Search Interviews:

Jeremy Weisz 2:39

Yeah, go ahead. I want to give a just a quick background, we did another episode called the five different types of episodes you should be creating with your content and your podcasts. And one of those types is the thought leadership episodes, which we’re going to break down even further today.

John Corcoran 2:57

Exactly. So that’s a good background on this. So this is one type of podcast interview, which we encourage people to create. And first of all, I guess it’s worth saying that there are some people who who approach podcast differently. And they think that they are going to create only episodes where they’re talking into a microphone, they’re sharing their wisdom. And the challenge with that is it’s very boring, it’s very isolating. And I have not seen many podcasts in that format succeed over the years, they tend to go for a little bit six months or so if that. And then they end up giving it up. Because it’s just not fun to do individually, the fact that you’re missing out on the advantages of upholding your network. Having said that, it is great to do some portion of your episodes using thought leadership. So let’s talk about Jeremy, what styles or what types of thought leadership episodes should people be thinking about creating?

Jeremy Weisz 3:55

Yeah, we’ll break down a number of different types of thought leadership episodes, what we end up talking about first is, you know, kind of a little bit more about the origin story. Right? So why you started your career. Again, when we’re talking about podcast, we’re talking about b2b podcast, not you know, a crime, you know, law and order podcasts or something like that crime. True Crime is hackley. But so the origin of why you started the company, how you came up with the idea, there’s a bunch of origin stories, and which, you know, brings people up to speed about your background and some interesting things in evolution of the company’s services and what you do.

John Corcoran 4:40

Yeah. And a couple other ones, you know, talking about a mentor talking about the secret sauce behind your company, what inspired you may be, you know, in many cases, you can create a great conversation around just one of these things. Talking about a mentor that you had as a kid or in college, or in high school. They took you under your wing In the lessons that you learned, you know, some people have amazing wisdom that you can spin out just from that one individual topic. Another one that’s really good Jeremy, is it a tear down? episode. So that’s where you know, you, let’s say your expertise is in SEO, or designing websites, or business coaching or something like that. And you will, in exchange for someone’s consent for you to share it as an episode. As content, you will give someone free feedback, free advice, or free coaching or consulting of some sort. And share that as as an episode on your podcast.

Jeremy Weisz 5:40

Yeah, I want to back up to the the other ones, you know, as far as an example goes, Yeah, I was interviewing someone the other day. And like they could have done this themselves if they had a podcast. And they want to do thought leadership, which is they used to work at Google. And so they worked at Google for a couple years. And we talked about how, you know, the founders of Google would give an all hands meeting every, you know, every week to whatever, 50,000 people and what he learned leadership from working in Google, where you learn to culture work in Google, and what he learned, you know, obviously, he did, you know, SEO and other things. So it gives him credibility of why should I use you and your company? Because he worked at you, he learned from the best, right? So talking about your past and origin, like how does that relate to what I do now? Well, it gives you all the credibility in the world to show what your background is, right. So there’s a lot of different great stories from that. So on the on the teardown, this is an amazing type of episode, which is a we call it like an audit or a tear down episode. And you can do this for someone like actually, you could do this for someone, you know, you could do it for someone you don’t know, you could do it for someone that you, you say, hey, submit your website, and I’m going to do a tear down or, you know, I was talking to someone who is in the wine industry. And I was saying, you know, you could pull up the bottle, the late whatever type you are in the wine industry and actually do tear down. I mean, early on, Gary Vaynerchuk, did Wine Library TV, and he basically was kind of doing a Terry pava wine, he pour it, he drink it and he would critique it, right. And that’s what he would do. And he do different, different wines. But you could do that if you’re an SEO, I did this with someone John on my website, or on my interview. Now he could have did it himself again, if he had a podcast, but this person was a linked in paid LinkedIn expert. So he focused on, you know, running LinkedIn ads for people. So I just thought it’d be fun in the interview to pull up LinkedIn live link LinkedIn itself, not LinkedIn live or on LinkedIn live, but LinkedIn itself, go through the feed, Paul, and like, go through the ads that come up in the feed and critique them. Because I thought it’d be interesting for the audience. And the funny thing is, we pulled up I think, three or four, on the episode along with talking about his company. And I happen to know two of the people in the feed, like, I just, Oh, I know these people. So what I did was after the inner F, even not even after the interview went live. Before I went live after the interview, I emailed both those people, oh, by the way, we did a tear down of your LinkedIn ad, live on the interview. And so be on the lookout for that episode. And obviously, you get into a dialogue with the person but after it went live, they watched it. And they ended up one of those people ended up hiring this person to do their LinkedIn ads. Yep. I mean, I get nothing for that. I just thought I’d be an interesting episode. But if they actually did themselves, they could probably reach out, give people great feedback that’s useful to them. And they can decide, they can see Wow, this person really knows what they’re doing. I should use this person and or not use it, but either way they got gave value to that person not really asking for anything in return.

