Episode 37Dec 9, 2022· 17:08

Replay - Isaac Mashman Jams On Guerrilla Marketing a Blog

▸ Show notes from the creator

In this replay episode, I'm chatting with Isaac Mashman about Guerrilla Marketing a Blog. Isaac Mashman is the founder of Mashman Ventures, a public relations firm specializing in personal branding and is the host of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman podcast. In less than 4 years Isaac took his personal brand from being digitally inexistent to where it is today. He has been featured on dozens of podcasts, in articles, and has worked with countless people from a variety of industries to help expand both their business and personal brands. Isaac's intention behind building his brand is to demonstrate that it is possible to build a life for yourself on your own terms in less time than you may think. Isaac's links online: Get Isaac's book "Personal Branding: A Manifesto on Fame and Influence" https://amzn.to/3J8Kkof --- Website: https://www.isaacmashman.com/ --- Podcast: https://www.isaacmashman.com/podcast --- Instagram: https://instagram.com/isaacmashman --- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/isaacmashman --- Facebook: https://facebook.com/theisaacmashman --- YouTube: https://youtube.com/isaacmashman --- Twitter: https://twitter.com/isaacmashman --- Pinterest: https://pinterest.com/Isaacmashman More Show Notes From This Episode: What’s up my bloggy friends! I'm slowly updating the show notes for this and every episode of The Bloggy Friends Show. My new home base for all things Bloggy Friends can be found here: https://www.famousashleygrant.com/podcast/ Be sure to follow me on social: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn

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About this episode

In this replay episode, I'm chatting with Isaac Mashman about Guerrilla Marketing a Blog. Isaac Mashman is the founder of Mashman Ventures, a public relations firm specializing in personal branding and is the host of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman podcast. In less than 4 years Isaac took his personal brand from being digitally inexistent to where it is today. He has been featured on dozens of podcasts, in…

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Full transcript

00:00

Welcome to the Bloggy Friends show! Well Isaac, welcome to the show. Welcome to the Bloggy Friends show. I've got to start with the beginning question. Will you be my Bloggy Friend? Absolutely, Ashley. Yes! I have always... See, that's why I started this show is I wanted more Bloggy Friends. Let's face it, blogging is damn lonely and we need more friends on the internet. Agreed. Alright, so Isaac, welcome to the show and tell me a little bit about who you are and what it is you do.

00:40

Yeah, well Ashley, thank you so much for inviting me on. I'm honored to be here and a little bit about me, I run a public relations firm, Mashman Ventures. I launched that in 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic in April actually. I've been doing that for over a year and a half. It's been great, worked with dozens of people. So I specialize in personal branding. A lot of public relations firms typically work on really narrowing the gap between the corporation and the consumer.

01:06

I noticed that there was a blue ocean opportunity to start working with people about other personal brands and this also includes executives of these corporations because people buy from people and I think that that's extremely important. And so that's kind of a little bit about what I do professionally. I'm also a podcast host like you. I host Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, first time author, launched my first book, Personal Branding and Manifestual Influence on November 1st, 2021.

01:32

And yeah, just building out my name as Isaac Mashman and somebody who's working for extra ordinary things. That's awesome. I'm really excited to have you here because one of the big things that a lot of bloggers complain about is that they don't know how to get the name out, the word out about what it is that they're doing. And one of my favorite things about you is that you really promote the shit out of yourself. I mean, you promote the hell out of yourself in a way that I've never seen anyone do it quite before.

02:01

And so to me, every time I think of you, I think of guerrilla marketing. And so I want to know in your opinion how a person would take their blog and guerrilla market the hell out of it. Yeah. Okay. Well, one example that I could think of is taking an actual article that you did on your blog and taking a printout, blowing it up onto a larger canvas, getting the canvas laminated and posting it in a random place. Like I would say guerrilla marketing, we have to think about guerrilla marketing as by definition.

