How to Dominate Instagram in 2019 with Jason Maxwell

Transcription

Yuri Elkaim:                         Jason, welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast. How’s it going buddy?

Jason:                                   Dude, it is going amazing. Thank you so much for having me, man.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Absolutely man. First of all, you need to check off two boxes on our checklist. Number one, you’re in Toronto, which is important. And two, you’re doing amazing things in the online fitness space. So I’m always excited to bring on more great people in Toronto who are Canadians doing awesome stuff, and I’m excited to dive into this because we’re going to talking about Instagram, which is a huge platform.

Jason:                                   Yeah, it’s nice to support the hometown crowd here.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s right. That’s right. And there’s so many as you know, there’s so many online health and fitness at first in Toronto. It’s insane, it’s really cool. All right, let’s jump into this. Let’s give our listeners a bit of context because I think we’re both in agreement that Instagram is probably the most powerful social platform now. Would you agree?

Why being on Instagram is a must

Jason:                                   Yeah, because if you think about this for a second, think about the last event you went to where you met a lot of people that you didn’t know. People weren’t giving out business cards, people are exchanging Instagrams now.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yup, DMs, following each other, engaging in conversation there. So I’ve noticed this in my business in the last two years, email has just taken a nosedive, and you notice the same in your business?

Jason:                                   Yeah, well open rates have been going down and you can like fight that, which is great, but the way I look at it now, I see stories as like the new email. Like you have your open rates, you have your click through rates, this is the direction we’re going and it’s great, like obviously if we drive sales from Instagram from the stories and everything people can buy and then they’ll go on to our emails and those are the type of people who are more likely to open emails. But it’s a lot harder now to just pay for leads and just to get them to open emails, it’s not like it was in the golden days, you know?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Golden days, the bronze age. No, it’s totally true. And if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking to yourself, “Man, my emails just suck.” Don’t worry. All of our emails suck in terms of deliverability, open rates, effectiveness. And that’s why like I really think that the future is in multichannel marketing, messaging, connecting with people on different platforms. Instagram being a huge one. So let’s take this conversation in maybe two directions. Number one is let’s say we have someone who is listening, who is thinking, “Should I go on Instagram?”

The first steps to get traction on Instagram and reading the metrics

Yuri Elkaim:                         If that’s the case, what’s like the first two or three steps to start getting some traction on Instagram?

Jason:                                   Yeah, so if you’re thinking about diving into Instagram, I think it’s a no brainer to do at this point, especially if you’re in like the health and wellness industry. This is where your future clients, this is where your future customers are hanging out. So you need to hang out with them there, you need to be where they’re going to be. You got to get out of your comfort zone, you’ve got to jump in and you got to jump into Instagram because I know a lot of people who are closing high ticket sales or at least getting people on the phone to close high ticket sales just in the DM on Instagram and that’s if they only have like a thousand followers.

Jason:                                   But if you’re just getting started, the number one thing I would say is start creating content and start playing around with different types of content. Look at what other pages are doing, start following people, start to really see how the platform works and understand it. Because if you’re using it like you’re using Twitter or Facebook, it’s a little different and people sense that you don’t really know what you’re doing. If you go in and you try to mimic what you did on other social medias. So the medium really matters.

Jason:                                   I would recommend following a bunch of people, seeing what they post and then trying to replicate some of those types of content. But I would also recommend posting very, very frequently. So for me, I saw the biggest growth as soon as I started posting three times per day and three times per day like that is, it seems like a lot. But I remember when I was first growing, I was working mentoring under Jon Goodman who has the personal trainer development center. When we built his Facebook page organically back in the day, I think zero to 100,000, we were using a similar approach where we were posting three times per day.

Jason:                                   It seems like three to four times per day is a magical amount of time to post. And the first 30 days it’s more of a discovery process. You’re discovering what kind of content is helping you grow, what kind of content isn’t, and kind of like getting in the groove of it. And once you get in the groove and you figure out, “Okay, this type of content works, you just milk it, you just keep doing that same type of content over and over and over again.”

