The panelists talk to Greg Hickman, of Mobile Mixed, about mobile marketing.

 

Hey everybody and welcome to episode 135 of the Freelancers’ Show. This week on our panel we have Curtis McHale.

Good day.

Eric Davis.

Hello again.

Reuven Lerner.

Hi, everyone!

I'm Charles Max Wood, and the recorder is not in standby this time. We also have a special guest and that is Greg Hickman.

How are you?

Now Greg, if I remember right, you have a podcast you do on mobile marketing called Mobile Mixed.

Yes, that is correct.

Is there anything else that we should know about you?

A little bit, I guess. I live in Denver, Colorado. Mobile Mixed got started in June or July of 2012 and started off as just a podcast, primarily doing interviews with people that I thought were doing cool things in mobile, from the marketing perspective. Then it slowly evolved into more of a solo-based show, teaching people who they can use mobile to generate leads and drive sales for their business. That has been a huge driver for me to build a speaking business, a consulting business, and I create informational training products, and had been working for myself now full-time since December of 2013, so I'm kind of in my first year. A lot of it was started on the side, but now I am 100% full-time myself.

That’s awesome!

[Chuckles] It’s been an interesting journey.

Yeah, it was kind of interesting. I went to your talk at Podcast Movement. After your talk, I kind of had to go up to my room and just check out a whole bunch of stuff [chuckling].

That’s usually the response that I get after I speak at conferences [chuckles]. They're like, “Oh my God, I need to go check my website” or “Oh my God, I need to do that! I didn’t know that so many people read email from their phone.”

I mean, it’s nice educating people on that; I think there's a lot of opportunity there, especially for people that are really just even getting started, it’s really hard to build an audience and every single member of your audience should count, and you should care about every single person. Whether you have a hundred people or a million people, if half of the audience is connecting with you from their phone and you're not doing anything to make that a good experience, then it doesn’t matter if you have a million people because you don’t – you just cut that in half. You really got to take care of those people, because they choose how they can consume and connect with your content.

Right. I mean, I use this system called Mouseflow which sort of gives me snapshots of people who come to my website, where you could sort of see where they’ve gone. There are a lot of different systems like that, and it shows you the actual size of the screen that the person uses when they're coming through your site.

Oh, that’s cool.

And it has been fascinating for me to see that not everyone, in fact, just fewer and fewer people are coming to my website through their regular desktop computer with a huge monitor. Now they’ve got these – this little rectangle here, and that’s what they're looking through, and it’s a completely different view of the universe.

Yeah, and really a different impression that you're giving them. As podcasters especially, a lot of people find out about us or hear about us through the podcast first. When we’re sitting on our show, we’re saying, “Hey, come to the site, mobilemix.com” or “Check out this episode and the show notes at episode 1.” That could be the first time they're engaging with us, and if your site’s not prepared for mobile users, then the likelihood of them ever coming back to your site again is actually low, and it’s against you. You got to make a good first impression and that’s happening on the phone.

Well the other thing is that I've looked and done some research to see where people are putting mobile versus desktop traffic and the most conservative ones I'm finding put the breakeven point where we had as much mobile traffic as we had desktop traffic. That evened out a few months ago.

The most aggressive ones in favor of mobile put it at 70% or 80%, and so a lot of people are browsing the Internet on their phone. Even if you're not putting out content that they're going to be consuming like a podcast on their device, they're still going to be checking your stuff out on their phone.

You give them a business card and they're sitting in the elevator or in traffic. They're going to pull out their phone and check it out.

Yeah, that’s just the way that we consume now, and it’s the way that we grow our business, quite frankly – or at least a part of it.

So the part of your talk that blew my mind wasn’t the part about having a responsive design on your website. The part that blew my mind was all of the text message stuff. Can you kind of give us a quick intro to that, or at least get us started talking about it? Because I'm not quite sure where the best entry point is for that.

SMS or text message marketing was basically like the original form of mobile marketing. It got started in 2003, a lot of businesses and brands were building mobile databases, sending out text messages to their customers, getting them to take action, and it offers the most reach out of any other mobile tactic, really. If you look at smartphones or apps, only – at least in the United States – 65% of the United States has a smartphone still, so there's a whole portion of the world that still can’t even connect with you if your only offering on mobile is an app.

