Happy Easter, happy post-Easter. This is probably the most personal piece of written in a while – they're all personal but even though I've the author of all the newsletter, I try to keep them on a business-y level – about the making of the company. But this week I'm kinda adjusting my format and I want to talk about ideas that are exciting and how I'm implementing them into my life.
I have a lot of stress over how much to put my face in a video from week to week.
Like, I don't want people to think I'm hiding from the camera? I like to think that people will respond more to clips if they see my face but also, there's no evidence that matters or is important. Me, looking grouchy in front of a white wall?
Okay, whatever.
I think I want to focus on getting this stream of my best ideas captured during the week.
When I write, I try to write in real time and reach for “what am I doing? why am I doing it?”
Life, It All Depends On The Situation
When you've got it together – where does it go? Does it go towards money? Does it go towards creative work? And how well can we aim this thing and build it?
There's got to be enough time to enjoy yourself, have entertainment.
Me, I was out all weekend.
I was at Body of Christ Church. I was at a film networking event held by PEMDAS Productions in Atlanta and Savannah. I was at a seminar on bisexuality and neurodivergence (packed house).
I'm always going out to things like that and I'm always meeting people that have some sort of need or interest.
The Hotline
So if all of that makes sense, I would like to promote whatever you have going on.
If I'm talking to you, I probably know you well enough that you have something that I'm really interested in. So I have a connect button, ghostcoast.video/hotline
So if you have an event coming up, I'll talk about that event with everybody I see, right? But also if you have an observation or if you have like a shit post, and you can think of this as a conversation, and I just want you to use it.
Most of you are already in my address book if you're seeing this, but it helps. Just keep me up to date.
Takeover Tuesday
What about podcasts and streaming? MixDeity has a Tuesday afternoon show that I cohost, and wow, the way it works is that we help creatives connect with being able to articulate their ideas. This is really cool.
So we've got a panel that's going to look at those answers and every day we'll bring in a new creator and help them improve their skills.
This show is the hub for the MixDeity Media Cafe which connects artists, creators, venues, activists, entrepreneurs across the city of Atlanta. It's the place where creatives can learn, connect, and play. It's a referral network for vetted contacts for event services. So if you are a physical location in town and you need to run an event, you can reach out here and we'll get it staffed, we'll get it open, we'll get it operating, using systems that improve every day.
Basically the idea is that we want to be plugged into every cool and interesting thing that happens in town. A community of communities for your social world.
PreGaming Social
Saturday, there's also a casual meetup at the little Five Points Community Center.
So if you're just looking for something fun to do during the week, this is just another way to say hi to me in person. Let's have drinks. Ho, ho, ho. You should call me and make 100% sure I'll be there ofc. But I'm a regular.
Honestly, social interactions and just hanging out grows organizations faster than meetings do. So if you're the kind of person that likes to leave your house and interact with folks in the real world for any kind of network building, just to be relaxed and to be there.
Live Hotline
Okay, if you're a person that's too serious to join any kind of club, I'm also having a call once a month.
I just want you to be high functioning and have your brain together. I'm going to talk to you about digital organizing and publishing. Just have your mind together. I'm going to ask you questions and put you on the spot. It's a live workshop. I'm going to show you how I do what I do. So if you want to make a podcast, a blog, make an advertisement, make a piece of software.
Some sort of tutorial networking thing.
Not exactly sure on the date yet, but it'll come.
Members and Community
What about me? What can I teach you? I have a course.
It's all recorded information on memberships.
One of the reasons why I communicate in all these different formats is like I just don't know what someone will not be able to communicate or understand it if I don't intersperse the message, right? If I don't put it out in a way that people can hear it and really be a part of it then I don't know what the hell to do. What can I tell you?
It's a digital publishing company so I'm being literal when I talk about I'd use digital publishing a lot. So membership course. This is a class about membership creation, how to make a petition or a digital sign-in and make a like a membership group. So if you have like a local political issue that you want to involve people in or something on a neighborhood level it's kind of what I designed it for a little bit. It's also very heavily inclined towards just making money from people.
No Boss System
I just don't know what else to tell you. I know the human attention span is it can be a little jumpy. So I've tried to jump through every possible hoop.
Some of you like to take your ideas and slow cook them.
My mom had a health scare. I had to stop and pat myself on the back, just in the sense that I can look at this and say, wow, I've got everything. And I've just been so guns blazing all the time. Not that you aren't going to feel shitty sometimes.
But just when you're very well focused on what your skills are and what you provide to the world around you, it just gives you an increased focus, increased heart, determination to take on the world around you.
I put a lot of trust and hope in myself and my own resilience. We have so much that we can talk about now in terms of how we get work done, and how we stay focused, and how we build these things out that I kind of have to communicate in a brand new way and talk just a little bit about everything that I'm doing and seeing and participating in through the week, which, again, is a little change from how I used to do things in the past.
What else did I see this week?
I saw Gypsy Rose Blanchard get divorced.
I saw the Cody Crybabies.
I saw that film networking event.
I saw colleges are having trouble processing financial aid meal.
I saw Cameron Brink agreeing with guys.
I saw Kahlua stir up. I saw positive self-talk.
Lead Generation Walkthrough
Okay, now I want to kind of explain all of the tools that I'm using and how they work together.
I'm going to read this, record it, and just sort of slowly build it into front facing training material.
Focusing here on lead generation,
Okay, so in order for any call to happen, in order for any connection to happen, I have to get someone on a mailing list.
You know, anybody I'm on a call with, they reach me through a list, how did they meet me?
