777 – Fish Where The Fish Are

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In the podcast:

01:19 – Do you really need to be everywhere?
03:45 – Seriously are you still chasing vanity metrics?
10:34 – Why it pays to engage a professional
12:56 – What exactly are you trying to catch?
15:22 – Knowing where to find your fish
16:48 – Critical equipment
19:03 – Content and guests that get traction
23:01 – How to link up your fishing to land a client

Is it about time you got help with your business? Get expert answers inside JamesSchramko.

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. This is Episode 777. That’s right, triple seven. It’s got a nice ring to it. To celebrate this special occasion, I’ve brought along my super good friend, Charley Valher from ValherMedia.com. Good day, mate.

Charley: Hey, James. How are you doing?

James: I’m doing really well, as are you. And recently, we’ve been talking, as we do. We speak quite often. And you and I were chatting about this great technique that I use with coaching clients, and you’ve been deploying with your podcasting and video production clients, as well. Do you want to tell us about the concept that you’ve been going deep on lately?

Do you really need to be everywhere?

Charley: Yeah, absolutely. I really want to like, talk into the bigger picture of this. One of the things I’ve really, really noticed in more recent times is just how backwards the thinking has become when it’s come to content creation, and podcasts, and even YouTube, where there seems to be developed almost like this spray-and-pray attitude, where it’s like, I’m trying to be in as many places all at once doing as many things.

And the borderline between that being useful and that being spam has kind of been blurred. And I see a lot of people getting really frustrated that they’re not getting results. And then at the same time, I’m not really surprised. And there was a concept you taught me, geez, I’ll say about maybe 18 months ago now, maybe a little bit longer, about the idea of like fishing where the fish are.

And what we’ve been doing in more recent times is really looking to ingrain that methodology into content creation. So rather than trying to be like, in as many spots as wide as ever, it’s about really dialing in and going harder into the areas that are doing better, and being more like a fisherman, really fishing where those fish are.

James: There was a movement several years ago that was prolificated. And it was about being everywhere. And it’s an unrealistic goal, because it requires a lot of resource to be in a lot of places. And I remember when we used to have lots of sharing widgets on our site, and we would then track and see what happened. And I discovered that some of the places we were sharing were not useful.

And so, we’ve disbanded some distribution centers, like we don’t send some content in some places, because we’ve found we don’t really get any return on it. Yet other ones are actually really effective. So it’s sort of the first power move that I have when I’m coaching someone, is I find out what’s already working. And we do more of that.

And it’s the same when we’re looking through our site from an SEO perspective, or when we look at the podcast episodes, I like to see which content is resonating well, and go a little bit deeper beyond that. I want to know, and especially when someone joins my program, I want to know why they joined. I want to know what resonated with them, because it starts helping me identify what sort of fish I have, and what they thought they were getting, and why they were getting it, and how they found out about it.

It’s very useful for me to know as a marketer. So the big idea, the big concept from this whole episode, is, if you have any kind of motion already, then you’ve probably got enough data to refine and improve your next move, if you’ve just been guessing.

The false impression of vanity metrics

Now, I wanted to talk about, I saw a post of yours recently, Charley, you were having a bit of rant on someone who had a lot of what we’ll call vanity metrics. Can you just explain what vanity metrics are and why they annoy you so much?

Charley: I think my fingers on the keyboard got the best of me that day. But this is one of those ones where this ideation came from. So I do a lot of podcast and content auditing at Valher Media. So throughout the week, in any given week, or I’ll say a month, it’s not uncommon for me to audit, like, 10 podcasts and go through and do a deep dive and understand them.

And there’s something that has been coming up more and more common. But this particular audit I did was very frustrating, and I think very frustrating to the person I was auditing. They had a show that was doing 75,000 downloads a month, and just no ability to monetize that at all.

And we were digging into this. And they’d been working on the whole premise of optimizing their show based on like engagement, likes, follows, like all these, what I would call vanity metrics. And they thought they were doing the right thing. But at the end of the day, what they wanted from their podcast, in this case, is like, they wanted more clients and more business. And they hadn’t been optimizing for that at all.