SMS definitely offers a lot of reach, but it’s also really, really effective due to its immediacy. I mean, 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes, 98% of them are opened, so you look at that compared to email, which, depending on the industry, the average is like 22%, if you look at multiple industries. It’s just a quick way to engage, and I don’t know if you're subscribed to any businesses or brands to get their offers through texting, but it breaks through all the clutter.

Some of the things that I've been promoting have been using text messaging as podcasters to build your email list, so you can actually collect email addresses through texting using certain softwares, so people that are listening to your podcast, when they're in their car or when they're running or not around – 65% of podcasts are actually listened to on a smartphone. When you sit there and say, “Hey, visit my site at this long URL,” the likelihood of them going there is a lot lower, but you could add a simple text call to action where people could opt in.

You could say something like, “Text MIXED to 38470 to get the latest checklist for what we talked about today in this episode” or “Subscribe to my email list” or “Register for this webinar that I'm holding next week. And then on the opposite side of that, you can use it what it’s really good for – reminding people.

I've worked with a handful of online entrepreneurs that use SMS, or that do webinars, and we’ve implemented a system where they collect the mobile number during the registration process for these live webinars and we send out both voice and text messages within an hour of the event. It’s just reminding people that the event’s happening, and we’ve seen it increased people’s show-up rates anywhere from 25% to now 45%. You get a thousand people to register, typically on webinars, you get 20-30% show-up rate. But if now you can increase that by 30%, 40%, maybe even 50% and you're selling on that webinar, you have a chance to make a whole lot more money on each and every webinar just by simply sending a few reminders via text.

I must admit that when you said sending SMSs as a marketing tactic – I mean, the only exposure that I've had of that, and granted Israel’s different from the US, is these companies that say, “Oh, what's your phone number?” when I'm checking out. So I give them my phone number, or I used to give it to them, and then I'm stuck on this SMS list where once a week, once every two weeks, I’m finding about the specials at the store where I bought my son his pants.

You're not talking about that. You're talking about something a lot more sophisticated and clever and less annoying.

Yeah. That's the use case that I talked about at Podcast Movement was very much just using it to build your email list and to drive people to show up to your live events.

I think if you're a brick and mortar business or you work with a brick and mortar business, yeah, there are ways you can use it where it’s sending the weekly offer. But if you don’t do it strategically, it could be really, really annoying. But I mean, you look at Starbucks, you look at Target, Walgreens, Walmart, JCPenney, Macy’s – all of these guys literally are sending one text message a week to their entire database, sometimes probably targeted, and they’ve been doing it for years. They have hundreds of thousands of mobile numbers that people that have opted in to receive offers and they say, “Hey, this is a last-minute offer for these set of products. Click here and buy online or buy in store right now” and it has a link to a coupon code or a bar code that they can go in and scan it in the store, and it’s really, really effective.

I was previously the head of mobile for Cabela’s, which is a large retailer in the United States for hunting, fishing and camping, and to get people to take action, sending a very strategic offer coupon, etc, at the right time to the right person that has that interest, you can see really, really good conversion. We've seen mobile offers redeem ten times that of printed coupons, so you can really get people to take action because it is so immediate and it’s on our personal device.

Now granted because of that, you have to offer relevant stuff. The example you were talking about, very easily businesses can get stuck sending stuff that’s not relevant to their users, but if you focus on it create a strategy – I mean, it could be really, really powerful.

Well I really like the tactic that you mentioned before with the reminders, and I've seen that with – John Lee Dumas, I think, does it now with EntrepreneurOnFire.

Yeah, I set him up with that [chuckles].

Yeah, I kind of figured once you said that. I noticed the changes on his webinar stuff.

Yeah, and I'm actually working on a case study of his right now; was going to publish it today but its’ probably going to get published tomorrow on the blog. All of that stuff coming out of that conference, everyone was like, “Oh my God, I want to do that.” Because of that, literally on the first week of November, I have a course launching called Convert From Anywhere, which is basically teaching people step-by-step how to set this up for themselves and their business.

