John Nemo Show Notes

John Nemo is an Online Course Creator and Bestselling Author who helps Business Coaches, Consultants and Small Business Owners generate quality leads, build their client base and increase revenue using digital marketing platforms and tools like LinkedIn and Webinars.

The author of 7 books, John is a former Associated Press Reporter, Award-Winning PR Director and Social Media Consultant based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

John has personally rewritten LinkedIn profiles for A-List Entrepreneurs including Chris Brogan, John Lee Dumas, Bob Burg, Jairek Robbins, Ray Edwards and many others.

In addition, John regularly guest blogs for Inc. Magazine and American City Business Journals, and his work has also been featured in The Huffington Post, Business Insider and many other publications online.

Most passionate about 

• What I’m most passionate about today started in the 1970s; both my parents were teachers. The ability now to teach others if you’re a consultant, coach, entrepreneur, small business… Teaching today really sells my focus in creating online courses teaching consultants, coaches, entrepreneurs and small business owners how to grow their business online through LinkedIn, webinars copy writing, email marketing.
• Being a fan of storytelling… the opportunity we have now is that the classroom is now global. You’re in Israel, I‘m in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the US, We’re talking, we’re connecting, we’re sharing information and ideas.
• The opportunity is really limitless for you and for me. It freezes up time. I have a wife, three kids, and a “wild” dog named Rosie, and I want to spend as much time as possible with them and what’s really neat about the world we live on today is you can automate and put on demand most of your business, without sacrificing the quality of customer service or one on one interactions.
• That is what I’m passionate about, finding a business that is built around the life I that want to live. I’m able to be with my kids and wife, work from home and yet, have an impact have an influence with teaching and training others through online courses.

The next step

• I’ve got a few tricks at my sleeve here… the online course I have had for some years now, called LinkedIn Riches… a training on how to use LinkedIn for sales and marketing, I just launched a new course called, Webinars That Work, and that’s all about how to use webinars on demand, automated webinars to reach a global audience to sell your product and service.
• Next is going to be probably another book, I’ve written seven books and I’ll probably get into email marketing and all forms of digital marketing.
• I also want to talk a lot about mindset and motivation, I think that’s really a key for a lot of audiences that interact with, which is small businesses, entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants. A lot of us work in isolation. It’s great to work from home and not be in an office or in a corporate setting, but you can struggle with your mindset, with your motivation, with not believing in yourself, comparing yourself to somebody else profile.
• Where I have had the most impact when I’ve seen the greatest reward in my business is really being authentic and transparent with people. The more authentic we are, the more real we are with people, especially in today’s world; the more people trust us, the more they like us, they know us. It becomes easier to sell my products and services to people when I share some of my struggles and weaknesses. Because they feel I’m real.

John’s best advice about approaching the customer

• Your biggest advantage in the marketplace is you! Your biggest advantage in winning new clients when you’re doing marketing online, with Facebook, with LinkedIn, with Webinars, with podcasts, with books; any kind of content you create, is you. Your unique personality, your unique journey, your unique story. We all want to attach a narrative to someone. Once you tell me your story, once we can attach the story to you, that makes you unique, that makes you valuable, that makes you memorable. That’s the big mistake I see people doing in online marketing right now, is they aren’t playing their number one strength, which is their personality, their humanity, their style of communication. You should just be you!

Customers

• I started out as a journalist for the Associated Press, and then Public Relations as in social media. I always worked for companies and I ended up getting myself in to some trouble. Eventually, in 2012, I went on my own. I didn’t know anything about audiences and what to do and the best advice I got was from my brother in law, who runs a very successful company in the US, and he said, “The riches are in the niches, be a big fish in a small pot. Identify an audience that you can serve and they can relate to you and like you, and go serve them.”
• When I started in 2012, I wanted to open a marketing agency and I identified a small audience of debt collection agencies, the reason why was I had worked for a trade association doing PR and I served that industry; I had the chance to work with them and saw their challenges. Because the most important thing for an audience you serve is: Do you get me? Do you understand the unique challenges, regulations, rules, and the style we serve customers?
• The first thing I teach students in the Linked Riches training is to start with an audience or an industry that they worked with. When I started, I focused only on debts collection and that got me a lot of credit in this industry because I was only for them. And that enabled me to generate 6 figures in revenues in 90 days.
• As I was growing my LinkedIn Riches training, I started constantly trying to find out who was buying my stuff. In my email auto response for anyone who buys my course, I ask, among other things: how did you find me, tell me what you do and who you are, and then … I break up all the data of my buyers to analyze who are my customers, what are the main lead sources that work and more. That’s how I found that 40% of the LinkedIn Riches course buyers were business coaches and consultants. It’s critical to know your audience.
• Then I started focus on these audiences and plan new services or products for them. I sent them a one question survey through my email list, or Social Networks connections and asked: What do you want to know about webinars/sales IT consulting etc.… And what I picked up from that one question survey is language patterns, phrases they use – so I know what buzzwords to use, how they refer to themselves and their needs, I picked up their pain points, their struggles. For example, the #1 concern of my audience of consultants and coaches is getting leads, the #2 concern is building my clients base, #3 is increasing revenue, # 4 is impact others. And then when I approached my potential audiences, I used these phrases, my next webinar was “How business coaches and consultants can use LinkedIn to generate leads, increase sales, and impact others”. And that sells very well.
• Ask your audience. Talk with your customers.

