Scott Carson’s First Stage: Tips for New Speakers and Building Your Audience

Hello everybody and welcome back to My First Stage, the podcast where experienced public speakers share how they started getting booked on stages and how they've used them to grow their business. I am joined by my good friend Scott Carson. He is known across the country as the Note Guy and has been speaking for over 20 years in real estate marketing and raising capital. So excited to have him here today and get to hang out a little bit and hear about his first stage story. So Scott, welcome.

Glad to be here. So excited to be here. Definitely excited.

You came with a fan club.

You know, I had a fan club here. You know, it's amazing what you can do for $10 on Amazon and get a sound box and, you know, introduce your own audience, which has come in handy when I've spoken on stage when there's been nobody there before, you know?

Oh my God. Have you actually brought that?

Oh my God. So I was speaking in a conference, I was asked to speak at a note investing conference a couple of years ago in New Jersey. And the guy that was monitoring the panel, I just could not stand. He was just such a douchepreneur. You know what I mean? Okay. Douchepreneur. And so he's up there asking questions. Well, I pull this out and I start using noises on it, you know, like the burp sound or the, you know, he tried to do a joke.

And it bombed, you know, and I was doing it. I just got them offhand, but the crowd loved it. They were literally rolling on the floor, having a good time about it. So yeah, this comes in handy. I gave Joe Saul-Sehy one of these at FinCon.

I remember that.

You know, but it's just, it's a great way to lighten the mood a little bit. So many people are so scared when they get on stage the first time. And I think that was one of the big tips I got from one of my mentors early on was not to come on and do the, how's it going everybody? You know, get it in and Do something different to break the monotony of it and to lighten things up. If you can start off with a joke or something fun or just throw people for a, you know, one time. Have you ever seen the movie Waterboy with Adam Sandler?

Many, many, many years ago.

So he's got, you know, Fonz in it, right? Henry Winkler in it. And there's a scene in the back of the movie. Yeah, exactly. Scene in the back of the movie. It's like, well, what mama don't know won't hurt her. And he pulls down his pants. He's got a tattoo of George Orbison on his butt cheek, right? Or Roy Orbison, you know, whatever. So I literally, one time I walked on stage and I just pulled the picture.

Well, that's, there you go. There's Henry Winkler's ass. Who's a fan of music in here? And that was a pretty good funny. I had a pretty good upload or uproar from the crowd on that one. So just be, try to have fun. It's, I always, always approach it like the worst thing has always happened. These people are not going to do, have not done business with you yet. That's the worst thing, you know? So let's just have a fun time and make people laugh.

So you have been speaking for years, clearly, and you— what was that first stage for you? Do you remember?

First stage? Yeah, yeah, I do. I totally remember the true, like, stage where I got up to sell something one time. I mean, we've all spoken in front of audiences before, but my first, like, oh, Scott, you have an hour to fill kind of spot was at a real estate summit in Pasadena, Texas, which Pasadena is not in the greatest areas of Houston. Across the street was like a BYOB men's club, if that tells you anything, where they're like wanting you down to get in and stuff like that. Not very good, not very quality. But anyway, so I'm there speaking in front of like 150 investors and I think I have this, these slides all good. I think things are going well and I have to fill them out. Well, my slides weren't long enough.

I filled like 20 minutes. Okay, and I was selling some like thumb drive with Craigslist ad prompts on it and stuff like that for like $99, right? Now the great thing is I sold one of those, but I was expected to fill another 40 minutes of content and sell a whole lot better. You know, sell 25% of the room is what you would try to shoot for. And I remember walking up the stage, just, oh, I just completely bombed. This is This is horrible. And you know, my mentor comes up to me, goes, okay, now you got that out of the way and you sold something. So even when you bombed, you sold something. So hey, good job, you know.

Um, and people don't know, like in a lot of real estate, uh, the way the real estate world a lot of times, if you're speaking in an event and you're pitching something, um, you're expected to sell like 25 to 30, 35% of the actual like butts in the seats. And then you give half of that commission to the promoter of the event because they put all the butts in the seats. You get half, they get half. So it's like a 50-50 split and stuff like that. Well, needless to say, I didn't do very good that way, but I didn't go over, you know what I mean? So I remember that. I went home and I worked on stuff. I joined some things. I started trying to speak to myself a little bit more in the, the, the mirror before going on.