I mean, John Lee Dumas did it; he still uses it, you see his great success. Amy Porterfield, who’s a huge Facebook marketing person, I implemented it for her, or helped her implement it with her team and she saw great results. Patti Keating, Lead Pages is now using it. If you listen to Tim Paige’s ConversionCast, I got them set up on it; there has been success in driving more people to their webinars.

If you look at someone like John Lee Dumas, I mean, he’s pretty open about how much money he’s making; he makes a lot of money. He basically makes about $20,000-$30,000 every single webinar, and he does one webinar a week. Now he’s adding another $5,000 to maybe even $8,000 per webinar, just because he’s getting more people to show up. He knows he’ll close 20-30% of the people on his webinars, so if I could just get 20-30% more people, even more, on to my webinar, that’s money in the pocket.

46] turning into over $5,000 in return [chuckles]. So now you guys all want to do it [chuckling].

The thing that I'm struggling with or wondering, like, how would I use that for my own freelance business? I'm doing a little bit of product here and there, but mostly, say, 90% of income comes from serving clients, performing services for them, building them sites, or building custom tools.

How do I use this type of stuff?

What type of – it’s mostly building websites and stuff?

I build complex ecommerce tools, normally.

Okay. For example, you guys are on this podcast, you could use a text call to action to get interested customers onto a list. If you hold any sort of events that are geared towards you getting more customers, you could use it. You could just do it for service-based messages too if you wanted. You have to think about the customer service level – I get messages from my dentist reminding me to come and schedule an appointment; I get text messages from AT&T about my payment was made; I get text messages from my credit card, like status updates, like “Hey, here’s where the project is.” You could do things like that versus sending email.

Coaches can send tips. Do you maintain all this stuff too, or are other people – do you kind of build it and then they maintain it?

It would depend on the client, so probably 50/50.

Yeah, so if they're maintaining it, you could actually send out quick videos and tips of “Hey, this just happened. I know you're managing your thing, you should probably look into this or maybe fix this” and you'll kind of be like that resource. It could be just a way of distributing time-sensitive information. But I will say it’s definitely not for every business.

Yeah, it seems to me like if I have a follow-up with a lead or a prospect, it’d be a good way to remind them that we have an appointment, or things like that.

If I am doing some kind of marketing, for example, if I'm doing an event where it’s “Hey, let’s talk about making your website mobile-friendly” – which is something that we talk about on here – then I can remind people to come. I can get current and past clients to sign up for the text message list and just let them know, “Hey look, if I'm doing an event that you're interested in, then I’ll text you and let you know,” and then they just get the text from the system instead. So things like that.

Yeah. Again, it’s like if you look at your business and you think about the way that you communicate with your clients, any sort of potentially time-sensitive information, exclusive information, can be delivered to this channel. Mobile shouldn’t be treated, or at least text messages, should be treated the same as email because of its immediacy, because of the device and how personal it is to us. Just think about how you can kind of go above and beyond for those people; can you deliver a weekly tip? A weekly video? Something like that that just adds value to their everyday lives – that can be one of the things that ends up bringing more customers to you, or the reason they buy your product when you offer it later.

So one thing that I kind of want to talk about here for a second that you kind of brought up was that our phones are kind of personal devices. Should your text messages be more personalized, if you can do that? Or do you have tips for doing that so that it doesn’t feel like an intrusion as much?

Yeah. The more you can segment, the better. I think it’s funny, the technology that’s out there that does this, especially for small to medium-sized businesses, I don’t think it’s as easy to segment and target as we would like.

But there are platforms out there that you can add users to different – essentially tag users, subscribers, to different interests and then send out targeted messages. The more you can send personalized and targeted messages – I don’t think it necessarily needs to go all the way to personalization, but I think segmentation is a must, based on interests, based on the type of content they want to receive, or actions that they’ve taken, products they’ve purchased. I think if you could deliver more targeted messages, they’ll convert better.

