TJ48 – How to Guest Blog Effectively Using the Expanded Guest Post Formula ~ Bryan Harris

Hi! Welcome listener! You’re tuned it to Traffic Jam Episode#48 and joining me your host James Reynolds, we have today Bryan Harris from VideoFruit.com.

But, before we get to Bryan, just a reminder that if you haven’t yet subscribed to Traffic Jam via iTunes or Stitcher, you can do so by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes or TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher. And whilst you are there, I would love for you to comment on and rate the show. Your feedback is extremely invaluable to me and furthermore, if you comment there, I am very likely to read your name out on a future episode. So if you like to get yourself out at least a couple of seconds of airtime that is a really good way to do it, at least on this show.

Back to today’s episode. We’re joined by Bryan Harris who’s got a website called VideoFruit.com which has really risen to notoriety in a very short span of time. What Bryan is doing at Video Fruit is putting together formulas and case studies detailing strategies that others are implementing very successfully. Some of those strategies come from within the marketing space and also some of those strategies come from outside of the marketing space. For instance, Bryan has deciphered the strategies and tactics of Barak Obama and David Letterman, for instance. Hardly obvious choices you might think. One such formula that Bryan has put together which we’ll be deep diving in to in today’s episode is the EGP formula. So you can get the most of the EGP formula training, I have put together a special cheat sheet and resource guide for you and you can get your hands on both by going to TrafficJamCast.com/48. Why don’t you head on over there right now, download the resource guide and the cheat sheet and follow along as you’re listening in to this episode.

So let me introduce Bryan, he is really a bit of a rising star on the scene to be honest. His site, Video Fruit has gotten real traction from within just a few months and he’s now contributing regularly to the Lead Pages blog, he has also written for Noah Kagan’s OK Dork and he’s garnered praise from Andrew Warner and Brian Dean, the latter of which introduced me to Bryan Harris and put this interview together. So, I think that is enough to introduce Bryan, I think we should now welcome him on to the call so without any further ado, here is Bryan Harris from VideoFruit.com.

James: Hey Bryan! How are you doing today?

Bryan: Doing good, thanks for having me on.

James: Cool! Well you’ve got two guest blogging that I want to talk to you about on today’s section. Nicknamed the EGP Formula, what exactly is the expanded guest post formula?

Bryan: The guest post formula builds on a technique I discovered a few months ago called content upgrade and it is the idea of having inline call to actions inside the content you create. So you think about a typical blog, you have a header that sometimes might have an email opt in, you have the side bar, which usually has links to places that have email opt ins, you have a welcome gate on a page a lot of times that is completely focused on email opt ins. After trying plenty of different methods of collecting email addresses just from my blog for the past ten months, I have discovered that the single most effective method for collecting and building your email list is using something called content upgrade and it is the idea of inside of your post you are talking about a specific topic so make your giveaway, your free thing you’re giving your customer, or giving your reader, the about, whatever it is you are talking about. So if you write a post about how to train your dog how to teach him how to sit, at the end of your post you have a call to action where you have a video that teaches your dog how to fetch, that is alright, it is kind of related, but not really. If at the end of the post you had a 10-point checklist and a walk through tutorial of how to get your dog to sit, then that is going to convert extremely well and I have seen opt in rates of well over 30% routinely on this type of approach. And Expanded Guest Post builds on that and uses that in guest posts. So if my blog has 15000 readers a month and I go post on a blog that has a hundred thousand readers a month and I use an expanded guest post, I can convert 30% of those hundred and thousand people versus 30% of my 15000 people which means you can build a list really rapidly by just posting on other people’s site and using the expanded guest post content upgrade approach and send those people back to your blog with a relevant download and capture their email in your list then.

James: Yeah, well, it is a nice strategy and I guess the expected call to action would be to drive people back to your blog to opt in to something but I checked out a post you’ve done for lead pages.net and you’ve actually done something sneakier than that on that post. Tell me about that.

