Q&A

On this episode of I’m That Geek Web-TV show, my amazing guest is someone that I really relate to because you hear me talking about relationships over and over again. You’re probably tired of hearing me say that you need to invest in relationships. Brian Basilico has a system that has been working for the past 15 years to bring home the bacon. What does this Jewish girl have to do with bacon? I’ll let Brian tell you.

Why was my first book obsolete before I even finished writing it?

The first book I wrote was “It’s Not About You, It’s About Bacon: Relationship Marketing In A Social Media World.” When I started writing that book, it was going to be a “How to” book about social media. As soon as I started writing it, three months into it, it was completely obsolete. Because of this, I came up with a system that would remain evergreen and named it the BACON System. So one of the things you need to understand, is BACON is an acronym. It stands for Building Authentic Connections Online Networking. The other interesting part about this, it’s one of the two most shared things on the internet. The other is cat videos.

It’s a brand, it’s really what it is. It’s not about me. You can be vegan and still like BACON. It’s all about creating a brand that people remember. That’s what BACON’s about.

What is the BACON System?

The BACON system is built around concepts that are principles that everybody can and should use. The first thing is I believe that if you’re going to run a business, you need to own your assets. You need to have your own website, especially one that’s protected and doesn’t get hacked.

The BACON system is about having your own website, having your own domain name. Because here’s the thing about social media, I love social media, I use it all the time. We’re all over it every single day. But I’ve seen people build businesses on social media and they’ll get a million followers and all of a sudden they break a rule on Facebook. Facebook shuts down the business page and their business goes bankrupt.

I’ve seen a hundred people lose their job in a day because of something like that. What you have to understand about social media is, you don’t own it so they could shut you down at any time if you don’t play by their rules. Your own website is super important.

Google analytics is basically QuickBooks for your website.

The second piece to the system is having Google analytics. You would not run a business without understanding your QuickBooks or your numbers. Bottom line, if you spend $1, and you make three, you would do that all day long. If I gave you a dollar and you gave me three, how many times would I do that? Well, you know as much as I possibly could.

If you’re in business and you’re spending a buck and you’re making 50 cents, how long are you going to be in business? Not very long. So Google analytics is basically QuickBooks for your websites, for your content, and for the things that you do. You need to understand your numbers of what’s happening on your website.

Why all traffic isn’t created equal and what should you really focus on?

It’s not just about quantity and the amount of people that come to your website. It’s actually about the quality of traffic and that’s what you should be focusing on.

Now, you know, a lot of people are obsessed with thinking they need to get as much traffic to their website as possible. We actually decreased the volume of traffic to one of my client’s website by 50% using this system, and they were happy as all get out.

The reason was because we got rid of all of the “looky loos” and the “tire kickers.” Before we did what we did, people were showing up and they were spending maybe 30 seconds on the website. Now they’re spending two minutes, four minutes, six minutes. They’re digging deeper and they’re actually filling out the contact forms, picking up the phone and calling my client. They’re getting better quality traffic to their website. So now they understand, it’s not just the numbers, it’s the quality of traffic that is showing up.

That’s the key thing. That’s what Google analytics does for you. It helps you understand the third piece of the puzzle.

What is the third piece of the puzzle in the BACON System?

The third part in the system is content marketing. You have to have some original content out there. If you’re not putting out original content, you can curate things from other people. But the problem with curating is when you put that up on social media, say you find a great article on Inc. Magazine that aligns with what you think, that’s awesome. You become a thought leader by association. But when somebody clicks that link, what do they do? They go to Inc. Magazine and then all of a sudden they look at that article, look at this article, look at that. Now they’ve gone down a completely different rabbit hole and you are no longer the focus of their attention.

What happens with the BACON system is those three things work together. It’s having a website, measuring the traffic and using content marketing to drive traffic back to your website. Then from there, everything else that you do is built around doing that. It’s really about creating a relationship and then the experience for your viewers, for the people that pay attention to you, for the people that you’ve influenced.

How do you create and personalize original content that engages with your audience?

It depends on the client and their audience. When you sit down and look at your audience, you have to figure out where your audience is paying attention. Video is great, some people prefer audio or reading the text. You want to see where your audience is consuming the content. Are they watching videos, listening to podcasts, reading blogs or articles?

Then the second thing that you have to think about is what questions are your clients or people in your market space asking and how can you answer their questions in a way that’s going to help guide them towards you? If you asked that simple question, now you will have content coming out of your ears because you’re listening to your people talk and it’s going to allow you to take that and put it into a format that you can put in front of people.

