TJ50 -Authority Marketing: How To Leverage Major Media for Instant Impact in Any Niche with Brian Horn

Hey what’s up? This is the Traffic Jam podcast episode#50. Now I feel I should be opening up the show with some trumpets and a fanfare to celebrate half a century of episodes but I am not going to do that instead I am going to acknowledge you the listener, every single guest that’s been a part of Traffic Jam plus of course the awesome Veravo team for helping put this past 50 episodes together. Thank you to each and every one of you.

I have certainly myself enjoyed this past 50 shows and I hope you have, too. In fact, if you haven’t had a chance yet to dig through to some of the earlier episodes, I strongly recommend that you do go back to the back catalogue. I might be slightly biased here but I believe the strength and range of guest that we’ve had on this show is pretty hard to match. So go check out some of the earlier episodes of the show, there are some real gems in there.

So what’s coming up on the 50^th show? Well, we are going to be joined in in just a moment by Brian Horn and he’s the guy that Dan Kennedy, Lloyd Irving and Vanilla Ice go to to get more exposure online. But before we get to Brian, I want to do this one thing, open up your browser and go to this address, www.trafficjamcast.com/50 because i have put together a special authority marketing mind map that will help you understand and implement the strategies shared on this show. So go to trafficjamcast.com/50 right now then we’ll move on with the show.

Let me introduce Brian, he is a bestselling author and more on that in the interview and he has helped many entrepreneurs become celebrities in their space by getting them featured in some of the world’s foremost media channels. He also practices what he preaches himself because he’s been featured on the Wall Street Journal, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, Forbes, Advertising Age, and a dozen other media outlets. Brian’s goal is to find the magic in each of his clients, help them position it, get national media attention and then leverage that attention in to more media customers and more profits.

So there you go, so now let us welcome Brian Horn, the authority marketing expert.

James: Welcome back listener! This is episode #50 of Traffic Jam and joining me right here, right now, is Brian Horn. How are you Brian?

Brian: I am excellent James. The big number 50! Congratulations! That shows your dedication. Most people actually make it to about 5 or 10 and then call it quits.

James: Well, let’s hope we’re not picking things to early and this is not the last –

Brian: That is a nice little achievement to reach #50. That’s impressive!

James: Well, thanks man! It’s good to have you on the show. I think today’s topic is going to resonate very well with our audience. Let me open up with a question, I just looked to your website and it says that you guarantee you can make anyone an authority in their industry within 30 days. It is a pretty bold claim, can you really do that?

Brian: Absolutely!

James: Okay, now we’ve established that, what’s the process? What’s involved?

Brian: Yeah, so we’ve got a multi- step process and at the beginning it is very much a mindset type of thing and getting people’s heads right around that. The first thing we have to do is realize that they are ready to become an authority. A lot of people will say, well I have to do this first, I don’t have my book finished, I don’t have as big of a reach as experts and they are always comparing themselves to other people they see as the top dogs in their industry. And so we take them back away from that a little bit and say and have them realize that they are ready right at that point, and then the next thing that we do is what we call a micro-specialization where if they are not the top person in that industry, they need to go and create a brand new niche and it is much easier than you think. If you look at a good example, a company that did this is Southwest Airlines. When they launched in to the space and became an airline, there is no way they can compete with the other ones, they are brand new and starting off so they created a whole new sub-niche of low cost airlines and they just immediately jumped in and own it and still own it to this day. And so we help people do things like that. What I am doing with authority marketing, it is not branding, it’s not internet marketing, it is not SEO. It is a mixture of all of those things but we just create our own blue ocean. There is nobody else competing against us and we just completely dominate very, very quickly. And the site has been an only option for the clients who want our services. The whole ideas has been picked up by writing for Huffington Post for a while. I just got signed on just a couple of days ago actually as a writer for Entrepreneur Magazine just to write about this stuff that we are doing so it is spreading very quickly and it is just proof that what we are talking about can really work.

James: Yeah, well it is an interesting marketing lesson in that I think it is better to be the first than to be the best quite often, right? If you can create your own category and then position yourself as the first in there in that category then just like what you said you’ve got that blue ocean all to yourself.

