Scott Fishman:    Today’s episode of The Seven Minute Sales Minute is brought to you by Audible.com. Get a free audiobook download and 30-day free trial at www.audibletrial.com/sevenminute. That’s www.audibletrial.com/S-E-V-E-N-M-I-N-U-T-E.

Jon Dwoskin:    Thank you for joining us for another episode of The Seven Minute Sales Minute podcast, your bite-sized and easy-to-digest guide to jump-starting your sales career and putting you on the road to gaining more prospects, more clients, more business, and, ultimately, more income. On this episode of the Seven Minute Sales Minute, we interview Mary Agnes Antonopoulos. Mary Agnes is a social media strategist whose client list includes best-selling authors, Academy Award winners, award-winning artists, Hollywood producers. And that’s just the beginning.

With over 100 speaking gigs for associations, organizations, and corporate clients, her experience speaks for itself. Even after more than 100 product launches with funnels and social lead-in, Mary Agnes still lives to serve others and believes that social media can change the game for anyone. She took the time out of her busy schedule to sit down with us this week and share some of her encyclopedic knowledge of social media. Grab a pen and paper, folks, because you’re going to want to take notes for this one. We all have an audience to discover us and Mary Agnes wants to help us along the way. Without further ado, here’s our interview with the one and only Mary Agnes.

Thank you for agreeing to be on our podcast, the Seven Minute Sales Minute. Not that this is limited to seven minutes, but we appreciate it. You have been a huge influence in my business, and I just want to share a story for anybody who’s listening to this. The way I connected with you was Bill O’Reilly. He was selling his Freedom Fest videos, which I bought. You were an amazingly dynamic speaker, and in your presentation, I learned something. You said, “I’ve given my phone number and only 14 people have ever called me. I’ve been giving my number for a decade,” however long you said, so I called you and said “Hey, I want to be your 15th caller.”

For any salesperson who is listening to this, take advantage when people give you their phone number because I called you, we had a great talk, and you gave me some incredible advice which has been ground-breaking in my business. This podcast for my business, is I’m an executive advisor business coach. You said, “I want you to start doing a video every single day,” which I did – 7 days – and then I went down to just Monday through Friday, but it has had a tremendous impact in my business. It has helped a tremendous amount of people. I’m able to reach and share advice with people, and it’s all because of you, so thank you a billion times.

Mary Agnes:    I want to tell you the next step to that. I’m just going to jump in and give more advice. If you’re putting up a video every day, if they’re really short, you can have them opt in for a longer one with more information on the same topic.

Jon Dwoskin:    That’s actually a really good idea. All right. Good. All right. Good, we’re jumping in. All right. Good. Listen, Mary Agnes, for all of you listening, is the social media guru of the internet. If you are looking to figure out how to utilize the social platforms, Mary Agnes is ideal. She is having an incredible conference at the end of January. January 29th and 30th, right?

Mary Agnes:    Yup. It should be fun.

Jon Dwoskin:    It’s going to be great. I can’t make it, but I’ve already bought the series which I can’t wait to watch. She’s going to be giving priceless information out today. You, somebody who I respected, just did a whole show this afternoon with Ryan Lee. I’m sure you’re fresh with all this great energy and ideas. Enough of me talking, tell everybody, maybe for starters, the five best social media tips that you can give.

Mary Agnes:    I’m so happy to do that! That’s my favorite. I’m going to stay on video for three of the five tips.