Bryan: Normally, in a lot of guest post, what people do, they make the heir of not putting links or any type of way for people to find you anywhere except at the byline at the end of the post. So I wrote this whole post on how to train a dog to sit and right at the end, usually below the related post section, there’s a bar about Bryan and it says Bryan is a dog trainer, here’s the link to find out more about his info, click here. That just never gets clicked on, and if it does, it sends them back to videofruit.com, like the main root domain. So that would be going to a landing page which is not specific and simply does not entice them at all. What I did with Lead Pages is take them in to the actual post. So with Lead Pages I wrote a guest post about 2 different product launches I did. And inside that post, I talked about the different methods I used and I talked about a bonus that I was going to include in to the post and bake that bonus in to the post itself we’re talking very natural in to the post. And at the very end of the post, the entire post built up to a climax at the very end which said hey if you want to learn more about this specific technique, I’m giving you a bonus, honestly at the top of my head I can’t remember what the bonus was in that post, but, if you click the link to download it, it popped up a box, it did not load another page, it popped up what is called a Lead Box so your pages did not have to reload or anything, you just click, it popped up, you enter your email address, and you’ll immediately be sent to a page where you can download the bonus. Instead of when you click and sent in to a landing page and then getting them to enter their email address, I put a box out there without reloading, allowed them to enter their email address, and went on. And usually, it’s 70% to 80% opt in rates on those Lead Boxes by doing that versus those 30% to 40% opt in rate when you send them to an actual rate that has to reload, that doesn’t have the design and everything going on. You just lose people in that process so if all possible, assuming they’ll let you, but if at all possible include a Lead Box in there and that alone for me has doubled my opt in rates just by doing that.

James: Yeah and how do you get around that? I mean because one, it is fantastic if you can get a Lead Box in there and you’re laughing all the way to the party. If you can’t get a Lead Box, you’d of course go for a link back to your site but how do you manage those scenarios where the editors are really very, let us say, not at all liberal in terms of the amount of links that they allow you back to your own site. Do you even entertain those opportunities or would they be just a nonstarter for you?

Bryan: Yes, I would entertain the opportunity because it depends on the traffic. I have seen Lead Boxes get published on the Huffington Post, on Entrepreneur.com, on Buffer, on Kissmetrics, I mean, there are a lot of sites that let you one. Two, if just for some reason you won’t, I would drop back and look at your writing to start with and see if it is an epic post, if it is a really, really useful post, I have never had a problem with that before. If it is a post that is kind of marginal and you are recycling some material and it isn’t top notch, then the writer or the editor is more or less going to agree to give you something like that but if you’re writing first class material, that’s the best way to avoid that. Write the best piece of content on that topic that has ever been written and it blows away the editor so much they could care less if you have a call to action. Now, some of those listening has probably never tried this before and they’d say, oh, that sounds great but that would not happen to me. First of all, shut up and actually do it first, and then if that’s a problem, figure out a solution to it. An easier solution is to just send them to a custom landing. It’s not the generic sender landing page that is hey welcome Buffer readers, here is the checklist that I promised you in the post, click here to download. And you’d have an email box there from the set up. That would convert well, not quite as well as a lead box but it still converts extremely well. And if you are posting on to the site that has a hundred and fifty thousand links a month, and you convert 40% versus 60%, alright you lost a few people, but, you’re still getting a massive boos to your list. A bigger boost than any technique I have known of that involves creating content. So yeah, if you can’t get a lead box in, want to produce content, not good content but world class content. And if you can’t do that, quit focus on sending a guest post and go learn how to write well and then come back. The most important thing you can do, can you create really, really, really good content, and if not, you can focus on some techniques like this but honestly, you’re not ready yet. You need to become a better writer first.

James: Yeah, and I guess the point is here, right, if you’re actually offering up something as a content upgrade that really does offer value and extended learning and expands up on the post that you’ve written, why would they have a problem with it?

Bryan: Yeah, and right now, not many people do this at all. It is kind of like list post five years ago, it works really well when many people did them. Content upgrade is in the exact same place right now, the problem is, they take a lot more work and they require you be actually a good writer. And there’s just a lot let of those, like anybody can go around and make a list post and as people did that, the technique became less effective because it saturated the market. But with content upgrade, I don’t think we’ll ever reach the content saturation that list post that because it requires more work and most people are lazy and most people suck at writing. But it is an awesome technique and not many people have ever seen that before so not many people know to not allow it. Has it been done ten times in the same blog, most people would develop a policy around it but right now most people don’t even have a policy around it at all so at the end of the day, you are not trying to good link anybody, all you’re trying to do is, one, write the best damn content that’s ever been written on the subject, and two, go even beyond that with the content upgrade and it will be even more helpful. And if you think about that in that approach, your upgrade is helping their reader even more. It’ not trying to get their email address, it’s not trying to scam anybody, it’s not trying to get past editorial guidelines, it is simply trying to help the reader more than any other blog has ever done, and if you can successfully do that, you can get people to ignore a lot of stuff that they would normally otherwise object to with lesser quality content.