Brian: Yeah, it absolutely works and there are so many ways you can do this, you don’t have to come up with a brand new original idea. You can do that by going after a sub-niche within your own niche so if you are trying to be an internet marketing type person. In the marketing world you think Frank is the greatest and you are trying to be like him but you’re a lesser version of him, you’re never going to make it, but if you go back and say I’m just going to help in real estate investing products with their funnels, that’s may be just one thing but you can be their one and only choice very quickly and by being very specific, you can charge a lot more money when you can really focus on the needs and wants and desires of that particular customer and you can talk to them better and deliver what they want or you can spend more time really honing your skills on just that one market you just become much, much better and you deliver a much better product.

James: So once you have established the position, the category in which you want to own, what is the next step? I guess there is a mass media exposure involved here, right?

Brian: Yeah, so then what you do, you start to use the media and 3^rd party sources to verify yourself as the expert or the authority. One of the easiest ones that you can do is have a book and a lot of people think of having a book think they have to sit down for weeks and months at a time and write it out, hire a ghost writer or a publisher and really the way with books with Kindle being so easy to publish on, you can just upload a word document to Amazon and you can do fairly short books and really get your point across, I have been doing this for people and they seem to be even better received than even more traditional books. So then you can have a one hour conversation like what we are having right now and you can get that transcribed and then translated in to normal English and then it could be about a 30-40 page book, not a lot but you can get your best ideas out that can help solve the problems for your prospects, and that’s really what you want to do and we call them one problem one solution books. When I create a book for a client that just solves one very specific problem of their target audience and it’s just a very specific little book and so you’re a published author so that is one thing. And the second thing after that is getting your name out there as quoted in and featured on some other well-known media sites which is much easier now with citizen journalism which a lot of these sites are now opening up and letting more and more non-professional journalist and non-staff writers consider content to their site so you can find contributors in sites like I am a contributor to Huffington Post and Entrepreneur website, I think I am in four or about five places. I am not a paid staff writer so anybody can literally just come up to me and just say hey Brian I saw that you are a writer for Huffington Post, I have an idea for an article, and what do you think about this? I’d be happy to provide you content. Now, there’s so many people like that that are dying for content writers that would jump at an opportunity like that particularly if you say to them that you can blast your whole list and send you lots of traffic, you have a better chance of picking up on something like that. And then you can get yourself positioned as an expert on those places, then you can say hey here I am I had written about an article in Huffington Post about how to build funnels to convert the highest rates and on this topic I am the expert. So right then you are completely positioned as an expert on the topic because even though I just told you how the stuff works, most of the articles that you read are done this the same way, it is either they hit up the writer, the journalist, or they have a PR person doing that. So it’s not magic, people are going to do this right now. And what you don’t realize is the magic can be taken away but again very few people actually know that. The prospects certainly don’t know that it’s that way, that it they are manufacturing authority, we call it manufactured authority and everybody does this. Even the big dogs like the financial experts like David Ramsay and stuff, they do very calculated things to hit the best seller lists. It is what they do.

James: Yeah, there’s some interesting points you’ve made already, one is in the intro where you said that no one is going to claim you to be the expert, you have to claim yourself to be the expert first and it is about owning it and believing it yourself but then the second point is, as you said, you can’t wait and expect people to come and approach you, you have to go out there and seize those opportunities and I think the availability of those opportunities once people start trying this sort of stuff, they’ll be quite surprised about it, right?

Brian: Oh, absolutely! These are the things that people always go for help with us, because we do these things for people, that’s kind of what our business is. And they’re actually just shocked and sometimes just appalled at how well this works because you’ll get them something like, we’ll get them like I’ll write an article in Huffington Post like that, and take a screenshot of your Huffington post article and put it on your Facebook page and just say wow I was just brought as an expert in Huffington Post, thank you so much for your support, this is a big deal for us thank you and if you want to know more about how I do this stuff, just hit me up. And also to add to that is the most well received post they’ve ever done and have the most interaction, for them it could just be a couple hundred shares or likes or something like that but they are just blown away by the response that they get and that people that have been sitting on the timelines not doing business with them for a long time all of a sudden step up and say I have been following you for a while and I saw your post and I think I am ready to start doing business with you. That literally happens all the time with this. It is absolutely crazy and once you see this you can say wow I was no smarter than I was 24 hours ago when these people wouldn’t give me the time of the day and now all of a sudden they bow down and want to do business with me and it’s just because of a little TV station and all those stuff. It is absolutely crazy how that stuff works but it’s more conditioned particularly here in the US we are used to believing everything we see on the media and on TV, even we have a negative opinion of the media, I don’t watch the news, I just hate the news. I feel like those things are just ingrained triggers on my head.

