Transcript: Thanks, Allan. This is David Brower with your 20 Minute Podcast. Our special guest today, fellow Coloradoan Greg Jameson. Inc 500 award winning entrepreneur, the author of the number one bestselling books, Amazon’s Dirty Little Secrets and The Influencer Effect. And he has partnered with some of the most successful influencers on the Internet. Greg, welcome. Good to have you here on the show, man. How are you?
Greg Jameson: Thanks, David. I am great and super excited to be here with you today.
David Brower: I appreciate it very much. Let’s talk about your books first. Bestsellers on Amazon, The Influencer Effect and Amazon’s Dirty Little Secrets, whichever one you wanna talk about. How did they come about?
Greg Jameson: Well, they’re actually both in some ways related. They are marketing books. I have been helping people sell more products and services online, basically since 1995, and they’re some of the experiences that I have learned, some of the things that my customers have learned, and decided to write them down so that I could share them with more people.
David Brower: Good for you. 1995, you had to be ahead of the curve a little bit, as far as helping people sell stuff online, right?
Greg Jameson: I absolutely was. It was both interesting and frustrating during those early years, because as you probably know, Amazon didn’t even start until ’96.
David Brower: So these books are designed to help people sell things online, find some shortcuts, answer some questions that maybe they don’t even know they have yet?
Greg Jameson: Yeah, that’s the idea. Amazon’s Dirty Little Secrets is really about the types of marketing that Amazon has done, and how you can take those same techniques and principles and apply them to your small business. Obviously, some of the things that Amazon has done, like let’s get big fast, may not apply to a number of companies. But things like let’s put the customer first, let’s get lots of people out there to review products and give their input to other consumers about how well that product is working for them, the layout of their different purchasing pages and so forth, are all things that most small businesses can implement. That’s really what that’s all about, is getting the power of Amazon and applying it to your business.
David Brower: So the layout, obviously, is very important. I would think you’d have some psychology thoughts in there, as far as language and text, and reviews have to be crazy important, to get as many reviews as you can as early as you can. Are both those thoughts right?
Greg Jameson: Yeah. Certainly, they are. Reviews are huge. But even things like the layout of the pages, Amazon has thrown millions of dollars at researching what works and what doesn’t, and you may as well leverage that research that they’ve already done, and say, “Hey, this is working for them. Let’s emulate what works for the company that is clearly the leader in e-commerce out there and do those same types of things ourselves.”
David Brower: You bet. And if you find, I would think, if you find someone that could be somewhat of a competitor or business profile, those kinds of things, and they’re very successful on Amazon, which is very easy to tell from the reviews, why not emulate what’s already working for them?
Greg Jameson: Yeah, absolutely. The best thing that you can do is to find a leader, and it doesn’t just have to be Amazon, but the leader in your particular marketplace might be the answer for you, too. Find out what’s working and do those things without having to go in and learn everything from scratch yourself.
David Brower: Absolutely. You’ve had great success in being an influencer. You’ve got the book The Influencer Effect. Tell me about that. What does that mean?
Greg Jameson: The Influencer Effect is really all about getting other people to help promote your products, and there are people out there that have become recognized experts in pretty much every field out there. Something that I recommend that all small businesses strive to do themselves is to become the recognized expert in their niche, and say, “Okay, now that I’m a recognized expert, who are other experts in my field that can also add credibility to what I’m doing?” and get them to say nice things about you and promote things for you. There’s actually a big movement out there right now of hiring influencers to promote products and services. Influencer marketing, as it’s become known, is really a huge thing right now. The reason is that it works. It doesn’t have to be people that are celebrities. It just needs to be people that are recognized as an authority, and therefore people follow their advice.
David Brower: So some kind of either name recognition or reputation recognition, something like that?
Greg Jameson: Yeah. I think that the reputation of them being an authority figure in a particular field is actually more important than being a celebrity, per se.
David Brower: That makes sense.
Greg Jameson: If you think about it, you have a family or friend member that says, “Hey, there’s this new restaurant in town over here. I went there. It was really good. You ought to go try it.” You’re probably a whole lot more likely to go take their advice and try that restaurant than if some big celebrity is out there just clearly promoting the fact that there’s this new restaurant in town.
David Brower: No question about it. Yep.
