speaker 1:I feel, like a lot of people are just begrudging about that. Like 8 am or 9 am meeting. So it's like no, none of us really want to be here that early, or the first thing we do is a meeting. So I don't, because pretty much any client or anyone I work with, if they're like what time do you want to meet At? To meet at or after 10 am is typically what I say, that's mine too. And if a few people are like, oh, I could only do nine, I'll make exceptions when it makes sense to, but that's like 10 of the time I'm shooting for yeah, yeah, yeah, I, I hate early morning me.
Speaker 4:Actually, my, my scheduler doesn't even allow for anything before 10 because I also, like I'm trying to wake up, drink my coffee work out, do whatever you want to do.
Speaker 1:Allow yourself to get into your day without feeling rushed yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4:So so what is? I want to debunk a myth okay so oftentimes people, uh, maybe think of influencers as people that get like gain a lot of attention and just your inbox is just just flooded right with things. Is that true, and does influencer equal money?
Speaker 1:yes and yes and no and no. Uh, that's a perfect answer. What do you want? Yes, oh, you wanted the answer to be no, just no. It kind of ranges by the person. You have to be in an industry that has people that would sponsor you. Like, I can't think of an industry off the top of my head that wouldn't apply. But I'm a general lifestyle content creator. I do mental health, so occasionally I get hit up about that. Yes, the big thing. So I get messages multiple times a week I want to say daily, but it's not quite that frequency.
Speaker 1:Okay, you have to be able to filter out what's spam and scams and what's actually legitimate, and sometimes it's hard to tell. So, like if you're newer at reaching out to influencers and asking them to work with your brand, if you look too much like spam, I'm just gonna ignore it, or it might get flagged in my email or dms before I even see it. So you kind of have to. It's hard to give advice to somebody who's never done it, but is like trying to figure it out. Like you have to tell people they're getting paid but you don't want to lose your leveraging power of like trying to negotiate price. So an easy one is just kind of say paid opportunity, and then you give a little bit of a spiel into it. Uh, without necessarily saying I'm gonna pay you thousand dollars. Yeah, that sounds great. But also that's tends to be the scam messages where you're like this sounds a little too good to be true.
Speaker 4:Yeah, too good to be true.
Speaker 1:Let me have a conversation with this brand and as we get down the road, if it sounds too good to be true, otherwise, deeper in I'm more likely to believe it. I'm more likely to be like, okay, this is legitimate, but don't like, come out of the gates with an unrealistic offer, even if it's not to you unrealistic, you just have to be careful of like getting caught up in the spam what, uh, what's the worst spam message?
Speaker 1:that you've got it's not so much the worst. I think any of them that are real, that are confused for spam, are the worst spam messages because you shouldn't be confused with spam and get deleted. Because when I worked for an agency, we would reach out to influencers all the time and of that you were lucky if 40% to 60% responded. Yeah, like literally responded A lot of them ghost you or don't see your message or aren't timely, and usually you know these are pretty tight turnarounds. You wish they weren't, but they are yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:So if the influencer isn't responding in a timely fashion, you're moving on to somebody else. Then it's weird when you get some that say, yes, you start the contract process, you send it off and then they ghost you. At that point You're like why are you ghosting me now? Yeah, Like, just because I get that 40% response rate doesn't mean that I'm going to end with 40% of those people Right right. Or 100% of the 40%, whatever.
Speaker 1:But, it's a challenge, it's right, or 100 of the 40, whatever, but right, it's a challenge. Uh, and I wish I could say, on the other side of it, as the influencer, I've never delayed response I have it's tricky because sometimes, like I'm an individual, I work by myself, I don't have anyone to bounce off things with and if I get a pitch that I'm like I don't know if this is the right fit or they're asking for this.
Speaker 1:I'm not really sure how to go. I'm thinking about the best way to address it, but I don't have a good response yet and I don't want to say no, but I'm not. It's not quite a yes, so it's, how do I respond professionally and politely, and then I forget to respond.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's, it's reality. I wish, I wish it wasn't, but I try to be better about responding within the same week, if not the same day or two.
Speaker 4:Got you, got you, and so I know for you that you've grown an audience and you're able to get brand deals, work with some amazing brands. What do you feel about the era of, like AI influencers? So like faceless, faceless accounts?
Speaker 1:Radio personalities influencers so like faceless. Faceless uh accounts, radio personalities uh, I think it's an option for sure if you want a quick turnaround. I I don't know what the service is called, but it is a way for you to use ai voice that can sound like you.
Speaker 1:You can make a yeah and that kind of looks like you, but there's no one else that's really doing it as well as them. They're doing it so well. I don't know their name, but I know there's not a lot of competition at their level, right, so they could really charge whatever they want. I'm sure they want to make it affordable, get you hooked and then, surprise, you've done this for a year and now we're up $100. I don't know. I don't think there's enough people that can afford to add on a luxury service like that and be able to use it effectively. A lot of.
Speaker 1:AI comes down to the creativity and the right prompts, and if you're already a bad script writer or don't really know how to articulate what you need for your brand and your content you're going to come out with subpar content.
Speaker 4:Right, yeah, you still need to craft it and create it it's. It's not anywhere near where it's perfect, where you just put it something in, it spits out like perfection, right, it's just not even close to it. Um, yeah, I I don't know. I just think it's so interesting of where it's all going um, because some of these also like these faceless accounts that just have like a voice and then they're just ai generated images are kind of popping up, um, but those pages are getting huge.
Speaker 1:I mean there's a lack of a better term, a meme account.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's like a meme account yeah, yeah, it's very um, but I feel like it's growing in popularity. It constantly comes up and it's like something that anybody can create. You still have to have a little bit of savviness around it, but do you feel like that's going to take away from some of the, you know, human influencers versus faceless accounts that don't have? You know? You've seen like travel. You've seen food ones.
Speaker 1:You've seen like the theory, or it comes down to personality yeah ai has an ai personality, but no one is going to have you and your personality yeah you can uniquely bring an ai.
Speaker 1:An ai can come close to you and emulate you, but you have the most control. If you want to make little changes of your inflection or how you want to articulate about something, you do a lot of in-person speaking and in-person networking. Right now AI can't replace that and I hope it doesn't. But I think if you get too comfortable with using AI, I like using it as a creative source. If I'm writer's block, help me prompt some stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I know there's certain AI that will make it so that your eyes are always looking at the camera, even if you're looking at a script off to the side, that's great, but when you talk in person and you're used to reading off a script over here. How are you?