Yeah. So you said that you had like 20 minutes of content for an hour. Did you just leave?

No, I got there, tried to take a few questions, and then I walked off stage and then the promoter was like, oh, you're like walking up. Dennis Orocho, he gets up there. Okay, guys, we're going to take a little longer break than expected. Instead of a 5-minute break, we're going to take a 30-minute break right now.

You just threw off the entire agenda.

Oh, I totally threw off because the other speaker wasn't ready to go, you know, and everybody's like, okay, all right, you know. I was like, yeah, it's like the opposite problem they usually have.

It's usually speakers go so long and then you're trying to make up time and they're just like, now we're good.

Yeah, I had the worst time with somebody. I was actually out in San Diego at an event one time, and it was like a mastermind event with Greg Reid, who's the author of Think and Grow Rich, Tree Fruit and Gold. He puts on these big events called like Secret Knock every year. And he had all these sub-sessions that were like 1-hour minute, uh, you know, 1-hour breakout sessions. There was 2 people supposed to speak. So you had 30 minutes and 30 minutes. Well, the guy that was in my hour session with me, the other co-speaker, he took 45 minutes and only gave me 15. And I had 30 minutes of content.

So I literally just ripped up my slides. I literally like my presentation, stuff like that. I said, oh, don't even bother loading it. I just pulled out a dry erase board and talked for 15 minutes. And then, you know, I was like, well, what I was going to say is out the window. We don't have time for all that. So let's go to this one thing.

Now that's like actually like a really important like skill. How many years of speaking or how many stages did How long did it take for you to get to the point that you could improvise and not feel like you need to be following a script or a slide?

Yeah, that's, that's tough. I've always enjoyed going to like comedy shows 'cause they rift so many times. They'll go in with like their list of jokes and they'll have to, you know, ad-lib from time to time. I even took some acting classes, improv classes to help me develop that skill. In case something happens. So that's, that's what I always look at, you know. Um, one of my coaches told me that if you are speaking, keep in mind, if you're going to use slides, keep in mind like the 10-20-30 model. Means 10 slides equals about 20 minutes of content, and you want everything on your slides to be 30-point font, right? So if you have to fill an hour, that means you need to have at least 30 slides.

But you also have to be able to cut in case something happens, you know. So practicing that so you have a shorter version of what you're speaking on is important. So I have like an hour-long and then I have a 30-minute speech, you know, speech on the same thing that I can just riff if I need to in case the power goes out in an event, right, or the PowerPoint, you know, breaks, or the, you know, projector breaks. I've had all that happen before. You know, in front of a bigger office. I was speaking at a real estate expo in Dallas a few years back in front of 250 real estate investors, and the power went out for 15 minutes. All right. Total black, total dark.

And there's 3 big rooms and there's 3 speakers on each side. Well, both speakers on the opposite side, we stopped. Well, I just kept rolling. I just got rid of the microphone because it wasn't working. And I just basically yelled for the next 30 minutes in a lot of ways. And people were laughing because I was cutting jokes, making fun of the people next to me. It's tough. Some people, when you have that happen, you flounder.

You're like, uh, just kind of have to go with it. And I always like to address the elephant in a room if there's something fun going on or somebody's loud or obnoxious or, you know, or me. I just make fun of me for the most part, you know.

That's pretty easy. I've met you.

Yeah, you've met me. You've made fun of me before and that's good. You know, you got to be able to laugh, you know. I even tell people like, listen, you know, like if people get up and walk to the back room like they're leaving, I was like, bye, see you later, thanks for stopping by.

I feel like that will then deter anyone else from doing it because they don't want anyone to see them, right? So it's like, okay, well, I'm sitting right here until the end because I do not want him to call me out.

Yeah, yeah. Years ago, I gotta say, I got that from Blue Man Group in Vegas, actually, years ago. I know you're getting ready to go to Vegas.

Yes.

Um, and Blue Man Group religiously does this, and somebody walks in late, you know, they've got the usher with a light They stop the show and just start staring them down, you know, and they'll do it if multiple people do it. They will stop the show to stare them down and start making fun of them. And I found how the crowd, uh, you know, approached that and laughed about that. So I always like, hey, you know, if somebody's gonna leave, they do the same thing. They stop and like throw paint at them and other things. And so I'm like, okay, let's have some fun with this. If you don't, you know, and I always say, listen, if you get up and get mad and you don't like what I'm saying, you're entitled to your opinion. I could agree with you, but we'll both be wrong at that point.

