- Alright, so, in today's clip,
we are going to talk about why
becoming a Thought Leader is easier than you think.
But before we do, whatever platform you're on,
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if you like clips like this on entrepreneurship
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So, becoming a Thought Leader.
People say, "Oh, Eric,
"you're a Thought Leader, blah, blah, blah"
and I tend to kind of disregard it
and I just kind of move on with my day,
because it's good to not get ego around it.
That's one thing, don't be egotistical about it.
So, I'm very grateful for the fact that there's one podcast
that gets about one point one million dollars a month,
the other one's about a hundred thousand,
and then we have a pretty adequate site,
so we have a decent-sized audience.
When I first started doing digital marketing,
I was like, there's no way.
How are these people getting
a couple hundred thousand visits a month?
And now, I'm finally there.
I'm like, wow.
You look back and it's like, all the things you did,
they added up, they got you there,
but man, I used to think it was impossible.
To become a, quote-unquote, Thought Leader,
you don't think about it.
You understand that you are going to suck in the beginning.
Don't think it's about, you know,
it's not about how you look.
That's very egotistical.
It's more so, how much value can you add to other people?
And when you're starting out,
maybe you can't add that much value
because you don't have that much skills in the beginning.
You don't deserve to have the audience.
And even when you do have the skills,
it's gonna take time to build.
You know, every big audience, people started from scratch
at some point and it took them time to build.
So, you have to understand
that it's gonna take you time to build it up.
The example I talk about a lot
is the Growth Everywhere podcast,
which is my entrepreneurship podcast
where I interview a lot of different entrepreneurs.
We were only getting nine downloads a month
after the first year, and this is when
I took over a failing business,
and I should not have been doing a podcast.
I should have been focusing all my time
on saving that business and I had nothing to show for it.
No revenues, nothing to show for it.
But, what people don't know is,
I was learning a lot from these people.
I was getting a lot of value from these people
and they were giving me,
even the experience shares that they were giving me,
were helping me make critical decisions
with my business to help save the business.
That was one piece of it.
Okay, and then after the second year, guess what?
I was only getting 30 downloads a day and same thing,
I was still getting value and I got people emailing me,
telling me, "Eric, I don't know why
"this is not getting more downloads.
"I don't know why this is not getting more acclaim."
I wasn't doing it for the audience.
I never started it to build a big audience in the beginning
and that eventually lead
to me doing a podcast with my buddy, Neil,
and we do a podcast called Marketing School
and that one grew a lot faster
because we knew a lot more about starting a podcast,
we knew a lot of the ins and outs, the infrastructure.
Plus, Neil and I, especially Neil,
we had an audience to go off of to really build it up.
That helped take it a long way.
So, compound growth takes a long time
and compound growth is the Eighth Wonder of the World
because, if you think about it,
if you keep something compounding over time, it stacks.
It continues to stack.
And now, we've got volume.
Just a couple months ago, we're at one million downloads.
A couple months before that,
we're at seven hundred, eight hundred downloads.
It's starting to stack.
And we just posted it to Spotify, our podcast,
a couple months ago, too.
Now it is starting to stack.
Our YouTube, the growth has been slow with it.
Even getting to about
two thousand, twenty-five hundred subscribers
was very hard and in the last
maybe year and a half, two years or so,
it's got to about seventeen, eighteen thousand.
It's starting to stack.
Even wealth takes a long time to stack.
Here's the other thing.
If you're watching this right now,
you own a business, you're starting out,
you're better off reinvesting the money.
I'm assuming you don't have,
this is assuming you don't have other obligations.
You don't have a spouse, you don't have children,
maybe you don't have other expenses to worry about.
You know what I would do if you were completely single?
Reinvest all the money in yourself.
Who else is better to bet on than yourself, right?
Compound growth, again.
That's how I look at it.
As you continue to get better,
like, if you look at this video right now,
I wouldn't even say I'm great at video,
but I've gotten a lot better at video
since when I first started.
When I first started, you know,
you're all nervous, your palms start sweating.
You uh, um, uh.
And I still do that, by the way.
It's fine, you know, you get better over time.
You get more confident and you start
to develop your own style.
Whether it's audio, whether it's blogging.
Blogging, too, that took a long time to establish my voice,
but even that starts to come out.
So, everyone you see on TV, they're all human beings.
Everyone that you see that's an influencer,
they're all human beings.
Here's the other thing I'll tell you.
If they're an influencer
and they call themselves an influencer,
they are broke, okay, so you don't want to be like them.
Don't be a broke person, okay?
All these influencers that have fifty-seven thousand,
hundred thousand, five hundred thousand,
even eight hundred thousand followers,
they are broke, okay?
So, don't worry about that.
More so worry about adding value to people around you.
Don't worry that someone has more followers than you.
All that kind of stuff doesn't matter.
At the end of the day, what matters is,
you're getting better, you're learning,
and then you're able to articulate what you're learning
and you're being patient with the compound effect,
and you're gonna get better.
So, let me know what you plan to do
in terms of becoming a Thought Leader,
why you wanna become a Thought Leader, in the comments.
Also, tweet at me, as well.
Let me know in the reviews inside of,
if you are listening to the podcast,
let me know what you think you're gonna do there,
and don't forget to rate, review, subscribe,
and we will see you tomorrow.