James: Well let’s take a moment to talk about what type of content actually works best for the post itself. What sort of guidelines do you have there?

Bryan: What I found work the best is step by step how to tutorials post. And honestly that is just my favorite type of post to begin with mainly because that is the type of post that I want to exist on the internet. It makes the internet a better place when you have stuff that teaches people what to do, and not let me tell you the ten common mistakes that people do on blogging. I mean, come on, that has been written so many times! I’m like, please write something helpful! Don’t tell me what’s wrong, tell me how to do it right. What I found most helpful to people is that including myself, who don’t want to think about most things. 90% of the time, I just want someone to tell me what to do. I don’t want to figure out the best work out, I just want to pay the trainer and tell me what to do, I want to focus my efforts where I can affect my readers the most. I want to focus on producing content and teaching better than anybody else in the world so going out and trying to decipher the best way to get my work out in, that’s just a waste of my creative energies in me. I just pay somebody for that. Same thing with writing content, somebody probably doesn’t want to go out there and figure out how to set up a content upgrade and inside of mail chimp, one it’s a massive pain in the butt, I’ve witnessed that and you’ll want people to tell you exactly how to do that because you spend five minutes to figure it out and once you’re frustrated you’ll read my post and it just gives you the exact thing to do. So there is no pontificating, there is no analyzing, nobody in the talking head, it’s actually teaching you how to do something, and that is so rare to do on a high level that you stick out like a sore thumb. In a good kind of way, it just sticks out. And then, with the content upgrade, it just takes that to the next level. So here are the ten steps you need to follow to set up your content and oh by the way, here’s a bonus that you can get, here is a video of me actually walking through and doing all that, a person that you can watch and just follow along. That takes that ten steps post in to a completely different level. And oh, by the way you have to enter your email address to get it. So I would love to enter my email address, please give me that video, because I want it in order to successfully execute that.

James: Yeah, I have discussed a lot about both the importance of selecting the right websites in terms of audience size and in terms of match when we’re exploring guest post opportunities, but even with those two things in place, a good size of website, highly trafficked and with the right sort of people reading it, can guest posts still flop?

Bryan: Oh sure, yeah. Again, I keep on coming back to the same topic. If the article sucks, and honestly, another measure isn’t just quality of article. One thing I found to be really important is writing your post in a way that the entire post is pointing towards that bonus. It isn’t hey here’s the ten steps, and at the very end of the post oh by the way, grab this video if you want to learn more. Most people don’t make it to the end of the post and they would never see that. You have to write your post like a TV show. So me and my wife watched Dexter the TV show, like two months ago and it is an alright TV show. It’s probably a B-, but something they are really good at is creating open loops inside of their TV shows. Game of Thrones does a great job of this. So you watch an episode of Game of Thrones and you hear that the season comes on next spring, everybody is going to be anticipating it, you’re going to watch the episode, and they are not going to answer like 1 of your 50 questions. So they are going to bring up a bunch of storylines, storylines already extending last season, you’re expecting this episode to fulfill all of that and when you read it, they fulfill just a little bit of it, but the rest of it is left hanging for the next episode. So that will make you binge watch TV episodes and that’s why Netflix is so popular, because you can watch the entire season in one sitting and waste 13 hours on it. You need to build your blog post the same way, you need to create an open loop inside of that post that brings anticipation to the end of it so your reader has to get that bonus. It isn’t just an addendum at the very end, it’s like the entire point of the post, so I did this in Lead Pages maybe, and I was talking about different methods of collecting email addresses. So with them I shared three of the most effective ways with content upgrade being number one but I shared two other ways as well. But I said, hey I have 10 major ways I collect email addresses but we don’t have time to go through all 10 of them so I will share with you three of my favorite. So then I talked about the three, described them in detail, and then several different times throughout that post I made a reference to other techniques as well and at the very end of the post, I said, hey if you want to get all of the other seven, get all ten email collecting techniques, I have created a 30-minute video that walks you through all of them. Click here to enter your email address and you can get all 10. And that bakes in anticipation, like you immediately create a knowledge gap in the very beginning by saying I am going to share three of my favorite 10 and the readers are thinking, what’s the other 7? That’s great that you give me three but what about the other seven? Are they better? Are they worse? I don’t know. And then you talk about the three and bake anticipation and drill in into those three and give them a call to action and they are waiting for that like they are going to read in to that posting to get to the call to action then. So that is one way you can take a really well written piece of content and use the expanded guest post route, and actually make that content convert.