James: Yeah, it is pretty fresh, in fact it has been a bit of nudge for me getting you on and perhaps we can talk about that in a moment but you a couple of days ago got that deal to write for entrepreneur magazine so I think it would be quite interesting to perhaps divulge how you did that because it isn’t as hard as you might think. I too write for Entrepreneur Magazine here in the Middle East and I don’t want to spill the beans to much but actually that was pretty to get myself onboard with. It isn’t a hard challenge. How did you go about getting that opportunity with Entrepreneur yourself?

Brian: I applied. It is as simple as that. One thing is they do look at your background, your portfolio and what your business is, they’re obviously not looking for someone who is a plumber and all of a sudden starts writing about an internet marketing and give you an internet marketing spot, nothing is being wrong with being a plumber and just starting out but they do look at what you’ve done in the past and what you can contribute but really there’s nothing much to that I just applied and I know a lot of people that apply and don’t get in but for me, yeah, it was that easy. For Huffington Post, it was that easy also, you can look on all these sites and they have ways that you can apply. I think when I submitted to apply for Entrepreneur, I googled that and found it, and sent a message in to the editors and it was the same way at Huffington Post and there is another one, a branding one that I write for and All Business which is a small business site, all the stuff that I once write for all was about the same thing, just going through and applying and going through the process and showing them examples of your work.

James: Exactly! But the point is if you can write to a decent level then that has got to be a prerequisite but second to that, if you are an expert which if you follow the steps at the start of the interview, you find what that small category is, you are an expert. So if you can put those two pieces together and there is a requirement for that type of content, you’re in with a pretty strong chance, right?

Brian: Oh, absolutely. And it makes a difference also on how you’re perceived, when I started for Huffington Post I got the nice messages and I put this out, for Entrepreneur, the same thing. There are some really big people and you can leverage this thing also. I mean I am not sure what you’ve done with it so far but you can pretty much reach out to just about anybody and say you want to write an article in Entrepreneur about them and get a callback, in the next two weeks I have 2 billionaires, one is Mark Echo, he has a really nice, big fashion line. The other guy is the owner of a magazine. I just reached out to both of them and I got an idea for an article in Entrepreneur that I would like to talk to you about and while we are at it, can I put you in the podcast also? And both said yes so it is pretty cool what you can do with that.

James: Yeah, and then it is self- perpetuating, right? This kind of principle of reflected light. If you can give them an opportunity to appear in some of these places and then you can appear alongside someone that may be perceived as being a larger authority than yourself then that automatically raises your own so that is some interesting way you can take in some of that stuff.

Brian: Yeah, we call that borrowed authority. We are going to borrow theirs. What we do is we bring very specific people in for these types of things, for one it is good content. We don’t want to put somebody boring out there, we want to put good content and good articles for those places. But it is certainly a nice added exposure next to their pictures for sure.

James: Yeah, so really a lot of this focuses on getting an earning media but I’m sure that you’d recommend owning some media too. You recommended a book as being one of those assets. What about other platforms, perhaps a blog or a podcast, what else is essential to this?

Brian: Podcast. I scream the benefits of podcasting for several reasons. One, that it is still new and still trending upwards and I think at least here in the US a lot of the car manufacturers are being paid over the next several years by Apple, Google and Clear channel to start putting their systems in to cars and start taking out the terrestrial radios. If that happens, podcast is going to keep getting more and more popular. It is on demand entertainment, it’s very easy to get in to and inexpensive to set up. Another way I like about that is that you can really syndicate your media and you can repurpose your media. Once you have one of these recorded, you can get it transcribed and made in to an article and you can just keep going, you’ve got this one audio, and you have video written and stuff and you can get it made in to a series of books and email and content for your listeners. There is so much you can do with this stuff without having to create so much content so I love podcast and every person that comes on tells me if you have you’re Brian Horn host of the XXX show that is great authority also, you sound awesome.

James: Yeah, absolutely. Well it’s been successful strategy for me and it sounds like it has been hugely successful for you and I think one of the things that I really like about it like you do is the fact that it is so leveraged, you and I are having a conversation now for about 30 minutes and the team will take over and before I know it there is an episode page up and it is syndicated to iTunes and Stitcher and we’ve got transcripts going out on all places and it’s just me and you having a fun chat for half an hour, right?