Number one is those one-minute videos that I had you start shooting every day leads the game because YouTube is owned by Google. I don’t know how many people know that, but YouTube being owned by Google, if you start shooting videos every day, your Google ranking goes up. It’s a great way to get your face out there and be your own ambassador. To share your expertise, that might be unique to you, so you start building brand advocacy, brand recognition, but the biggest thing is you start raising your Google ranking. We might not talk about that so much in social, but your Google ranking is how often does Google suggest you when somebody types in a search in your realm. That starts to raise and raise and raise exponentially. Those videos are so important. One minute on social…

Tip number two is tell them “Opt in to get four great tips on this same topic.” All you do is every single day you drive to the same video. So, you have sort of an editorial calendar. All week long, you’re talking about the same thing. Five days a week, you send out a tip a day and you send them to the four tips they haven’t seen yet. We know people are only using social when they’re on. They’re not on when we’re on. If you start doing those videos like John does, every day, five days a week, then you have four more tips. All you need is ten tips in total. Auto responder on Sunday so anybody who’s opting in gets these four already.

Jon Dwoskin:    Yeah, that’s great.

Mary Agnes:    The third tip about video, I just wanted to say, is you want to put those videos up on YouTube because YouTube is owned by Google, but you also want to load them organically to Facebook. If you load it to your Facebook page, that’s your business page or your fan page rather than just your profile, then Facebook will let you put on a Call to Action at the end of the video. If you guys see that, it’s only available on a page, not on a profile or a group, and at the very end, when you send in the video it says ‘do you want to edit this video,’ always say yes. It will give you a place to put a title, a little description and at the very bottom of that template it says Call to Action, no button. It defaults to no button, so a lot of us didn’t notice it, except we have an agency, so we noticed it right away. Click no button and you get choices like “Opt In.” “Learn Here.” “Register Now.” “’Buy Now.” You can give them a link and it makes that video clickable over to your webpage.

Jon Dwoskin:    Oh wow! That’s terrific.

Scott Fishman:    Oh wow!

Mary Agnes:    I know. Only marketers are really excited to use it. Who cares. But if you’re sending more traffic to your site from social, there is a huge opportunity to convert social to list conversion. That’s where the money lives. That’s where the revenue lives.

Jon Dwoskin:    Amazing. Tell us more. Tell us more.

Mary Agnes:    Those are my three tips. My fourth tip has nothing to do with that, whatsoever. Well, put those videos on LinkedIn also. You can put them on your LinkedIn profile or as an update just to LinkedIn, you can blast it out to your followers. But the thing I like most about LinkedIn is to put up PowerPoint slides as slide share. The real revenue, like show me the money kind of revenue, is on LinkedIn, but none of us know what to do with it, right? Start putting your great PowerPoint presentation, like you and I, O’Reilly, we’ve got great presentations. Load them on slide share, put that on your LinkedIn and the CEO’s start searching for slide shares based on the topic they want to learn about. That is the number one space that high CEO decision makers go to, is slide share. Isn’t it crazy? Who knew?

Scott Fishman:    Wow.

Jon Dwoskin:    Everything you say is filled with such rich content, Mary.

Scott Fishman:    Was there another one that you wanted to throw out?

Mary Agnes:    I would say the last tip is have a podcast. Everybody is doing podcast this, podcast that. We’re all like what kind of real estate is there left for me to get? Who’s going to listen to mine? I like what Ryan did. The ten-minute podcast, right? The ten-minute podcast. The win is not who’s listening. Like, great, whatever a few listeners. There’s not a lot of revenue conversion for podcasts. The intimacy of having a discussion like we are right now, in a podcast, you’ll generally be talking to them about who they are and what they do. We’re doing swap expertise. That’s different.

If I asked you to come on, I was just talking about you, Jon – what are you doing, who are you, what is your most important stuff – there’s an intimacy in that conversation that often times can become a shared revenue experience, an opportunity, a chance to go out to lunch. Hey, we should go out to lunch some time, man. There are the seeds of a relationship with the people you would like to work with. You just say “Hey, I’d love you to be on my podcast.” Like I’m 200 episodes. I have a client that has 200 episodes, a million downloads, yesterday said “I don’t see the RLI in this.” I was like holy cannoli! You need to be reaching out to the people you interviewed and follow up and make those relationships come to fruition. That’s the win for podcasts.

Scott Fishman:    That’s great.