Yuri Elkaim:                         How do you find for people who don’t understand what to look at, like what are the metrics, what are the indicators that a piece of content is working or not working?

Jason:                                   When you’re just getting started out, it’s just essentially the number of likes and then how many posts you got within the past 24 hours. That’s the simplest way because when you first start out, you’re not going to start out with a business account. I would just start out with a personal account, because what I found is it seems to be easier to grow with a personal account, easier to grow organically because as soon as you switch to a business account on Instagram it’s like, “Oh well they put a business account, so I guess they have money. So maybe we’ll try to make it more of a pay to play for them.”

Yuri Elkaim:                         Which actually will be probably.

Jason:                                   Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well I know it’s going to follow exactly in Facebook’s shoes, so if you look at like what Facebook was like, in 2012, 2013, that’s what Instagram was like about a year ago. And then Facebook introduced their ads and now Instagram introduced their ads and is starting to catch on. So you can predict exactly what’s going to happen with Instagram just by looking at Facebook. But the beauty of it is Facebook made a few mistakes in the process so we could see Instagram doing what Facebook did, but at an accelerated pace because they’re not going to make the same mistakes because they know how to monetize, they know the business model now.

Yuri Elkaim:                         So I know you’re a big fan of using, I call them Instagraphics, but I guess infographics for Instagram. I know you’re a big fan of those. Talk to us about what that is and I guess guys, if you’re listening to this, just go into Jason’s page, what’s your … Is it JMax Fitness?

Jason:                                   Yeah. J-M-A-X Fitness.

Yuri Elkaim:                         So just check that out on Instagram, you’ll see what we’re talking about when we talk about infographics. Talk to us about what it is, why you do so many of them. And if it’s a good play for our listeners.

How Jason got started and gained followers

Jason:                                   So back to the 30 days of posting three times per day. So to give you a little bit of a background, I was following a guy Jordan Syatt, and Jordan Syatt is Gary Vaynerchuck’s personal trainer. I noticed August 2017, I hit him up and I was like, “Jordan, this past year I think you added like a quarter of a million Instagram followers, how’d you do that man?” Because in the back of my head I was thinking, I was like, Gary probably just gave him shout outs because Gary has like over a million followers, right? And so I was skeptical and he told me   December 2016, I was training Gary and I told them a big goal of mine in 2017 was to grow my Instagram.”

Jason:                                   So Gary said to me, “All right Jordan, how many times per day are you posting?” Jordan’s like, “Maybe like once a day.” Gary is like, “All you gotta do is post three times per day. Just focus on good content.” “Can you do that for me, Jordan?” Jordan’s like, “Yeah, I’ll do that.” So Jordan goes home, he post twice that day and then the next morning, 6:00 AM crack of dawn just training Gary, Gary finishes up a set of weighted pushups, sweat beating down his face. And Gary says to Jordan, “Hey Jordan, did you post three times yesterday on Instagram?” And Jordan’s like, “Yeah, Gary, I posted three times.” And Gary’s like, “That’s bull man, ’cause I just checked and you only posted twice.”

Jason:                                   So then Jordan said, “Okay, if Gary Vaynerchuk is watching me, I should do what he says.” So Gary, who held him accountable and he posted three times per day every day since essentially. So I was like, Okay, if it worked for Jordan, like it can work for me. So I started posting three times per day and I was like, “I’ll do it for 30 days and if it doesn’t work, then I just won’t do it anymore. It’s just not for me.” So I did it.

Jason:                                   And within that first month of posting three times per day, I gained over 10,000 followers. It was absolutely amazing. It’s like you talked about instant gratification, like the first time I posted three times in a day, I got 200 followers. So I went from 800 followers to a thousand followers and that was huge for me because it took me three years to get those 800 followers. So to get 200 followers in 24 hours was insane. So now back to the infographics.

Jason:                                   So during that 30 day discovery period, I was posting different types of content. I was posting pictures of myself, I was posting videos, workout stuff, memes, quotes and infographics. And it seemed every time I posted an infographic, I got way more followers, I got way more likes, I got way more engagement. I was like, “Hmm, maybe I should be doing more of these.” So I started doing more of those and within that first 30 days, I just only started doing infographics because I was growing so quickly for them.

