Kim Walsh-Phillips is the founder of Powerful Professional, a business coaching and education company. She was recently named #475 in the Inc 5000 and is a multi-seven-figure business entrepreneur with no business degree and a tendency to say “crazy pants” more than is socially acceptable. She is the best-selling author of The Ultimate Guide to Instagram for Business and The No BS Guide to Direct Response Social Media Marketing. (Fun fact: she uses a thesaurus when she writes or she would use the word “awesome,” “cool,” or “very” 7,452,675 more times than she already does.)
She’s an in-demand speaker, having shared the stage with Tony Robbins, Grant Cardone, Kevin O’Leary and Gary Vaynerchuk.
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Kim Walsh-Phillips about increasing your social media presence and seeing it pay off for your business.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
- How pivoting is powerful and yields opportunities that reveal themselves to you.
- How social media should be like cocktail party; have fun, entertain, and inspire.
- MOM is always right; get people Magnetized, get them to Opt-in, and M
- How to use social media to increase your audience and generate success.
- Why the leads generated from writing a book are the best kinds of leads.
Connect with Kim:
Links Mentioned:
publishproprofit.com/getmorefollowers
Guest Contact Info:
Email
kwphillips@powerfulprofessionals.com
Twitter
@TheKimWalshPhillips
Instagram
@TheKimWalshPhillips
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/kimwalshphillips
Rob Kosberg:
Hey, welcome everybody. Rob Kosberg here with another episode of the Publish, Promote, Profit podcast. I’m super excited to have Kim Walsh-Phillips with us today. Kim is the founder of Powerful Professional, a business coaching and educational company. She was recently named number 475 on the Inc 5,000 list. She is a multi seven figure business entrepreneur with no business degree and a tendency to say crazy pants more than is socially acceptable. Probably one time is more than socially acceptable. She’s the best-selling author of two great books, The Ultimate Guide to Instagram for Business and The No BS Guide to Direct Response Social Media Marketing, which we’re going to talk quite a bit about today. Kim is a very in-demand speaker, having shared the stage with Tony Robbins, Grant Cardone, Kevin O’Leary, Gary Vaynerchuk and others. Kim, really happy to have you here today. I haven’t seen you since Rich Schefren’s event last year, so good to see you again.
Kim Walsh-Phillips:
Great to see you too.
Rob Kosberg:
You look like you’ve fared well during COVID.
Kim Walsh-Phillips:
Yeah, I mean being in the space of teaching businesses how to go online to get more clients, I feel like literally God has prepared me for a time such as this so we can serve people. Our business has doubled since this time last year.
Rob Kosberg:
Congratulations. I love that. That is fantastic. You know, obviously brick and mortars and businesses that haven’t had a big social media footprint, they’ve gotten hammered, they’ve gotten crushed and those that are prepared or those that can be prepared with things that you teach and train, it’s the future. We’re not going back. Everything is becoming more digitized.
Kim Walsh-Phillips:
Thank you so much. It’s amazing because we’ve seen traditional brick and mortar, like one of my coaching clients who has a wine shop, and you would think, “Oh my gosh, okay. What did they do?” They were on the island in Nantucket. They did not want to allow any foot traffic into their store and they literally increased their sales from $1.3 million to $2.7 million in revenue in one year and they just started going online doing a weekly virtual wine tasting, doing a delivery, doing online ordering. They just pivoted and they increased. What’s amazing is that she leveraged that opportunity to become an expert and authority in her space and launched an online course about how to pick the right wine every time. Speaking of your topic of influence, she’s then writing a book about how to pick your right wine every time because now she’s not just a commodity of a wine shop, she’s now the expert and authority. What do you want to do when you go out to dinner with your friends, your colleagues, business associates, you bring a bottle of wine to someone else? You want to make sure you’re picking the right one. She’s empowering people. I think you can look at literally every type of business and say not, “How is everybody doing it,” because 87% of those that do marketing get no ROI, but, “How are the ones who have had success doing it,” and you’re going to find these clues into how they pivoted in a way unlike how others did it.
Rob Kosberg:
I love it. Let’s dive into that just a little bit if we could. Let’s say we have somebody listening that doesn’t have any type of real social media footprint, or does, but isn’t really getting an ROI from it. What are the biggest mistakes that you see that people are making and what are some of the steps that they can take to fix all that stuff?