02:28

And that is a creative form of marketing that uses the surroundings around you. During the American Revolution, we won, Americans won versus Britain, not getting political, sorry for the Brits that are listening. But we won because of guerrilla warfare, right? Because we knew the turf, we knew the forest, we knew the woods, and they were marching in straight lines and banging their drums and wearing the woods, taking them out, right?

02:54

So in this particular case, we can take that and look at marketing tactics to where we can leverage our surroundings to our benefit. There was a once a time, and I'll give it a good example of a form of guerrilla marketing. And that is I took my business cards and I was in Los Angeles and I was with a friend and we are in a Barnes and Noble. And I talked about this in the manifesto, but I took my business cards, went to the business section and I put them in great Cardo's 10X roll.

03:19

I put them in Gary Vaynerchuk's books. I put them in Damon John's book. I'm like, I'm putting them everywhere in this business section. And I actually put one underneath the mouse of one of the employees to watch him later rip it up, screw him. But I got a message a week and a half or two weeks later from somebody who bought one of those books and found my business card. That is an example of guerrilla marketing. But although the direct results aren't so much what is significant, what is significant is the mentality that it takes in order to do those small things that you might not see instant results with because that is what it takes to grow your blog, to grow your podcasts, to grow your personal brand.

03:56

Really being able to go up to anybody in the mall and talking about what you've got going on and not being afraid to talk about yourself, which can be uncomfortable at times. So what is it that made you confident enough to just go up to anybody and say, listen, this is what I do? Leaps of faith consistently over time. I wasn't always that confident kid. Now I was a kid who whenever there was a presentation at school, I could go up and present.

04:19

I wasn't somebody to run away with it. But when I was in middle school, in high school, I was that self-conscious rebellious teenager who would avoid the cameras. I hated my smile and I still have some self-conscious things, remarkably so. But it took me going and taking one way flights and going across the world and doing things that made me so uncomfortable to where I'm like, I did all of this. So I should be comfortable enough to talk to a stranger.

04:46

I think putting yourself in uncomfortable situations will increase your level of comfort to a new level, to a new standard, to a new degree. Then from there, you're able to continuously look for additional layers of discomfort, raising your rates, raising your prices, getting a higher caliber guest on, writing an article and doing an interview with somebody that you would normally idolize. Really just putting yourself out there in an uncomfortable way.

05:10

Okay, so what are some of the tactics that you use to promote your own business? For my own business, it is- I mean, yeah, well, hold please. I know you said the business card thing, but I got to ask the other stuff. Correct. Well, the thing is I have so many different moving parts with the business when it comes to my branding strategy. And I don't want to talk about every single one of them because we'd be here until next year.

05:32

One of those things is search results. What pops up on Google and especially as a blogger and as somebody having a blog, backlinks are going to be essential. Measuring your performance on similar sites.com, putting yourself in their database, going to Alexa.com, understanding your Alexa rankings, connecting to Google Analytics, Google Search Console, looking at performance, click through rates, all of the above. Understanding the site map.

05:55

I could get into the technical side because I built on my own personal website, my company site like I did everything from scratch myself. But when it comes to promoting a business, you need to be on as many directories as possible. You need to be on podcasts. For example, I'm leveraging my personal brand to grow my company brands. But actually, I had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to land my very first client for Mashman Ventures through a Google search.

06:19

He was in Fort Lauderdale. My company is legally based out of Miami, Florida. And great thing about being able to work remote is your business can be based anywhere. And he searched up social media marketing and Mashman Ventures, although it's a public relations firm, guess what came up. He gave me a phone call and I closed him and now we're working together with Spina in the next year. And that came about by building out my brand through Google search.

06:42

So I'm going to bring up the elephant in the room because it's going to totally be in the description. One of the ways that I know you promote yourself is through Harrow. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah. So Harrow is HelpRecorder.com and that's actually how we initially got connected. You had a, you know, you were looking for people to give advice on podcasts and this was right at the beginning of you launching Blondie Friends.