Jason:                                   The beauty of it is if you have a post that goes viral, you have a post that does really well, it gets lots of engagement. It seems that the algorithm is the next post you put up has a higher chance of going viral because your last post was really good. So it’s almost as if you’re only as good as your last post. But if you can get that momentum up, you start growing very, very, very, very quickly.

Jason:                                   At one point, I was growing at like 10,000 new followers a week. It was amazing because I started figuring out the type of content that worked well and it was infographics but when you design the infographic, you want it to be very easy to consume right away because you don’t have attention very quickly. So if you’re going to capture that attention very quickly and give value very quickly, like it’s very obvious what you’re teaching in the infographic and it’s very simple. Then I think those were the ones that helped me grow the most.

The importance of the image and caption

Yuri Elkaim:                         Totally. Because again, if you look at his page on Instagram, so @JMax Fitness, just scroll through the feed and you’ll see what he’s talking about and you can look at it and it’s very like everything you need is in the post, like it’s in the image itself, which is super valuable. So you create enough value in the image itself where by that in and of itself is super valuable. If that’s the case, how important is the caption?

Jason:                                   The actual post, the image, that’s where you capture the attention and you provide value quickly, the caption is where now that you have their attention, the caption is where you make people love you and make them want to keep coming back. In the caption, what I like to do is I like to provide more value. Maybe explain the post a bit more, tell a story to captivate them. Maybe future pace, what their life is going to be like if they do what I taught in the actual post. And then I’ll end with hashtags.

Jason:                                   So the hashtags are great because those are like the SEO of the posts, so it’s like Search Engine Optimization back in like 2008 or whatever. And it helps your posts be seen by more people and to the right people. So the caption is very, very important. And in the caption is also where you can put your call to action, which if you want people to buy something or you want them to like DM you or something like this, that having a call to action, the caption is just, it’s a gold mine to be honest.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Oh, that’s awesome. So looking at these images, are you the one who’s actually making these images or do you put together a template and have a graphic designer do them? What does that process look like?

Jason:                                   Okay, so my first year and a half I did everything which is, you know, crazy but I knew I needed to have a hundred percent control and figure this out for myself before I could teach other people how to do it and how to run it. So literally like a month ago, I hired a team to help me out, but in terms of like creating the caption, like I was doing the graphics or sorry, the content I was … I was doing the graphics for the post, I was writing the caption, I was scheduling it and the only outside help I had the first year and a half was I had this girl from Macedonia, she’s my Instagram assistant. She would post them at different times throughout the day, but I would just schedule them in an app called Planoly and then she would get a notification on her phone and she would post it and handle that so I had a peace of mind, so I didn’t have to like get out of deep work just to post on Instagram because it was distracting.

Jason’s 4 pillars, growth, and infographics

Jason:                                   But now with the new team, what I did was I was talking to my coach Craig Ballantyne and he was like, “You know what, this taken up a lot of your time, I think it’s time to find some young guns who you can train, who could possibly even do a better job than you.” So I trained them up, I gave them the process. In terms of coming up with the content, it’s you just gotta be creative, but you have to have your pillars of your business and what you stand for. And then every post that you make needs to incorporate those pillars.

Jason:                                   So the pillars of my business are very, very simple. If you want to build muscle, you need to eat high protein, you need to lift to get stronger, you need to train each body part two or more times per week and eat in a caloric surplus. Those are my four pillars. If I have those four pillars, they can make a lot of different types of content around those four pillars. And the guys that I hired, I saw them blow up there, they took my Instagram course and they blew up their Instagram and they actually, they passed me on Instagram like a couple of weeks ago.

Jason:                                   So I was like, these are the perfect guys to do it. So I hired them and my growth had slowed down just because I wasn’t putting all my creativity into it anymore. And it was like, I felt like it wasn’t fun to do anymore, I felt like it was sucking energy and time out of me. So I couldn’t create the types of posts that I was back in the day so I wasn’t growing as quickly anymore, like I was only growing the past like month or two, I’ve only been growing like a thousand new followers a week. Well before it was between five and 10,000 followers per week.