Kim Walsh-Phillips:
It’s amazing because I see people try to put themselves in a cookie cutter of what they need to do. I actually had one of my clients recently, she said, “I want to send out a weekly post and this is what it should be, and would this irritate you?” I said, “It doesn’t matter. Stop worrying about what I want. Start showing up as you are.” This woman is incredibly flamboyant. She’s got 45 birds. She dresses to the nines. She’s eccentric in the most wonderful, outrageous way. I said, “Start showing up like that so you can get people who will actually attract to you. Don’t look at what someone else is doing and think that’s what you need to do. How do you feel the most alive and like yourself? When you show up just as you are, you’re going to attract people to you who want to work with you just as you are and then it’s going to be this beautiful chemistry and not exhausting at all because you are totally authentic.” The mistake I see people making, number one is, that they try to follow a script or be like somebody else is. Now, we all love little hacks, things we can do for more results, but be truly yourself. I’ll tell you the way I figured this out was I was at a conference. I had a weekly Facebook live that I did. I still do it to this day. I went to the conference cocktail party before I did my live. I had had a cocktail. It was rather strong. I get online. I’m totally relaxed. I’m having a great time. It was the most fun I ever had doing a live. It was the most responsive my audience ever was. I was like, “Why?” I thought about it and I’m like, “Because I wasn’t worried about what they think or what should I say. I was just having fun and being me.” I thought, “Well, could I do that without drinking because I don’t really want to be drunk all day long, but I want to be good.” So, I started doing this. I listened to Eminem’s Lose Yourself before I would go on doing my lives and I would get so pumped up, like on fire, that I could hop in my chair and eventually I don’t need the music anymore. I can now just be me. What could you do to get yourself in the zone before you show up on social? That’s number one. Number two, people typically are either one of two terrible dates. Back when I was single in South Florida, I would meet one of two guys. One would be the super pretty and spent all night talking about himself and if he ever asked me a question it would be, “Why did you go out with me,” which is really another question all about him. Then there’d be the other guy whose mom is putting pressure on him to get married and so he’s talking about marriage and kids on the first date completely freaking me out. On social media, that’s what most businesses do. They either are making it all about them or they’re trying to get the sale right away, making it way too serious, way too soon. Social media is a cocktail party. People are going to have fun, to escape, to be inspired. If you’re going to pull them away from that cocktail party that they went to escape, then pull them out of that, what you show them first has to be something that’s going to entertain, it’s going to educate, or it’s going to inspire. I like to follow a formula called MOM. M, you’re going to be magnetic for your perfect prospects that they’re going to want your things so much that they’re willing to click out of Facebook. O, you get them to opt in away from the funny cat videos and the memes, and the final M is then you sell them something. It’s MOM, so the final M is monetize. It’s mom knows best, this one right here. It’s a way to leverage the power of social, where your people currently are, get them to join your list and then become your client.
Rob Kosberg:
I love it. This is gold. Let me ask you this. This may be more tactical, but I always like tactical stuff as well. Are you suggesting to people, again going back to that individual that you know who is maybe trying to figure it out and stumbling around, do you suggest that they work from their personal profile? Do they work from a business profile? Are they setting up a completely separate kind of persona when it comes to sharing this new version of yourself, which is the real you?
Kim Walsh-Phillips:
It’s such a great question. It should be from a business page and a business account, but that business page and business account should be your name because people want to do business with the individual. When you look at Elon Musk, he has more than 10 times the number of followers that Tesla does. Richard Branson has 4.4 million followers on Instagram. Virgin Airways has 500,000. People want to have a relationship with an individual, not a company name, not a company logo. You utilize your name as the spokesperson of your business to be leading edge. Why would we not do personal? It’s because first of all, using your personal page to grow your business is against terms of service. They can shut you down at any point. Number two, there are no analytics for your personal page. You don’t know how many people are seeing your posts, how far is distribution, how well it is doing. Number three, you can’t run any ads from your personal page. If you’re growing your account and it’s going really well, you can’t go any farther. There is a fourth. There is a 5,000-person limit of friend connections on your personal page and that’s limiting the reach of your business. You really do need to do it in a business and yes, you will need to spend some money in order to do that, but there’s two ways to get somewhere. There’s the winding road that’s completely free and there’s the toll road that will get you there faster. I always take the toll road. I don’t know about you Rob, but I look for the express lane on the toll road that I pay a little extra toll for so I could get there even faster. Running ads is taking that express lane that you do have to pay for, but it’s going to get you there a lot faster.
Rob Kosberg:
I love it. Some of what you’re sharing obviously is directed towards Facebook, talking about the 5,000 friends limit on your personal page and that kind of thing. Do you have a hierarchy of what people should focus on; Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, et cetera? What are your thoughts on the different platforms? Also, who should focus on what kind of platform as opposed to another, if that’s even a thing?