07:04

And I responded with a pitch and I said, hey, in order to get higher caliber guests, you need to approach them as they're equal and you love the pitch. And then included me in the story. I connected with you on multiple platforms. We had a conversation, had you on my podcast. You know, we had a great conversation and then bam, a couple of months later, now we're doing this today. But Harrow is a great way to connect with people that are normally out of reach, reporters that hide their emails, reporters that get hundreds of pitches, but they want to be the ones that are in control of the queries coming into their inbox.

07:34

And so Harrow is the way that they put themselves out there. So you see a pitch that is relatable to you, your industry, your niche, or what you are building your personal brand up as you reply to it. You have a subject line, Isaac Mashman on effective podcast marketing strategies. You include your name. Thank you for the opportunity. This is my pitch and this is why. And you make it straightforward. It doesn't need to be, you know, an essay.

07:57

It needs to be two, three paragraphs relatively quick and they like your pitch. Great. They include you. You're in AM, you're in articles, you're in press because press is an essential thing when it comes to building out your credibility because it's third party validation. And that is not always easy to obtain, but at the end of the day, that's going to be what drives you the most results because people buy from people and people trust other people's words.

08:24

And, you know, same reason why you need to get video written testimonials as well. And you can establish backlinks that way. Well, now you said for business and for podcasts, but can blogs actually benefit from Harrow? 100% because at the end of the day, you're, you're submitting a picture, you're pitching yourself, you're giving value, you're positioning yourself as an expert by naturally being featured amongst other experts, right?

08:49

No matter the quantity. And then oftentimes they'll include a back leak. And from there, every single person that is the reading that article is going to see, famousashleygrant.com, right underneath Ashley Grant, they're going to click on it, go to your website, go to your blog, read what you have going on. And they could very well love what you have happening and following you, connect with you, subscribe, put in their email information.

09:13

And sometimes it can be difficult to measure the exact incoming traffic and the benefit of this. But at the end of the day, know that every single strategy is going to add up over time to where you'll be able to get that momentum happening. Okay, so let's say I'm going to start a food blog. I'm going to start a food blog and I want to be the most famous food blogger of ever. And I want, you know, read Drummond status where I'm getting my own show on Food Network and all that stuff.

09:39

What's the first thing you would say to me? Well, number one, subscribe to Hero. They write like, you need to subscribe to healthreporter.com and I believe they actually have a segment for food and travel. So I would click that check mark and you're going to get notifications to your inbox every morning, afternoon and evening time, Monday through Friday. That's going to be, you know, 15 emails at the end of the week, every single week out of out of an entire month of 60 emails, you're likely to get one, you know, story at least.

10:07

So that's going to be credibility. But if you're wanting to become a very successful, renowned, respected and in demand food blogger, you need to start blogging food, right? You need to actually get your social media profiles created, get the same exact handle on every single platform. So you need to have a universal brand. You need to establish omnipresence. Now omnipresence is typically referred to when we're talking about God.

10:31

Now not to be sacrilegious, but we need to be like God in the sense where we're everywhere all the time with our personal brand. And so you need to have the, you know, omnipresent social media presence. You need to have your website built. And even if you cannot maybe afford to get your website going because you have to start somewhere right and you want to keep costs low. Well, I would look into going and building a free website on Wix or, you know, maybe I'm trying to think about another site that I use actually, but go to Wix, create a free website, go to Zoho Mail.

11:01

Once you buy a domain, right, get your domain, get a free email and their forever free plan and you are going to have the foundation laid. And then once you have the foundation laid, the concrete settles, then you can start building up off of it to where you have a skyscraper in the sky. I love it. I love it. You know, and it's like, I know a lot of the things that we're talking about right now. One of the things that we discussed whenever we did the episode where you interviewed me on your podcast is we were talking about how most of the things we were discussing, no one's going to do.

11:31

Like maybe 1% of the people will do it. And I think that's kind of sad because so many people have this light burning inside them and they have a message that they could share and then they do nothing with it. And it's like, if you wanted to get internet famous, why are you sitting on your hands? Right. So, now you mentioned the book or did you mention the book in this part? I think I did. Okay, in case you did mention the book.

