Giving some stuff away just to say thank you [PODCAST]

Episode 035:
Pete and Dom’s Favourite Things

Pete Williams: So, seriously you have to try MIDORI [Melon Liqueur] and milk. It’s actually quite nice as a drink. It tastes like Banana Big M.

Dom Goucher: Oh dear.

Pete: Do you have MIDORI over there?

Dom: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Pete: The alcoholic mixer, MIDORI?

Dom: Mate, you are well getting into this end of the year thing.

Pete: It’s New Year’s. This is New Year’s week, mate. It’s what it’s all about.

Dom: Baileys. Baileys will do me.

Pete: Baileys. I think there are some Australian listeners who know what MIDORI is and who are cringing at the thought of MIDORI and milk. But trust me, one of their sales guys did it at a Christmas party a couple of years ago and it tastes remarkably good. MIDORI and milk. Sounds terrible, tastes delicious.

Dom: What kind of thing is it?

Pete: Well, MIDORI is like a green liqueur.

Dom: Oh, no. Green’s wrong! That’s a drinking rule. Green is wrong.

Pete: MIDORI Illusion Shaker was huge when I was at the University. That was the thing. You go to the Nurses’ Bar, which was one of the bars, a night club I used to go to quite regularly. The Nurses’ Bar was the Illusion Shaker bar that made MIDORI Illusions. You’d get literally a shaker that you walk around the night club with. You drink out of a shaker bottle.

Dom: Oh dear.

Pete: Yeah. It sounds terrible, MIDORI and milk. But trust me, listeners out there who are in Australia or who have access to MIDORI, just try it once. A little bit of milk, a little bit of MIDORI, mix it with like any sort of drink, 30-mil shot and a bit of milk. Just sit back and relax, and it will take you back to your childhood. Because it tastes like a Banana Big M, like milk-flavored drink you can buy at the corner store.

Dom: Before we get anymore with your dark past, I think we should get on with, just to be safe. Pete Williams is not a medical professional. His advice should not…

Pete: But this episode is Pete and Dom’s Favorite Things.

Dom: Yeah, okay. I’m just getting a little bit worried about you. We’re talking about going to the Nurses’ Bar; and last week, you were talking about getting into Oprah Winfrey’s shoes. Just, you know…

Pete: The university that I went to had a campus, a campus dedicated to nursing. Obviously, there was the university town, and one of the bars was trying to target that sort of market. So, obviously, a lot of the guys went there as well because they were trying to target that sort of market as well.

Dom: Dude, put the shovel down. Step away from the hole. Okay?

Pete: Pete and Dom’s Favorite Things. Welcome to the final episode of our PreneurCast for 2011.

Dom: Last week, folks, we talked about our Shitweasel Awards, the things that influenced us the most in 2011. And so, Pete, as you said last week, wanted to do an Oprah Winfrey take-off. I don’t think you were serious about wearing the shoes, but you never know. And we wanted to give some of this stuff away just to say thank you for being a listener. But there are, as Pete mentioned, a few hoops that we want you to jump through, nothing serious, nothing dangerous, like drinking dodgy spirit.

Pete: It’s a mutually beneficial conversation we’re having today on PreneurCast, put it that way.

Dom: There you go. Right. Let’s keep this one short. Everybody’s getting ready and is spinning up for their New Year’s celebrations. We’re going to keep this one short, so let’s get in to it. Pete?

Pete: Basically, as Dom said, we’ve got a couple of things to give away to you guys, to the listeners. A whole range of cool goodies. Santa left a sack after delivering all the presents last week. What we’d like you to do, the contest or for want of a better word, the giveaway, is going until the end of January. For those of you who are listening and catching up in 2012, you still have time to play along and get involved in this, to gain a chance, so to speak.

What we want you to do is… Actually, we’ll make it the best of. Why clarify the next couple of podcasts before the actual contest is finished? I reckon we might go the best of these three things, so we can deem the winner by ranking system. Fundamentally, you’ve got three choices. We’d like you to do two of these three things and then email us to tell us what you’ve done. Ideally, we want you to leave an iTunes review. Obviously, for us, we want to continue to grow the ‘listenership’ and things like that.