Brian: Yeah, it’s awesome. That’s exactly with ours as well, it’s just the same way and it works so well. And I like that you also keep it and one thing we learned is the show link, in 30 minutes or less the show- it did not work for a while then we changed it and realized that people were not hearing the last of it just because we did a survey and most of them listen to it while they were doing cardio which they did for about 30 minutes. And in the last 15 minutes if we told them some cool stuff and changed that up and got much better results.

James: Yeah, it’s interesting advice. What advice do you have for actually getting podcast interviews? You used a pretty effective strategy to get on this show, how you recommend others get more, not just podcast opportunities but just interview opportunities as a whole because there is nothing being interviewed, right? As a way to increase your authority.

Brian: Right, there are a few ways. One, reaching over social media always works well, that is one way. Another way is going through somebody else that has already been on the show before. That is a good way; somebody that you see that has been there recently and maybe it is a larger show so you say, hey Joe, can you do me an intro with Mike’s podcast, I saw you had an interview with him, maybe you can intro me. And also if you have your own podcast you have them getting on first and ask to interview them. And most people say yes to these interviews. I really have not somebody say no or not respond within reason. Sometimes you have these other things within leverage now. I go for these the Mark Echo and the shark tank people next that I would leverage but before that I had some pretty big people just within the marketing type world. I knew a lot of them and that certainly helped, but I tell you, people have asked me for interviews, I rarely have said no.

James: Yeah, that’s good stuff. Let’s talk about press releases. I know you are a bit of an SEO guy and certainly things like press releases have been abused to death in the SEO world and the internet is pretty much awash with these things now. Are they still effective for just general PR and exposure and if they are, what’s the step by step process for crafting press releases to get some exposure for you?

Brian: Sure, press releases ultimately does not work anymore because it used to be you write those, first you write them for the press to try to get them to pick them up and then people find out and use it for SEO and then they throw some links in there and get some SEO benefit. Both those don’t work at all anymore. They’re completely a waste of time. But, we have something we call authority news releases where it is using some of networks that we have done built down, you can do something similar that instead of doing it to get the attention of journalists, you write it right for your prospect. We write them in the same style as a typical journalistic news article where the headline is formed the same way so it’s not Brian Horn announces new XXX, it’s actually written like a news story. It will be something like, in response to your Houston Area entrepreneur writes books to help entrepreneurs. Something like that. Like that where it’s not written in a way where it is so promotional. All you really want is to write it just like a news article and we have several different formats of headlines we use and you put it out there and you get screenshots and those get picked up on the impressive sites like on like the local CBS station and your areas across and you send that out to people on your list and you share that on social media and you get that same type of followed authority by appearing on that site. Again, this is not like the old days, we can put that for SEO and have it sitting at the top of the results, keywords can get you a lot of traffic but you can definitely have it up there for your name and your company name which a lot of people don’t focus on which is really good because there are lots of people who right before they decided to do business with you the last thing they do is go ahead and google James’s character and see what google says about him. And they type in James Reynolds and they see your website and your social media and they go whatever but if it also had a #3 result that was Yahoo News or a local ABC station that says James Reynolds is an awesome guy and it is an article about James Reynold’s new company is setting records in his industry and then it just talks very third person like a journalist that talks about James Reynolds is doing, these are some quotes from his, these are the results, and it becomes very impressive and they go wow this is James Reynold’s character is actually being written up by these news stations and it has a very, very powerful effect.

James: Yeah, it is really all about owning your own results. How do you make that happen? Do you advocate just keeping one central site and then using content promotions like this to perhaps get press releases and news article appearances appearing there or I see that you’ve got a few different properties, would that be a better strategy to try knowing that first page results?

Brian: It whatever people want to do, everything that we do is really for the reader and for the customer. We don’t even really try for the Google stuff anymore. I was an SEO guy for a long time so I am not really anti- SEO at all but we’ve really found this way works extraordinarily well. I think why it’s even work better for me is being the writer on different places not just the big ones like Huffington Post and Entrepreneur but there’s several other places that I write for and I get picked up as a guest contributor that access, it just works so well just having your stuff just absolutely everywhere and putting those little fish hooks out everywhere.

James: And have you got a strategy for that? I mean there is plenty of opportunity out there, the website is a wide ocean. What kind of criteria do you have for looking at those guest post contribution opportunities to see what’s right for you?