So in turn, they’d created, like, this frustration loop that’s become more and more common, where it’s like, well, I’m judging my podcast or content on ego metrics, I’ll call them, or vanity metrics, when really the result I want is to potentially get new clients or make a profit from it, and they’re just not one and the same. And I always feel like such a horrible person when I have to make someone aware of this, because they kind of get it. But at the same time, I don’t think they’re necessarily proud of what they’ve been doing either, because they just think that’s the way.

James: Do you think it’s possibly because they’ve followed people who are famous, and they have big metrics? And they think that’s the way that it needs to be done? Or is there some other reason causing that?

Charley: It’s a really good question. I think inherently with social media, there’s something that goes on at like, the deep brain chemical level of like, we like the feedback of knowing we’re liked. So when we see that, there’s something going on, and I’ll call it ego or status or something, where we feel that is the right thing; and I’ve done it myself, like even that little rant I had, I couldn’t help but check my social media later in the day to see how many people clicked on it.

James: Oh, the irony.

Charley: Oh, I know. I know.

James: But in this case, that piece of content actually will make sales for you. We’re talking about here on a podcast, someone’s going to listen to this, they’re going to go to ValherMedia.com. They’ll ask you to have a look at their site, you’ll tell them what’s wrong with it, and how they could fix it. And a few of them will say, “Yes, Charley, we’re happy to go ahead,” and you’ll have a new customer. So that’s actually useful content.

I put rant as one of the types of content in my OwnTheRacecourse training many years ago. Because it polarizes and it brings attention to a problem. What about those famous authority-type people, though? Don’t they need all of those numbers to be famous in the first place, so that they get better speaking opportunities or better gigs?

I mean, every single day in my Instagram direct message is someone trying to sell me 10,000 likes so that I can be considered acceptable on Instagram, because I’ve only got three and a half thousand. But the thing is, those three and a half thousand people actually wanted to be there. And it’s not some bot in a country that I can’t pronounce. It’s an actual human who wants to consume my content.

So where is the gain for people to be considered an authority just because they have big numbers? Is there a point where it would work eventually? Or is there a chance it may never work?

Charley: I think there’s a very real chance it may never work. I mean, I’m in a position where you’re probably in the same position as well, James, I know people with massive followings that they’re not seeing business success in line with the size of their following.

James: Gosh, I know people with seven and eight-figure revenue who don’t make any profit. Oh, Charley, I learnt this from Mercedes-Benz when I was in the Mercedes-Benz dealership; I would have a high flyer come in and buy a top-of-the-line vehicle. Now, back then that might be $400,000 in Australia. Cars were expensive. If you’re listening to this in America, enjoy your luxury cars at a bargain. Seriously, what you’re paying 100,000 US dollars for would cost 300,000 or 400,000 in Australia.

In any case, they’d buy the car. And then six weeks later, I’d read about them or see them on a current affair, like a news show, showing, you know, a fraudster, or a con artist, or a scammer or whatever. Like there was often a house of cards and it fell over. So when you look at the surface of all these Insta influencers and so forth, you’re definitely not seeing the true picture.

And I have helped plenty of people get themselves sorted out. I consider myself quite specialized now at turnarounds, because that was really my last two jobs at Mercedes-Benz; actually, my last three, was to turn around something that wasn’t going that well into something that was going amazingly well. And I’ve been doing it ever since. And the best thing is, if you actually get a business that’s not broken or destroyed beyond belief, it’s even faster to get a result, so that’s good.

But yeah, I’ve learned that the surface is very deceptive. And you might think someone’s really successful or whatever. But gosh, you know, I’m good at keeping secrets and plenty of people have come to me for help. And I’m often shocked at how much of a mess people can get themselves into. And that’s why there’s a lot to be said for having a general experience and to be able to look at all the elements of a business and not just being amazingly good at one thing and letting everything else decay.

Charley: I think that’s so fascinating, James, but to prove, I suppose to the point I’ll say, is that both you and I are in a position where we’ve seen behind the scenes, where for us, we go, ‘Oh, hang on. Big following doesn’t mean big success.’