Speaker 1:going to be able to command your presence in a room. So it's helpful to an extent, but it depends on what your goals are as that influencer. If you want to do in-person stuff, you kind of have to have a little bit more of a presence, more of that deliberate approach to things, as opposed to an influencer that just only wants to be online and never really do anything offline, that's totally fine, but I think you can leverage those AI tools a little bit more, because your goals are different.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's almost like the more when you have that humanized approach to it, you have more options than just a faceless account, could you know? Yeah, you may get people reach out that want to do some kind of sponsor or brand thing with you, but it's still not like you don't have a human connection element to it and you definitely can't take it offline because who's going to show up?
Speaker 1:And it sounds almost a little too perfect. Yeah, yeah, there's those natural ums and sos, and as much as I would love to get that out of my verbiage, and delivery it's the natural flow of how someone talks. That is relatable.
Speaker 4:Right, right, no 100%. So, speaking of those in-person events, talk to us a little bit about why you created Hashtag MKE and, from a business sense, why do you continue to throw those amazing networking events?
Speaker 1:I started in 2017.
Speaker 1:I was looking to do more networking events at the time and a lot of the networking groups then and even now aren't great at social media promotion and you'd hear about an event the week of and you're like, well, I didn't have time to plan for this, or if I had known I would have blocked this off my calendar, so partially wanted to get a networking group out there that you knew every second Thursday we're meeting and is out there promoting and very specific. The other part is I used to go to networking events all the time, and any time I got onto a topic of social media I was engaged with the conversation, Not to say financial planning didn't excite me. But you can only have so many of those conversations before you're like I don't know if I want to keep coming to these events.
Speaker 1:So, I wanted a space where everybody coming knew that the central core topic was social media. If you have other conversations, that's fine, but you know that okay. Either you work in social media, you're a content creator, you do it as a hobby. I had a dad come once that just wanted to learn how to use TikTok before 2020 to connect better with his son. He came to one. I showed him how TikTok works, and he never came back again because he got what he needed from that interaction Got you.
Speaker 4:Wow, didn't know that. Yeah, that's crazy. Those are the fun little stories. That's crazy. And then how? So you've been doing it since 2017. Mm-hmm, and I guess, what do people? Is there a way that people can connect outside the events, or are they just? Yeah, we have a Facebook group. It's not as active.
Speaker 1:It slowed down, of course, when the pandemic happened. I know there are people that did digital and virtual events, but I was like I don't really want to attend those. I'm not going to host those. I tried one and it was fine. But, like, no matter how you split it, there's one person talking at a time. It's not like a natural networking event where a couple of people can talk and then you can schmooze over here you can do breakout rooms.
Speaker 1:It's still the same structure In a breakout room you have five person, only one person's talking or multiple people are. It's just easier to flow back and forth, in my opinion. Yeah, yeah. So I think the pandemic kind of throttled the momentum that we gained on social and those online conversations. Yeah. And now it's mostly just a tool to get information out about future events.
Speaker 4:Awesome information out about future events, awesome, and then. So a lot of our uh audience are entrepreneurs or executives, and I always talk to them about like the power of like hosting the party. So what is? What kind of value has these events that you've been throwing for years? Um, what has that done for you, for your own personal brand and also for for your business?
Speaker 1:Uh, one thing that a couple of the regulars will point out is how I'm always at the welcome table you come in. I'm the first person you see. I like doing that because if you're a first timer I kind of assess your comfort level. I can tell if I've had college kids come and they'll be in a suit and a tie and like overdressed for sure.
Speaker 1:This is their first networking event. So right away I can diffuse and kind of be like hey, have you networked before? No, okay, well, what do you want to talk about tonight? What's your goal? And it gets them thinking. It's like well, I would like to do video content better. I know who's in the room already and I can direct you to go talk to various people. And I'm sending you to people who've come to my events before and they know. If you come up to them and say, oh, j-matt said I should talk to you about video, j-matt said is a trigger for them to be like oh, this guy's probably a little less comfortable with networking. J-matt sent this person my way. I'm going to take them under my wing a little bit and get them comfortable before I pass them off to talk to other people. And that guy with the tie, he was like oh, oh, that's what this is. He left, took his tie off, came back without a suit coat and he like got himself a little bit more casual before going and networking
Speaker 1:that's great. I love to see it, um, but it's just important to me as I've gone to other networking events where the host is kind of in a clique of their friends. It's hard to break in and you feel like you're rude and interrupting. So I like to be very purposeful so that if you come to my event you don't feel like you're interrupting If I'm talking to you, even if you're new, and somebody walks in I say I'll be right back and they just know I'm working the door. I'm reading everybody. Sure, I could assign that off to somebody else, but I just genuinely enjoy being that first person people see.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, it's powerful man. I mean, it's a great way to connect with others, and the cool thing that you do is you also get kind of testimonials by people that were there. So talk to us a little bit about why you do those and then how do you actually distribute those testimonials out?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a newer thing I'm doing. You were at the last event where we were doing it. I pull aside the special guests that we have, because there's people that can't attend the event but let's say they want to know about the topic or talk to that special guest. I don't do slowed down speakers and presentations Nothing against them in the sense that they don't add value. They do, but it slows down the networking process of the event and you have to be there at a certain time or you'll miss it.
Speaker 1:And have you ever seen one of those presentations end on time or early? No, exactly, they always go over and they're asking questions. You're like I don't care about this question. Sure, some are like Ooh, that's thoughtful. I'd like to know, but that's rare. Right right. So now you're sitting through other people's questions and you're like I got here late and I didn't get a chance to talk to this person over here and I know they got to leave shortly so you're missing out on those opportunities.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, rather, my events are structured that you know these three to four people are going to be here on this topic If you have on your mind answered, and then you can bounce around to different people. So if you can't attend an event and you wanted to talk to them, what I've been trying to do is video an interview midway through the event and talk to them and ask them those questions and then post them online so that if you miss the event, you have a source to go and it doesn't break down the event to have a formal presentation. There's a lot of special guests that we have that are shy, that are intimidated, that wouldn't want to do a presentation if I had asked them, but are much more comfortable in a one-on-one conversation, and I'm able to diffuse that real quick, because some will be like I don't know about this, I don't know the questions. Cool, well, we're just going to flow and it's going to go fine.
Speaker 1:And then very shortly into it they just going to flow and it's going to go fine. And then very shortly into it they're very calm and having a nice casual conversation with me that I then can post. I have not posted a lot of them yet because I'm a short form video content creator, but I'm trying to do more long form and these are all long form, so it's trying to work the long form edits into my flow. So I'm a little behind, but I need to have kind of an example of what the events are like or some of the people that come to it to encourage those people that have continued to be on the fence for a year.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're on the fence, I think people that have come this year who have said oh, I've been following you since 2018. This is my first event Great. Lovely to have you. Thank you for finally rolling that dice and coming out.