James: Yeah, got it. Well, I don’t think your example was entirely a theory, at least for me, I have just literally watched five whole seasons of breaking bad back to back and they do the exact same thing! At the start of the episode they’ll have a flashback towards the end of the episode so you’ll always tend to hook to find out exactly how that scenario falls out and of course at the end of the episode they open up something for the following one, they just keep you constantly gripped to see what’s coming next, right?

Bryan: It’s amazing! Like one of my favorite techniques in doing this whole online business experiment is taking stuff out of other industries and I think writing TV shows, that’s how your blog should be and trying to write a beautiful blog is like every blog is an episode of the TV show where it leads in to the next one and it talks about the previous one and leaves you waiting for the next one. So it isn’t just this one off things you’re doing your guest post is in a series where it’s like it’s a pilot episode that leads in to the real season of the TV show which is your actual blogs or your products or whatever it is you’re doing so you have to write that pallet correctly. It can’t just be awesome content but awesome content that leads them in to the rest of the content. Because there is no way you can teach them everything they need to know in one 1200 word blog post content, like you can’t just physically do it. And if you try to it is not going to be good. Talk about the main thing, get them hooked, and then lead them in to the rest of the content. So, it is an overall structure thing as well as a content upgrade thing, if you are just going to get one or the other, you are not going to get the full effect.

James: Yeah, well let’s talk next a little bit about how we might seek out these opportunities because I guess unless you’re a real authority in your market place, these aren’t going to be landing necessarily on your lap. How do you go about pitching the expanded guest post to website owners and try to get your footing on the door there?

Bryan: I think it starts with understanding how the sites that you want to write on think. And for me, I really did not understand this in the beginning but after doing it a little now, understand more and that every website owner wants good content. Everybody. If you are a really good fitness writer, you can write for the New York Times fitness column. If you are the best at doing that, all you need to do is show them you content, like, hey, here is an article that I have written for you. It is world class, it is better than what you are doing now, and if you are persistent with that over time, you’re going to be able to publish for them because everybody wants good content. So if you were going to pitch me, it would depend on who you are, I guess you’ve got two different classes of people. If you are just a zero marketer, I have never heard of you at all, when I go to your website, there’s like two articles and you’re kind of like in Stage 1. Stage 2 would be that you’ve written for six months and you have a lot of content out there and you’ve written for some other people then it’s definitely easier to pitch that because you can reference past work. But most people are in stage one, they are kind of just starting, they have never written for other people, and the best way that I found that people can write for me which is the only way I can answer that question because different people process differently is to show them your work. In the pitch, you have to grab their attention in the first two sentences and one way I’d like to do that is by showing them that I know who they are and that I have read some of their past content so I would open the email with something like this, hey James, my name is Bryan with Video Fruit. I have been following your blog for the past year, I love your content. Recently you wrote an article about how to build your email list. I really appreciate that article, I actually took it and implemented the strategies that you recommended there and I started my list and now I have a hundred people. That sentence is so pitiful because it shows me you’re not another Yahoo wannabe that isn’t willing to work. It means that you took advice that I have already given you and acted on it. And that goes such a long way so if you’re writing a fitness column in the New York Times guy, you would write and say, hey Steve, my name is Bryan. I noticed you wrote an article about XYZ so I took some of your advice and I implemented it and I have seen these results. That goes a long way in letting them know you are a real human and that you read their stuff and that you know who they are. The next step I would do would be to show them some of your work. And specifically go ahead and write, if you are just starting out, you have no body of work, you have to show the body of work so write an article for me. If you know I’m about to go in to a series of post on lap sequences and you kind of know what they’d look like because you have read some of my content, write a quote about lap sequences. And write it my style, write it in a way that my readers resonate with it and that answers all of my questions because my questions when I get pitched are: are you a Yahoo? Do you know what you are talking about? Can you actually write good stuff? That’s the number one thing. Can you write world class content? And if you just send me a pdf that says hey I went ahead and wrote an article and analyzed 15 launches that I noticed recently, fully diagramed the emails out and notes on how people could do it and step by step formula and oh by the way, I shot you a 30 minute video that shows you how you can do the same thing, that pitches my pitching because that is so unique! Like you spent 20 hours making that. And honestly, in the beginning that’s what you have to do. Don’t think volume, don’t think quantity. Think quality. So go ahead and create that and send that to me, and I will say yes in about three seconds for you posting that because nobody else has ever done that before. And not many people can do it because people usually aren’t willing to put in the time to do it. So two steps, #1, let them know that you are a human by referencing past work, #2 spend 20 hours writing a world class article and send it to me and make sure it jives up with the current theme of what I am currently talking about and the chances of you getting published are through the roof if you do that. I have never been told no myself using that approach.