Greg Jameson: That’s really what influencer marketing is all about, finding those people where someone is likely to say, “Hey, I trust what that person is telling me, because I know them, I like them, and they know what they’re talking about. I’m gonna follow their advice.”
David Brower: And even if, and I’m just speculating here, but even if they’re not that familiar with them, if they come across highly credible in some way, shape, or form, maybe it’s their photo or their language or their references, credibility and integrity in the influencer world has to be pretty high.
Greg Jameson: Yeah. It’s huge. An influencer, someone that’s really trying to make their living as being an influencer, usually has to recognize that, too, that they’re not just gonna be out there pimping products to get paid. They aren’t going to be saying, “Hey, this is a product that I can really align myself with, that my followers that are going to benefit from.”
David Brower: It sounds like, and I’ve only heard about the influencer part of this world just in the last few months. A lot of people, as you said, are talking about it, bringing it up in conversation. Does your book then identify what an influencer is, how you go about finding those kinds of people? What kind of information is in your book?
Greg Jameson: Yeah, that’s exactly what it does. I’ve got an acronym that I put together based around the word GEARS. I utilize that acronym to go through the whole process of what it takes to, as you said, find influencers and work with them, and how to actually apply that to your specific website. In the case of the acronym, the G stands for generate interest. What kinds of things can you do to generate interest? The E is to engage with influencers. The A is to amplify your message, for example. All of these things are a system I have found that works, through all of the years that I’ve been on the Internet and working with my various e-commerce customers to say, “Hey, these are things that you can do that will make a difference in your marketing.”
David Brower: Can you tell us the R and the S, or are those top secret? Is that what … are you gonna leave us hanging, so we have to buy the book, right?
Greg Jameson: Yes, I could divulge the information. The R, if you actually take a look at the diagram of the gears, what I’ve done is utilize what’s called a planetary gear system. The center of a planetary gear system is what’s called the sun gear, and the planets revolve around the sun, and the whole thing is encased with what’s called a ring gear. The sun gear that everything revolves around is the S. That’s your strategy.
David Brower: Okay, that makes sense.
Greg Jameson: The planet gears are the G, E, and A, which is generate interest …
David Brower: Engage with other influencers.
Greg Jameson: And amplify your message. The R, the ring gear, is your results. The results encircle the entire system. The S, strategy, is what everything revolves around.
David Brower: That’s fascinating. And folks, we’re talking about the cover of the book. So when you look at that, you pull it up on Amazon, The Influencer Effect, you’ll see exactly what we’re talking about, as far as the gears and how that acronym works for people. You’ve had, I’m guessing you’ve had that acronym around for a while.
Greg Jameson: I had it when I wrote the book. The whole process of putting the book together was really interesting, and in many ways, it felt like the book wrote itself, because I had done some presentations around that, and I like to use acronyms because it’s easy for people to remember what it is that you’re talking about when you’re doing an hour-long presentation.
David Brower: You bet.
Greg Jameson: At the end of an hour-long presentation, they don’t come out of there going, “What?” It’s pretty easy for people to remember the GEARS system, especially when you have a visual and you’re describing like I did, where everything revolves around the strategy, the whole thing is encased by your results, and here’s the things in between that you’re gonna do. Even after an hour-long presentation, it’s more like, “I get it. I can remember that. I can remember up to five points.” I had done a couple of hour-long presentations around this. Having done that, I was like, “You know, I’ve already got all this information. Let’s just put it into book form.”
David Brower: Yeah. Absolutely. What’s interesting about it, to me, in fact, both your books do this, they’re designed in such a way to really distract you from wherever your mind is at the present time and focus on that book, because it’s going, “Oh, well let’s look at that.” So your looking at the GEARS, and the influencer effect with the effect in a special font, and insider tips for gearing up for your online success. Then you’ve got some forwards by some influencers, I would assume. It’s so cool, so well done.
Greg Jameson: Thank you. To me, a good book is something that really is going to make you think of new things and come up with new ideas on your own, not just a one-two-three how-to, but instead to really cause you to think of things that you can do and implement on your own.
David Brower: You want to … I think that’s wonderful, because you do want to emulate the way to get the influencers, but you want to do it in such a way that it makes sense to yourself. You don’t wanna copy, other than GEARS, you don’t wanna copy how you do it exactly. You wanna make it work for the way you think and the way you operate.