A great way for us to do that is to get more exposure in the Apple iTunes Store. All you need to do is head over to the iTunes Store, go to the Podcast section, and just do a search for ‘PreneurCast,’ if it’s not already on the front page of the business section or the marketing section. Just do a search for ‘PreneurCast,’ and leave us a glowing review about a particular episode or our show in general. That’s Choice 1. Choice 2, what we’d love you to do is write a blog post.

So if you have a blog, whether it’s a blog about your entrepreneurial journey or even if it’s a business blog, we’d love you to do a quick post about PreneurCast; why you like it, what you’ve learned from it, your favorite episodes, any key learnings you’ve had. And if you can, link over to PreneurMedia.tv, which is the home of the podcast. Choice 3 is, if you have a Twitter account, we’d love you to tweet about us.

If you think we are worthy, of course. We don’t want you to lie at any of these things. We want them to be completely honest reviews. If you think we’re crap, leave a review and you might win a prize for being honest. So, just send a tweet like, “Hey, we really love what you do,” or if you found this episode really handy, or you’ve applied something that actually worked. We’d like you to do two of those three things. Hopefully, it’s not too much investment of your time.

And then email us at [email protected], whether you have some screenshots or some links to what you’ve done, so we can check it out and we can link back to our blog from our site to give you a bit of SEO juice, a little bit of traffic as well, no doubt. We’d love you to do that. And then what we’ll do is, based off that, we’ll pick the winner of each category based on who we think is the funniest, or the wittiest, or the most honest of the things you do.

Dom: Absolutely. Now, let’s clarify a couple of things here. First of all, please no one-liners on the iTunes Store. That will get everybody in trouble. If you haven’t got a legitimate review, good or bad, then take that one off your list because you’re not adding value for people to put a silly review.

“Yeah, give me the prizes!” No, thank you. Please don’t do that. And as Pete says, there’s something in this for you. Because if you have a blog and you put a blog post up, write something useful and intelligent for other people, we will link back to you.

Pete: We’ll tweet it and do a few things to give you a bit of exposure.

Dom: Yeah. And similarly, if you tweet us, we’ll tweet you; that kind of thing. This is a kind of mutually beneficial thing. It’s all about giving back. And the first thing we can do to give back to you is talk about, you mentioned, you link back to you. We’d love iTunes reviews if you’ve got something useful to say because obviously, that gets the word out within the iTunes Store. But any two of these three methods is really what we’re after. And then, give us some proof to [email protected].

And one thing I will say is we’ve got a range of stuff. We’ve really dug around and got some cool things to give you as prizes. Now, some of them are quite specific. So if there’s something you’d specifically like as your prize, if you’d want to make a bit of an effort when you send us what you’ve done, then mention that in your email when you email us. If you just say, “Hey, great guys, thanks a lot,” or whatever you’ve got, that would be cool. Super. But if there’s something specific, let us know and we’ll do our best to line that one up if you win.

Pete: Absolutely. Before we get into the cool stuff that we’re going to give you guys and give away, I just want to say, again, a big thanks to everyone for listening to the PreneurCast all year. For those who have already left reviews and comments, we really do appreciate it because this podcast is not driven by sponsorship or anything like that; we do it because we enjoy it. Having reviews is a great way to show that there are people out there actually listening to us.

Obviously, the stats show that people are, but that people are really engaging with us is probably a better way to say it. If you do enjoy the show and you’ve been listening along for a while, an iTunes review is the perfect way to say thank you and it only does take 15 seconds to do. We’d really appreciate you doing that. So, let’s get into the cool stuff that we have on offer as part of Pete and Dom’s Favorite Things.

First one is a Lumosity membership for two months. Lumosity is a service I mentioned on the podcast previously. I use it quite regularly. It’s an online brain training software, service or app. It helps you increase your memory and trains your brain to be better. They’ve got a whole bunch of cool, short, fun interactive games that cover math games – I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but they’re fun math games, fun memory games, fun visual games, and other things that I enjoy.

Just play it 15 minutes in the morning, and it switches your brain on. We’ve got a two-month membership available to listeners.

Dom: I love Lumosity. All joking aside, because you like math and I don’t, you geek; but Lumosity is great. It is that little, 15-minute thing that you can do. There’s something in there for everybody. It’s just, as I say, sharpening the saw. It’s just something to keep your brain going and help you focus and think differently. There are just so many benefits and it’s something that we both believe in. So, yeah, we want everybody to give that one a go. A two-month voucher.