James: Yeah, I’ve had similar experiences with a very similar formula actually. I tend to seek out guest opportunities by first citing a website, citing a particular piece of content which I am familiar with, and then perhaps lead to something like hey it was great but I thought it was missing this. How about I write on that topic because I know your readers would enjoy it and here are some of the examples where I have done similar stuff. And as you said, it is actually easier said than done. Unless you’ve got a body of work behind you, people are just screaming out for good stuff and it is kind of amazing that so few people are actually reaching out for these opportunities themselves.

Bryan: Yeah, the number one problem is writing quality. My advice keep coming back to that. If you can’t write good stuff, don’t waste your time pitching people. Like in six month you could become – not grammar and punctuation, I could not care about that, I am talking about actually being able to actually teach stuff, spend six months, become a good writer online and then see what’s pitching out to people and surprisingly it is easy to do when you can write well. When you become a good writer, you can get as much good traffic as you want because you can write anywhere you want.

James: Yeah, totally. And then nothing there beats actually than writing frequently. Put yourself a schedule and stick to it consistently and get stuff out, get it out there.

Bryan: Every single day. If you are struggling with that, the cure is – last December, I have never written stuff before. I have never since college. I would write 250 words a day, I’m the worst speller you’ve ever met in your life. If you read in my blog post you can probably find at least 20 errors in them but you know what, people could care less. People don’t care about that! I mean, do I want to get better? Yes, I hired an editor and hopefully that will help. But honestly, I just don’t care. Like what I want to do is become really good at teaching people how to do stuff and get good at that. Spend six months writing every single day. Publish once a week and you will be a good writer by March. So if you have not started yet and you are listening to this, by March, you can get published at Entrepreneur.com, Ink.com Buffer, Hubspot, myblog- any blog by March if you do that. Write 250 words a day, publish 1 a week, constantly keep trying to improve and you will be at that point substantially ahead of where you are now and if you have any kind of opportunities at all, you can get to the point where you can publish anywhere.

James: Yeah, let’s loop a little bit back to content upgrade because I have noticed a post you have written reasonably recently, at least at the time of recording this that was titled 11 Ways to Turn Readers in to Subscribers where you actually laid out some content upgrade examples, I think it was eleven. Which of those are your favorites and you’d recommend others pursuing as a first step with content upgrade?