“but I suck at writing…”

The other secret sauce to all of this stuff is I suck at writing. So what I do is I hire help. I’ve got virtual assistants that help me with content marketing. One of the things that I do with my clients and these are all B2B clients, I interview them on zoom and then we have that transcribed.
Then we put that in front of a writer, a virtual assistant or a professional writer who sits down and takes that content and does two things:

1. They put it in the client’s voice and…
2. They answer the questions that their customers have and turn it into content. Whether it’s a PowerPoint, used in a webinar, it’s a blog post, or it’s content that can be produced for video…We’re basically trying to get the message out and into a format that people prefer to consume. You just have to have the system in place and that’s why I call it the BACON system. Once you have the system it becomes easy.

How do you get out there and build a relationship that actually works and move the needle in terms of business, visibility, reach and all that stuff on LinkedIn?

Let’s take a step back and talk about what LinkedIn is now and why it is what it is. Cold calls don’t work anymore and why don’t cold calls work? That’s because you have spoofed numbers coming in from all over the world that are dialing in what looks like I got a call from my hospital, I got a call from Walmart, from my local college and they were all trying to sell me social security insurance. They’re trying to sell me a car warranty, they’re trying to sell me a credit card and it looks like something else. The bottom line is because of the spoofing, people aren’t picking up their phone because they don’t know you, so they’re letting it go to voicemail. People are leaving messages in the hopes that the person will call them back and that’s why cold calling is fishing and doesn’t really work anymore.

So now we go to LinkedIn. People are being taught, “Hey, you can make $1 million. You have 30,000 people that you can connect with. If you just message all 30,000 of those people, with at least 1% of every thousand, you’re going to connect. That means that 10 people out of every thousand people you connect with, you’re going to be able to sell to. So think about that. If you could make $1,000 per person, that’s $10,000 times 30 you can make $3 million.”

The problem is that nobody pays attention to that because it’s junk mail. There are two key things that you have to understand. People spend an average of four minutes a day on LinkedIn, 17 minutes a week. They don’t spend as much time as they do on Facebook because there’s no memes, no political arguments, no cat videos. What’s on LinkedIn is articles about business and the thing about LinkedIn that’s very unique is LinkedIn is the only platform that does not ding you for posting links outside of the platform. LinkedIn is not in the business of advertising because LinkedIn is the business of getting people jobs. So they make 70% of their money off of jobs and they only make 5% of their money off of advertising. When we talk about Facebook, they’re making almost a hundred percent of their money off advertising. Twitter is making their money off advertising. Pinterest is making their money off ads. LinkedIn is the only place where they don’t mind you going off base.

They just want you to log in so that you see what’s there. That’s their biggest challenge is getting people to log in. So they want good quality articles in there. They want to be known as the place where people are curating great content.

How do you use the BACON System on LinkedIn?

Let me tell you how the system works. It starts with a business card. I go to a networking meeting, I grab a specific business card and take out my cell phone. I open up Evernote. Evernote allows me to take a picture, so I can take a picture of the business card. As soon as I take that picture, it says OCR, optical character recognition. It sends the person who I got their business card as long as it can read the email address on it, an email: “Nice to meet you”. And that’s it.

What that does is that starts the,” Hey, I met you at this meeting and remember me kind of thing”. Now when I go into LinkedIn, if I have their email address, their name, and their company, I can go find them on LinkedIn and I can say, “Hey, I sent you an email. I just wanted to connect on LinkedIn, let’s connect. We met at (name of meeting).”

Now I just say let’s connect. Then I let it sit there. I’m not going to go in for the juggler and pitch them. I want them to see the content that I’m posting. I want them to start to recognize that I’m an authority. The goal of all of this is to get them to know about my podcast, my blog, my videos, my live videos, so that people are aware that I’m there.

When they see your content, they pay attention to that. Then from there you start to become an authority. It takes time. You don’t walk into a bar tap somebody on the shoulder and say, “Hey, you’re pretty, do you want to marry me? “ I guarantee you don’t go into a relationship like that. Why would you do something online that you would do differently face to face?

Why do you need to treat social media like face to face marketing?

If somebody says “Hi, how are you? What do you do?” The first thing I say, “Hey, I do marketing. What do you do? Tell me about you. What are your interests? I’m not here to sell you anything. I’m here to connect with you so that you can make money or find somebody that’s going to be a good resource.” I need to be a resource to you and that works in so many different ways. That helps you to build that relationship. It’s all about the relationships. Relationships take time, but you know what? If you do it the right way, the quality of the relationship that you have is going to turn into either a client or a referral. Maybe it turns into a good friend. It could be somebody to have a drink with or go golfing or go to a concert. Not everybody is going to buy from you and that’s okay. In order for this to work, you have to be present with the person you are connecting with.