You know what I mean? Another thing that I like doing to break the ice, especially if I'm speaking for an hour and it's kind of a dry audience, I know you've experienced a few of these. Like we've talked about when you went to, was it Miami? And you're that really weird audience that wasn't set up what you thought it was going to be. Right. I was like, if I'm talking to a new audience, I will use a slide and I'll put like 4 objects up there. And by objects, I mean like I'll put a circle, a triangle, a square, and a star. And I say, hey folks, when I'm, you know, I'm here, thank you for having me. I've got 4 shapes up here. Before I dive into the main content, I like to get a feel for the audience, you know what I mean? And find out who's here.

So if you look at this, take a second, look at the 4 shapes on the screen. Take a look at them, not at me. I know I'm kind of round sometimes, but look at the circle up there, you know. And one of those shapes is going to call to you. And I'm like, does everybody have a shape that's calling to them out of the 4? And they're like, yeah, yeah. So, okay, who are the circles in here? And people will raise their hand. It's about 10% of the audience. Circles, you are the, you have to know everything inside and out before you take any actions.

That sound about right? You gotta know everything. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's total bullshit. Squares, where's the squares? A few, you know, 5, 10% of the audience raise their hand. I'm like, okay, great. You guys are the ones that, hey, give me a few, give me a few details of the mid, the high, and the low levels. Give me a few points and I can make a decision from there. And that, Where are the triangles? Triangles of, you know, about 15-20% will raise their hand.

You guys just need to know the top high points. Give me the top points and I'll run with it. And I said, then the stars. Of course, the stars always gets more people to raise their hand, right? And it's usually about 75% of the audience. I said, okay, everybody, look at the stars. Look at the people in the room here. You guys are best learned by sex, drugs, and alcohol. So let's go to the bar.

And that always gets a good, good little laughter and and pattern break for where they're at, and then they start laughing, and then I go into the content and go from there.

But you said before about that event that I did, it was, it was Orlando. It was the one that you had actually— I think you had spoken there because it was real estate. It was the American Real Estate Association or something.

Yep.

Worst stage I've ever been on. And they literally, they put me in the wrong room. I was supposed to be speaking to the real estate agents, and like half of that event is real estate agents, half of it is like PhDs that are getting their doctorate in real estate, which I didn't know was an option. Like, I didn't know that was available. And so they're doing like really heavy research. And then there's me and everyone else in that room that was speaking, because they don't even give you like, this is the time this person is speaking in this room. It's like, there's 3 speakers in this room at this time, and you just go to see all of them, but they don't tell you what they're speaking on. So it's not even like people could choose to see mine.

They just chose this block. So it was all just set up to fail. But everyone, their slides were like Word documents, and then mine are pink and pretty and sparkly. And I think the way I opened was, raise your hand if you do not belong in this room. And I just raised my hand and I'm like, bear with me, guys. I don't know why I'm here. But I feel like from what you have said, you deal with that a lot better than I did because I just like went through my presentation. I tweaked a few things to talk about.

It was supposed to just be like how a real estate agent can use a podcast.

Mm-hmm.

So instead I'm like talking about how you can use a podcast to share your research. I'm just like making things up while, as I go. And then I leave and I just cry for 3 days.

Yeah. I know you're pretty upset when you're like, guys, I almost think you emailed me right after you got off stage. This was the worst event ever.

Probably.

You know? Yeah. And I'm like, I'm sorry, that's not like it was when I was there. But then we started looking at the description, I was like, this is not the same type of description for the event that I spoke at. Um, I mean, I'm sorry, sometimes you'll run into that. You're on the wrong stage with the wrong audience and, and, and then, and, you know, no matter what you do, the lemonade's gonna be pretty bitter from the lemons.

I did, I, I ended up getting like my, cuz I had to, I was there as a speaker, but I had to pay the ticket price to attend, which was like $800. I got it refunded. And they even admitted like, yeah, we put you in the wrong room. But I, I guess it'll eventually be a learning experience. But until then, I literally, I called my dad crying and I'm like, can you come get me? Like I was the kid at the sleepover party that didn't want to be there anymore. And the poor man had to drive from Tampa to Orlando and come get me the day after he dropped me off because I visited them first and he just had to come get me. Because I'm just like, I can't be here. I'm just crying.