Speaker 4:You never know how long it will take. It happens Like I don't know about J-Map, but you know.
Speaker 1:I don't know about networking events.
Speaker 4:It took me several years to figure it out. It happens, oh, you won't regret it. It's great people, yeah, great events, great events. So I want to switch gears on. I know a lot of people. I know I've been able to accumulate sponsorships and and brand deals. You've been able to do brand deals as well. Talk to us a little bit about and share with us what, what you can you know as far as because a lot of people want to find those ways of how to actually monetize their content. Um, a lot of us kind of go into the flow of content, especially on YouTube in particular, where you're kind of like, in this darkness void of just putting out content, you're getting slow, maybe a couple hits here and there, but it's not paying you yet. How do your your brand deals and what do you look for in a brand deal?
Speaker 1:The brand deals find me and I don't cold call. It's mostly because I post consistently, that they see the content that I put out there and they feel I fit the brand or the campaign within the brand that they're going for and they'll reach out to me. Okay, um, I tried some of these creator programs early on where TikTok would pay you for X amount of views but reality is, if you weren't consistently getting 100,000 views per video, you weren't really getting a good payout. Oh, really, okay.
Speaker 1:And then there was, like it's up for debate. People will say, oh well, if you're in the program, it throttles your views. That's my opinion. There's plenty of others that say you can be in the program and it won't throttle your views. It's the quality of content and I'm like I agree partially to that as well. But I don't know, because what platform ultimately wants to pay out all the thousands upon thousands of creators? I mean, I'm not gonna say they don't want to, but like, yeah, they don't want to. So they are likely going to make sure that you follow all the guidelines already, which they already were, but now they're paying you out instead of you just existing. So they're paying attention to you more. Yeah, okay. So I've gone in, gone out, gone in, gone out over the last four to five years with these programs and ultimately, I just find more consistent reach and views when I'm outside of those programs.
Speaker 1:Okay interesting and I never made enough for it to really matter within those programs. I was making $5 there, $5 there, Wow. I would rather have no doubt in my mind whether or not I'm being impacted negatively or being in a creator program when a brand hires me to do hashtag ad content, I'd rather just I'm not in any program If something gets flagged or doesn't reach. There's probably something I overlooked, Like for example, TikTok, if you mention any word associated with alcohol suppressed, and I found this out Interesting.
Speaker 1:Wow, Didn't know that hey it's in the branded guidelines there's. If you look up branded guideline policy or branded content policy or something for TikTok, for Instagram, they lay out here's what's restricted for industries Right Alcohol, smoking, gambling.
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 1:Politics, legal services and a variety of other things. Tiktok's more strict than Instagram is, and Instagram has some leeway of what you can get around.
Speaker 1:But, before I realized this. I was trying to tiptoe around some things that had some alcohol involved and those videos always did worse than the rest. I'm like I don't understand. I did a organic post where I was talking about speakeasies and the word, and I was very deliberate not to put any like alcohol in the in the bar, no tavern, nothing like that. The only word I had in there was speakeasy. It did fine on the other platforms and I re-edited the speakeasy video to take the word speakeasy out. I did five shh in the city of Milwaukee. That was the change and it blew up Really.
Speaker 1:And the speakeasy flagged it Wow.
Speaker 4:Everything else was the same.
Speaker 1:That's crazy and it just throttles the whole post because they're like yeah, we don't want, especially if you are a creator who is otherwise considered family friendly, because there's two news feeds yeah, tiktok there is everyone, which includes people under 16, and then there's, you know, the 16 and up.
Speaker 1:It used to be like a little different breakdown, but there is a feed where it's specific for kids, essentially. Yeah, not that I want to be on the kids feed, right, but I am somebody that puts content out there that isn't flagged for mature content right, right, right, it's just lifestyle so if I, you live in, if I, if it's all lifestyle and family friendly, for a lack of better term and then suddenly I have a 21 and up content it's gonna
Speaker 2:be, like whoa, whoa, whoa, yeah, yeah, what's going on everywhere?
Speaker 4:yeah yeah, that's super interesting. I I actually I knew about some of the the throttling, but I didn't realize that tiktok in particular was a little bit more um they don't want. They don't want to promote certain things. That's interesting and so, and, and so you. So you're not really for those programs, but you're also kind of like that's your opinion and kind of your experience.
Speaker 1:Right, good, yeah, good for you, yeah, yeah, but it's a small percentage of people making enough money to do it full time.
Speaker 4:Right, right. That's like the top 1% of people that are.
Speaker 4:If that yeah, yeah, and then so, and also, how do you, how do you structure your brand deals? Cause I know I get all I get asked a lot about sponsorships of like, what do I charge what? You know, how should I structure it? You know, what do I need to give to the brands? You know of what they're getting. How do I continually get sponsorships? So I get a lot of questions around sponsorships in particular.
Speaker 4:So for brand deals, how do you structure it? How do you know what to charge? Did you kind of do a little bit of a trial and error type thing where, like, hey, you know, I know there's one time I had talked to you, um, uh, either it was either it was just a side conversation that we had or it was the first lead the movement um, that we had you speak at. You were talking about like contracts and that was like a big like learning lesson of just making sure that you know your contracts are good and, um, you don't skip over it. Sure that you know your contracts are good and you don't skip over it, especially on you know when it comes down to like, hey, what's the payment arrangement or things like that. So anything you can share just around how you structure your brand deal.
Speaker 1:I know everybody's different, but if, if a brand approaches you and they have a template they want to send you, great, let them do it, because that's just easier okay you're doing the contract. Call it an agreement, a letter of agreement. It's a little less like legal yeah, sounding yeah, but like how many of us are giving our agreements and our contracts to a in-house lawyer that is able to look?
Speaker 1:right, yeah I don't do that right but, I did work at a radio station for four years where I worked really intensively with our legal team for contest rules for radio station giveaways and all that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:So I have a weird edge in that I know how to navigate a contract and what to look out for and that sort of thing Again, not a lawyer, but I have some experience with working with lawyers and what to look out for and what they're going to try to make it more in favor of the brand. Yeah, A brand's contract, though, is written in a way that caters to the brand.
Speaker 4:Oh, of course, Every time it's not a surprise.