But yeah, it is possible and if you can do it, you should. Kind of when you're beginning to build your list, most people and even brands sort of start off generically and build a master list, and then over time they start segmenting. They’ll introduce, say, it’s like a shopping center, for example. They have tons of different retailers in the shopping center; they can be sending all these different types of offers – restaurant, dining-related offers, coupons and sales, retail-related offers – but if they start just building everything, they’ll get a bunch of people in and over time they could say, “Hey, do you want to keep getting retail-based offers with coupons and deals from all the participating retailers? Reply YES.” And then that would put them in a different group, and they can start sending retail-specific messages to those guys.

So to answer your question, yes, I think we should [chuckling].

How does that – and this is perhaps an unfair question – but how does this affect people? I assume you're doing mostly work with people in the US. How does this affect people who have multinational businesses, or want to reach out internationally?

04] now, that I call or SMS 80 countries for free. But I realized that’s not the case in the US.

Yeah, that’s a great question and great point. Yeah, most of the platforms that you would do this in the United States, it’s definitely US-based, or sometimes it’ll include Canada. Mainly the obstacle there is the different wireless carriers; they all work at different networks. When you're working with a US-based provider, it really does kind of limit you to the United States, and it’s the same with other countries. There are other companies out there that do SMS in the UK, Australia, etc, but you'll be limited there.

I mean, you do need to be cautious; I have an international audience for my podcast and my products and services. It’s just one of those things where you have to be clear with your call to action. When I'm on my podcast and I do say, “Text Mixed to 38470” or what have you, I do mention and try to mention that it is for US-based mobile subscribers only, and if you're international, visit this URL. You kind of have to be intentional about it, but there's unfortunately no great solution to do that for all countries at once.

Do companies like – Twilio is the one that comes to mind – do they handle different countries?

They do handle multiple countries, but I don’t believe that on one number they handle multiple countries. There's kind of two ways to execute something like this, and it’s using short codes or long codes.

Short codes are like those five, six-digit numbers you see like when I say, “Text Mixed to 38270” – that’s a short code. Twilio uses both short codes and long codes, which is just a 10-digit number. The 10-digit number is more likely to work in more countries, and it looks like Twilio does send over to a thousand mobile carriers’ mobile reach, but that’s more likely with their long codes, not with their short codes. Because short codes, they work on different systems.

If you have a huge list, a huge mobile list, and you're sending high volume on a long code, wireless carriers actually hate that and they’ll just turn you off. The reason Twilio can do that is because most people are doing, building applications for group messaging, and they're not hitting the high volumes, so it kind of goes under the radar of the wireless carriers. Like when you do text messaging campaigns with short codes, those campaigns get provisioned and approved by every single wireless carrier, which is why it takes longer for them to get set up, which is why it’s beneficial for you to use a platform that gives you a shared short code, like a CallLoop, which is what I use.

And yeah, short codes are expensive. If you wanted your own dedicated short code, going through Twilio, like Eric who just messaged here is saying that it cost 3,000 for three months, and that’s all paid up front. If a retailer wanted to get their own, dedicated short code – which I don’t recommend they do if they're a small to medium-sized business – they're paying either 500 or a thousand bucks/month on 3, 6 or 12-month increments. That’s why people go to tools like ToTango in the United States, or CallLoop, because they went and provisioned the short code and hundreds of businesses are all using the same short code. That’s totally deep into the weeds, but a little clarity there.

Yeah, I did some work on a mobile-based application a while back, a long while back. I remember that there were also some rules as far as if you text STOP then you can’t text them anymore and things like that. If you go out and provision your own short code, then you have to build that in yourself, and if you go and use some of these other tools like CallLoop then they handle a lot of that for you.

Exactly, yeah. In the United States, in October of last year, 2013, there are new rules in text messaging that got added to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, so it’s definitely more governed now. That’s why it is safer to go through the route of working with one of these other providers because they're doing their due diligence to make sure that they're compliant with all the organizations that kind of monitor that.

I wonder, Curtis, do you know this? Do US short codes work in Canada?

I have no idea. I got to be honest; I hate those text messages from anyone [chuckling]. I get them occasionally from Bell, which is my cellphone provider, and I just delete it immediately because it’s something I don’t care about, so I have no idea.

Do you know, Greg?