I can't stop. I was like full anxiety, just like panic breakdown.

Well, yeah, I mean, it's, you know, fear of speaking is the second biggest fear after dying, or sometimes bigger in a lot of cases, you know? And, um, you get better the more you speak. I mean, like, I used to travel so much where I would be speaking at a different real estate club or seminar conference like every week. Stuff, and I look back at like our hotel like hotels.com, and it would be like 270 days out of every year for 3 years was literally on the road somewhere else besides home. And that's a lot of practice. I don't travel and speak as much as I used to because I'm like, I can be at home and record a podcast or be on somebody else's podcast and knock 3 or 4 of those out in a day and live my own life without having the time loss and the fear of that, of, uh, missing a flight or not showing up correctly and just doing it where I'm comfortable, which is always important. I think, well, probably one of the things you have to do is figure out— and I think Tony Robbins teaches this a lot from— I've seen his stuff before where he talks about like you prime yourself. You literally like motion or breathing skills or positive thoughts or words, whatever it is. And, uh, that helps overcome some things, especially if you're in the wrong audience.

You know, you laugh about it or, hey, I saw one guy one time realize he was not in the right audience and he literally just stopped. He goes, I'm at the wrong presentation. And he got up and walked out of the room.

You know, the speaker or someone in the audience?

The speaker did. The speaker like, okay, I'm in the wrong room and just got up and left. Everybody's like, what's going on here? Actually, that was at FinCon a couple of years ago. You know, when they would have all those like rooms and glass partitions and the speaker got up there, uh, and left and some other lady in PR got up and went and taught for 20 minutes because it was an empty stage. There's people there already.

I mean, like, way to take advantage of the situation for that lady.

Yeah. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah. Um, so you and I both are in agreement that speakers need podcasts.

100%. I mean, 1,000%. I mean, speaking is a great lead gen. And, you know, I used to say I would never say no to a speaking spot when I first started off. I would go speak for 30 minutes at the local networking group or go across the country to speak and be on a panel for 30 minutes where I got 10 minutes, you know. And you sometimes you have to do that in the beginning side. But I've also been like at events where there was nobody at. You know, I was at— I paid $5,000 to sponsor a summit called the REI Expo.

It was out, it was traveling across the country, like 6 events, and they did an event in San Francisco. Okay, there was 125 people that showed up to the event, but only 4 of them were paid tickets. The rest were all vendors and speakers. That's not a very good cost per lead on it, right? And I remember going to the room and they're like, my friends came in. So I would be speaking in front of a couple of people. And there's like 2 people that I didn't know there. Right. So I got, okay.

And so this big room, I said, let's just shrink this down. Let's just be here. These 5 seats where you guys are sitting at and the people behind it. And then, um, this was when Facebook Live was big. So Steph just pulled up Facebook Live on my phone and we did a Facebook Live pitch. I had 250 people watch the Facebook Live and 3 people in the audience that didn't know. So I just had to try to pivot with it. But that's the thing is just trying in today's world, the, you know, the need to travel, the need to fly out there.

You don't have to do that anymore. A podcast is so much easier to have a stage every day, every week, as often as you want to not only talk with people, but, or talking on people's stages, you know, virtually. That's, that's the way I always look at it. I would love podcasts. I think I've been on over 400. Other podcasts out there, and I always look at it. I don't care if there's 10 people or 1,000 people downloading the episode. It's another stage to be on, another way that I can get my message out, whatever it is, but also leverage that time, that audio, that video, and it's things that I can share with my audience that can be a calling card for other people to see.

And I just show up professionally as best I can, you know, and have fun with it. So it becomes a It may be a flop of a podcast for them and their audience, but it's something that I can use to help me spread my word. So I, you know, speaking is important. You just got to get out and it's still the best way to build credibility, being on somebody's stage, whether it's in person or here via StreamYard or Zoom or Restream or however you're doing it.

Please don't do your podcast on Zoom, but that's that. We'll move on from that.