Speaker 1:But, because of the emails that you've exchanged and you have agreed, agreed upon. Stuff in an email doesn't always go back to the contract yeah so just because you think you've had, we're all under an understanding, make sure you're double checking, because one, a lot of these people work off of templates and a lot of these people are coordinators, so they don't really know what they're doing. They're just switching it over. Yeah, because I'm usually the only tiktoker amongst all the instagrammers. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So it'll say in there like deliverables are two 30 second instagram reels, or at back in the day, it was just two instagram posts right, and I'm like, hey, I know this was probably a mistake, but can you change that to say tick yeah, yeah just because this is a contract.
Speaker 1:I'm sure it would have been cool and fine, but also make sure you take the time to ask for these changes. I write out an email in every paragraph and the lines and da, da, da da. I'm like paragraph three. It says something about confidentiality here and blah, blah, blah. I'm not sure about this phrasing. What's the intent behind that? Yeah, yeah, yeah phrasing.
Speaker 1:What's the intent behind that? Yeah, yeah, I ask a laundry list of things. A lot of it'll just come back with like oh yeah, this is what that means. You're like oh, of course, no problem, because there's no standard legal term for everything. There's multiple ways you can phrase it that mean the same thing. It's fine, it's whatever, um, but you just have to be aware of it. Some of the bigger ones are content use. Are you providing content that is posted for your channel only, or is it also intended for the brand to own and to post? That's very important verbiage, because if they are also having rights to your content to post as an ad or something, you should charge more. If it's content for hire, that's another thing. So maybe, uh, it's content intended for them and not for you to post to your account, so your price structure could be a little different too. But that should have come up in that early phase of negotiation. But sometimes you get surprised and you're like wait what is this?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah so make sure you read it. Even if you think you have a good rapport with the person, mistakes happen yeah, yeah, you definitely need to look over that stuff.
Speaker 4:Just, yes, just, you dropped a lot of good gems there. Um, so just for the audience to know, like, what are kind of what are some of the brands that you have work with, if you can name drop?
Speaker 1:yeah, I mean anything that's public I can drop, uh like subway probably being the biggest, so it's a tie between Subway and Red Bull.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 1:It kind of depends on how you view it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Both international brands, for sure. Red Bull for a while was my number one get, and then Subway happened. I was like I don't know.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's one of these two and it was pretty impressive because in both of these situations they reached out to me and they said we have a program we want you to be a part of. What I like most about the Subway thing is their reasoning behind who they selected. And they kind of like oh, you know, we had a list of criteria and we went through all of that.
Speaker 1:After that, after, you made sure that you were a safe creator, more or less you then made sure that you had good engagement and all this other stuff which is like, oh well, I've made it through all these rounds. Before. I even realized it was part of these rounds and I was one of like a dozen selected nationwide and I was like, oh, all right, I'm doing something right.
Speaker 4:That's dope, and the cool thing that I've also learned from you is that you want to do the brand deal in a way where you're helping with one of their goals. So either they have some kind of campaign that they're doing, there's a particular event maybe that they're trying to promote and kind of market out, so it's always being focused on what is the brand actually, the objective that the brand is trying to solve or get to, and make sure that your content or however you're working the deal, it actually caters to the objective, instead of being like, well, brands should just work with me just because I got a big following, or brands should just work with me because, I mean, this is the common thing, that Anytime you put hashtag, ad or have to mark something as sponsored, your videos are throttled.
Speaker 4:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:And then people are like, well, what if we got rid of the ad? We didn't do that. I was like, well, you're paying me, so that automatically means I have to disclose that because I don't want to lose my accounts and I don't want to lose the trust of the people that follow me by trying to deceive what this?
Speaker 4:is yeah, yeah, it's this, yeah, so the more that you can point towards the actual business goal and then packaging it. Now, have you ever packaged something in a lot of different ways, so like, obviously you can do video cut ups, shout outs have you done anything like even with your own events that you've attached on to it? Or like, hey, the next hashtag MKE events, you know we'll put up a sign or have some like have you kind of packaged Because this is something that I always encourage people like you, your personal brand is not just content, it's not just you know you doing the events, it's you could do a collective of things and then raise your rates and raise kind of the price that you do for it. Have you, have you done something like that in the past?
Speaker 1:Sponsoring the events is definitely on my radar. It's the challenge of once I know the right way to do things, the right way or the intended way. Like I know FTC regulations inside and out, and so it's okay. Well, technically they're paying me to sponsor this event and in that includes X amount of sponsored posts. Technically, I would have to includes X amount of sponsored posts technically, I would have to disclose that these are sponsored posts, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And then you're like oh man, well, that throttled the views and the reach, because I want to make sure I'm getting the message out there and getting people to attend. Right.
Speaker 1:So that's my current pondering of how would I phrase that technically. And people would say, well, you could just put the logo on it and that discloses it. I'm like technically and people would say, well, you know, you could just put the logo on it and that discloses it. Like that doesn't do that. So I've seen some local brands like Bucks and Summerfest and whatnot that will have a sponsored stage, but nothing else about that post is sponsored and they will do paid partnership.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm like oh well, that seems to be the right way to do it because they have like legal team and stuff that tells them. So it's trying to navigate. How do I do that correctly?
Speaker 4:okay, okay is my current yeah, yeah, okay, cool, cool yeah cool. Yeah, paid partnership on all your content just have it throttled like your whole account I will say, like you, there's so many things.
Speaker 1:I like the five events. I could get that sponsored, but like I don't want my page to be non-stop sponsored, yeah, that's so I have to be mindful of that because I don't post a ton on hashtag mke and if the five events all of a sudden was sponsored, and the goal is to have my actual events sponsored what would I be posting that's not sponsored yeah, yeah, yeah, true, true, true yeah it's is that you always have to kind of juggle with how much you're promoting other people's stuff versus.
Speaker 4:This is why people come to the page in the first place, that's. You know you got to keep generating that content. Um, it's kind of switching gears a little bit to you post a lot of uh content, all about milwaukee, so of all. So actually I'm going to have this whole next segment is brought to you by Visit Milwaukee, immerse yourself in a place where bold ideas are sought after, where all are encouraged to bring their personal flourish here.
Speaker 3:innovation is a way of life In this city. The beat flows Together. We're dancing to the rhythm forward. Now it's your turn to grab hold of that energy. What you'll remember not just the meals, the celebrations or the uncommon coasts. What you'll remember is how we made you feel. Come experience Milwaukee, where fresh meets fearless every day.
Speaker 4:I want to ask you why Milwaukee? Why? I mean you, could you know, know you can go anywhere I think it's because I live here I'm a resident, but but your content is all all about, you know, milwaukee. What's what's happening, what's going on um why? Why milwaukee? Why, why not just create? A page or uh, you know which? I know you like spicy stuff. We'll get into that in a second.