James: It’s true.

Charley: But I think that’s such a minority of people.

James: It means success with a big following. But the problem with that is you go down to the supermarket, you can’t buy your groceries with a big following. They say, “Oh, that’ll be $300.” You say, “Great. I’ve got 50,000 downloads on my podcast. Are we good to go?”

Charley: The second they change that, I’m in, by the way.

James: You’ll win that game for sure. You’ll just go and buy the right traffic. But back to the point of this episode, what we’re saying is not all traffic is equal. Not all likes are equal. Not all shares are equal. If I were to go and put a free iPad giveaway on my website today, I reckon I could get more shares, likes, maybe some spammy second referrals, refer 10 people and double your chances or whatever. But are those people going to increase my profit in any way? I doubt it.

Charley: Probably not.

James: No, probably I’ll lose one iPad off my P&L. And maybe not get much more extra reach. You’ve got to be careful about several elements of this. So why don’t we break down some of the things you want to consider if you’re going to fish where the fish are?

Charley: Yeah, let’s do it.

Why it pays to get help from a pro

James: Right. Well, I guess it matters what kind of fish you want. I go fishing sometimes on Sydney Harbour, and we hire a professional fisherman and his boat, which is definitely the way to do it. I don’t want some boat sitting in my garage, most of the year to go out like three times a year, and then I have to deal with all the fuel and the fumes and the fish smell and everything else, and the registration and the insurance and the car space it takes up. Better just to pay a guy to go and have a fantastic experience.

But the first thing we do is we go squidding, and we go to a specific spot. And we put out a little decoy that’s like a pretend squid and it’s got these little hooks on it and the squid go up to it and try and grab it. And we can pull in the squid. It’s a very different type of hook or bait that you use for a different animal. And then we go around to a different place. And we put the live squid on the line and we catch kingfish. So it’ a particular place.

But sometimes, I mean, they usually prefer squid, sometimes we can’t catch enough squid, so we have to use a different bait. So we also go and get yellowtail. And for them, we have a different technique. He puts a handful of bread in the water and then just dangles this line that’s got about 50 shiny hooks on it. And they jump on it, it’s crazy. And so then we have live yellowtail as well.

And we also try some other bait. He might have some prawns or something that we put on the hook, and then he’ll put out five or six lines. And sooner or later, one of them will take and the kingfish will be on. But sometimes we have to go to two or three spots until we find the kingfish because they love to hide around these sort of poles and special little pockets. He knows exactly where they are. And he won’t tell anyone else, by the way. So don’t ask me where they are. You have to hire the guy.

But basically, there’s a real art to this. It fascinated me. It was just so precise and so tuned. He’d been fishing all his life, and his father was a fisherman. So anyway, if there’s something out of that that you think might translate to our discussion, go for it.

Charley: So I think that what you just said in context of what I’m about to say is just amazing. Because this isn’t pre-rehearsed like we’re doing this live. But I have someone in my life, a relative, who is very into fishing. I mean, very. And I’m not into it at all. But what amazes me is just anytime I spend time with him, or we’re going about things that are fishing related, you realize just how much there is to it. Conceivably, you know, you’re just catching fish, like simply nature. But there’s so many depths of understanding and complexity to it.

What exactly are you trying to catch?

And the first thing I’ll kind of go into is that you recognize that the first thing you have to work out is like, what are you actually trying to catch? Like, inevitably, if you don’t know that, the rest of it becomes impossible, because there’s so many different requirements and changes you would make. And to bring that into podcasting world, or content world in general, is like, if you don’t know who the audience is you’re actually trying to obtain, like, it would actually be really, really hard to capture them, because there’s different requirements and needs to put that together. So I’d say that’s probably point one.

James: How do we know what type of customer we’re trying to acquire? I mean, I’ll answer from my perspective, I want more people like the ones I’ve got. So that’s pretty easy for me to understand. I mean because I get great clients. I have the best clients. I sound like Donald Trump, I have the best clients. They really are terrific.