Mary Agnes:    Yeah, for service providers.

Jon Dwoskin:    Oh yeah, for sure.

Mary Agnes:    Absolutely.

Scott Fishman:    Now with so many different social media outlets out there, they don’t really come with instruction manuals. What are the biggest mistakes you see people making?

Mary Agnes:    Let’s go through really fast all of them. Let’s do all of them.

Jon Dwoskin:    You’re the instruction manual. So everybody knows, right now you’re listening to the instruction manual.

Mary Agnes:    On LinkedIn, the biggest mistake you can make is in their headline, there’s space where you can put your headline, people put their title. If I see CEO of Rockaway Writer, that would be my formal title. Or CMO of Viral Integrity. Who knows what that mean? They’re coming to me only because they know me then. If I put in social strategist NYC, because NYC has a brand, right? I’m going to piggyback off of whatever branding I can. Social strategist NYC, top speaker Blog World, speaker IBPA. You use that headline as a headline to broadcast all your great stuff and not as your title. Number one mistake on LinkedIn.

Jon Dwoskin:    You gave me that advice. I want to contribute for a second because you also gave me that advice. I changed my LinkedIn title. I’m an executive advisor business coach and I changed it to “C-Level Exec? Stuck? I grow businesses big. Very big.” I have gotten, for people who are listening, I have gotten two clients because they have called me and said I saw you on LinkedIn, I’m a C-Level executive, and I’m stuck. They read it right off because of you.

Mary Agnes:    Well, that is the best implementation of that advice that I’ve ever heard. I might go piggyback off of what you did. “Socially confused? Socially diseased? Let me help.”

Jon Dwoskin:    So, what else, because I think that people make a ton of mistakes. What are some other common mistakes?

Mary Agnes:    I don’t know who your audience is 100%, but I’m going to speak as if we are all CEO, exec level service providers. What I want to say, is if you travel the country for anything, go and do an advanced search on LinkedIn and tell them you are going to be in their area and you want to support them. I’m going to San Francisco for my event, let me go search San Francisco. Reach out to some of the highest people in there. Like, Adobe’s there. Say “I’d love to come and do a presentation on turning your employees into a branding army.”

I want every company out there to know how to use their thirty employees as their personal branding army. Give them a suite of posts, give them a suite of pictures, let them chose, make them opt in to be part of this. I think that’s a great win. I’m going to reach out to Adobe while I’m out there, so it starts three months before you travel somewhere. You start sending a note. Then you send a video note. Use LinkedIn more than we all are. This is really where the RLI lives on social media.

Scott Fishman:    Sure.

Jon Dwoskin:    I love that you talk about video notes. Since you gave me the video tip, I’m video crazy. A lot of my clients, I’m trying to get them to think video, video, video. That’s outstanding. When it comes to social media, people I don’t think fully understand how to do SEO and I think that’s so confusing. Everybody thinks that they can maybe … They don’t know how to do it. They don’t know who to reach out to do it for them. Embedded in their psyche. Can you talk a little bit about SEO?

Mary Agnes:    The thing about SEO that people don’t understand, well, let’s just go for the basics. The first is any space that has a search bar has an SEO model. So SEO, literally is what it says, it’s search engine optimization. You want to be optimizing the search on every single platform. Facebook has a search bar, so it has search engine optimization. As does LinkedIn, as does YouTube. All of those feed into the Google, the mac daddy, of search engine optimization. Google ranks your website. This space of search engine optimization goes from the bricks in the wall to the wall itself. The wall itself is Google. Now, Google, about two years, eighteen months ago … Google had recognized all along that the model for search engine optimization was broken. The model was they would use keywords from your website and how often it was updated to rank you.

Quickly, people figured out how to gain the system and SEO companies were born. Then the only way you could get found was if you gained into the system and had an SEO company. A good example is a weight loss person could never get found above Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, forget it. Even if you had high credibility. Like, JJ Bergen was our client for years. We could never get JJ above Weight Watchers. Never. In the meantime, the best you could hope for was a secondary line. If JJ was about non-inflammation diets, hopefully you could get found there. All the big guys really say the secondary market, so they would have impinge upon you as well.

