Brand Architect – Details, episodes & analysis

In this episodes we discuss:

• Importance of the storytelling in marketing
• What kind of stories could you tell
• The importance of transparency
• How to find your differentiator
• what is a fractional CMO
• The future of work

• Importance of the online communities
• How Appics managed to build such a loyal community
• Influencer marketing
• Authenticity online
• Importance of he cooperation with other partners
• Future trends of the social media platforms

Today I spoke with Chris Walker. Chris is the founder and CEO of Refine Labs. Their Revenue Engine Optimization formula helps B2B companies grow revenue, increase pipeline velocity, and lower customer acquisition costs. In this interview talk about - how to start and grow your business - short term focused companies and the power of word of mouth - cold messaging on social and personalization - should you market during the coronavirus crisis - how to re-evaluate and adjust your business for these challenging times

My today's guest is one of my best friends Julie Sheranosher.

Julie was a Captain in the army and had absolutely no choice but to get REALLY good with time management. She found out that she has a talent for understanding people's needs and routines and matching them with custom-tailored time management systems that work for them.

Julie quit the army and became a Time Hacker, helping the highly successful entrepreneurs to reach the NEXT level. She has a blog, 2 podcasts, book and a whole bunch of happy clients.

Today we will talk about how to make time for writing every day and Julie provides us with practical tips of how to make it happen. Below are the highlights of the interview, but as always they don't cover everything we spoke about. That is why I encourage you to dedicate about 50 minutes to listen to the interview itself and learn much more than I covered in the notes.

Highlights

Time Hacking is all about finding how time can work for you instead of the other way around.

It all comes down to finding clarity, focus and priority.

Every single day you get 24 hours no matter what you did with the previous ones. It doesn't matter if you've managed it well or not. You get a new fresh start.

There is no such thing as "I don't have time". Time is not something you have. Time is something you make.

If you want something to happen then you make time for it.

Multi tasking is basically doing more things slower. I am never ever busy. I'm always doing what is the most important thing right now.

I am never busy for anything because it's always my choice.

Changing habits take from 28 to up to 32 days straight. And if you stop in the middle the counter starts from zero and you have to start over again.

If you can't see results and don't see early wins you won't stick with it.

Julie Sheranosher's website

The Time Hacker podcast

Julie's Time Saving Tools

Please feel free to join me and other Write 2B Read podcast listeners at our Facebook group. [text-blocks id="podcast-subscription-links" plain=1]

I knew that my interview with James would be packed with wisdom and that you'd enjoy it too. For the very few of you, who don't know who James Altucher is - I have included his short bio below for you. James Altucher is a successful entrepreneur, investor, board member, and the writer of 11 books including the recent WSJ Bestseller, "Choose Yourself!". He has started and sold several companies for eight figure exits. He's on the board of a billion revenue company, has written for The Financial Times, The New York Observer, and over a dozen popular websites for the past 15 years. He's run several hedge funds, venture capital funds, and is a successful angel investor in technology, energy, and biotech. He has also lost all his money, made it back, lost it, made it back several times and openly discusses how he did it in his columns and books. Although I encourage you to listen to the interview, because there is no other way to feel the energy and the flavor of our conversation, I have included the important points James mentioned during our talk below for you.

My today's guest is Srinivas Rao. Srini is a bestselling author and the host and founder of The Unmistakable Creative podcast. In this episode we have a pretty unstructured talk about things related to success and creativity.

Expectations are killer of joy.

You will never live up to everybody's expectations.

Part of what kills our ability to so things is that we have these lofty expectations and when we don't - suddenly things are lot easier.

There is a beauty about being a beginner and not having an audience and not having anybody reading yourself. There is something very liberating about that.

Feedback can become whole other form of addiction.

We're culturally conditioned to seek praise and avoid criticism.

We've kind of really gotten obsessed with growing the audience - almost to a fault. And the challenge with that is that we're trying to do work that is designed to build audience as opposed to work that is designed to strike a cord or touch someone's heart.

It doesn't stop after you had first level of success. That's not where it ends.

Being away from the computer. The key is shutting down every digital distraction.

One thing that kills creativity is comparison.

"Where my work started to improve and change is when I stopped reading books about social media and blogging. Once I literally stopped reading any books about marketing or online marketing or social media and then my work got significantly more interesting and better."

Please feel free to join me and other Write 2B Read podcast listeners at our Facebook group.

My today's guest is Ryan Hanley. He helps brands and businesses find their audience, tell their story and win the battle for attention online. He is also the author of Content Warfare: How to find your audience, tell your story and win the battle for attention online.

Content marketing is the process of creating media in the effort to add value to an audience.

It's a culture of audience building. You are never not building an audience.

You don't write a book and then go and find an audience. That would possibly be the worst possible thing you could do as an author.

You never gonna find time. [spp-tweet "You either make time or you don't wanna write a book that badly."]

1. it validates the idea
2. it activates the audience
3. it is a good accountability tool

With crowdfunding your core audience has already bought the book. So you have to sell the book twice: once to those who will fund your book and once again when it is published.

Those who back up your campaign will not be part of your Amazon sales and therefore contribute to your book's bestselling rankings.

Ryan raised $10K with his crowdfunding campaign and it took only 147 people to fill that campaign. This means that you down need huge audience - all you need is couple of hundred people, who are willing to invest in you.

Ryan Hanley's website

Content Warfare (Ryan's book)

Publishizer (crowd-publishing platform for authors)

Book Baby (POD hardcovers)

CreateSpace (papaerback)

Please feel free to join me and other Write 2B Read podcast listeners at our Facebook group.