Charley: Tremendous.

James: And so I get a good feel for them because I speak to them every day, I’m answering forum posts, I’m talking to them on Skype, you know, the higher level ones and the partners, etc. I just want more like that. So to some extent, if I just go and look at all the podcasts I’ve done, and see which ones result in customers, which you can do, you can see which content upgrade did they download and then become a customer. That attribution pathway is going to be a huge breadcrumb for me. Then I’ll do more content around that. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

Charley: You know, it’s interesting, even in the point of tracking that there, more and more commonly, people will reference things from my podcast, or I’ll see something on the forum from my podcast, or they’ll download a resource that’s related to the podcast, like there is amazing ways to actually measure the success of their turning into clients if you’re paying attention to it.

But to your point there, like I think, if you’ve got existing great clients, that’s probably the best thing to analyze in the beginning. But let’s pretend you’re a startup, right? You’ve got no clients, and you’re still working them out. Maybe the approach for you is to try a couple of different fish first, or maybe to have a look at other businesses in similar nature and see what type of fish they’re catching or going after. Like, there’s ways to kind of digest that before you go all in on, ‘This is my fish. I’m only fishing for salmon here. This is what I like.’

James: Well, you know, there’s some argument that I should be looking at what are the types of audiences might potentially be good. For example, when I spoke at Chris Ducker‘s event, I discovered that his audience are great for me. I got some of my best people from his audience; were interested in what I had to say, I was a perfect fit for his values and you know, what he teaches. And I was like the additional library to the stuff that goes beyond the stuff that they were doing.

Knowing where to find your fish

So it was a perfect complimentary source. So I know that it would be worth me staying in touch with Chris, getting on his show, having him on my show, and I should definitely ask you to help me set up some advertising on his Twitter feed, because he’s tweeting every five minutes, which is good.

Charley: Yeah. So if I look at that, I’m like, all right. I found a fishing hole for James here.

James: Yes.

Charley: We know a spot. I’d be like, all right, well now, where is that? What do we do with what you just mentioned?

James: So that’s where we find the fish now. We’ve got an idea. We like this fish, we want to go find them. So we identify it. Now you’ve mentioned in a previous episode your technique for advertising specifically to people who are following a certain person on Twitter media, which is fantastic. And I know you’ve got a bunch of other tricks because I keep seeing your wonderful screenshots of podcast growth.

You’re my podcast growth go-to at the moment, and it’s just through, basically, merit. You get the results, and I’m impressed with them, and I love to see how we can continue to share these ideas for the other podcasters who listen to this. And in fact, we even destroyed the myth that you’re too late or, you know, it’s not worth starting a podcast, because using some of those tactics, you could start a podcast and feasibly get some pretty significant results in a reasonable timeframe, you know, not tomorrow, but certainly not in three years from now. Right?

Charley: Oh, completely agree. I actually think now is probably one of the better times, just because of world events, quite a few good podcasters are kind of like, I don’t know, they’re not bringing their A game. I think their titles are up for grabs.

The equipment you’ll need to reel them in

James: I’m definitely wanting to tune up at this time. I think this is like, spending so much time at home; you’ve helped me gear up, I’ve got a better camera, etc. We spoke about that. That is one of the topics that has to be covered. What equipment do we need to catch our best customers?

Charley: Yeah, so this is probably more into this methodology I’m thinking about from here, which I think is really important. If you know anyone that’s into fishing, like I have my relative, like, he’s got completely different sets of equipment, depending on what he’s going after. And I look at that, and I just think how true it is here.

So for example, if you’re in an industry or a niche where YouTube is a huge part of it, you’ve recognized, like, YouTube is, you know, where my fish are. Then video becomes more important to you and you would very much go after video equipment; you do a video podcast, you would make the most of fishing where those fish are. You bring in that right rod, you’ve got maybe, I don’t know, a certain type of, he’s got one of these wetsuit things where it’s like overalls, a dry suit, sorry, I think it’s called, where it’s like he can get in the water and he’s not actually wet. It’s very cool.