John Corcoran 9:16

Yeah. And so an important point is you can do this either with the person’s cooperation and assistance and live there or you can do it for a company that you you don’t even know perhaps so in that case, I had a client or a guest who is on my podcast, a while back who the funny thing was, he had done a podcast for a period of time but had wasn’t doing it currently. And this so frequently happens with people where I go back and I asked them about it, like how was the podcast? Sometimes, you know, they they did some things wrong, and they didn’t get good results from it. But sometimes, they’re like, you know, when I think about it, actually, I got this great client from it, and I’m like, why are you not still doing it? And this particular person, they they did kind of like a tear down format where They gave advice to different large tech companies. And they actually ended up landing Microsoft as a client, because they did an episode where they just addressed and said how Microsoft could overcome a particular challenge. And they did a whole episode where they went through and gave their wisdom freely how they would do it, and Microsoft ended up hiring them to help them with that particular challenge. Because they, you know, shared it after the fact with them. So, you can do you can do it either way you can do it where, you know, you ask them in advance, they come they participate. And in certain types of professions, you would need that assistance, but in others, you maybe you don’t, you can just do it without Yeah, without that.

Jeremy Weisz 10:37

And I want to say caveat, like we’re talking, you know, I was talking about LinkedIn we had the guest on but thought leadership is you’re just doing it without a guest at all. So if, if I were this person, I would probably do a bunch of episodes, just pulling up the feed in LinkedIn and doing a tear a breakdown of some of the ads. Another example was, I had the CEO of Site Tuners on my podcast, and which is a conversion optimization company. And he tore down my webs our website, right. And also, he, I had him bring up other websites to tear down. So if I had a if I was, like, conversion rate optimization, or website, person, I would be pulling up websites all day long on my episodes and going, here’s what I like, here’s some things to improve on. And it’s just just delivering a lot of value. And I mean, if he did that for us, which he did on the call, I would definitely watch it and see what advice he had, you know,

John Corcoran 11:37

so yeah, yeah, definitely. What about FAQ style episodes? Jeremy?

Jeremy Weisz 11:44

Yeah, so we talked about kind of origin, which are, there’s a bunch of different questions on the origin category, we talked about the teardown, and then FAQ. So FAQs, we look at ways to you know, when you have an external guest, you build this amazing relationship when you having doing a thought leadership episode with you, or your internal team. How do you save your team time, so you’re demonstrating your expertise, but FAQ should save you and your team time? Like, john, that’s one of the reasons like he says very meta, one of the reasons we’re creating this episode and other episodes because we get these questions over and over and over every single week. So instead of spending 20 minutes explaining it to 10 different people that week, we could go, Hey, here’s the short answer. Here’s the full episode, where we talk about the types of thought leadership episodes, you should be creating the five types of episodes in general, you should be creating. So it is designed to save you and your team time. So if you think about what are the biggest questions you get, from clients, potential clients, it could be anyone, you can create episodes around that. And then there’s other ones where you can talk about misconceptions. Um, as well, and mistakes, which kind of feed into FAQs. I was talking to someone the other day. And there’s like, I don’t know, people don’t really understand, you know, the higher us branding versus design, we do this whole branding thing. And then people show up, they just want like the design of this thing. We really do the whole branding. And that’s just like this is the design is one part of the branding. And I go well, you should do an episode about what is the difference between branding and design? Because they end up explaining it over and over again. Right. So yeah, that would be an example.

John Corcoran 13:38

And with that, the way that I explained it to people all the time is imagine it’s Saturday night, it’s 1030. And you’re checking, you’re working, well, maybe you shouldn’t be but you do anyways. And you see an email that comes in. And it’s someone saying, Hey, I would love to talk to you about your services. But it turns out, you’re fully booked Sunday, Monday, you can’t talk until like Tuesday afternoon. Well, you can set a time for that appointment. But you can also send them some resources. In the meantime, say check out this resource, check out this resource. And then they’ll go consume it. It’s not viewed as marketing. It’s not like a pamphlet or something, they’re like, I’m not going to read that people are more likely to consume it. And then they’re going to be so much more warm when they talk to you because they’ve learned about your knowledge and wisdom. So I hear that all the time. When I talk to people, and they’ve listened to a bunch of our episodes that they’re they’re really a lot further along in the buying process. What about case study types of episodes, Jeremy and how you distinguish that from actually interviewing a client? How a case study persona thought leadership?