So, what happens? Google hates that it’s so non-democratic. They go out and make a new model for SEO. They create the social grid model. There are two updates that happened, if anybody heard about these, they were called Penguin and Panda. Incrementally, they rolled what you do on social media into how Google treats you as a company and as an individual. Now, if you don’t have a social presence, you don’t have a Google ranking. You really have to be just active on social, active on your website, you have to be active online for Google to really start to recognize you. That’s my opinion. It’s published. It’s Google’s, this is how they run the world. They’re watching everything we do. When we turn off our cookies, we sort of do ourselves a disservice.

Scott Fishman:    Right.

Jon Dwoskin:    That makes sense. What are your thoughts on these Hootsuite, TweetDeck, that sort of thing that automate your social media? Is that something that’s good?

Mary Agnes:    No, they’re not good. You know, for a long time they were great and I was like, “Yay, do anything that makes your life easier!” What we saw happen was Facebook started banging people who used Hootsuite. If you’re scheduling your posts through a third party platform, you get about one tenth as much exposure by Facebook. Why? If somebody clicks their link, they get over to Hootsuite. Facebook doesn’t like anything that takes people off of Facebook. They sell advertising based on how many people are on Facebook, live, at any given moment. They can see the ups and the downs in the locations. People are very sophisticated with Facebook ads, even little people, so they are going to market to San Francisco people based on my ad requests, but only to people who are on live. There’s no win if they have people clicking away to YouTube. That’s why we don’t float video across with a YouTube link any more, we upload it directly to Facebook. If you want to delay your posts, just schedule them on Facebook. That’s why there’s a scheduler.

Scott Fishman:    Very interesting.

Mary Agnes:    If you go hire somebody to do social, like I get hired, I have an agency, don’t let them use third party platforms. Make them respond in real time to your tweets. Make them post in real time. An agency should have the manpower to do that or they’re not big enough for you.

Jon Dwoskin:    I will just comment on your agency, and you may not want to say who some of your clients are, but I know we’ve talked and for those of you listening, your clientele is many of the Who’s Who who are doing social media placements.

Mary Agnes:    Yeah, high pedigree. We’re very grateful for this. It’s crazy.

Jon Dwoskin:    You know, you’re phenomenal. What you do, you’re approachable, you’re fun to be around and you always are direct and say it how it is. Let me ask you a question, so I want you to give, I want it to come from you, the advice you gave me. Whether you’re a C-Level Executive, an owner of a business, a salesperson, tell everybody how to do a one-minute video.

Mary Agnes:    Oh, okay. So the thing about one-minute videos is you really want to have this formula. I used to teach it. I used to do a formula one-minute video like … First of all, it was a two-minute tip of the day. I would say first, give your name, rank, serial number, which is your name, your website, a two-second mission statement – why do you do what you do – then give them the tip and exit with name, rank, and phone number. You know what?  We are so invested in our industry and helping people do the right thing, we watched our own videos get less and less views. Then we started testing it again and here’s what happens.

I went back to what I learned from Christine Comaford, my first client. Maybe she was my third client, but my first big client. She wrote Rules for Renegades, if anybody has an ancient memory. It was like eight years ago. She said always go from their pain, then people start relating to you. I was going through old notebooks. I was like I’m going to do video that way. Now we have everybody doing this. You know how frustrated you get when you’re on social media for five hours and you’re answering questions and you’re pouring your heart out and you’re building relationships, and you haven’t built anybody to your list. You’re not getting any RLI and you’re so frustrated. Is everybody nodding?