12:01

No, I did at the very beginning. There we go. Yeah, I did. I did. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, Isaac, so you said you mentioned that you have just recently published a book. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what is in the book? What people are in it? Yes. So, I was just asking and it's called Personal Branding and Manifesto on Fame and Influence. And again, I don't know if this is going to be on video, but I have the author copy right in front of me right here that has a little gray bar that says not for resale, but super excited to have this published.

12:26

And the entire purpose of the book is to focus on the what and why of personal branding. A lot of times people don't understand what a personal brand is. Have they already had it or is it something they create? And then why is it important to build out their personal brand? Why and what is the benefit? And a lot of people that I talk to, they want to play it at a very mediocre level. And this manifesto is telling them to think bigger and not in some motivational hurrah out of the way, but in a way of your personal brand is going to be the number one thing for virtually every problem in your life.

12:58

Need more sales. We broke up in the film just then. Oh, now there was a glitch. Okay. Sorry about that. But I was just saying that, you know, your personal brand is the number one way that you can solve all of your problems. All of your problems. I mean, from finding a girlfriend or boyfriend or significant other to getting more clients, to getting more opportunities, to connecting with more people or maybe spreading awareness about a cause.

13:26

And so I wrote the book and then I start to get into the how of building out your personal brand and the basics, but I wanted to write something that would be around and be applicable a hundred years from now to where I can look back when I'm an old man in my bed and you know, doing whatever I'm doing at doing when I'm 80 and be like, you know what I wrote back then? It's still applicable. So I didn't get super specific about, you know, specific forms of media.

13:48

And I talk about media in a general sense because media is going to evolve over the next half century. But at the end of the day, the same principles are always going to be, you know, always going to apply. And it is currently sitting at the number one new release in public relations. It's like the fourth or fifth day that I've checked and it's been there at least for an hour. It reached the top nine bestseller list in public relations on Amazon too.

14:10

And so super grateful for every single person who's grabbed a copy and just glad to get it in as many hands and households as possible. Well, we'll definitely leave a link to it in the show notes. It'll be at bloggyfriends.com backslash chase the vision. Ooh, there we go. Yes. So, well, is there anything that I didn't ask you that you think I should have for my bloggers to hear? You have these questions. When would be the best time to start a blog?

14:34

Right? Yes. When would be the best time to start right freaking now? Get a website, Velk and start out your blog because content on Google ages like fine line. It's the same thing with YouTube. It's going to age over time, become more, you know, well known, going to pop up higher on Google and especially for search engine optimization, not to get it too geeky and too technical, but SEO is something that evolves every single day.

14:58

Google's algorithm changes 500 times a year, if not more. And so in order to start ranking in Google, one of the factors that they measure is age. How long has this been around? And if you want to get a step up on everybody else who's starting to blog, well, you need to start now and time is going to be on your side then. Absolutely. I completely agree. And the thing is, you know, what's awesome about this day and age is that you can start a blog so cheap.

15:25

I mean, all you really need to pay for if you really want to talk brass tacks is the maybe what, $10 or $13 for the domain. You can actually start for free on blogger.com. That's how I started my very first blog. I grant you it was hacked, but we'll get into that some other time. But the point is you can do it for free. And then once you start gaining traction, then you can pay your $4 a month with Bluehost and get your WordPress account set up.

15:49

And one thing I'll leave in the show notes is that if you do want to start a WordPress site, I have an awesome blog post of how you can start it in less time than it takes to have a pizza delivered to your door. So I'll definitely drop that in the notes. And Isaac, I just want to thank you so much for being here today with me and sharing all of your amazing knowledge. And where can people find you online? Well, Ashley, it's been an honor being here.

16:11

And thank you again for inviting me on the show and great to be able to talk, you know, bloggy friends with you, right? My very own bloggy friend. But people can find me everywhere at Isaac Mashman. I also have a podcast, She's the Vision with Isaac Mashman, available on literally every single directory possible. And if you wanted to grab a copy of my book, go ahead and click on the link that Ashley is going to include in the show notes.

16:32

And Ashley, thank you again for having me. Thank you. And I'll see you next time.