Speaker 1:So I'm I don't know how to phrase this, but I've gotten to a point now where a lot of people have forgotten that I used to work on Kiss FM. Okay, okay that reaction right there shows that maybe you didn't remember and maybe you knew.
Speaker 4:Oh no, I know, I know, I'm more surprised that people forgot.
Speaker 1:There's a well, it's not even that they forgot.
Speaker 1:I have amassed a bit of a following now that had nothing to do with the fact that I was on the air.
Speaker 1:Okay, the early followers of my social media accounts, yeah, are followers from Kiss FM for sure, but I would say that's, at this point, 10% of my audience. I can point it out to people and they'll be like oh, you know what. That does make sense, yeah, but we're far past people associating me to radio and associate, associating me to the content that I make and the presence and the uniqueness of what I do, which is great because early in the pandemic got let go from the radio station, like a lot of people. And people would consistently be like oh jay matt, when you're getting back on radio, and it was about my identity as it is with radio, as opposed to now, it's separate. And when I was on the radio I was doing a lot of local content, granted, not just city of Milwaukee, but I was doing a lot of local content. So for me it became this thing of oh well, here's a local topic, how do I talk about this?
Speaker 1:Because I'm not on the air anymore and, no, social media wasn't obvious to me in the moment it took me about four months until I stumbled into short form video as that way and it really kind of took off and I had been trying to find a new niche to live in. And during early pandemic I was just trying so many different things to see what would stick and what was useful, because I understood how the platform worked and I just didn't want to get myself into a situation where I didn't care about the notifications, I didn't care about how people interacted with my content.
Speaker 1:When I kind of stumbled upon Milwaukee because I did a viral video not that I made it intentionally be viral but it was cool that it worked out that way about the Milwaukee Pirate Barge. Okay, and people will be either. Oh, I know what that is. I used to party on that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or I've heard of it, or most of the people saying I've lived in Milwaukee my whole life. I don't know what you're talking about. Or I used to live in Milwaukee. I have no idea what you're talking about, so I was like oh, I kind of shared this pretty cool story about something at the time that existed in Milwaukee that a big population didn't know about, and it was okay.
Speaker 1:how can I inform locals about other cool things that they may be overlooking or may not be aware of? And that's kind of how it evolved into what it is now.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah kind of how it evolved into what it is now. Yeah, yeah. And what if you had to? I'm going to put you on the spot If you had to tell people. So if we had somebody coming in from out of town since you're the guy that knows about everything that's going on in Milwaukee and the hot spots and where to go if somebody had a day to spend in Milwaukee, what would you have them do?
Speaker 1:So I'm going to answer your question. Well, another question. It doesn't work because it's a podcast and I'm not talking to a listener. But people are like what's your favorite thing in Milwaukee, or what should I do? And I'm always like what do you like to do? In your free time, what do you do at home, or what are things you like to do when you travel, because that says a lot about what I would recommend If someone's like.
Speaker 1:I really like trying different beers? Well, great, we have a lot of brewers here, like Lakefront Brewery, amorphic, gathering Place I'm trying to remember the one that just closed and not mention that one but there's enough breweries in here where you could go all over the city and have that be your sole experience for the weekend. Yeah, maybe you're an na or you're not of age and you can't drink, so then where do you go? Uh, if you are somebody that likes more of the touristy uh vibe and want to see the things that I may. Only come to milwaukee once. I don't want to miss out on the big things like going to the milwaukee art museum or if I have a family and kids and we're looking for fun things to do.
Speaker 1:Right next door is Discovery World. If I'm here in the summer and it's one of the three weekends of Summerfest, you kind of have to go to that. So it really comes down to individual interests and, partially, what your budget is.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, what about? What's okay? Just because I know you constantly go to these places um what's your top three spicy food joints in milwaukee?
Speaker 1:well, I would say the I know you're a fiend for it the ones that uh delivered in spicy, and I'm not necessarily someone to do tops or the best yeah, yeah, okay. Okay, the one that caught me off guard, honestly, and I could only eat one of the wings they gave me because it was that spicy Jack's American pub on Brady. I can't believe I'm saying that, but they had uh, I forget what the level was. It was like dragon's breath, or something.
Speaker 1:And somebody had told me to go there for, like tiger sauce or something slightly lower than that and I thought that was the top and I people.
Speaker 1:I was like, yeah, I'm looking for the spiciest wings, the spiciest option you have, and they're like, well, the tiger thing is not the one dragon's breath is that. I was like, oh cool, so I tried it. And yeah, like literally on the tongue, and I was like, oh no, could not finish. It was a rough one. Uh, another one would have been fought. 414 at mung town okay, it's uh like a food court within the uh market in the back of it and I told them what I was doing and they're like, yeah, we can.
Speaker 1:And he was very skeptical and and I understand why, because then I ate some of it and I think I got maybe a quarter of the way in before I was like nope, and the guy felt so bad. He came out and he was like, hey, how you doing? I was like I'm fine.
Speaker 1:He's like I'm sorry and I'm like no, you literally did what I asked you to, did what I asked you to, because so many people won't right. And he's like well, if you use fish sauce, it can kind of like bring the spice level down.
Speaker 3:I was like didn't know that, but that's helpful to know okay given what I'm trying to do, and take these leftovers home, yeah, uh.
Speaker 1:And then my other one that I brought leftovers from that stands out is issans on farwell. Okay, and a lot of people know they have the level one through 10 on the menu.
Speaker 2:Off the menu because, again, I explained what I'm doing and I was like I'm looking for the spiciest make me cry.
Speaker 1:If I say make me cry, people are like alright, well, this guy's serious. Awesome. We'll make him cry. Yay, I really like to push my tolerance too. So if I'm not sweating or tearing up or whatever, then I'm not pushing myself beyond what's right. You got to feel it, you got to feel it. Man, I felt that one, and they said the highest they can go is level 25. So mentally preparing for 10. And I heard 25. I was like, all right, cool, but can you bring a side dish of the 10 out?
Speaker 4:just so I can taste what that is going to be, yeah, yeah, and know the difference between the two.
Speaker 1:yeah, I was mouth on fire a third of the way in and to cool it down, I was like drinking the level 10 because it's like let me cool this down it was cooler, holy crap.
Speaker 4:Yeah, man, do you have all these on your page that people can see?