How do you show your personal side that compliments the business side without being Facebooky on LinkedIn?

One of the ways that I do it is when I go to meetings, I take pictures all the time. At a recent networking meetings that I was at, I took a picture and posted, “Relationship Marketing Tip 101, you need to get out face to face to meet people in order to create engagement.” That’s the kind of thing that shows that you’re out and about doing things.

It’s showing who you are and what you do without advertising. That’s really what it boils down to is you can show things, but it has to be business oriented. If you’re on a boat and it’s a business meeting, that’s okay. If you’re on your boat and it’s just you sailing because you want to show off your yacht, don’t go there. It really is about Building Authentic Connections Online Networking. Authentic means being you. If you can do that online, you can create the kind of relationships that will generate the kind of business that you desire.

How do you connect with people on LinkedIn without pitching them your business?

This is the conundrum. I was working with one of my coaching clients teaching him how to use LinkedIn. The first thing that I want people to understand is if you call somebody, you’re a salesperson. If they call you, you’re an expert. Because the goal, number one, is how to become the expert that people want to call. The second piece, and this is where a lot of people make the mistake, is they’re so busy focused on the people that they don’t know. They’re so busy prospecting that they negate the relationships that they already have.

When I was working with this person, I went through his contact list and I said, “Hey, I know Gary, you know Gary, when was the last time you talked to Gary?” He says, “Oh, I haven’t talked to him in a couple of years.” I said, “Okay, here’s all you do, connect with Gary on LinkedIn. Just say hi.

I have this strategy. I’d rather spend 10 minutes with 10 people who know me, then spend 10 seconds with 10,000 people who don’t because I’ve already got an established relationship with them. Then there may be something of value for either one of us. It’s not about me selling my stuff, it’s about me being a resource.

What is the 10x10x10 Strategy and how do you use it on LinkedIn?

The third piece of the puzzle is what I call my 10 sentence script and the 10, 10, 10 strategies. What I tell my clients to do is take 10 seconds with 10 contacts every single day, or 10 minutes. Take 10 minutes for the entire group. 10 seconds, one minute for 10 people and write 10 words. The 10 words can be, “How are you today? How can I help you? Or, “Hey, dude, what’s up? Tell me what’s new.” It depends on the person. You don’t want it to be formulaic. You want to be authentic. A simple little message sent to somebody you already know.

This does a couple of things. Number one, it makes you top of mind. Number two, LinkedIn, if you send them a direct message, it will send them an email notification. That email comes in and it will get them to go into LinkedIn to look the message. Now if the message is all pitch, they’re not going to pay attention to you. But, if you say, “How you doing?” or,” Hey, I have somebody I think would be interesting for you to meet”, that would be awesome.

What is the Golden Rolodex and how do you use it to your advantage?

There’s something that we all have at our fingertips. It’s called the Golden Rolodex. Keep records of people that could be a resource to other people. If you come to me and say, “Hey, I’m going to be in Chicago and I need a videographer for a live event. Brian, do you know anybody because you’re in Chicago?”

I’ve got three people I’ll send you right now that are in my CRM. I say, “Here’s option A, B, and C. These are three people I know, like, and trust. Go check them out.”

What that does is that stops you from having to research all these companies and you have somebody here who has actually worked with these people and trusts them. So you have resources to be able to give people and if somebody posts a question like, “Hey, I’m looking for a videographer in Chicago”. I’m all over that. It lets me give you something first.

When you give something and they get value out of it, they almost feel obligated to give you something in return. It could be a gift card or it could be a job, it could be exactly what you need. They could refer you to somebody who can use your services. The key thing is don’t be in such a hurry to sell something, be in a hurry to help other people and you’ll get what you want eventually.

What is the secret to getting quality recommendations on LinkedIn?

The recommendation strategy is this. If you want to get great recommendations, what you do is you give a recommendation first. Go find somebody that you’ve worked with and write a recommendation for them and make it as good as you can. You know this person and be honest, don’t lie. Say, “I’ve worked with this person, they’re honest, their integrity is great, they have creative values, yada, yada, yada.” Whatever you’ve had a true experience with, and put that in there and send it to them. Number one, it alerts them that you sent them a recommendation. Number two, they’re going to put your picture up on their profile. Number three, LinkedIn will prompt them to write a recommendation back for you. Probably 60% of the people that will do that. When they write the recommendation for you after you’ve written it for them, people are competitive.