Kim Walsh-Phillips:
If you are looking for individual clients, my number one platform that you need to be on right now is Clubhouse. It has more ROI faster than any other platform that’s out there. People are seeking information on there right now. We have generated over seven figures in revenue from Clubhouse since the beginning of the year. Think about it. They’re early adopters and they’re in there seeking information. They’re affluent typically and they are on there, they had to figure out a new technology. They are there to get information just like a podcast listener is amazing for that reason. They’re there in that space and they need to be there in real time and implements. You can literally take them from, “I will open up a Clubhouse room and then I will send them to a webinar that I have that starts in 30 minutes and they will buy.” I could take them from knowing me to buying in a 30-minute cycle. It’s epic. If you use Clubhouse, you need to have Instagram up and running. Instagram is important for that reason, but for scaling, you’re going to use Facebook because that is 3.6 billion. If you took every social media and combined it, it wouldn’t hit the value of Facebook, so I want you to be on there too. One strategy you can use is, you can do a Facebook live once a week. You take that Facebook live video, you download it, that becomes your podcast. It can become a post you do on LinkedIn. It could become a video you put on YouTube. You can slice it up right inside of Facebook. They let you do it to become Instagram stories. If I was just going to do one thing, I would do my Facebook live. Now, baller strategy, you could actually go on Zoom, you could do your Facebook live through your computer because you can broadcast a Zoom into Facebook. That would record the whole thing, so that would now make it a video, and then I would have it on my phone, I’d have my air pod in my ear, and I could be on Clubhouse giving all that same information at the same time. I’ve done that. I’ve done a Facebook live while I would do a Clubhouse room and gotten all that content done in 30 minutes.
Rob Kosberg:
That’s what ballers do, right there. Clubhouse was so hot, and it felt a little bit like to me that it kind of tapered off, but evidently I’m wrong and I just haven’t been paying close enough attention.
Kim Walsh-Phillips:
If you are someone who is seeking clients, it is the number one place I would say to go because really, I love LinkedIn too for person to person outreach and we get a lot of success with LinkedIn, but it’s not real time interaction. It’s just not. I have someone who does my LinkedIn for me now because they can. This is literally getting in the space and getting to meet. Random side note, I have a call later today with an NFL player who is going to have me help them launch their course, who I literally met on there because he heard me speak about something, DM’d me, and now he’s my client. That has happened multiple times on that platform.
Rob Kosberg:
You had mentioned, and I’m assuming it’s the DM version of it, but you had mentioned if you’re going to run on Clubhouse you need to have Instagram set up. Is that the one-on-one communication device that you’re using in conjunction with Clubhouse?
Kim Walsh-Phillips:
It’s Instagram, and Twitter is the other option, but Instagram is a lot more popular. I do have a Twitter account, but my publisher will use that for that piece. That’s big in the literary, but not big in the client. Instagram is really the one that you want to have set up because that’s the one you’re going to use.
Rob Kosberg:
What am I not asking about the social media piece? I’ve loved what you share. I love the MOM, that’s a great acronym. Mom’s always right. So, what am I not asking about it? What are the newbies or people that really don’t have a good presence, what are they struggling with? When you talk to them, what are the things that they’re afraid of or they’re challenged by or they’ve known for years that they should be doing? Why are they not and how can we help them overcome that?
Kim Walsh-Phillips:
Well, the exciting thing is, is that you can grow a following very quickly online and you should. When you think about tribe mentality, like for the books, when they have more reviews, people feel like it’s more credible. It’s something that we call tribe mentality that people protect themselves by choosing things that other people have chosen before, they have to make that choice. It’s a safety mechanism that’s built into our DNA. And so, when I go to your Facebook page, I go to your Instagram page, and you have no followers, even if you are awesome, it makes me think, “I’m not so sure about that.” The good news is you can grow your followers very quickly on Facebook and you can leverage that in the other channels that are online. What I’m so excited about is that we have an upcoming challenge that we’re partnering with you on, and people are going to be able to join in, but I’ll give you a quick little preview and then we’ll give them the link that they can come in on it. When it comes to Facebook, what I want you to think about is it is an international audience. All the people of the world are on this and Facebook sees all people the same. We might think about it different, “I don’t do business with people over in Italy.” I mean, I don’t know why you wouldn’t because they’re fabulous, but maybe you’re thinking that right now. Facebook, they see us and everybody else in every country the same. You can leverage that with growing the followers of your page. There’s a type of ad on Facebook called promote your page and the entire purpose of it is for you to get more followers. You can choose the demographics that you’re looking for. Let’s say you’re an expert. Let’s say you are a therapist and you specialize in kids. Let’s say that’s your specialty. You might want to target moms that go to Whole Foods. Maybe that’s your target market, organic living and all the different categories for that. You could set up all of your promote page with moms that have these kinds of interests and then you just choose the location setting of worldwide. In that free training we’re going to show you how, but you can choose the location setting of worldwide. What Facebook sees is there’s this massive audience they get to choose from and the larger you can choose from when setting up an audience, the better it goes. They’re going to be like, ding, ding, ding, ding. They’re going to get you followers at pennies a piece. You can get thousands of followers in just a few days. When you shut that ad down and you open up an ad to drive in clients, you can choose the same interests and just change the location to the exact location you want to target. Facebook has already vetted your page. They say people know, like, and trust them. They already have followers and the demographics are already set up so you’re able to reach more people at a lower cost than you ever could before you ran the campaign.