Number one, I use meetup. I went to a meetup group, where people go in for two minutes, and they give their presentations.
You've got to sit there for, you know, an hour, two hours, show some sincere interest.
And everybody that you run into is not necessarily a match for what you're doing. But sometimes they are.
“There wasn't any gulp, I've got to sell you, you've got to sell me!” we kept a very natural vibe. Right? You've got to be kind of a pro at emotional connection, in order to do that.
But it's free, just find a group of people and get along with them and talk about what's most important to you. And get them on a one on one call like this.
And generally, just in real time, we can achieve each other's purposes with a conversation. I'm also using some software.
This is NuReply. And the way that it works is you put in an Excel spreadsheet of contacts, you put in your email address, whatever you need in terms of sending the messages.
And it sends your email out to a group of people with whatever variables you need in terms of adding a personalized opening, or talking about a specific industry, or inviting people to a specific event, or asking them to connect with you in one way or another.
And this is a lot more direct than making a social media post and sending it into the wilderness. And it's a lot more steady and consistent than Facebook or LinkedIn, where, you know, they really want you to spend time on the platform. And it's completely game towards, you know, if your whole social network lives there, that's their goal. And if your whole social network, you don't have to go anywhere.
If you're using a tool like NuReply, you are getting into the email inbox. And then your time is not just spent looking at the social media, but it's really spent on one to one connection. So that's important.
Okay, what about the website. I use fluent booking. It's built into WordPress, my page builder. So it's built into WordPress, which is my page builder, I don't have to pay Calendly $15 a month, you know, and it scales upward if you have like a team that's working on bringing together your your contacts.
I book with people or people book with me. And then they are put on a client relationship manager. And I use this for my personal life. I use this for my business life.
I use this tool everywhere I can use it. This is called Fluent CRM. And it allows me to tag people by their interests. So if they are business moguls, I can tag them. If they're people I'm getting on calls with, if they're podcasts, guests, hosts, listeners, whatever their interests are, I'm just sitting down with them, walking them through that.
And in fact, one of the things I do is I form so that people can tag themselves. This tool is fluent forms.
And that's how that works. You know, I build out membership, questionnaire files, whatever, tell me your interests. Do you want to save the whales? Do you want to save the environment? Do you want what do you want to talk to me about?
And even if you don't have the time to talk to me in real time, if I have something to say that's relevant to your interest, I can send you a message. I don't really fill anybody's inbox.
Hell, I would like to have more things to talk about.
Doing this making projects like this kind of helps me with that. Just building out a database of what I've got to say, what's going on, how I'm doing, yada, yada, yada. Makes that whole communication process faster.
It seems awkward to talk about sales here, but it's just a fact that you're going to want to talk about money. So there's nothing to hide from. One of the things is, I mean, obviously, you can just get someone on a call. And if they need money to give you money for like a service, then you can just punch it up in Stripe and you can send them the invoice like right away.
The tool that I use for that is, what is it?
It's DocuSign is the name of the tool. It's DocuSign.
And we have a mock-up contract for like three of the main things that I might want to do business for, you know, and went to see a lawyer about them.
So like if they need video production, if they need social media management, if they need a web funnel built, we've got just the stock contracts for those things. And I can do that.
Relationships & Knowledge
The majority of relationships that I enter to with are not financial relationships. They're just normal human relationships.
But I kind of make it a point to put people into those same systems because that's how I communicate with people without blowing my head off. Right.
So for that, the tool.
I mean, I talked about Fluent CRM, keeping track of those relationships once they're there. But it handles both the sign up stage and the relationship and the interest. So you see that it's like really wide ranging in terms of what it can do.
For me, sometimes I need to share ideas and training.
So I have a tool called LearnPress. I can record videos, upload them. Right now, I mean, I'm putting videos up on YouTube. It's not so much the end of the world, whether I have them bottled up tight, but I do have them. I have training for organizations. I have internal training for how to use the tools that I'm talking about here. Keeping recordings of our brainstorms and conversations about how to do things, um, how to upload, how to put things on this website.
So it becomes a very self satisfying system, you know.
And this has, LearnPress has got a lot of relationships with learning in the terms of you can set it to be monthly. You can set it to have weekly drops of new content. And you can also set it to synchronize with emails. It can also work with text messages, but I haven't gotten that deep into the weeds yet.
But just the idea that: if you sign up for that membership course, it will email you each day at the same time.
And it'll send you a link to the new video that's on LearnPress.
And you've just got the means to reply to me. And you can always get back on a call with me. If you want to change your financial relationship, or you can always just quietly change a form here. If you want to change your interests, you know, you just have all kinds of control over how you relate to me. You can unsubscribe and not hear from me, whatever, whatever, whatever.
When you think about a business, they definitely want to have that kind of level of tracking, but they don't really have anything that's cool or worth like, like a person just wants to hear less from them. He wants to hear about the price of shirts. All right.
The whole mechanism of how it works is totally different because it's more interpersonal. There's something hopefully that you're getting out of it, whether it's a venue access or space or knowledge or broadcasting.
Streaming Radio
The thing about the podcast network is it runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, certified freak. You can just use it whenever you want. It just is always streaming. You can always listen to it.
My hope is if it becomes really popular for people to, you know, maybe you don't have time to be part of the creator economy, but you can just give feedback on whatever you've got going on and just your personal network, that it will get out and reach the right people with our small amount of time.
Yeah. And so that's like a whole loop, just audible content of us talking to an audible stream and it's just the whole kit and caboodle.
It's just the whole story and anything that you want to interact with is there. Wow. That's digital publishing.
That's what it's all about. Wow.