They’re going to write you an even better recommendation than you gave them because they feel like they have to one up it. When I give it to you first, you’re going to, more often than not, you’re going to stop what you’re doing and reciprocate on the spot better than what I did for you.

So you use that same principle. It’s actually based on one of my mentor’s books. His name is Al Ritter. It’s called The 100/0 Principle. The concept is: Give 100% of yourself 100% of the time, expect nothing in return and watch what happens. That’s how we build great relationships.

What’s the difference between recommendations and endorsements on LinkedIn?

A person can be endorsed for anything. You can be endorsed for underwater basket weaving. Anybody can endorse you for anything. They don’t have to know you, or don’t have to work with you. They can click a button that has the skill listed on it and say that you are good at that skill even if you really aren’t.

A recommendation is that somebody has to physically go in and type something. I have a rating system and it’s a loose rating system, but here’s the bottom line… There are three things that you can do in social media. You can like something, you can comment on something or you can share something.

I give a like one point, one point means I click a button and I hit like, or I hit a funny face or a sad face or whatever it is. I give five points for a comment because some of these people have to go in to type and think about what they are saying. Then I give 25 points per share. Because if they like your content so much, they’re sharing it with someone else, they’re sharing you with their audience.

Think of an endorsement as clicking the like button and think of a recommendation as somebody not only going in and typing something, but also sharing your content with others.

What do you think that it does to your reputation when you’re hiring a company that promises to get you leads on autopilot to represent you?

I’ve actually talked to salespeople who pay for that service and they pay $500 a month. They get a hundred leads and they contact those people. I’ve sat down and had a one on one meeting with one of those guys and said, “You’re paying $500 a month to get a hundred leads. You contact them. What have you made out of that?” And he said, “Well, I haven’t closed any business from them.” Then I asked, “How many of those people have answered you back?” “Well, about 10%”. And their answer was, “Hey, hit me up in a month or so”
In essence, they’ve gotten nothing out of that and they don’t have a relationship with the people. They have a contact that’s in their CRM. Well that’s not really a contact in their CRM. I can buy an email list and do the same thing.

There are certain incidences where cold calling will work, but it’s a numbers game. The reality is people are wanting customized information for their immediate problem, and they want a solution provided. They want to build a relationship and get to know the person they are working with.

But if you don’t have a relationship with somebody, just adding them into an email list and sending them an email is spam. Doing the same thing on social media, sending a message without permission, doing the same thing on the phone, is spam. If you do this, you run the risk of hurting your reputation and your business.

How would you go about running a business without a computer, website, email or video?

Imagine today you can’t be on a computer, you can’t have a phone, you don’t have video, you don’t have email, you don’t have a website.

You would have to get back to the ultimate basics. The ultimate basics are if you are going to run a business, you would have to meet people face to face because it’s the only thing you can do. Back in 1979 when I started, there was no internet, there was no email. I mean you could get on the phone and call somebody, but that was it. We had a yellow pages directory. But even now with spam, people are not very happy when you call them up out of the blue to try to sell them something. If you get out and meet people face to face, if you start building relationships, then all those other things become tools in your arsenal rather than the main focus of what you are trying to do.

The world wide technology is removing the geographical boundaries, but you still have to have human connection. Whether you do it in person, or you can do it with Zoom, Skype or whatever other technology that’s available to you… you have to connect on that human level, with people. Once you do, you grow your network. A lot of people say your network is your net worth, so you want to make sure to be making connections and building relationships with people that matter.

How do people get access to the Free LinkedIn Training that Brian Basilico offers?

Once a week I do something called, 3 tips in 30 minutes. It’s a free LinkedIn webinar. If you go to LI4Sales.com, you’ll find a link for the webinar replay I recently did. Or, every Wednesday, it’s going to be at three o’clock in the afternoon, central time you can show up live and ask questions, or you can watch the replays. It’s a free service if you want to go check it out live or over the next couple of days and then they go away. I keep replacing them. I’m always sharing new tips.
Does Brian share tips on his BACON podcast as well?

Yes I do. There’s different kinds of tips on there, because my podcast has a bunch of different people who share different technologies to help you run your business more efficiently.

How can you follow and stay in touch with Brian?

If you want to follow up and stay in touch with him, Brian is on LinkedIn. He’s on Facebook, and he has his BACON Podcast you can listen to. Reach out to him, connect with the marketing GURU and be sure to mention you saw him on I’m that Geek Web-TV Show!