Rob Kosberg:
I love that. Thank you. Let’s give them the link now. We’ll do it again at the end. I want to change gears just a minute and talk about your most recent book. I want to talk about the No BS Guide book, but let’s give them the link now to the challenge that’s upcoming because I think it’s a challenge that anybody that wants to grow their platform, their social platform, they need to be a part of it. Publish pro profit forward slash, let me just open up my book and make sure, get more followers. So, publishproprofit.com/getmorefollowers will be the link for Kim’s challenge. We’ll give that again at the end, but let’s change gears for just a second. Obviously, you’ve written your books to make an impact on people. Your books have done fabulous. You’ve made an amazing impact on people. Your business is exploding. Your books have also done amazing things for you, right? They’ve gotten you stages, perhaps revenue. Talk to me about what your books have done for you and specifically the No BS Guide to Direct Response Social Media Marketing because that’s the one that you have some cool things in it that you shared.
Kim Walsh-Phillips:
It’s amazing because I spent a long time as someone who worked really hard in her space, who was not seen as the expert. I ran all the marketing and promotions for the downtown of the community that I lived in. I worked for their main street organization and I would get the retailers to come and they really wouldn’t listen to me. I would always feel like I’d have to bring in outside speakers to say the same thing I would’ve said, but because it was an outside speaker, they would value them. What’s amazing now is, I have these same people who reach out to me to ask if I can autograph their book for them. That’s one thing about a book that changes the way that people see you as an expert. My first time I published the book, The No BS Guide to Direct Response Social Media Marketing with Dan Kennedy was 2015, and then it republished last year, which is a crazy time, but it worked. That one book alone has generated 16,125 leads to our lists and $1,463,733.24 in revenue. Not only is it over seven figures in revenue, but the people who come through our book funnel are the best clients because they were action takers, they were information seekers and they had to jump through a hoop to get our information. So, it wasn’t just, I love Facebook ads, but it wasn’t just clicking on a Facebook ad. That’s super easy. They had to put effort in. They already see me as the expert. They already see me as the authority, and they come to us asking what they can buy. It is very different than me having to offer them something to sell.
Rob Kosberg:
I love how you know to the penny exactly what’s come through. When you’re running a funnel, and you’re obviously running funnels in coordination with your book and whatnot, then it’s easy to track and it’s easy to know exactly what has happened from it. Congratulations on that. Sometimes people hear these numbers and they must be thinking, “Holy Cow,” but these are not numbers from royalties. This is not because a million books sold. This is because you are very, very smart with using your book in conjunction with making higher level offers, high ticket offers, et cetera. Congratulations on the success of that.
Kim Walsh-Phillips:
Thank you so much. Its super simple. We just offer a free gift inside our book and people get it and then we can track them. We know exactly down to the penny how much money they spend.
Rob Kosberg:
Awesome. Okay, Kim, so we want to send them to publishproprofit.com/getmorefollowers. That’s for your free challenge that is coming up. When does it start? What’s the date on it?
Kim Walsh-Phillips:
The challenge opens up at the beginning of August.
Rob Kosberg:
That’s when the challenge is. The challenge is free for people. There’s no reason not to participate in it because you’re going to learn some amazing things from Kim. Any final words for those that maybe it’s time for them to take up the social media marketing gauntlet?
Kim Walsh-Phillips:
If you’ve been following what other people are doing and think the secret is to copy what they do, don’t. Most people who are using social media marketing to grow their business, or books to grow their business, don’t know what they’re doing and they’re not getting results. You have from Rob a path and blueprint to follow in order to get the result you’re looking for and now you have a way to drive traffic into it. Stop struggling. We’re not ever going to be rewarded in heaven for reinventing the wheel. That’s not going to be a statement that’s said. Instead, you’re going to have a blueprint and follow it in order to grow the business that you’ve been dreaming about all along.
Rob Kosberg:
I love it. Kim, thank you. Thanks for sharing, being your authentic self, and thanks for all the amazing advice and tips that you’ve given. I look forward to seeing you on the challenge and I can’t wait to be a part of it with you.
Kim Walsh-Phillips:
Thanks so much for having me. It was a blast.