This is what I would do on video. Everyone is nodding when they watch the video. Then I say I’m Mary Agnes Antonopolous and I’ve helped so far about 18,000 individuals and 22,000 companies over that exact hurdle, so let me help you. I’m going to give you one tip right here. This is the same tip I apply to Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street Jack Canfield, Christine Comaford, JJ Bergen, all New York Times best sellers, so you give yourself that quick second. Talk really fast.

You want to tell them why you are better at what you do than the other social media people. How many people do we know in social media? Every time I make a left turn, I run another one of us over. Tell them why I’m better and I’m just going to give good advice. I’m going to say how painful is this, yes. Here’s who I am, just to give a credential. Then what do we do. So what do we do? If you’re not practicing social to list conversion, if you’re not constantly moving people over to your list, constantly, every day, you’re really spending wasted time on social media. You can’t market as aggressively through social. It’s inappropriate and we don’t do it. Get them over to your list and immediately when they join, opt them into something wonderful. If they’re watching a video, offer them four more videos on the tip. Or another four-minute tip video, right? Move them from one thing to another. Then once they come in say, “I’m so grateful you watched that video. It’s my privilege to serve you. Let me invite you to my next webinar.”

Then you move them to a live Q&A webinar and from there you can sell them something. By the third touch, somebody that wants to work with you, wants to hear what you have to sell, it’s not inappropriate. The first touch is on social, the second touch was at the opt in, the third touch was the webinar, or whatever is appropriate for you. Then at the end of that I say, “You know what, I don’t even sell at the end. I sell right at the beginning.” I just say “For those of you who are really busy, I want you to know how to get into my class.” Then make it appropriately affordable to any man, right?

I say the class is 300 bucks, but if you can’t afford it, I want you to tell me that. I teach that class anyway, I want to figure out how to make it work for you. Please come to the class. Just tell me it wasn’t a fit for you financially. We just let people come in if we need to. There’s no win in not having those people in your audience. That’s sort of exactly what I would suggest doing. If you do your video, the formula just to recap is: pain, credential, release (that means your tip), and call to action. I wish we could make it an acronym like the PARK, you know? Pain, credential, release from the pain (which is the tip you promised) and then the call to action in one minute, forty seconds.

Jon Dwoskin:    That’s outstanding. Mary, feel free to tell people who your clients are, but I also want you to tell people where they can go to get more information about you. I want you to tell them about your event that’s coming up. It’s going to be incredible and the information is going to take their business to a different hemisphere. Share with everybody.

Mary Agnes:    I think it will too, I have to say. We faced the difficulty of boring. I don’t just teach social media, right? Because that would be so empty. We have a 57% high-open rate on a list that went to 100,000 people. For us to get 57,000 people to open something was phenomenal. That’s all about open. That’s all about your subject line. One of the things we’re going to teach that has nothing to do with social media is email trickery and subject lines to get open reads. There were just too much to pack into one day. What we did was make a two-day event, where even if all you can go to is one day, it still made financial sense. It had to be inexpensive.

It’s a $297 event. It’s in San Francisco on the 29th and 30th of January and we’re going to do it on the East Coast in March. I’m going to work with Ryan Lee and we’re going to piggyback his event somewhere. I just think it’s going to be phenomenal. We’re going to teach each of the social platforms. We’re going to teach with guests the things I don’t teach, like Facebook advertising. I teach YouTube advertising five times more successful than Facebook ads, you guys. Think about why.

I’ll just throw you a really important tip. When somebody’s on Facebook and sees an ad, they’re like doing random stuff, watching their family, right. They’re looking at pictures, they’re looking whatever and an ad pops up. When somebody is on YouTube looking how to fix my car and you pop up an ad that says don’t fix your car, buy a new car. They’re already in the pain of their car. They’re already in the pain of social media or the pain of executive matters, but like, I’m so stuck, how do I bust my career wide open. Then your video pops up, so they were already in pain when they got there. That’s going to be an important part of what we teach.