Speaker 4:yeah, people follow you know you gotta gotta follow jay matt and you can actually see these experiences with him they are experienced it's funny because I'll just be scrolling on um on tiktok, particularly usually at night yeah um, you know, and then I kind of do my 10 minutes of just hey, let's see what's going on, and your stuff usually pops up, and then I'm like oh, here's another, uh, another excursion that he's going on, and you know, the kicker for me is I've gone to places that don't make video series. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because if it wasn't hot enough, if I wasn't reacting yeah, I felt there was spice, but it really wasn't spicy enough for me.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't include it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's good, though, because you're just giving people the hottest of the hot and it's just a cool thing. I think it reminds me of um hot ones, you know, like the interview minus the interview. Yeah, yeah, I feel like that could be in your future some kind of interview and they're eating like some really hot ramen or yeah, yeah, some people have mentioned that to me.
Speaker 1:I'm a solo creator most of the time and then you're adding, like another layer, somebody in here to interview, maybe far future. I have, yeah, I have a big team. That'd be great. That's the dream. Give me that overhead expense.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, yeah, you don't need that, you don't need that, but the idea is pretty solid, pretty solid. Why is content so important to you?
Speaker 1:It's a creative outlet to an extent, like I enjoy it. It's challenges me and my feed isn't filled with Milwaukee content there's a little bit of it and it's not filled with foodie content there's a little bit. It's a lot of other content creators that are shooting and editing content in unique ways. We're all watching it and be like, hmm, how did they do that? And I will take it and, frame by frame, see where the transition is and be like that's how that was done.
Speaker 4:Cool, so you're a study of the game.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I don't always have time not time, but like it doesn't make sense to do all the bells and whistles of what I'm seeing. It's more or less I put it in a share folder or like a saved folder or favorites whatever, and when I'm trying to come up with something a little bit beyond my comfort zone especially when it's like branded and they're like you know, we're paying you, so let's do something I'm like all right, let's try this for the first time.
Speaker 1:Right, I go to those folders and I'm like, okay, what could I realistically pull off?
Speaker 4:Okay, cool Can. I try the idea vault that you kind of go into and then just gets a bunch of ideas. That's cool. And what would you tell businesses that are trying to figure out this whole content game Like? What would you tell? I know you work with companies as well, but what would you tell them? Because I feel like there's a spectrum of where, especially in business, of how they view content creation as a whole. So what would you? What would you? What advice would you give the number one?
Speaker 1:thing that I'm seeing that I would say is viewing it wrong or incorrectly. There is still the traditional sense of advertising and even if you do a voice ad on spotify or something, you get like a 15 second spot. A radio, you get 30 second spot, television 45 seconds, but I know you get all the intervals up to 60 seconds or whatever, but it's typically 15, 30, 45, 60.
Speaker 1:it's one of those four and what I will get a lot are brands saying you are required to give a minimum of 30 seconds in this video, when I, for my own organic content, I'm shooting for 15 seconds. If I'm lucky, it's under 15 seconds. So to require a time limit for the sake of having a time limit, because you think you're paying for that, is not the right way to go Interesting.
Speaker 1:You should be saying here are our objectives for this campaign, this is what our goal is, and we want you to have creative freedom and let them come up with the content that makes sense. If they make a content that's over 30 seconds, great, they've decided that that makes the most sense for their audience. If they make something that's 15 seconds and they deliver all of the points that you want to get across in that shorter time, great, you know what's going to happen. People are probably going to finish that video, complete watch time and maybe even start it over again.
Speaker 4:Right right.
Speaker 1:Every split second really is a chance for somebody to scroll away. Why would you force somebody to be in a time?
Speaker 4:box yeah, to be in a time box.
Speaker 1:And now they're adding fluff in there and people will scroll.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and then it's not going to convert the way that you would like it to convert yes. So the lesson I got from that is like when you're hiring your creator, let them create. You can have requirements or parameters, but don't put a time box on them. And should businesses be creating content?
Speaker 1:Yes, all businesses and brands, if they want to reach their audience, should be creating content where their audience is. And that's probably social media, and I heard once from someone in an industry that would otherwise be considered boring there's no boring industry, just boring content. So it's, how do you approach what is perceived as a boring industry and flip that on its head and make content that people would care about? Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's a challenge for some, for sure.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's definitely a challenge. So let's take a scenario real quick. Let's say I'm in the financial planning industry.
Speaker 1:How do I?
Speaker 4:make that fun? How do I make that engaging?
Speaker 1:And you, gave yourself an added challenge because I've had financial advisors talk to me about what they can and can't do. They have a lot of restrictions in and of itself of what they're allowed to post.
Speaker 4:Right.
Speaker 1:Because if they work for one of the big insurance, companies, yeah, the bigger ones, yep they have disclaimers that they have to include and blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:On that level, you, the financial advisor, need to know what those restrictions are, Because I can't give you an advice and say, oh, you could try this, but that doesn't fit within the restrictions. You got to know that inside and out to an extent, so that you know okay, I can't deliberately say I advise you to do this with your plan. I think that's one of them, but more of a general concept of like oh, if you're struggling to make ends meet, something you could try, blah, blah, blah. I think it has to be a little bit more ambiguous. Okay.
Speaker 1:But there's ways to color within the lines, no matter what your industry is. And then the big thing for any industry, any creator, the easiest way to go is can you make it a series Instead of coming up with how do I make? Let's say you're being very ambitious and creating one a day, 365 posts. Oh, what if I had a series every week that I consistently added to? Now I just need 52 videos to fit this series if you're doing it every week.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying you have to but-, but it's a good way to think about that though.
Speaker 4:As opposed to such a huge chunk now it's fitting within this, and what's the next thing that can evolve in this series and add to it? I like that because it's, it's uh, it's not as much of a big chunk for people to like take a bite out of. Yeah, yeah, I'm just gonna.
Speaker 1:I don't know what to do this week? Oh well, I'm just gonna go eat something that's gonna torture my insides and let people watch that for entertainment. It's a, a series, and it works.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, it's cool, it's cool. I think I love the series idea because people can think of a few different series to do and then with like Chad, gbt and like there's ways, you can say, hey, this is who I am, this is the content I would like to create. Here's a couple series ideas. Give me more. Give me more. Give me more things, topics I could talk about.
Speaker 1:So one thing I've always I've worked for nonprofits and whatnot and the one thing. I always push for is to get the CEO or the president of the company more active.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 1:Because if anyone's going to be the face of it, it's hard to get employees and the average person to be the face of it Right right. The CEO is kind of taking on that role, whether they want to or not. That is the face of the brand. So if you can get them comfortable and come to them with ideas that make it easier, and you're doing all the work and they're just the face and the voice. You could do a series like Ask the CEO. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's super ambiguous. But now we know we're asking our CEO some sort of question, probably related to the brand, and letting that be and that could be a series.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, that's a great idea, that's a fantastic. So I, you know, I always tell people like, don't overcomplicate it, but just know that you're going to have to create content to gain attention, to meet where your customers are. I mean that that's, most people are just living on the device. So you, you have to do it. Um, but I like this idea of starting in chunks and starting with a series and just giving some but, and you could do this with your phone. Like this doesn't have to be full production, you know, like big studio, like you don't have to do that. You could literally just you say you shoot all your content on the phone.