It depends on the provider. I was working with a company that’s now – they just changed their name a couple of times; now they're called – they used to be called iLoop. The short code that we were on was provisioned in Canada and we got into certain parts of Mexico, I believe, but not the UK or anything like that.

I hear advertisements for short codes sometimes, but I have no idea how it all works at all.

You don’t really need to get into the nitty-gritty of that stuff unless you're building a business around it, like a Twilio or what have you. But for the people listening, you can get on a plan anywhere from 25 bucks to a hundred bucks/month and start building a mobile database, using it to engage with your audience in how you see fit and be engaged with them pretty quickly. It doesn’t take long to set up.

Yeah. One other thing I want to point out with the short code SMS marketing that I like is that I hear from people all the time, “I listen to you on my commute” or “I listen to you while I'm mowing the lawn” or “I listen to you –” whatever. And so when I tell them to go check out some website or something, a lot of times they're not in a position to do that, but when they're stopped at a traffic light or something, then they can go in and send that text message.

Or the other thing that they can do is they can – if you have an Android phone or an Apple phone, then you can “Hey, Google” or you can pull up Siri and hopefully you can get it to text the right thing to the short code.

Yeah, and hopefully you're not texting while you're driving [inaudible 24:59] like in a car accident [chuckles].

Quite frankly, even just typing in URLs, especially complex URLs, in my phone is really quite annoying. So I can see where that would be quite helpful and useful.

Yeah, and you could deliver links. Say you have an app and you wanted to offer your podcast, like, “Hey, make sure you download the app. Just text app to 12345” and it delivers them the links to the App Store, versus saying, “Hey, go into the App Store and find my app.” You could do things like that as well, distributing and making it just easier for your customers.

So how do you use this tactic of using SMS messages to build a mailing list? Because you mentioned that, but it seems like the two are different media.

Yeah. I mean, I use it off my podcast, like I mentioned. I use it when I go speaking; I've spoken 16 times this year and every time I'm on stage I give a text call to action and when they text in, it says, “Hey, to confirm your registration, reply with your email address.” They’ll reply with their email address, and that actually adds them to a sequence in my Infusionsoft software, and then it triggers an email that gets sent to them.

So I use it from stage all the time. I use it at networking events; I tell people what I do and they're like, “Oh, I want to learn more about that,” or if they do it, I'm like, “Oh, well just take out your phone and text Mixed to 38470 and you'll get on my newsletter.” That works. That has sort of become like “Oh I don’t have a business card, but you can text Mixed to 38470,” and that’s helpful.

Again, it depends on where you're promoting it. One thing I like about it is you can create crosschannel engagement. You can say on Facebook or Twitter, “Hey text this to this and get this cool thing” and take people from your Facebook audience, bring them into your mobile database, possibly get them onto your email list if they're not already. Do the same thing from Twitter, do the same thing from Instagram. It’s not like depending on how big your audience is; it’s not like you're going to be getting droves and droves of clients or opt-ins, but it is a way to capture those and engage those audiences in different channels. So just a matter of using that call to action of “text this word to this number” in all those places.

I know that – I mean my kids, I have three kids. And my daughters – I guess my son also has a phone now at this point – all three of my kids have phones, and they certainly use apps a lot to communicate with their friends. I mean, they're all in WhatsApp and using that all the time. Not that I'm encouraging let’s unnecessarily go after children with our marketing – besides, they couldn’t afford my rates – but generally speaking, do you see younger people using things like SMSs, or are they more interested in apps?

Well, from a consumer perspective, it’s kind of mixed. I mean, it depends on what you're delivering. I think they're both, as a marketer, as a business, depending on your business, it definitely warrants having both an app and leveraging something like text messaging.

The way I kind of look at apps is, apps are for loyalists. They're like your most loyal fans; they're your most loyal customers, so not everyone’s going to download your app. But if you're sending out offers and information that is of value, they might text in and join and just get those updates, because they don’t have to go through having to download this application.

I mean, when you look at apps in general, 80%-90% of apps downloaded are used once and never used again. If you're going to build an app, it needs to be really sticky and give people a reason to come back. I mean, if you look at the apps that you use now, they probably offer some sort of news or entertainment or utility, and if you can’t continue to deliver on that over time, the odds of them staying with you is really, really low.