Biggest failure with a customer

• I‘m always open about sharing my failures… Because I make them all the time. If you want to be successful you have to embrace failure! Fail big, risk big, and learn from that.
• The number one thing I had to overcome as entrepreneur and in my business was taking failures personally, so the number one shift that improved my business was not taking these failures personally, but taking them as a learning experience, and then adjust, adjust, adjust…
• But the biggest failure was on my early days on LinkedIn and that was about how to market and sell to people. I was trying to sell immediately and what I learned very quickly was that I wasn’t taking the time to warm up my prospects, I wasn’t taking the time to get them to Know, Like, and Trust me. I’ve got to get the right to offer them something.
• The first big mistake with LinkedIn was when I sent, to some people that I was just connected to, a sales offer, and immediately I got responses like, “This is spam! I didn’t ask for this, don’t annoy me…” and that was a huge failure and very embarrassing. What I did for my credit I wrote back to each and every person, and apologized, and wrote them “thank you for calling me out, I’m sorry, I’m going to learn from this…”
• It happened because I was acting from my own pressure, from my own fear I wasn’t looking at them.

Biggest success due to the right customer approach

• I think the biggest success that I have had was connected to webinars. I‘ve spent the last five years studying how to use webinars for marketing, how to be able to reach any potential customer in the world with this type of presentation that results of a sale. And at the recent 60 days period I was able to sell 50 LinkedIn Riches courses that ended up in $75000 in revenues, and I didn’t spend a moment online, it was all automated. That’s the mountain top for me.
• Another trend that I see that I get a lot of success with is audio… Amazon Audible is a big era of success and the same with podcasts. I’m amazed of the results I see from that. Most of the people that come and buy my courses are people that listen to my audio book or to my podcast. The reason is they feel like they know me already. They’ve heard my voice they’ve heard my emotions, my passions, I’m literally in their heads.
• It’s the audio that sells for me. I record a podcast, I record an audio book, and put it out on different platforms, and people discover me and engage with me, and buy my product at a much higher level than they do when I just publish written content on blog.
• Audio is more successful now than video because audio is passive, I can listen to a podcast when I’m walking my dog, when I’m running, when I’m driving. I can’t watch a video without crashing.

Recommendation of tools for customer focus, marketing or sales

• When it comes to LinkedIn, one of my favorite tools is a third party tool called LinMailPro. What it does is it automates your invitation and your messaging in LinkedIn. [email protected]
• One other great tool that helped me close more sales than anything else is called LiveChatInc. It’s a software app you can put at the corner of your website or any page, and it’s a little icon with my smiling face that offers people (the option) to connect with me, live. It’s a little live chat app that connects across all my devices and all my computers, so when someone lands on my landing page, I get an alert that I have a visitor on this page, and it gives me all the information about this visitor and I can have a chat with the prospect one on one in real time. It can also be perfect for customer service or for a virtual assistant. It costs around $30 a month and it’s worth its weight in gold for sales and customers’ service.

Recommendation of a person, or a book that impacts John’s “customer focus” and success

• The best book I’ve ever read (still!) is, “How to win friends and influence people” by Dale Carnegie. He wrote the book in the 1920s here in the US, and it’s the best book I’ve ever read about how to really market and relate to people. It’s a timeless, priceless book that everyone should read. One of the quotes I use all the time on LinkedIn is: Your customers, they don’t care about you. They care about themselves, morning, noon, and after dinner. So make sure that whatever you put out focuses on them and their problems and their desires.
• As far as a person, I got a business coach since I started my business in 2012. His name is John Michael Morgan and he gives individual coaching and group coaching through a personal development coaching program called, The Achievers Alliance.  

What is your one key success factor?

• I think that number one thing is not trying to get my personal needs met through work. Not trying to get validation from customers, prospects, critics, just viewing that as business. I struggled so much with taking criticism personally, and taking business personally, and the biggest factor of my success is now viewing that as business and use the critics to improve my business.
• The only people that aren’t successful are the ones that quit. I would not give up.

Resources Mentioned:

• You can get a free copy of John’s bestselling book, LinkedIn Riches, online at LinkedInRiches
• You can also get access to free tips and trainings on using webinars to build your business at WebinarsThatWork
• John’s LinkedIn Profile
• John’s Twitter account
• LinMailPro
• LiveChatInc.
• John Michael Morgan – The Achievers Alliance
• “How to win friends and influence people” by Dale Carnegie.

More resources for Entrepreneurs

1. Don’t Miss – Customer Focus Strategy & Execution: Market Analysis for Fundraising
2. Hayut Yogev’s Latest post: The three free, most practical steps to researching and locating your market
3. Former interview: With Douglas Burdett host of the Marketing Books Podcast, one of “10 Podcasts That Will Make You a Better Marketer”