My Today's guest is James Thorn. J. Thorn is a Top 100 Most Popular Author in Horror, Science Fiction, Action & Adventure and Fantasy (Amazon Author Rank). He has published over one million words and has sold more than 130,000 books worldwide. In March of 2014 Thorn held the #5 position in Horror alongside his childhood idols Dean Koontz and Stephen King (at #4 and #2 respectively).

James believes that reading dark fiction can be healing. James admires strong people who are not afraid to speak their mind.

You can watch this presentation at the Author Marketing live where and find out about all the mistakes he made at the very beginning. You can get more details and contact James through his website.

"I figured out what to do by failing over and over and over again"

"I think talent is overrated. Perseverance is essential in becoming a writer"

"There was a moment when I was sitting at my desk and had my finger on a delete button on a title at KDP"

"Horror is like pizza"

"I like my books to be escape for people"

"Even the best book is gonna get really harsh criticism"

"Reviews are for readers. It's readers' space and authors should stay out of it"

[spp-tweet "When you are starting just write the story you wanna read."]

Writing a novel is a long lonely process and if you are not really excited about what you're doing - it's gonna be hard.

If you can't take criticism or you can't accept rejection writing is not the business for you.

[spp-tweet "You have to keep writing and you have to keep growing."]

If you give up easily you're not gonna be successful writer because there are way more rejections than there are rewards in this business.

You should chase what you're passionate about in life no matter what anyone else thinks about it.

If you're doing it for money you will eventually lose interest. It will become a job and you'll wanna do something else.

Your biggest challenge is not sales - your biggest challenge is discoverability. What you're trying to do is get eyes on your work and in order to do that you have to sacrifice your compensation.

[spp-tweet "Giving your book for free to certain people at certain times does pay off."]

Personal branding is the single most important thing you can do besides the writing.

Be patient. It takes time for you to develop your voice as a writer. It takes time to understand how to unfold a story. You're gonna doubt yourself. You're gonna have moments when you want to quit. You will have people tell you that you should quit. And if you listen to it all you will quit and you won't write.

Just persevere, be patient and at certain point if writing is for you you'll know it and if not you'll know it. And that should come from inside and from your own judgement and not based on the things that people are telling you.

Please feel free to join me and other Write 2B Read podcast listeners at our Facebook group.

Neeraj Kumar is an IT Professional based in London. He was born and grew up in India and moved to the UK in 2000.

Neeraj has just launched his maiden Novel called ‘The I.T. Immigrant’, which a biographical fiction.

On this Podcast Neeraj shares some insights about his writing journey, what inspired him to write this Novel and some practical tips and tricks he has applied in his own writing and book promotions. Neeraj can be contacted via his Facebook page

You can get all the details and reserve your spot here 

The Master Class starts on March 20 and the group will be limited to 25 people.

25 people only because I want to ensure that I have enough time to provide you with the personal support, encouragement and over the shoulder guidance on top of the knowledge you’ll be getting.

Please do not hesitate to contact me and ask anything you need to know but could not find on the website.

I will be more than happy to meet you in the class.

Let’s share your story with the world!

Please feel free to join me and other Write 2B Read podcast listeners at our Facebook group.

Today I would like to talk to you about the most exciting and at the same time scariest moment. That is the moment when what you’ve been working on for a while is put out to the word.

Many of my guests have mentioned that the biggest challenge that writers are facing is hitting the publish button.

Many writers complete their work and stop there. There are so many amazing stories hidden somewhere in someone’s computer folder or in someone’s drawer.

What makes publishing a book so scary? I can tell my personal opinion. I think that what keeps most of us from putting ourselves out there is the fear of failure. We are afraid to fail publicly. We are afraid that the book won’t be liked, that the book will get bad reviews. We are terrified that people will be asking “so how is your book doing?” and we’ll have to admit that it is not selling…

Besides the emotional pressure we are having with ourselves, by putting our work out there we are putting ourselves in a situation where we also have to deal with others. By publishing our work we kind of give permission to people to read it and later publicly share their opinion about it. The opinion, which can’t be predicted in advance. The opinion which can’t be silenced if it’s not what you hoped for.

So, does it mean that those who hide their writings are right? Well… I don’t think so.

Because along with all the things I said there is another side to this.

What if your book helps someone? What if your book inspires people? What if people need to get the message you’ve shared in the book? What if your writing will help someone escape the reality, forget their problems and re-live the lives of your characters? What if people will actually like it and the book does well?

You know what?

You will never know what will actually happen unless you publish.

So you have 2 choices. Either keep that writing to yourself and keep dreaming seeing your name on book’s cover knowing that the dream will never come true… or collect all the courage you have, take the risk and hit that publish button.

I know it’s hard. I know that you have to get out of your comfort zone for that and that taking risks is scary… But I also know that nothing amazing in life happens until you leave that comfort zone of yours behind.

I know that it is very difficult…

At the same time I believe that an unread story is a broken dream.

Unread story is a broken dream

I know what I’m talking about because I’ve been there. I had different notebooks and word documents hidden far away. I’ve been their only reader and they felt lonely and neglected because of that.

None of the books wants to be read only by its author.

Maybe you are not ready to publish your book because you think it’s not good enough? Well, let me tell you something. None of the good writers are ever completely satisfied with their writing. They all think that it could have been written better. And that’s ok… No one’s first book has been perfect. But if not that first book… we would never have read author’s second, third and fourth books either.

When I was launching this podcast my biggest fear was that no one would listen to me. Well if I listened to that fear and did not launch - no one would listen to me for sure… but you’re listening to me now right? Which kind of proves my point. Just don’t let the fear stop you. Go ahead and try and you’ll be surprised how wrong you were to feel scared.

So ask yourself now…

Do you have a story that you want to...