Pete: It’s up for grabs. The second thing is something for last week’s episode, from The Shitweasels, which was my Book of the Year: Built to Sell by John Warrillow. We’re going to give an audio version of that away from Audible. You don’t have to have an Audible membership to get this, you just have to have the ability to create one as part of the giveaway and we’ll give you that audio version for free. It’s a fantastic book, hence it was my Book of the Year. So, we have the audio version of that book up for grabs as well. That’s an option for someone who wants to get a copy of John’s book for no direct cost at all.

Dom: Yeah. Again, Built to Sell, great book in keeping with The E-Myth ethos that I’m into. And also, being an audiobook, that’s the way that Pete and I consume a lot of content. Again, with the theme of what we’re talking about on PreneurCast this year.

Pete: It’s four-and-a-half-hours worth of great content that you can cut down to two hours and fifteen, if you want to do double-speed like I do. That’s up for grabs as well. Third thing. Do you want to talk about the third thing, Dom?

Dom: Yeah. The third thing is a pretty big thing. We’ve talked about it on and off. We haven’t really gone into depth about it, but we ran the first-ever 7 Levers of Business Mastermind Group this last quarter. We had a small group of people, and we provided some training and we also provided a weekly, kind of mentoring, mastermind call for those people. We had some phenomenal results with that. We’ve had some fantastic feedback from everybody.

Pete and I are going to do that again in the new year. We’re going to do it as much as possible throughout the year. We’re going to take on as many groups sequentially. We’re going to keep the groups small so that everybody gets a bit of our time. Now, one of the things that people really found valuable in the 7 Levers was the initial run-through of what the 7 Levers are and how that applies to their business.

We look at it the first run-through, it may not be obvious how particular one of the Levers applies to you and your business, depending on what kind of business you’re in. Obviously, in the new year, we’ll also be announcing how you can sign up if you are interested in being part of that program next time. What we want to do is give away a one-hour audit or consultation. Pete and I will arrange a call with you and spend an hour going through the 7 Levers and how it applies to your business.

We’ll give you specific action steps, things that you can implement against those 7 Levers. If you ask any one in the Mastermind, they will tell you that this has a phenomenal value. To be able to spend an hour with me and Pete, focused just on your business, picking our brains on how you can move forward in 2012, improve your business, and get each one of those 7 Levers that little bit of increase to massively increase your profits at the end of the day.

Pete: Super fun sessions when we did them as part of the 7 Levers, and obviously, every week as part of that Mastermind Group. We delved deeply into each one of the Levers to make sure we had some key action points. We had some awesome responses. Some people did one action off the previous week and came back to report they increased their traffic by 40%. It was just phenomenal.

Basically, what we want to do is jump on a call for about an hour at least, if not more, and just help you identify what some of these Levers are for your business and how you can pull them a little bit to get those increases that we spoke about. Pull these Levers by 10% and you’ll increase the profit of your business. It’s a phenomenal framework to apply to your business. So we’re going to do that as part of this giveaway. And also, as you said, Dom, we’re really excited to go through the 7 Levers again with a whole new bunch of entrepreneurs and action-takers to see them get the same results that the first group of Mastermind participants did.

Dom: I’m really pleased that we’re going to be doing that for somebody as a giveaway, but I’m definitely pleased that we’re going to be running that Mastermind Group again.

Pete: And the next thing as part of Pete and Dom’s Favorite Things is Pitch Anything, which was your Book of the Year.

Dom: It was. And my name’s Dom, not Dave. You’ve been on that dodgy spirit already, haven’t you?

Pete: I didn’t just call you Dave, did I?

Dom: You just called me Dave, dude.

Pete: Ooh. Sorry, Dylan.

Dom: Never mind. Thanks, Frank. Okay. Pitch Anything, my Book of the Year, and in a different format. We’re going to go with the Kindle format for this one. Don’t forget, you don’t need a physical Kindle device to read Kindles. You can either read them on your laptop with their laptop/desktop reader or software. You can read them on an iPad. They’ve got readers for pretty much every platform. I’m a big collector of things in Kindle format, both textbooks and just general information, and it’s one of the main uses I have for my iPad. It is my reading resource as I travel around.

If I have to fly anywhere or travel anywhere, it saves me from carrying thousands of books. So, I love reading on the Kindle as much as I like listening to audiobooks as well. So, we’re going to give Pitch Anything away in Kindle format. Hopefully, somebody will enjoy that.