Greg Jameson: Exactly. The same thing, obviously, like we were talking about with Amazon. You don’t necessarily want to say that, “Hey, I’m going to build these gigantic warehouses and try to sell everything under the sun.” But instead, say, “Hey, what are the things that are working, and how can I sit here and go, ‘Oh, that’s a really cool idea that worked for Amazon?’ Maybe I can tweak it and do it this way for myself.”
David Brower: Absolutely. And I love the name of your podcast, by the way.
Greg Jameson: Oh, thanks.
David Brower: Yeah, 20 Minutes of Influence. Mine is Your 20 Minute Podcast.
Greg Jameson: Yeah, 20 minutes is a fantastic length for a podcast.
David Brower: Isn’t it? Yeah, I absolutely love it, and it’s cool to have it in the name like you do. It’s really worked out well for me. And of course you’re all over social media, with Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest. Twitter as well.
Folks, if you go to Greg Jameson, that’s J-A-M-E-S-O-N, Greg G-R-E-G, gregjameson.com/media, you’ll be able to see all of his links to his social media. You can connect to his podcast, his blog, you can learn all about him, you can shop his online store. And also speaking, tell me about how your speaking programs work.
Greg Jameson: I actually really enjoy public speaking. I know some people are scared to death of it. Public speaking is something that I really enjoy being in a situation where I work with a number of people simultaneously. Any time that people invite me to come do a presentation, I usually try to find a way to make that happen. I do a number of things like you were saying with the podcast as well. I join people on webinars. I teach some online classes through my coaching programs.
David Brower: There are so many ways. There’s group coaching, private coaching, technical marketing, websites, e-commerce systems. This is pretty much, if you wanna learn how to adapt the influencer system in what you’re doing with your business and incorporate all these kinds of things into your website and your business, really the only place they need to go is to gregjameson.com, because everything is right there on that one page.
Greg Jameson: I appreciate that.
David Brower: Yeah. Really well done. When you speak to groups, are they small? Are they companies? Are they stadiums? What kind of groups do you speak to?
Greg Jameson: I’m working on getting to the stadiums, you know.
David Brower: Good.
Greg Jameson: I’m not quite where Billy Graham was or something, but …
David Brower: But you’re on your way. That’s awesome.
Greg Jameson: Maybe that’ll come at some point.
David Brower: That’s right.
Greg Jameson: Yeah, frequently when I do conferences and conventions and trade shows, it’s not uncommon to have 60 to 100 people in a room. But on the other hand, having smaller groups, half a dozen to a dozen people in a workshop type environment is something that I do a lot of as well, because people are actually able to engage better there, and ask more questions.
David Brower: Yeah, you get more of an engagement. You get more of a … really, it’s a small enough group where you can have a one-on-one experience with you, and that would be the way to go, huh?
Greg Jameson: Yep.
David Brower: So how do people find out how to … well, the course. I just answered my own question. They go to your website. But if they want to connect with you, maybe invite you to speak, again, just everything is right here on the website, correct?
Greg Jameson: Yeah, it really is. There’s a page on the website there that’s just called Connect, and it’s got all my social media accounts on there. It’s got my email, being able to schedule a phone call with me, everything’s all there.
David Brower: Very nice.
Greg Jameson: I’m easy to find and easy to get a hold of.
David Brower: That is no question about it, man. No question about it. Well done. You know what’s cool about this, folks, is often times, at least in my limited experience in podcasting, often times you get experts on who tout certain things, and “I can do this,” and “I’m experienced with that,” and you go to their website and you find little pieces of that, but you never find all the pieces. I gotta tell you, this is the first website I’ve been to, this is my 150th podcast maybe, and this is the first website I’ve been to where every single question can be answered just by going to that one website. That is so impressive.
Greg Jameson: Oh, thanks.
David Brower: You bet. Greg Jameson, from a neighbor of mine now. I just found out he’s in Franktown, Colorado. Greg, continued success, man, and thank you so much for being on our podcast, and have a good time.
Greg Jameson: I appreciate it, and thanks for having me here.
Allan Blackwell: Your 20 Minute Podcast with David Brower has been brought to you by Audible. You can listen to any of David’s podcasts anywhere podcasts can be found, including iHeartRadio, the Spotify mobile app, and at DavidBrowerVO.com/your20minutepodcast. Until next time, thanks for listening.