Speaker 1:I don't have a real camera. Wow, we're in the day and the age where you can be a mobile creator from a smartphone and I am clear with certain clients and things I'm hired for. They're like we're just, we're hiring you to make this content. I'm like, all right to be clear I will be using a phone and mostly I'm pointing this out to more prestigious like yeah, yeah, I think I'm meeting up with uh so that they don't expect me to come with a real camera, and then, when I'm there later, like what?
Speaker 1:is this but if I and plus they already are reaching out to me because they think my content is good to be hired for right right I'm just telling them behind the scenes.
Speaker 1:What you're not seeing is everything's on a phone yeah, yeah I have like studio quality uh, microphones and wireless stuff, because you can't really mess with that. Yeah, phones are great, but like you can do better, yeah, um, and yes, you could probably go on the rabbit hole and say, but visually you could do better, yay, yeah, I don't have that kind of money. I can do well with audio and do all that.
Speaker 4:That's later, when you got the full team.
Speaker 1:and when you can get that, I drop my phone all the time and you know it keeps kicking because it's got a good case on it. I don't think I would feel the same if I dropped a camera.
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah, it's painful Half of the height of my phone, half the happened a few times. Oh yeah, unfortunately gotta replace another camera. Oh no, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's torturous, uh, so what would uh. One question I want to ask you, because I know you work with also other people's uh personal brands as well for somebody building or starting their personal brand, what would you advise them?
Speaker 1:figure out what's consistent for you, Because it's gonna mean different to everyone, and even like a brand who has a team for it. Well, maybe your team is very stretched thin because most of them are Right and you have time to do, I don't know. Three posts a week. That's your frequency and we're not saying just three posts, we're saying three core posts. I never know how to explain it because you're posting it to linkedin and to tiktok right right so this core piece of content is being spread out everywhere, right, you're not just posting three times?
Speaker 1:if you're on four platforms posting three posts, you're posting 12 times.
Speaker 1:Right, you're posting 12 times yeah so, yeah, that's a fun one to always figure out. How am I articulating that one? Um? But you figure out what your frequency is, and some might have a bigger team or may have a structure where it's set up for this and they can post every weekday or the weekends, and they can do seven days a week, they can do multiple times a week or multiple times a day, which more power to you, but not a lot can't.
Speaker 1:So, rather than trying to hold yourself to the standard of what those best practices are saying of like post every day, do what you can do consistently, and when you're starting out, don't be too ambitious. Ok, batch it out and sit on it, as opposed to creating five days worth of content early on and you get burned out and then all of a sudden you're doing zero. If you're doing conservative, let's say, you're doing twice a week. You're doing twice a week. You think, okay, we can handle that, and you realize you know what. We can add another one. Cool, get into the flow of two and then add a third, or you get yourself.
Speaker 1:On average, we're posting two things, but if things come up that are time sensitive or we want to get out there real time, then we add a bonus one in that week, cool, yeah, yeah, just create that structure, that frequency that makes sense to you so just stick to a plan, yeah, like be consistent.
Speaker 4:I I've, I keep hammering that one is be consistent because easiest and hardest tip yeah, it literally is, and I'm sure people are tired of hearing about it, right, but it literally is the goal and uh, and and so on. Since you've grown a great following on tiktok, what would you tell somebody starting a tiktok account now how, how to grow actually on tiktok? What? What's the secret? What's the the golden nuggets that you can give? I know algorithms change you, timing is different, but yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah, Like what would you tell somebody? I'm starting from zero. So, what do I got to do Post, I've heard. Three times a day is what I've heard. I've heard.
Speaker 1:That's dumb. Who's got time for that? Because now you're in this game of like I'm just going to get quantity out there and something in there is going to be quality. Yeah, that quantity out there and something in there is going to be quality. Yeah, that's great. Whatever, we're not all in middle school and have nothing but time yeah, over the summer it's what I've heard.
Speaker 4:It's what I've heard.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean three times a day, five times a day if you want to post five times a day on any platform, something's gonna hit, something's gonna happen, but you're gonna make a lot of crap, crap within that chunk of quantity, quantity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, quantity, quantity is not all going to be quality. Yeah, as opposed to, let's be intentional with the content that we are putting out. And yes, even still not everything's going to hit, and that's fine, right, but don't. I wouldn't look at it as how do I grow on TikTok? It's TikTok is a short form video platform, so how can I grow my short form video content? Because I wouldn't say just invest in TikTok. I would say okay, put it on YouTube shorts, put it on TikTok and then put it on Instagram reels and.
Speaker 1:Facebook reels. There's more than that you could do, but you know, like if you were thinking we're just going to do. Tiktok. You should be doing TikTok Instagram Reels and maybe YouTube Shorts. Yeah, those are the three. That really would be the short form and you're creating the short form.
Speaker 4:That's the ones we're cycling through too, right, but it's also tough, the one piece of video you're making.
Speaker 1:Why only put it on TikTok?
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I've had videos blow up on YouTube that have done nothing for me on TikTok and vice versa, right.
Speaker 4:You don't know which platform.
Speaker 1:The video is going to blow up somewhere. Yeah, maybe.
Speaker 4:I've had that too, where it's like a dud on TikTok but then, like, I put it on YouTube shorts and like, oh, like, oh man, it's gotten thousands of views on here, but then I put it on TikTok and it's like a couple hundred Something people need to know about YouTube and I hundred something people need to know about youtube and I think people get frustrated.
Speaker 1:I am people in the past uh, for brands, because I I saw this number and I was like my video for this organization we put together and spent hours on, got a hundred views yeah I don't want to keep working at this. I didn't know at the time. I know now that a single view on YouTube counts at 30 seconds. So you need to go deeper into the analytics because it has the impressions in there and those impressions look a lot like what I'm seeing on TikTok.
Speaker 1:Instagram, but the impressions are that millisecond, which is essentially the same as those other platforms On YouTube. It's about that 30 second watch time. So then the question is okay, well, what if my short is 15 seconds or less? I can't 100% confirm it because it's not written on YouTube anywhere, but from what I've researched and what makes sense, it's a complete watch. So sometimes you'll see a video that is just posted and it has more likes than it has views.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Because you can watch a video for a split second and like it and move on without actually viewing it, and that's where that's coming from, but a lot of people don't know that.