Jason:                                   Si I brought these guys on and they’re helping me get to where I want to be again, which is great. It’s almost as if I found like some clones of myself and clone my brain, and then they go in there and they know my pillars and they’re creating this type of content. One thing I should mention is if you’re going to go the infographic route, you’ve got to look at what other people are doing and look at the top performing infographics on their pages, like the ones that just seem to go viral and kill it.

Jason:                                   And then what I’ll do is I’ll repost that one on my page and if it kills it on my page, then I’ll recreate a very, very similar version of it and then post that and then that’ll kill it, and that seems to outperform the other one. So it’s an evolution process, but at the same time you got to try different things, it’s like trial and error.

Jason:                                   An example of this is back at the end of 2017 when I first started doing this, I saw there’s a bunch of infographics and I just tried one saying, “Do this and don’t do this.” So on one side is telling them to do something to build muscle and the other is telling them what not to do. And that is really polarizing but no one was doing that at the time, so that was kind of like my own unique type of content and because I figured out that unique type of infographic that a style that no one else was making, those ones killed it for a long time and those ones helped me grow a lot because it was new, it was innovative.

Jason:                                   Even though if you look back it’s like, it’s pretty simple like you’re telling them what to do and what not to do and anyone who’s doing what you told them not to do, they’re going to get mad and comment, which is going to help your post explode anyway. And then anyone who agrees with you is going to like the post and maybe comment as well. It’s just this very simple way to go viral.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, it’s cool. And now you see a lot of guys who are kind of … it’s almost like a real infographic where they have a picture of themselves holding a watermelon and then picture of themselves holding a pizza and they’re like on one side, 3000 calories, on the other side, 3000 calories. So almost like copying that, do this, not that type of split approach.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I’ve noticed that pop up in various accounts, which is pretty interesting. So I mean, would you say that like obviously you have a lot of variation in terms of the look and feel of your infographics. Do you just found that work the best as opposed to having a standard branded look for all of your infographics?

Jason:                                   Yeah, and I’ll tell you why, people, you wanted to capture their attention, right? So if you just have all your infographics looking the same, eventually people just start to feel like it’s the same infographic. They’re like, “Oh, I already saw this one.” So you want to change it up, you want to change up the fonts, you want to change up the colors, you want to change up the styles of infographics that you do and keep it fresh.

Jason:                                   Actually so this is something that I was doing when I was growing too, I’ve actually never told anyone this, you just kinda piqued my memory here.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I know.

Jason:                                   Yeah, I know. I know, I know. It’s like you’re a luminary or something. So I would try different colors, different fonts and if one infographic blew up, I would use that type of color and font for a bit, like maybe for a week or two and those ones would all do really well, but then they would start dipping again. So obviously content is king here, but the design does matter. And sometimes you’ll find a design that works and you stick with it for a little bit until it doesn’t work anymore. And then you can find another design.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Smart. I love it. It is interesting because we’ve done a couple of infographics for our page. Obviously we’re talking more to entrepreneurs and businesses, I don’t know if the reach is obviously as big as health and fitness, but we found that we are usually better engagement on those. And then we just kind of fell out of doing them because we didn’t have a strong enough process or the designer we had doing them was not really, it wasn’t what I was looking for. But I do agree.

Yuri Elkaim:                         My whole thing with Instagram was the reason I never got on Instagram until like this year pretty much was because for me, I’m like, I don’t want to show people my ass. Like no one cares about what it looked like or what anyone else looks like. I mean, I guess they do to some degree, but how can we figure out a way to add value just in the image itself? That’s why I love this whole infographic approach because it’s not about you, right? It’s about how can I be of service? How can I add value to your feed by giving you in a Snapshot like do this not that or three ways to do this. So I think it’s a really great approach.

Jason:                                   It’s kind of interesting too because I feel like infographics started in fitness, but now you do see it in other industries like in business and things like that. I’m noticing like if it’s a really great infographic in business, it just absolutely crushes it and sometimes I’ll just repost them on my page and they’ll just crush it like that.