Anyway, you’d understand that. But conversely, I did a little podcast audit yesterday, and it was for someone who does, running is their niche, and the running niche and all the people listen while they run. So for them, video is like, I don’t want to say a waste of time, but kind of. Like, it really is. Like, they need to optimize for audio.

James: Of course, what a good fit there. It’s like the people going to a hairdresser, you know, aren’t going to be wearing a hat. You know, it’s one of those obvious things.

Charley: Yeah that’s not what we see, right? Like, this is the thing I look at with a lot of people who were making content. They’re not even thinking about this. They’re like, ‘Right, how many different ways can I make a video snippet so it’s on absolutely every platform all at once and we’ll spray and pray the hell out of it and hope someone comes to it.’

James: Do you know how many moms have told me that their kids know the sound of my voice, because they listen to it on the way to school, drop offs and pickups? That was a really nice anecdote. I have a lot of audio listeners, because I was only doing audio anyway, for most of the time. And hearing stories about where they’re listening to the podcast has always been fascinating. And a lot of them say, “I’ve just taken my dog for a walk along the beach, I looked out at the surf and I thought of you.” So I know they’re listening to it at the beach.

You don’t want to watch your iPhone at the beach. If you’re watching your iPhone at the beach, put it away. Stop it. Do something better.

Content and guests that get traction

Yeah, so I think that’s great, really knowing about what kind of show you’re putting together that’s going to be getting you the maximum traction. Like for us, YouTube hasn’t been a big thing. Because I’m not making YouTube-style videos. I haven’t put in the effort to do the editing. And I’m not as tech-driven to get all excited about the stuff.

We’re more of, I don’t know, like a consistent producer of stuff at a reasonable level. I want to hit the mark, I want to be the most relevant thing that someone could listen to. So when they pop those earbuds in, they say, “Yes, thank you for not having a 10-minute ad roll at the start of the episode. Thank you for not being cheesy, or putting in weird effects. Thank you for just getting to the point, you know, and then just finishing this show, and not even having a big end-of-show sale or whatever.” That’s what I like. People resonate with that for me.

Charley: Hugely so. And I would say, in the context of here, that’s the right bait, your market.

James: Right. For my audiences, it’s really weird. Like, when I was testing, one of the questions I used to ask on my purchase pathway was when someone bought, one of the follow-up questions I’d send them via email was, it might be, ‘Charley, why did you buy such and such?’ And nine times out of 10, they would actually regurgitate something that was on the sales page.

Charley: Good sign.

James: It’s a good sign, but it also means you can really set up and frame and steer people into a pathway that works. It actually works. If they were attracted to something on the sales page, they’ve taken it in, and that was the reason they bought, you’ve actually lit it up for them. You showed them the thing, and they remembered it. And that’s what stuck. So that’s been a really interesting discovery for me, is that the way people come in.

So what I’m saying here is, if I’m direct and straightforward on my podcasts, and I just get to the point, and I bring in straight shooters; I don’t bring in like super famous people. No offense, Charley.

Charley: Working on it.

James: You’re well-known in my circles, and you’re a bright shining star. However, I bring in people who have the goods, who know what they’re talking about. So I end up attracting customers who love the no-BS. They like the direct, they want to get the result done. They’re sick of being dragged around, left aside, discarded, ignored, burned, thrown into a massive group of noise. They just want the result. So I actually attract the type of client that matches the content I’m putting out. I think there’s a point in that.

Charley: There’s a huge point in that. And I just think it’s so, so interesting in like layering this methodology to it, that isn’t it amazing that you can kind of proof in the pudding here that for you, you’ve been doing that, and that’s what you’ve seen. For a lot of people, I would say when we look at their content or their podcast, what I see more commonly, is they’re kind of just throwing out all kinds of stuff, or what they want to throw out there, or what they think wants to work instead of what the audience wants.

So there’s this really, really interesting idea that I think too many people are trying to make content that they want to make, instead of what will actually produce the results or what the audience wants to consume.