Jeremy Weisz 14:35

Yeah, that’s a great question. So another amazing one is case study. Now you with case studies, you can have your clients on the podcast, which we do all the time to talk about their services highlighting what they do, but of course, you know, they’re gonna say, Oh, yeah, I love john and jet. Hopefully, I love john and Jeremy and rice, my five does and you talk a little bit about their experience, but it’s going to be focused on a couple things. So You can also do a case study interview as this is a thought leadership, meaning you say, in the biggest, I guess I have to say the biggest objection john, I get with this is, well, I can’t mention their name. I can’t mention the company name. I can’t mention the person’s name. You don’t need to, you could say, listen, there was this company in the manufacturing space. There’s lots of companies in the manufacturing space. So you don’t have to specifically if you don’t, you can always ask for approval, can I use your name on the episode and some of the stuff that we did together, but if you don’t just make it general and go in the health of this company that worked in the health space, and you walk through the journey, you walk through the journey? You know, I know, john, when we’re doing when we have clients, we do the thought leadership episodes with our clients. So we actually, our team will interview them for this episode. So it’s, it’s even though it’s a thought leadership, we’re the guest. Interviewer for that, so it helps those can

John Corcoran 16:00

work. Which The reason we do that is because it’s far more likely to get done. You know, people are busy. And it’s far more likely to be done with us, right. That’s why we’re doing this right now talking to one another, because it’s a lot more interesting and fun than, you know, just having a solo person talking to a microphone. And I think more interesting for the listener too, as well. We’re almost out of time. But let’s talk about the give loop, the gig loop strategy, Jeremy and how that works.

Jeremy Weisz 16:26

Yeah. So quickly, just to reiterate the origin, right, the origin questions, the FAQs, the case studies, the tear down, and then the give loop. Really quickly. In the case studies, you can also since you’re doing it, there’s different questions you could ask under the case studies that walk someone through that customer journey from the beginning to end. And so the last one is the giveaway. And this is our favorite. One of our favorites ones. It may be my favorite one personally. But the giveaway loop is where you can incorporate a lot of different companies and people and do an episode. thought leaders in the space. We’ve seen these John, you’ve written some of these for Forbes and Inc, you know, the top 25 most influential connected people or something, right? So you’ve done these in his articles, and we see them all over top 30 under 30, top 40 under 40, top 40 242 I don’t even know there’s probably a million out there. But how do you create a list of the top influencers, people whatever category that looks like? So an example would be, let’s say, I am a paid ad expert for b2b SaaS companies, I would probably say Here are the top b2b SaaS tools that I use that my clients use the top 30, b2b SaaS tools out there. All of those are potential clients. But it’s also a great knowledge for the industry. And everyone wants to be in a top 25 or 30, less than I’d love for you to tell the story of, I think, one of the people that you did this with even included in their email, I don’t know, we’ll talk about that.

John Corcoran 18:16

Yeah, one one of the articles that I wrote like this was when I was writing for Forbes, I did a list like that top 25. And for years, some of the people afterwards would have it in their email signature, they had it in their, you know, LinkedIn profile, because people love to be included in those types of lists. But you know, you don’t have to write for Forbes in order to do that you can do it on your own. You can create content in a variety of different ways. We’re, we’re big proponents of doing it in a podcast, because it’s so easy and fast to do, it’s easier to talk out your content than to write a long article, that thing took me a lot of time to write. And so we’re big proponents of that. Any final thoughts on this? Jeremy, any final thoughts on thought leadership episodes before we wrap things up?

Jeremy Weisz 19:01

No, I think, um, you know, the biggest thing is to just, you know, think about not you know, people kind of think about different ends of the spectrum, when this common like people default to or doing all interviews, or sometimes they default to doing all thought leadership episodes. So a good mix is good. But you definitely want to make sure that you’re including this, and I’m just going to bring up I don’t know if you can see my screen, or if you could bring up my screen for a second. I’m going to show something really quickly. That’s not it. I think you have to click on click on that tab for a second. Yeah, and so I just want to show like it’s an like you said, deploying these assets, right? Um, you’re it’s 10 o’clock or you don’t have time, you know, each of these episodes that we do is lives as a separate blog post. It’s written up. It’s got the video component, it’s got audio components going on all the podcast channels and gets repurposed into all of these different places. And you can see, we mentioned some of our friends and other people in these episodes, you can still include other people, just they’re not there. Right? So you can see we’ve linked Ian Garlic and Steve Simons and some other ones. So this creates a really amazing asset that you can use to educate, to produce thought leadership to you know, be the expert

John Corcoran 20:30

excellent All right, Jeremy, where can people go to learn more about Rise25 of the work that we do

Jeremy Weisz 20:35

yeah, they can go to Rise25.com check out the videos go to our about page and they can obviously check out in Inspiredinsider.com and Smart Business Revolution. We’re all this content is going out and we’re sharing some of our best strategies and tips.

John Corcoran 20:53

Ex. Excellent. Alright. Thanks, Jeremy. Thanks, everyone. Have a great week.