Jason:                                   Like a simple one like, how to get up early and then you have like 10 ways of getting up early. Those ones crush it and you know, I can put it on my fitness page but if you have a business page you can do a post like that or like on business pages, like 10 tips to be successful or top 10 ways to be successful. Like those ones just seem to crush it over and over again because it’s new in those other industries. In fitness, it’s almost like the market sophistication is like, “Okay, we’ve seen these infographics, but in the other industries it’s like there’s no quicker way to grow organically.”

Instagram stories and IGTV

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, and I agree. I mean our mutual friend Rudy is doing a lot more of them now on his feed. So, I mean just looking at the engagement on those is pretty solid as well. So I mean, what are your thoughts? So we talked about the feed, the use of infographics, kind of testing different content and seeing what matters, what makes the most impact. Then there’s obviously the stories and talk to us about Instagram stories, what they are, how we can use them and all that good Jazz.

Jason:                                   Yeah, so just look at stories as if it’s your daily emails. So if you’re already writing daily emails to your list, you can just repurpose that content and do the story as like a video of you talking and you just provide the same content, the same call to action, everything. But on top of this, stories is where you can get people to fall in love with you too because it’s almost as if you’re turning yourself into a reality TV star. So you can show like, here’s what I ate today, here’s what I’m doing with my friends. You’re showing highlights of your day and people just love that, they eat that up.

Jason:                                   They will watch your stories while they’re like, as soon as they wake up, they’ll click and watch your stories or they’ll like, if they’re in the bathroom on the toilet, they’ll watch your stories. It’s like you can now be in someone’s home and if you think about it, how do you make yourself a celebrity? There’s this study that was done a few years ago and what they did was they had a group of people and once a month these group of people would come in and they would show them a list of names. And it was a list of names of all the fake names. The first time they come in, they tell the people, “Okay, out of all this lists of people on this page, I want you to check off the people that you’ve heard of that are celebrities.”

Jason:                                   The first time they do it, maybe like 1% of the list gets checked off. Then they brought these people in 30 days later and they gave him the same list but randomize and then it was like 5% of the list was checked off. People heard of these people as celebrities and they kept doing this month after month after month after month and like six months into it, people are saying they heard of half of these people as celebrities.

Jason:                                   So it just shows you that the way to become a celebrity is for people to see you over and over and over and over and over again. That’s what you’re doing with your stories. If you’re present on your stories every single day, showing your face, showing the highlights of your life, and then providing the same content that you would provide in your daily emails. Well, that’s going to turn you into a celebrity. People are going to love you and people are gonna start watching your stories every day, and then people are going to swipe up when you tell them to swipe up or DM you when you tell them to DM you or visit the link in your bio if you tell them to visit the link in your bio. Those are the three big call to actions in the stories.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, it’s pretty cool because you mentioned something which is your story, you just becomes a daily email. I think this is important for everyone listening to think about is if you approach this, I think intelligently, it’s not additional work. It’s leveraging what you’re already doing. So for instance, like the infographics, those are just a graphical representation of a video you made for instance, or an email you sent and then you can retell that in a different format inside your story while you’re having breakfast in the kitchen. It’s not like its extra stuff that you’re having to think up. It’s just leverage or repurpose what you’ve already done.

Jason:                                   Exactly. So it’s not like you have to keep the creative juices flowing, it’s just you already have the content there, you just need to repurpose it for the medium.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yup, totally. So we talked about the feed, we talked about the stories. What about IGTV that’s obviously that, I guess the more recent addition to Instagram, what are your thoughts on that? How do we want to use that and is it worthwhile tapping into?

Jason:                                   Okay, so IGTV, you really need to respect this medium. So the medium is vertical video instead of horizontal video. I see guys that are just crushing it on IGTV, but these are the videographers that are filming specifically before IGTV and creating really high value content. These are the only people that are actually growing from their IGTV. For us like entrepreneurs and the people listening, the only way you could tap into that strategy is if you hired like a high quality like videographer and team to film these amazing high quality videos that provided value and we’re like engaging and exciting and can capture their attention for like two minutes.