Brian: One thing I like to look for is to see where that site syndicated to, there are some that are very powerful syndication, there are some that you can pretty much just jump on and become a contributor to and it is syndicated out to like Yahoo News. I have one in my little arsenal out, this one is secret but it actually is syndicated to Fox News it is really nice if you can find a place like that and have your content appear on but there is one that is a business to community, that one is very easy you can go there and you actually they ask for 2-5 writing samples. There is nothing automatic about it at all but you can go through as long as you can write decently and they look at how active you are on social media and your following but if you hit those points it gets picked up by Yahoo News. So that is a good way to get in there and have your content out in Yahoo News which is very good SEO wise as well.

James: Yeah, certainly. Cool, Brian let’s get close to wrapping up things there, have you got any final passing pieces of advice you’d like to pass on to the listeners today?

Brian: I’d like to give them one really cool, hack is kind of a dirty word, and I don’t like it but we describe it as an authority hack when we talked about it in our podcast and I share this with a lot of groups but everybody always seems to love it and it is a good way for you to get some authority fairly easily and that is using CNN’s iReport. A lot of you have heard about it probably but for you who haven’t, have you used it James?

James: I’ve not used it so I am all ears right now.

Brian: there is a section in CNN that is ireport.cnn.com and it is their section for their website for citizen journalism. Basically anybody that is a citizen of the world that wants to write news stories for CNN is welcome to and your stories will then be published. You can then go in and they have assignments of stories looking for content on or you can just submit any type of news story and be a contributor for CNN. Now, I am going to say this and everybody is going to get this wrong and get their first article banned every time. Don’t write about yourself, don’t write self-indulgent things, don’t tell people how great you are, write news stories or the community will ban you. It gets instantly published but there is an active community there and if they can smell marketer or smell somebody is trying to do business with it then they’ll flush it down and it will get knocked out. Just write news stories, and the purpose of this is not to have – because I can tell you right now, nobody is going to click on your story and end up buying from you if you get links on there. So the whole purpose of things is just to be a contributor and have news stories up on CNN’s site. So what I always people is that once a week put in a story about your niche and then basically you are a weekly contributor on CNN on your topic. If your topic is internet marketing then you are a weekly contributor for CNN’s internet marketing. It creates a powerful punch when you go pitch yourself to be a guest on a podcast or a radio show or if you want to get to speak at an event, put that little designation at the side of your name and you sound a whole lot cooler.

James: And it is a valid point. I mean there is almost as much opportunity at what you can do post event than there is the actual event itself. It’s getting on your buddies on your website then you’re contributor to and that gives you more exposure, more authority and ultimately you can probably charge a little bit more for what you do as well, right?

Brian: Oh, absolutely! It makes selling so much easier so if you are selling you actually need to get on and talk to people. I have not to sell since I started doing this. A guy gets on the phone with me and I ask them what they are doing and I say oh here is a solution that I think will work best for you and here is a price. And they’ll either say yes or no and that’s it. I don’t have to sell anymore, it’s not that they don’t want or they are just not a good fit for or they say yes and want it.

James: Yeah, so we mentioned your podcast earlier and that’s I guess a way for people to go out and find out a bit more about these strategies, where do we go to find that?

Brian: Go to AuthorityAlchemy.com. We’ve got a website there, we’ve got several podcast episodes, we’ve got some blog posts as well as links to all the other cool stuff that we are doing.

James: Well, awesome. Thank you Brian, it’s been a pleasure having you on this episode #50, a complete honor to have you on the big 5-0 so thank you for your time and expertise today.

Brian: Absolutely! Thank you so much for having me I’m honored to be on the 50^th, that is really cool.

James: So there you go listeners to get all of the resource mentioned by Brian in today’s show plus a few episode bonuses head on over to trafficjamcast.com/50.

That was Brian Horn and that was episode#50. I just love the CNN resource that Brian ended with and I am certainly going to put that in to action myself and I suggest you do too. In fact, I urge you to implement as many of the strategies that Brian shared as possible because if you are an entrepreneur or you help entrepreneurs, authority marketing is something that is one of the best possible investments of time that you can possibly make.

And talking of time, to help you save some time and help you implement these faster, I have put together an authority marketing mind map detailing Brian’s multi prong approach dominating your niche as the go to guy or girl and you can download that authority marketing mind map by going to TrafficJamCast.com/50. And that’s about it for episode#50.

If you have been listening in to the show for some time and you haven’t yet left a review, perhaps you can do so for this landmark episode. The places to review and rate are TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher.

We end the show with a Traffic Jam of course chosen by our Guest and Brian Horn has selected Pride by U2 so here’s that track and I will see you back here well, in about seven days from now.