Speaker 4:I did not I did not know that.
Speaker 1:Fun fact of the day, there's always something there, yeah, so like YouTube is the hardest one. They will say that one subscriber on YouTube is the equivalent of 25 followers on TikTok.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 1:Because even TikTok has evolved and it's changed. Maybe the ratio is different, but TikTok it's a lot easier for someone to hit. Follow.
Speaker 4:Oh, for sure.
Speaker 1:Whereas YouTube you're there for a reason. Did this YouTuber help you with what you were searching for? Did you watch another video? Sometimes it takes multiple videos for you to say okay, this guy gets my follow Right or a subscription. Subscribe yeah. It's a lot harder there.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and also people are stingy with that subscribe Mm-hmm. I know some really large creators on YouTube that they show their analytics and they're like 75% of you are unsubscribed or not subscribed and like the other other percentage of subscribers, like if you just all, like if even I got like 20% more to subscribe, like I would go up by like and we all laugh when we hear the like.
Speaker 1:Follow and share for more. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But that's because of that 70% is watching that and like it's dumb, but like, like, for some reason, when I say subscribe, you're like oh yeah, sure, okay, you pass for it, I'll give it to you right and you do get people to hit the button I feel like what do you think about if, if, as far as like a subscription or uh, to subscribe, if people, so let's say, you watch a creator's content and you watch, let's say, 10 of their videos all the way through, right, as far as like for watch time, that it auto subscribes you to the? I know through the algorithm it will show you more as you watch people's content.
Speaker 1:I think the algorithms have evolved enough where you don't have to subscribe to consistently get people's content.
Speaker 4:Yeah, but that's the thing it's like. But you want the subscriber because that's gonna help so followers and subscriber numbers are a vanity metric, yeah at the end of the day
Speaker 1:like I don't put too much weight on it, but I am aware that because I have 181 000 followers on tiktok yeah I can price my uh rates a little higher, or? Yeah uh, that some brands will only want to work with my Instagram because they can't afford my tick tock or whatever gotcha the thing that's more important is how does the content, the actual post, the video, how does that engage? Do it? Is it getting views, is it getting likes? And yeah, shares the engagement right.
Speaker 1:So less important as to the subscription and the followers, but is each post that I'm putting out there a standalone enough where it's getting? Yeah? I I you won't even reach like two percent of your audience half the time oh, I know so like.
Speaker 4:Why would I?
Speaker 1:want a huge audience I mean I'll take it, but like at the end of the day, I just want what I'm making and putting effort into to be seen.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, the results matter and I do. I do feel you on the the, it being a vanity metric, but a lot of times the the subscriber or follower count at least gets the door open like it kind of cracks the door.
Speaker 4:We're like oh hey they got a big audience. So let's start a conversation versus because I've also seen like micro influencers that have 10 000 followers but they're all hyper engaged. You know they don't have millions of followers but, like for a brand, they actually would want to do more business with that person, versus somebody that has 500,000 and gets like no engagement on their stuff.
Speaker 1:You're at a networking event. There's five people there. Can you have a quality conversation with all five of those people in the course of a two-hour event?
Speaker 4:You should be able to. Yeah, you should be able to If there's 100 people in the room.
Speaker 1:Will you have a quality conversation with all 100? Exactly, would be able to two hours people in the room? Yeah, will you have a quality conversation with all 100? Exactly, the more people that you're trying to get in front of, the less time you have for them, for that individual one-on-one time. Yeah, yeah those micro influencers have that advantage of they're really trying to grow and nurture their audience and not everyone is responding, so the few that do, they get to know really well.
Speaker 4:Yeah yeah, so it's actually a competitive kind of advantage to that, but as you can grow that, but that that's why brands are getting smarter about like hey, let's look at their engagements.
Speaker 1:Let's look at their comments.
Speaker 4:Yeah, they're more affordable, yeah yeah, well, man, this is cool man. I mean, I could talk to you all day about you know content, personal brand Milwaukee events. I just feel like there's so many different areas to go into. What do you got coming up on the horizon that you would like everybody to know about? And also, where can they find you to get connected?
Speaker 1:everything is jmat mke or hashtag. The word mke or jmat adhd is my mental health brand. Yeah, it's. I would just say, if you're interested in what was being discussed during this podcast, check out one of the accounts on your preferred platform dope and I know we didn't get to talk about the mental health stuff and I just was like let me just throw that should we do some push-ups here on set.
Speaker 4:Uh is it? Is it a push-up day?
Speaker 1:every day is a push-up day okay day 2719, I think. Give or take a day, yeah, it's starting to just blend. Now. Double check every day, I'm like did I miscount? Should we do it?
Speaker 4:we can let's do it. Let's do it all right real quick let's put it off to the side. We're doing the push-ups. Hold on. Oh wait, tell people what this is for first. What is for first? What is the push-ups?
Speaker 1:for. So the push-ups are symbolic of the average of 22 combat veterans that die by suicide each day. And yeah, it's not literally 22 a day, but if you take the annual numbers and you break it down into a consumable rate, that's what it would break out into each day. The number has fluctuated over the years, for sure, and it was kind of like the ALS bucket challenge back in the day where if you do it then you get to challenge others. If you do the 22 pushups, you're supposed to do it for 22 days and each day you're going to challenge somebody. I didn't stop. I wouldn't say I have them in a row anymore. Unfortunately I've missed maybe four out of the last seven years. Happens, life, whatever, but 2,700 or some days, seven and a half years is still.
Speaker 4:But you've been pretty day consistent.
Speaker 1:I've been pretty consistent, like there's been days where I'm like I don't really want to do them for my condo again, but I don't want to miss a day. So here we go Down One, two, three, four, five, six, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21.
Speaker 4:Oh, feels good man, it does Well, thank you so much for being on this podcast you're welcome man, great conversation get connected to J Matt, that's the greatest end to a podcast ever yeah, holy crap here is like a special outro.
Speaker 1:Well, we did the push-ups and then we decided we were done.
Speaker 4:Thanks for watching oh man, thanks for watching. Like, comment, subscribe uh, definitely, I want to know what you think about this episode. Please drop some comments in there. Get connected with J-Matt, because you never know, you could change a circle, change your life. We're out of here, peace. Don't forget to like, comment and subscribe, and don't forget to hit that notification bell for more amazing content that we're going to be putting out. And don't forget you can change your circle to change your life.