James: There’s that, and then there’s people who follow like the social media things like doing those stupid crappy social posts, you know, like the idiot ones like, what kind of superhero would you be or whatever. Like, the people they are attracting for that are just like the type of person who would respond to a tweet about what kind of superhero they would be and I don’t want those customers, no offense.

Charley: Can anyone link up for me how knowing what type of superhero they would be would make them a customer?

James: It’s all about this bullsh*t of getting engagement and having people follow and pushing your feed to the top so that invariably, at some point, they’re going to ask them to buy something or put a call to action; although some of them are so scared to do that, because that’s like, becoming a sellout, and that’s a whole other thing. That’s when you get pure artists. I have an artist friend who will not make sales, because that would be a sellout, but he’s broke. So I don’t get that either. But anyway, that’s the thing. I’ve redefined for him what selling is and he gets it now. And it’s taken him years to finally accept that.

How to link up your fishing to land a client

So how do you reel them in? I know how I do it. I do mention my products and services, I do bring my partners on the show, I do suggest if people want help, they go and get help from me or anyone else. But it’s good to get a coach. I get coached in some areas of my life. Like, even when I want to learn how to cook something, I’ll watch a video of how someone’s doing it, because they’ve done it before, and it’s a shortcut.

So, you know, I say, if you want help growing your online business, go to jamesschramko.com. Check it out. That’s about it. How do other people link up their fishing to actually landing their client?

Charley: I suppose zoom out a touch. It’s the idea that like some people, I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience James, I’ve come across people that make really good content. I’ve just never ever bought anything from them at all. It’s like I stay in this content loop. And it’s like, I’m almost not even aware what I can buy, where I can buy it, how I can buy it, how I would be better off for doing it.

James: There’s one guy, Charley, I followed him on social media for about 10 years. And I just found out he actually has a product. I’ve always wondered; I’ve always wondered if he even sells anything, but he’s never linked it up. He’s very popular, he’s quite famous, and he makes a video every day, and he asks the most controversial posts, and I think he’s got a purpose.

He’s trying to make people think. You know, he’ll put something like, Trump is an epic leader, true or false? You know, that sort of stuff. And I didn’t even know he had a product. He actually posted, he goes, ‘Oh, I’ve just found out that some people don’t know I even have this product. And I want to link to it.’ Who knew?

Charley: So this is actually like a concept I’ll say I borrowed from you, but really you in-lined me on, and we really stand for it today, is the idea that when you made content or podcast, one of the things that’s really important is that every piece of content stacks into the next. I think it’s a hugely important idea that if you are a content producer, there should be like a natural flow of that, the next logical step is your customer coming to you.

So let’s say the content itself needs to do that, and inbuilt within that is having the right call to actions throughout that content to let people know. So even in this episode, or other episodes from you, James, it’s not that you’re making someone’s life harder for doing it, you’re making their life better and saying, “Well, if you want more help with this, I can help you solve this problem better, faster, or more cheaply, and this is how you want to go about that.”

And I think introducing that type of methodology to a show, or into our fishing style here, can just make such a huge difference in the results of actually having someone work with you. Like, you would hate for your product or service to be the best-kept secret, which it sounds like your friend, or potentially person you follow here, is, and that’s just dangerous.

James: That’s probably been my story, Charley, the best-kept secret. I’ve worked behind the scenes with a lot of famous people. I might be the least famous of all of my clients, which is fine. I’m okay with that role. In fact, you’ll laugh about this. One guy, he came and signed on to SilverCircle, which is $3,000 a month. And I asked him why he’s joining. He goes, ‘Because I went to your Instagram, and because you’re not famous.’

Charley: That’s interesting.

James: And I know who you work with, so I figured you must know what you’re doing. Because you’re not getting all your business from the marketing. Because it’s true. I’ve never marketed SilverCircle. Of course, I talk about it here and there on my podcasts. And I’ve closed SilverCircle to the public, so I’m definitely not pitching SilverCircle right now. You can’t buy it. You can only join that as a partner, like you are, Charley, and a couple of others.