Well, see, I totally agree to that, but I have often had a lot of folks that are low tech You know, they're not podcast, they're asset managers. So to try to get them to get on StreamYard or Restream or something else is they don't get it, you know. So we just give them the Zoom, make it easier.

You know, they don't— they just have to click enter.

It doesn't work that way because you know how things affect differently with like the microphone and the audio side. I always have this happen when I go from Zoom to StreamYard or something like that. The tech doesn't want to work properly. So I just like, let's just do Zoom. Be easier.

Okay, that's fair. Yeah. Um, so I— when I, when I say like my first stage, and I'm talking about getting on stages, I do not only consider a stage to be the physical stage. I'm talking podcasts, I'm talking webinars, I'm talking any opportunity that you are having to like speak to people and have the attention on you. And you have clearly— you do that often with podcasts, and you do your lives and everything. What is your advice for people to repurpose that content and use it to help them get more stages or grow that impact that they're having with the stages?

You got to share that message everywhere. I mean, you've got to rebroadcast it. So like, I'll give you an example. If you, if you will send me the raw file on this, I will turn around and rebroadcast this on my own dime, my own marketing to all my social media channels. I'll, I even create a podcast called The Best of Scott Carson. Which is just me speaking on other stages and people can go there and watch me speak on every stage I've ever spoke on and listen to it. It's a great like business card to hear about what I'm talking about. Right.

Is it like an actual like podcast? Cause I have a, like a, I have a Spotify playlist where I go and add any podcast that I guess on, I add to this playlist.

No, it is its own podcast. The Best of Scott Carson Podcast.

Subscribed.

Yep, exactly. And it's just anywhere from a 10-minute video up to an hour and a half, you know, and then I take it and upload the video into Restream to broadcast it. I'll transcribe it again. I'll rewrite the episode. I'll give you a great example. I had a guy who has a syndication podcast. He had me on in like June of last year for 45 minutes. And he said, oh yeah, your episode will be out in August.

Well, August came and went. So I sent him an email last week. I was like, hey man, I said, where's this episode? Is it, did it just not make the cut? Did you not like me? That's fine. Just let me know. Oh no, no, I've just been behind. So he sends me the link. Well, he split it up into 2 episodes, but this, the episodes are the same exact name, same exact description, and the same time, 15 minutes and 32 seconds each. So what does that look like? If you're looking at something, it looks like he just— well, it looks like it's a duplicate episode.

Nobody's going to watch the second part or the first part, right? And it's horrible. It's like, it's barely like a 1,000-character description about it. Like no SEO, no AI juice, none of that good stuff. So I was like, wait, let me fix this. So I went and took, downloaded both video or audios, combined them into one video, transcribed it, rewrote two different blogs for him, even created two different thumbnails and two different titles. And I said, hey man, let me send this here to you. Can you use this stuff? Because what you have looks like it's the same thing. There's no Google AI juice.

People are just not gonna download the second episode of it because it looks like the same thing. Can you use these things? He's like, oh my God, yeah, I'll gladly do this now. And I'm like, okay, now it's got 2 episodes that are out there versus looking like one that's kind of pathetically done. And, you know, reuse it everywhere. Your time is so valuable. We've gotten to the point where if somebody sends us a crappy description of the episode or they just have the same cut and paste, we'll rewrite it and send it to them and say, hey, here's a blog or here's a new description. Why don't you use this, please? These, because in today's world of AI, AI loves video, they love transcriptions, they love blogs, but they, they don't want you to take the same thing and reload it every day. They want you to tweak it up a little bit so it shows up as like 3 different articles instead of 1.

It's just 3 times. So while it is the same thing, just rewriting it and, and retweaking it and retableting it, AI sees that as 3 different pictures, 3 different types of content, and boost that even more for you. And we've seen huge results of going in and just kind of restreaming, recycling, re-editing content and reuse it everywhere.

What I'm hearing is I can save myself a lot of effort and not write a description for your episode and you'll just send me one.

You know I will, girl.

You know, I know you will. So there's a few minutes saved from my day. Thank you.

Well, it's not going to cost me anything. I'm just going to take the audio or the video that you'll send me and ChatGPT will do it, and I'll just put my prompt and it'll write 3 blogs and 3 articles for me, and I'll send you one of them.

I'm curious, the first guy you did that to, um, the one that had the, the 2 episodes that looked the same, have— did you ever go back and see like more recent episodes if he did better and like learned, or did he just keep doing what he was doing?