Jason:                                   That’s really tough to do. But the way I look at IGTV right now is that’s the only way to grow that platform, but Instagram will reward you if you are using IGTV. So it’s like a catch 22 it’s like, “Should I do all of this work just to just to grow my IGTV or should I back off a bit and focus on the things that actually move the needle on my Instagram page and my growth and my business.”

Jason:                                   What I tell entrepreneurs now is whatever your story was for the past 24 hours or the past week, download that to your phone. You can download it to your phone and we’ll continuous video and then just post that on IGTV as a new video, as a video post. And then that way Instagram sees you’re using the platform, you know you’ve delivered value in your stories already. And these stories are just going to disappear after 24 hours so you might as well save them and then upload them to IGTV, so that’s what I recommend people to do.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Nice, and IGTV is kind of like, from what I notice of it, it’s kind of like YouTube. I mean it’s longer form I think, at least from my account so I can up to 10 minutes but I think other accounts, obviously you can do more than that. So I think like for anyone who was looking at it, I can’t stand stories because of the 15 second rule and it’s so frustrating to always have to be like, “Oh shit, I didn’t get my point across.”

Jason:                                   Well, you can hold the button now and go beyond that.

Yuri Elkaim:                         You can?

Jason:                                   Yeah. It’s a new feature so you don’t need to worry about getting cut off anymore.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Does it automatically cut it as it goes, I guess?

Jason:                                   Yeah. So then let’s say you did like a two minute video you’re holding down the button, then you can go through, after you take your finger off the button, you can go through and see all the different posts and then you go through each one, you can put like different filters, you can put different swipe ups, you can put your texts on it or polls or whatever you want to do. And then you press post and then it posts them all in sequence.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Oh my God, dude, you just made my life so much easier.

Jason:                                   It’s not me. It’s Instagram. They just made your life easier.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Totally.

Jason:                                   It’s like totally came out of like a week ago.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah. That’s great and that’s really cool. So, yes, I mean, so Instagram we talked about the feed, IGTV just now talked about the stories.

Jason:                                   Actually, so you mentioned something that reminded me of something. So you’re saying IGTV is a lot like YouTube and that’s how they’re modeling it. And I feel like the only way to blow up your IGTV is to put in the same amount of effort that we would take to put into YouTube. So if you’re going to do one or the other, I would probably just do YouTube because the potential for growth on YouTube is a lot better, and the potential for monetizing on YouTube is a lot better than IGTV because right now it’s like, “Okay, if you did do go all in an IGTV, it could be high risk, high reward kind of thing because it’s almost as if the platform IGTV is dying and obviously they’re going to try to save it and figure it out because it is basically the only true like vertical video platform, comparable to YouTube.

Jason:                                   But what I could foresee happening this year is YouTube having their own vertical video option and then people just watching vertical video on YouTube. So they might even just like kill Instagram’s IGTV vertical video market but we will see.

Yuri Elkaim:                         We shall see. There’s an infographic right there, YouTube versus IGTV, who’s going to win, right?

Jason:                                   Yeah, true. True. That’ll kill you. You should post that one.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Oh yeah. There we go. Awesome. This has been really, really fascinating and illuminating. So thank you so much for sharing all this stuff. Now, you’ve got an amazing course on how to do all this stuff. And before we get into the rapid five, I want you to share that link with our listeners so they can check it out if they want to get more of the step by step process of what we’ve talked about here and obviously more than this, where can they get that?

Jason:                                   Yeah, for sure. So the course is called A 100K Insta Followers and it gives you the exact steps to go from zero to a 100,000 Instagram followers, 100% organically. And it’s the exact method that I use to go from zero to 250,000 Instagram followers in a calendar year. You can get that course by going to www.jmaxfitness.com/yuri. That’s where your listeners can grab that course and it’s only about an hour, but it gives them every single step that you need to take to grow organically.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Beautiful. Got it guys. I mean if you’re not on Instagram, you probably should be. Don’t make the mistake that I did, don’t become a dinosaur, like don’t be the guy who gets on the bus too late. I think it’s a big platform and your clients who are health and fitness interested people are on there anyways, so get the course is really, really helpful for that.