Bryan: I mean, it is really experimentation honestly it is going to vary based on industry and everything but for me, one of my favorite things which I am doing now because I have experimented with all of these just because it’s the fastest and I think it does have a higher procedure value, is doing two or three videos at the end. I have done a lot of videos so it is fairly easy for me. I just turn on my webcam and turn on my screencast and record. So if I give you a step by step, I just go through those steps with an actual example. I can say, alright, we talked about how to set up your content upgrades and now I want to show you how to do it and I just turn on the camera and record me doing that. And I found my readers really like that because they can get the concepts and get it by reading but they can – it’s like fixing, like I fixed my refrigerator recently, I don’t know what happened to it but it froze out or something. So I googled around, found an article that showed me the most likely problems, identified one of them as being the problem and they showed me how to fix it but then I went to YouTube and I see somebody actually fixing it, which was just interesting, like I did not even think about doing it, it just a natural me trying to find the solution and I watched the video and then when I fixed it, I just put the video right beside the refrigerator and fixed the refrigerator while watching the video. I think blogs really suck for implementation. They are really good for learning, they are really good for reference, but they suck for actually implementing because they are hard to find and they have side bars that are distracting. And bookmarking is a pain in the butt. But a video is really handy for actually using to implement whatever it is. It can be exercising, it can be nutrition, it can be cooking, it could be internet marketing stuff or whatever, like when I cook, it is courtesy of a recipe but it is also is me turning on Google and watching somebody doing it. So I found, my favorite right now is doing that. But honestly, it’s really – like Friday I had a post and it’s my most popular content upgrade I have ever done and it was just a Google doc spreadsheet of links and titles and it’s got almost 500 opt ins from it. Sometimes, it is kind of random so just experiment with them and see what works for you and your readers too. That is the nice thing about upgrades, you can measure it. The better you are at analytics, you can see what people actually want by seeing what they enter their email address for and notice where your spikes are for your analytics. If you normally have 50 opt in and you get a hundred and fifty from this topic, well, then talk about that topic more. If you need to create a product about that topic, maybe you can. There is just a lot of stuff you can do with upgrades. You can create multiple products as a result of seeing what opt ins that people opted in to the most and creating paid product around it. It is a great validation strategy.

James: Yeah, totally. And I guess if you are using something like Lead Boxes or perhaps a system like Ontraport or Infusion Soft where you can tag those particular form fills, then you get that learning back almost instantaneously so I love it too.

Bryan: Yeah, you can do it, I mean LeadPages will give you numbers, it won’t tell you who did it but it can tell you how many people did it. Mailchimp, Aweber or any of them, you can actually. Some of them have limitations as to how many content upgrade you can do, now with MailChimp you can do 27 content upgrades, which, if you’ve done 27 content upgrades and you’re doing a decent job, you have a big list and just about paying for some higher end software but you can do up to 27 and tag individuals and know the exact individuals that opt in to your upgrades with lower end soft wares like Mailchimp which is $10 a month starting with more options.

James: Yeah, perfect! And then you can of course follow up people with specific messaging if you want to drill down that far, can’t you? I mean, exactly why I have joined your list for, you can detail your content and your sequencing as you follow them up afterwards.

Bryan: Absolutely! Honestly, if you are starting a business from none, your email list should be your number one focus. And if you are not using content upgrade to build your email list, you’re just irresponsible, it is crazy that more people aren’t doing it. It is the single best tactic I have ever seen, I have tried it in I don t know how many industries now but I have been consulting for different friends in different worlds and there is one buddy of mine that is collecting six thousand email addresses a month, and he was collecting eight hundred a month. Only thing he did was he went to the top 10 posts of his of all time and added content upgrades to them. It completely blows my mind how well the work. So, if you are going to focus on one thing, create your content, put upgrades in them, guest post with it and your list will be huge in no time.

James: Yeah, well I am sure that message is drilling itself home. You are not the first person to mention it, we labored on that with your good friend and mine also, Bryan Dean and of course Tim Page when we had him on a few episodes ago was also versing the benefits of content upgrades so listeners if you are not quite yet seeing the benefits of content upgrades, it is a damn good strategy to be implementing. I would say that is your one action point as a result of today’s podcast.