This just happened this week. Oh, okay. It literally just happened, and like he didn't even auto-update he's updated the tube, but he didn't update his email campaign because literally before I got on here today, here's your second episode. Here's part 2 of the interview and it still shows the stuff that was pre, um, he did not any of the new updates to me because when he did it, he said it all and then set and forget it. Yeah. So, but we've, but here's the thing. We've been going back in to older episodes of the last year and then we've been redoing it and we've seen more downloads from those episodes and more AI. Grabbing that under that content and boosting me in a variety of different ways.

So yeah, it's been worth doing it just to go re-edit what we put up there to make it look different.

If somebody hasn't really been on physical stages yet and they wanted to just find some ways that they could put themselves out there, what would you recommend they start with? Is it launch your own podcast, guest on podcasts? Do lives, webinars? What is it?

All the above, whatever you're comfortable with. If you don't have an audience, go create, do a live stream and start to build an audience. Like when I launched my podcast originally back in the day, back over 8 years ago, we started doing a Facebook Live daily for 150 days straight before we decided to go, we'll do a podcast. And that helped us build an audience through Facebook. The algorithm's differently now, a little bit, obviously, but wherever your audience is, is where you need to be. So think about that. Not every social media platform is good. Like Twitch, my audience is not on Twitch.

We still broadcast there. We still get 1 or 2 viewers every time, but that's not my main audience. My main audience is on LinkedIn and Twitter. Facebook's okay, but, um, you know, LinkedIn Live is great. You know, there's other services out there you can use. Like, you can go live here, like Restream, and pick up different places. Restream as well. Just go figure out where your audience is at and then start, start delivering content.

Do a daily or weekly something that's live that gets you better in answering questions, Q&A. You know, one of the smartest things that we did years ago was we would do like a virtual event where we brought on 34 speakers in 3 days that were peers in my industry, and we did like a live summit with them on there speaking about stuff. And, uh, that helped tremendously in answering questions and asking questions and helping to build an audience that we saw a big boost with new episodes that came on after that was just solo stuff.

So, so many things like go through my head with this conversation because like if I were to go live on Facebook and nobody is watching, I would be like, like cringing at myself. And there's like a weird dichotomy of like, how can you be embarrassed? Literally nobody is seeing it, and yet you're embarrassed because nobody is seeing it. And that doesn't make any sense, and yet it does. Um, but what do you say to people like that want to get started, are afraid to get started, don't want to be speaking to crickets? Or maybe it's, how do you actually still show up and speak excited and like to, like the room is crowded when there's nobody there?

Great question. And I actually used to think that way. Like, I'm just going to get up and speak into the void. You know, we like interaction. We want, we like people besides your mom or my mom watching me talk. Right. Thanks, mom.

My mom always watches you talk.

I know. I know. She's, she's got the whole I Love Scott Carson t-shirt fan club. But Gary Vaynerchuk said— I was at an event in Vegas years ago and he got up there about when Facebook Live was first coming out. He goes, man, just get on here and talk about things. You may have nobody there, but all it takes is that one person to see it, to do something, to take your content and then reach out to you or do something. All it takes is that one view. You're not going for the thousands, you're going for that one person.

So great if you have a lot of people on there, but it all starts with that first person watching and then maybe Maybe they're not logged on at 3 o'clock when you go live. You know, maybe they're not logged on at 4 o'clock. You know, with so many analytics today, you could actually go into AI or go on to just Google and type in what's the best time to do a Facebook Live in this niche? Or what's the best time to go live on YouTube at this niche? And it will help you come up with a better time when people are more likely to be there. But, you know, there's like I was doing, you remember, Clubhouse, you know, that was around during COVID and everybody's all excited about Clubhouse. I would get on and do like a 30-minute Clubhouse Live and I would see people jump on and see people jump off. I'm like, okay, worst case, they're not my right audience. At least I'm out here. And you got to put the food in the water first for the fish to bite.

You know, let's see, you might as well just get out there. If you don't put it up, nobody's ever going to see it. So get out there. If it's 15 minutes, it's 15 minutes more than you did. If it's 10 minutes, it's 10 minutes more than you did.