Pete: And the final giveaway. Again, something two-on-one, is a website audit. Now, this is something we did quite a bit as part of the 7 Levers because a lot of people were getting a lot of their traffic from their website. Funnily enough, the really cool thing is that the majority of people who went through our 7 Levers Mastermind were real-world businesses. There was a retail store, a wholesaler, a manufacturer in a way. A huge, diverse stream of people, but they all had their website as one of the tools they use to get traffic.

And so, we did website audit as part of this to make sure their website was not only effective to convert, but also effective to get that traffic. We’re going to be offering that as well. We’ll jump on the call with you one day for about an hour and help pull your website apart to ensure it’s getting the write traffic that you want, and once you get that traffic that it’s built in a way that will actually get those conversions and opt-ins that you need as that second part of the 7 Levers formula. We’re going to be doing that as one of the things that’s up for grabs as part of our giveaway each year.

Dom: That was originally inspired by the 7 Levers Mastermind group and the work we did in there because we did do a lot of online presence consulting and audits. A lot of the people also had Faceook pages and things like that. Some people were just starting out. But as you said, there were very diverse. This lead us to what is possibly becoming a big announcement for 2012 for us.

Pete: It is.

Dom: We’re really, really pleased about this, we’re really excited. We’re going to be producing a video show, a videocast, a video podcast (depending on where you come from, depending on what you want to call it), but basically a web TV show. The core of that show is going to be about improving your online presence. And at the center of the online presence will be a website or a Facebook page, but predominantly a website. The core of the show is going to be these website audits.

Pete and I are going to sit down and look at your business and your online presence, and give feedback on a regular basis to listeners and viewers. We’re going to put a bigger show around this. We’re not just going to slap a quick audit once a week or whatever. We’re actually going to put a whole show together about improving your online presence. It’s going to be video-based. It’s going to take a lot of work, so we’re not sure about the frequency right now.

We’re going to run a few test shows. But if this floats your boat, if you’re interested in this, as well as the free one that we’re going to give away as a lead-up, we’re looking for people that want us to review their online presence. Look out for that announcement in the new year, but that’s kind of the big news for 2012. So, we’re moving on with the 7 Levers Mastermind, we’re also going to be producing this web TV show about improving your online presence, which we’re very excited about. Look out for that one.

Pete: Yeah. It’s going to have very high production value with a whole bunch of segments as well, with the core being those website audits. That’s going to be very cool for something we’re going to launch in 2012. Something else we’ll continue on with is the Noise Reduction newsletter. For those of you who haven’t checked out yet, Noise.re is the home of that, which you can subscribe to. And then every week, you’ll get a simple email from me with seven or eight links of worthy things you should check out. Just to try and reduce all the noise that’s out there online in the marketing world and summarize it in seven links.

There might be a YouTube video, or a good article, or a website application, or a software service that you might want to check out. Noise Reduction is something we’re going to continue on next year. Obviously, my blog at PreneurMarketing.com will continue to be a source of release from me for various concepts, workflow hacks and ideas and things like that. It’s going to be a big year next year. We’ve got a few bits and pieces in the planning mode as well, which we won’t quite reveal yet until we have it all solidified. Again, as we said in the last couple of episodes, we really appreciate you all jumping onboard with our podcast this year.

The feedback has been fantastic. We’ve ranked Number 1 in a lot of countries for the podcast in various weeks, which is fantastic. We hope to see you again in 2012. We’re going to continue straight through and not have a break or anything like that. We’re going to push through. Don’t forget to enter this year’s final show’s contest, Pete and Dave… I did it again. I’ve gone all year calling you Dom; and for the final episode, I’ve had three MIDORI and milk for over a quarter of this episode, and I’m done and calling you Dave.

Dom: Okay, Frank. Well, that’s it for the show. Let’s wrap it up before you fall asleep.

Pete: This is terrible. It’s awful. Hey, it’s been a big year. It’s been a big year, Dom Goucher. I’ve worked really, really hard, Dom Goucher. We’ve done a lot of stuff in this podcast, Mr. Goucher. So, we’ll leave it there, Dom, and we’ll see the community next year. We’ll look for their emails for their entry into this content and look… I’m done. I can’t speak English. I’m out. I’m done.