But the thing is, sometimes all that noise and authority could actually work against you because it raises the guard of the client. They might feel like, oh here we go again, I’m going to get sucked into the vortex of this big machine and lost in the noise and the crowd. So there’s an element to bespoke that works.

Now I want to just refine that point you said. There’s two elements to it. And I want to give some attribution as well.

One thing I learned from a lady called Catarina was that no matter what your solution that you’re selling is, there’s almost always another solution that could be sold from that to the next thing. I used to sell workshops, and I thought I’d sell the workshop and then I’d deliver the workshop. But that awareness helped me understand that some of these people at the workshop, they need more solutions. So I would then extend that on to membership in my program, because they need more help.

And the other idea that I learned from a guy called Raymond is that everything must support the sale. Everything you talk about or do must support the end goal, like the point of what you’re trying to do.

And if you have a podcast, please, unless you’re an artist, and you’re doing it for fun, and I’ve got a couple of those, I did a couple of podcasts that I never had any financial expectation for, and I was proven correct; and that is, have a point. Make sure you’ve got a point to your podcast. If you don’t have a point or you don’t know why you’re doing it, stop doing it and pause and think about it for a minute and get into this concept of fish where the fish are, and get more strategic.

What fish are you attempting to catch? Where can you find those fish? What equipment do you need to catch those fish? How do you reel them in? Once you’ve got the fish, then what are you going to do with it? Like, you know, we kind of just covered that. There’s always something else for them. But of course, I suggest you look after them extremely well, like make the most of it. Fish is a bad analogy unless you’re building an aquarium, but that’s even a bad one too, because we don’t want to capture these lovely things. I think we just want to fish.

By the way, I throw my fish back. I just want to put that out there. In the real world, generally, I’ll throw them back unless we’re going to eat it. And then if we do, we eat it. And that’s fine. It’s sustainable.

But measuring and weighing what you catch, talk about that one, Charley.

Charley: So what’s interesting with my relative is there’s this obsession towards the size of the fish, though everything he catches, he weighs and measures and he does throw the majority of it back. He’s not really into the whole, I suppose we’ll call it unsustainable fishing thing. I think he’s pretty against that. But what’s interesting with anyone at the high level of fishing is they’re quite obsessed with this.

And I noticed very quickly that of the most successful content makers and podcasters I know, they’re a bit the same. When they’ve had someone come in, they’re very interested in knowing where they came from, how they come in, which spot or which fishing location did that come from? And you kind of mentioned this in the beginning with your chart that you’re going on, is like, this guy’s got some spots that he knows. Like, he’s keeping records and measuring where his best results are.

James: He knows it.

Charley: Yeah.

James: It’s the 80:20. It’s the 64:4. If I can kind of summarize this, and I’ll credit John Reese for some of this idea, because he once said, “I can rank number one for any term on the internet.” And I thought, that’s a pretty wild claim. He said, “I’ll just go and buy the site that’s ranking number one.” So I can just go and pay a world-class, second generation fisherman from Sydney Harbour for him to take me to his absolute best premium spot within an hour from when I get in the boat. That is mind-blowing.

So how about I say this? If you’re not getting the results you want with your podcast or your video marketing, get in touch with Charley. If you want to get some more results with your online business, get in touch with me, because we can get you there way quicker, and you’ll pay a small fee, but it’ll be so much cheaper than trying to figure out for yourself.

Charley, summarize our episode, and then we’ll wrap, I think.

Charley: So the summary of this episode, we have to bring it back to fish where the fish are. Like I really, really think that if you carry that thought in your content, in my case, or in James’s case, your business, you’ll probably see a lot more success.

James: Love it. This is Episode 777, triple seven. It’s been special. Charley, I always love our chats. They’re very organic. We don’t over-prepare these, because I want to make sure that it’s a free-flowing conversation. And I like to try and get the best out of you and you delivered again. Thank you so much, and I hope we see you on a future episode.

Charley: Me too, James. I enjoy being here.

James: We’ve fully transcribed this episode and we’ll put together some bullet points for you at Episode 777. If you enjoyed the show, give it a rating or share it with someone who needs to hear this message today. I’ll catch you on the future episode.

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