Then the best practices for every network: How to write your blog if you’re not a writer. We’re going to have somebody there doing head shots for free. It should be really a lot of fun. As far as who we’ve worked with, we just have a high pedigree of clients and I have to be honest with you, I don’t know how that happened. I feel like a hot mess most days. I problem solve. And webinars. We’re going to teach webinars. I problem solve really fast and I never forget anything I learn, so I just think it’s been useful to people. That’s really it.

Jon Dwoskin:    The website, tell them the website, the Facebook page, the way to actually go to the event?

Mary Agnes:    I have the worst website known to man. The event isn’t even on it. I know, it’s so stupid. Find me on Facebook, because the event is on Facebook. It’s facebook.com/rockawaywriter. Writer with a pen, not a pony.

Jon Dwoskin:    Let me just say this, too, because I can’t make the event, but I paid for a college student to attend the event.

Mary Agnes:    Sponsors a student. Yeah.

Jon Dwoskin:    I sponsored a student. For those of you, I’m telling you, the information, you’ve got to get this information and we’re going to launch this podcast in the next day or so for you so we can get some momentum for you. If you can’t go, sponsor somebody, get the information and/or if you’re listening to the podcast when this is done, still go and buy the videos.

Mary Agnes:    Yeah, what we’re going to do is go back and edit the links. What somebody can do if it’s before the event is sponsor a student. You register as if it’s you. You just shoot me a note and then a student gets to go for free and you get all of the videos and all the workbooks and the updates to the workbooks for a year, because social changes so fast. Every other month, we’re going to update the workbook with the latest information. I think it’s just such a solid and I’m glad we came up with that. We’ve got eighteen students coming who are paid for.

Jon Dwoskin:    Wow.

Mary Agnes:    Yeah, you know we teach this class on social media, Jon, and it started as a way to teach other work-from-home moms how to make revenue. We graduated fifteen women into their own businesses so far. It’s been a privilege. It’s really great.

Scott Fishman:    Wow.

Jon Dwoskin:    That’s wonderful.

Mary Agnes:    Yeah, so thanks for sponsoring somebody.

Jon Dwoskin:    Yeah, my pleasure. My pleasure.

Scott Fishman:    Mary, thank you so much for joining us. This has been amazing. My mind is blown. Seriously, there’s smoke going on.

Mary Agnes:    Oh, can I give a final blast out?

Scott Fishman:    Yeah! Of Course!

Jon Dwoskin:    Yeah!

Mary Agnes:    I just wanted to say two things. Number one is: Social media is the great equalizer. It is the space where, due to the change in the SEO algorithm, if you are active on social, you can find your right audience. It doesn’t matter who else is out there. And, video really pitches us to our audience. Only certain people are going to be attracted to my frenetic dynamic. You know, let me solve this in twelve ways in twelve seconds. Other people are going to look for somebody a little more soft spoken, a little more serious perhaps, but they’re going to find that person. You know in video who somebody is. You can watch their body language, how they speak, the tilt of their eyes. That’s how we’re attracted to people at first. Video is so powerful. For anybody who feels like they are behind the game or they missed the wave, it’s just not true. Start implementing and you enter at exactly the right time in your universe. It’s just how things work, you know?

Jon Dwoskin:    You’re the greatest person in the world, Mary Agnes. I can’t tell you how much we appreciate you being on this podcast and sharing everything. I have learned so much from you. I continue to. I learned a ton today. It’s been a privilege to have you. Thanks for doing what you do and sharing your gift with the world.

Mary Agnes:    Thank you for the fun! I really love being your friends – both of you.

Jon Dwoskin:    Scott, any last minute questions?

Scott Fishman:    No, just definitely want to say thank you so much for joining us. We’re going to make sure we put links to everything for you. The show will end here.

Jon Dwoskin:    Thank you for listening to this episode of The Seven Minute Sales Minute. For show notes and worksheets pertaining to this week’s show, check us out at the sevenminutesalesminute.com.

Take today’s strategies and run with them. Increase your sales and increase your income.