I mean, you probably have – the average customer or consumer, I believe, has a hundred apps on their phone. How many apps would you say that you use regularly? I'd guess three or five, that you probably use pretty regularly.

What are you going to do? What can you do as a business to be one of those, be one of those three, or five, or ten maybe? And use it frequently. Because one of the biggest challenges that people in businesses, specifically in retail, they invest in these apps with the intention for it to drive revenue, but they don’t do anything to create ongoing engagement. It’s just like, “Hey, you can come shop in it,” but they don’t send me the push notifications; they don’t add value in any way; there's not content of any sort. I can just go to your mobile website and buy something; why do I need to have your app? Now it’s slowing down my phone.

Or maybe like if you build an app and it’s not optimized and it’s sucking your battery, now there are tools out there that showcase which apps are draining your battery. If you're the guy who built the app that’s draining the person’s battery, that thing is gone. And Eric’s sitting here, saying, he has 98 apps in total, including Apple apps.

Yeah, which I'd love to delete, but they don’t let you. I have, on my bottom bar, I have three apps – I

don’t like the way four look – and one of them is a folder of nine. The folder’s called Awesome; that’s where I'm in all the time. Between that and my running programs, that’s mostly what I use on my phone.

Yeah. If you're going to create an app, you really need to think about what can you do to really keep that audience engaged and keep coming back for more.

Actually, one thing I want to mention though too is mobile, in general, a lot of people – and this probably can be said for some other marketing channels as well – when they're diving into mobile, they think mobile’s going to swoop in and save the day like it’s Superman or something. Right? That’s just not the case. You have to look at the fact that the reason mobile is so important is because it connects our media consumption and experiences in-store and all that stuff altogether; it really is the thread that puts all these things together. It, most likely, is the device that is going to take you from one stage of the engagement and sales funnel to the next. It could be that little nudge that gets them from being just a prospect to buying something or being in your store. I think it’s a matter of how does this help the customer advance through this customer journey.

When you say mobile, by the way, do you only mean phones, or do you also mean tablets?

I specifically mean, when I say mobile, I think smartphones. If you look at Google Analytics, they separate mobile and tablet now. I personally don’t believe tablets are – yes, they're mobile devices, but they're not used as mobile devices. If you look at most tablets, statistically, a lot of the research shows that people use tablets very similar from a behavior perspective as they do with their desktop; whereas smartphones, the intent is a lot different when doing things from a smartphone than, say, from a tablet. Not all the time, but I think enough that – people aren’t carrying their tablet with them when they go to the mall because there's a bunch of offers on it, right? They're going to have that on their smartphone. So I think just the way that you interact with those people is different.

So you can also use it then to send out these kinds of offers. Are you under the same kind of constraints that you were under for things like email lists, where your email provider – you get a certain number of unsubscribes or spam notifications and they start getting worried? Do CallLoop and some of these others worry about that as well, like if you get a certain number of –?

About unsubscribes?

Yeah.

Unsubscribes, I don’t thing, are necessarily a bad thing. I mean, if you're a business, yeah, like if you're seeing a high unsubscribe rate, you want to figure out why. It’s probably because your content’s not good or not targeted or you're not relevant. But industry average for SMS opt out is 3.7% opt out; I've never really seen it hard to stay underneath that.

The biggest concern now with all of the new regulations is, did the consumer opt in knowing very clearly what they're going to get and how frequently they're going to get it? Because there's a lot of shady people out there that will build mobile lists that people never opted in, and when someone complains – that’s what people are worried about. Less about the unsubscribes, but you want to be concerned with the complaints that you potentially generate.

Like the [inaudible 33:37] version of it.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

They actually passed a law a few years ago in Israel saying that it was illegal for companies to send you SMSs if you hadn’t explicitly opted in, which is why those stores then say, “Would you like to opt-in to our list?” And it took a while for me and for others to realize we could say no.

Or they’ll give you a discount dependent on you saying “Yes, of course.” But there's actually a loophole in the law, which is, I think nonprofits and political parties. They can basically SMS you and call you as much as they want.