You said it's like Gary Vee says to do this, and it's like when Gary Vee says to do something, like, and sometimes it only works because you're Gary Vee. But I actually just had this conversation with, um, a friend of mine that we kind of like barter our services back and forth, and he's a business coach and he put up— he's been trying to like challenge himself to do more video content. So he puts a video up on YouTube and someone reaches out to him. And he's like, oh, like, how did you find me? And because the guy's like, I'm in, like, I wanna, I wanna hire you, I wanna work with you. He asked how he found him and he's like, this video. And he tells him which video. That video had 1 view.

Yep.

And it was that guy, which I mean, that's 100% conversion rate. Like that is some good data right there. But also he saw this video that nobody else had watched, but he watches it and sees this guy is the expert in this, this is the best one, and reaches out. And it doesn't matter that it didn't have tens of thousands of views already. The content, like, as long as you're leading with high-quality content and high-quality advice, it's okay.

Yeah, we're so caught up in that numbers or followers, subscribers, you know, that's all ego.

Vanity metrics.

Exactly, vanity metrics. And I had a guy try to sell me one time on helping me boost my Instagram. Like, oh, I'll help you grow your Instagram to 10,000+ followers. I'm like, I don't need you to grow it to 10,000+ followers. I don't need a bunch of 18-year-old Filipino boys over in the Philippines subscribing to my Instagram channel. That doesn't help me in any form or fashion. I'll take the 1,800 investors I know that are really here who are going to watch my stuff versus that audience that doesn't make any sense for me, you know.

One more question, because I know we're getting to to time right now, but when you're on stage, like a physical in-person stage, it's not as easy to have like metrics and data and all of that. So a lot of the times what my goal is when I'm on stage is to get people onto my email list.

Yep.

And what is, what are some ways that have worked for you to either get people to subscribe to a mailing list, get people to be able to check in with them those 5 times in order to make that sale? Like, what, what do you do?

That's a great question. Great, great question. So, um, we will use a QR code that they can pull their phone out and either, you know, QR code to get in the link that captures it, sends them to a web page, and on the web page we have, you know, IP grabbers. So even if they don't click on the link in the website or my landing page, our IP will grab their IP address and go find a first name, last name, and email address for them. They don't even have to like opt in. Now if they opt in, we know we've got them in and we've got an email sync list or stuff like that. Or if you could have them, you know, type in a shortcode like send it, uh, text the word notes to 30, you know, 72,000 is what we use forever. And they would text it and we would capture their first name, last name, and email, and they would get 8 hours of a training video.

So give something that's valuable, you know, like I always say, hey, don't bother taking pictures of the slides. I'll give you a QR code. You can download slides at the end, and that's an easy way for them to be able to grab that. But, you know, just get something in there. I see so many people that go out and speak, they don't have anything. They don't, they're not building an email list from day one. And that's like, oh, it's like the kiss of death. That means you got to do all this extra work to build a database.

If you aren't grabbing that email or a cell phone number, one of two ways, then it's not worth your time.

That is time. That is all my questions. I actually have another 40,000 I could ask you. Um, for anybody listening, if they want to get in touch with you, figure out what you're doing, learn from you a little bit more, how can they do that?

Yeah, it's really easy. You can go to talkwithscottcarson.com, book a phone call with me. Always glad to lend in here for 30 minutes if somebody asked me questions. Our main website's weclosenotes.com, but you probably don't want to know about the note business. But if you do, then I'm the guy for you. I'm the note guy. But, uh, talkwithscottcarson.com, book a phone call. But you got to do me one quick favor.

Don't bother booking a phone call with me if you haven't gone over and hit subscribe or left Sarah a 5-star review. Gotta do that. That's priority number 1 before you can talk to me. She's doing a great job kicking ass and taking names. And so give her a little love because we as podcasters, speakers, we'd love to get feedback. And so even if you don't like me, that's fine. Go leave her a 5-star review.

You see, you always give great advice.

I try to. Here's another thing. Give a LinkedIn recommendation to a speaker. That's another great way. Go to LinkedIn. If you like people, go give them a recommendation for something and say, hey, I'd love to talk with you about having you on my show or speaking together.

Even more good advice. I love it. Thank you so much for being here. I am sure we will talk very, very soon. And thank you everyone for listening. If you have a first stage story you want to share, go to myfirststagepodcast.com and we'll see you next week.