The Rapid Five

Yuri Elkaim:                         All right buddy, are you ready for the rapid five?

Jason:                                   Oh, you know it.

Yuri Elkaim:                         All right, buddy. All right, so here we go. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Jason:                                   Chocolate for sure. Like actually it’s like any food in the house in general, that’s not healthy. So I try not to keep anything in the house. That’s my weakness for sure.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I’m pretty much the same as you on that for sure. Number two, what’s your biggest strength?

Jason:                                   Biggest strength? Bringing people together and leading and making plans with groups. That’s something that I didn’t even realize I had until I was doing a course from Dave Ruel and we’re trying to figure out like your strengths and your weaknesses. And I got to this part where it’s like, “What’s your superpower?”

Jason:                                   And I’m like, “Man, I have no idea what my superpower is.” So then I messaged my coaches, I messaged Vince Del Monte, I message my entrepreneur buddies and they all said the exact same thing. It made me realize, “Okay, that’s my strength. That’s my superpower.”

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome. Very cool. Number three, what’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at in order to grow your business?

Jason:                                   Phone sales, so closing on the phone. If I could go back in time, I would have completely done my business differently. I was like, “Okay, I want to be as fully hands off as possible.” If I just started phone closing like let’s say like four years ago and closing people into high ticket coaching packages, my business would be probably over 10 million per year by this time. So that’s the skill, that’s the biggest skill to move the needle in my opinion.

Yuri Elkaim:                         There you go guys. We talked about this a lot. I mean it’s either that or you become an amazing copywriter, but those are the two choices. And hopefully selling $47 eBooks for the rest of your life. So mass for sales is amazingly powerful.

Jason:                                   Well, if you’re not making sales in your business, you don’t have a business, right?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Exactly. And it’s like if people were like, “Oh, I don’t like selling.” Well you don’t like making money and you’re not going to have a business if you don’t master this. It’s so, so important to get these fundamentals and that skill set out. And it’s probably, it’s something I’m going to turn my kids in because you’re always going to be selling something. You’re selling yourself, you’re selling an idea, you’re selling a product, a service, whatever and it’s industry agnostic. You’re anywhere with this skill set and it’s going to serve you.

Jason:                                   Yeah, I think it’s like one of the top things that you need to know how to do. A lot of people are afraid of selling because when you hear selling, the first thing you think of is like a greasy cars salesmen. But think about it, have you ever gone to a job interview? What were you doing? You were selling yourself. You weren’t selling a car, you were selling yourself.

Jason:                                   So if you want to get what you want in life, you need to learn how to sell. And if you say, “Well, I don’t want to sell, I don’t want to be salesy.” I feel like that’s being selfish because you know, we are in the industry of helping people and changing people’s lives. So it is your duty to sell someone into your program so that you can change their life for the better.

Jason:                                   If you don’t help them because you’re afraid to sell to them, that’s being selfish on your part.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s right. Selling is serving totally. Number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

Jason:                                   First thing in the morning, I take a scoop of Greens plus powder and I put it in 500 milliliters of water and chug that. And then I have Dave Ruel’s Effic Planner journal and in that there’s a gratitude section and then something to keep in mind and then I review what I’m supposed to do for the day and I just get into my first deep work block.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome. I thought you were going to say take a scoop of ice cream.

Jason:                                   No, I don’t keep that in the house. Remember?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Got a scoop of Gelato. No, I know for sure. And finally, number five, complete this sentence. I know I’m being successful when …?

Jason:                                   I know I’m being successful when I help people.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome. Love it. Jason, thank you so much for being with us, buddy. I appreciate you being an open book and sharing what has been working like gangbusters on your Instagram channel. So now you’ve got what? 291,000 followers-ish and growing. So guys, obviously he knows what he’s doing, take his advice, grabbed the course, it’ll be super valuable for you and Jason. Once again, thanks so much for everything you do and for playing full out with us today.

Jason:                                   Yuri, thank you so much for everything you do, and thank you for having this podcast. I’ve been listening to the other episodes and they are gold, my man.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome. Thanks so much, dude.

Jason:                                   Thanks.

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