Oh those are the people I want contacting me!

Well for the nonprofits, I mean, you still need to opt in. Political stuff – I remember in the last election, I opted in –. I also opted in; I opted into Barack Obama’s campaign just because I was curious, and they would send text messages out when they were doing reminders of voting and also when he was doing town hall-type online events that you can stream, really just trying to get you involved and engaged.

Interesting. So you said you're working on a course about this. Is there a way for people to get information about that?

Yeah, you could either text, if you're in the United States, text “Convert” to 38470, or you can visit convertfromanywhere.com and sign up for early updates.

Alright, and we’ll also look for that case study from John’s stuff.

Yeah, there’ll be a case study of John; there’ll be a case study of how Amy Porterfield uses it as well.

Awesome. Alright! Well let’s go ahead and do some picks. Reuven, do you want to start us off with the picks?

Sure! I've got one pick for this week. I think I've mentioned before I'm a big fan of the Slate Political

Gabfest. Slate has a whole bunch of podcasts that they do. David Plotz is the now former editor of Slate and one of the people on the Political Gabfest now has a short series of podcasts he’s doing that he’s calling “Working.” He’s interviewing people about the work that they do and how they do it.

You get up in the morning, what do you do? And his first inaugural one was with Stephen Colbert. Now I have been thinking Colbert is just brilliant and funny and on and on and on and a great satirist, and I think it was amazing, absolutely fascinating to hear how disciplined he is and has to be in order to make the comedy come off the way it does.

It was very enlightening to hear the way that he gets up in the morning. He already has – he reads through the news in this way and that way and that way, and it was quite inspiring to see how much work and how much discipline you need to get those sorts of results at the end. I definitely recommend it, certainly if you like Colbert’s comedy – and who doesn’t, right? [Chuckles]

But even if you don’t, just sort of get a behind-the-scenes look at how some of these things work and how different it is behind the scenes than what you see in front of the camera.

Cool! Curtis, what are your picks?

I'm going to pick a book called Minding the Store, which is about the founding of the Neiman Marcus store in Dallas. It’s more of a history book than it is a strategy book, but there are lots of really good tidbits out of there.

One of their personal philosophies is, it’s not a good sale for the store if it’s not a good sale for the customer. Even if we’re going to turn down a $25,000 sale, that doesn’t matter if it’s a bad product for the customer, and that’s how they operate everything on. So then people start coming back to them over and over and over because they know, if it’s a bad sale, they just won’t sell the product anymore.

Cool. Eric, what are your picks?

Alright, so I got a pick today from the Freckle Blog; it’s called How to Land Big Fish Clients With No Cold Calling by Amy Hoy. She’s the founder of Freckle. She has an interesting way to approach your marketing and how you're doing your work when you're trying to find clients.

Awesome. I have one pick and that is the Business Podcaster Summit. It’s going to be in January; it takes place over two weeks. There are a whole bunch of speakers. It should be pretty good if you're interested in podcasting and in building a business around it or making money at it, then you can check it out. It’s at podcastersummit.com.

Greg, do you have some picks for us?

Yeah, I'm going to go with the new podcast called StartUp. If you guys haven’t listened to it, it’s really good. Alex Blumberg, who is the producer of This American Life and Planet Money, broke out and left and is now building his own podcast and network. He tells the whole story in the exact same style like journalism storytelling as This American Life, but of him building his business. He’s on episode 5, and I actually just got to meet him.

I just did a creative, live presentation on Podcasting 101 and he was doing a two-day segment on – we did the Foundation of Podcasts and then he did The Art of Storytelling and Journalism. After meeting him in person, it just kind of further validated why he’s going to be successful.

The podcast is amazing; if you want to hear candid stories, very highly produced podcasts, which are so good, you should definitely check out the podcast called StartUp.

Awesome. Alright! We are going to be doing a freelancing Q&A sometime next month; we haven’t picked the day yet, but you can go to freelancersanswers.com and sign up for the mailing list and get information about when we’re going to do that.

We should probably set up a little short code for that. Anyway, that's all I've got. Thanks for coming and we’ll catch you all next week!