Bryan: And the great thing is, not everybody is going to do it. So, will it become more popular? Yes! Will it ever go out of style? I don’t know. But a great thing long term for you to pay attention to is look at what other people are doing in different industries. Look at sports, look at the newspaper, look at magazines or look at the movies, see what Tom Cruise does when he promotes a new movie. Pay attention to these kinds of stuff, like I’ve got – Lead Pages was using this technique for growing software subscriptions. They are the first and only people I have seen doing it, then I started doing it, and a couple of other people started doing it and now it is becoming even more popular but it came from a software company that was not even doing it. Lead Pages did not do it in their blog article. They did it when they released a new theme in to Lead Pages, they gave away the template but they did not do it in their blog articles. Now they are doing it in their blog articles because they see how well it works but the idea came from a software company and not from a blog. If you are always reading internet marketing blogs to learn about internet marketing, you are going to be five years behind everything. So pay attention outside of your world, see what other people are doing and try to figure out what would fit in to your world. That is how I found content upgrade – just by doing that and I am sure other stuff will come out of that but that is probably one of the best tips I can give anybody in any business. Pay attention to other people, see other people outside of your industry and try to bring their strategies in to your world.

James: Well let us kind of wrap things up there appropriately because that is kind of the theme of your website Video Fruit, right? You kind of take strategies that you have seen implemented elsewhere and you put them in to frameworks that other people can then replicated themselves. Tell us a little bit about what you’ve got going on at VideoFruit.com.

Bryan: Yes, so Video Fruit is an experiment that I started back in April of last year and I was just interested in online business so I did a few things that led me in to the video world and I realized that I had been in offline marketing for the past 12 years doing direct B2B Sales. I did not know anything about online business at all. So I just started paying attention to what people who were doing a good job online business were doing, the strategies they were using, the approaches they were taking, and I just started Video Fruit as an experiment to see if I can grow an online business by using the strategies that successful people were doing so I combined a lot of my offline experience with a lot of other people’s online experience and just tried and cut and paste and changed and just tried a bunch of different methods to see what works. Eight months ago, I had no idea even what an email list was or how to use it or why it was important and now it’s like, when you don’t even have an email list and you have a business, you are just throwing money away. It’s the single most important thing outside of actually providing value to people like in Marketing Moz, it is the single most important that you can do, build a list. I did not know that in eight months, I had no clue. So now that I kind of learned all that stuff by reverse engineering what people are doing, and as a teaching mechanism, as a learning mechanism really, I just teach that stuff like something that I just experimented with last week as a giveaway and man, it has blown my mind, I have collected 1700 email addresses in like a week by doing a giveaway. I mean, I had no idea those things work so well. So I will be doing a formula in the next month and a half just showing the results of that, how I did it and how people can do the same. So it is just an experiment, as I do experiments I report back on the results and people have resonated back with it. it has been fun, I really enjoyed it.

James: Good! Well it clearly has worked for you so perhaps another action point for our listeners would be to head on over to Video Fruit.com and kind of see what you are up to and perhaps model some of the strategies that you too are implementing. Bryan, outside of VideoFruit.com is there anywhere else we should direct our listeners off to as a result of listening to today’s session?

Bryan: Nope, the best way to find me is to set up a few bonuses at VideoFruit.com/email if you are interested. We talked a lot about doing an email list so if you come over there, I guess my best formula is there where you can come and check out and join the email list I put out two formulas a week that teach you how to do different things and they are always, I try to post stuff that is very different from what the mainstreams are doing so you will find some really interesting techniques and strategies that really nobody else talks about so come over there check it out and I will tell you.

James: Well, thank you Bryan! So to you the listener to get all of the resources and links mentioned by Bryan in today’s show, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/48.

So there you go that was Bryan Harris from VideoFruit.com. To get the best results from this podcast, make sure you put the expanded guest post formula in to action and to help you with that, I have prepared a special EGP formula cheat sheet and resource guide. It is available by going to TrafficJamCast.com/48 and on the cheat sheet you’ll find this simple step by step process you need to follow by the first expanded guest post plus the resource guide, you get a list of expanded guest posts others have published so you can get ideas and model that format for your own scenario. So you can get both that resource guide plus the cheat sheet plus MP3, full transcript of today’s show at TrafficJamCast.com/48 where of course you can also join the discussion for this episode. So thank you for listening in to episode#48 so make sure that you receive episode#49 as soon as it is released, remember to subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio which you can do by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher.

We end this week’s show with a traffic jam chosen by me actually with a little directive from Bryan. He said I should go for a country and Western track, now admittedly my country and Western is a little bit limited so I have gone for a famous artist and a famous track. The track title is called Walk the Line and it is by Johnny Cash so enjoy!