 An entrepreneur, a blogger, an author, a marketer, and a speaker, ladies and gentlemen, who's been working with personal brands and businesses to optimize their online personal and company brands with emerging technology, social media technology, and digital marketing. Someone who clearly believes in inspiring and educating people to win at business and at life in the digital world. I think this is the perfect personality to share with us the three key pillars for digital marketing success. Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome the number one global digital marketing influencer 2016 and CEO JeffBullass.com. It is Mr. JeffBullass. I love coming in. This is my fourth visit and I haven't quite worked out why I keep getting invited back. I'm not going to let you know, but I have this sort of like love-hate relationship with you guys. Number one, I love your passion. You are so passionate. I remember going to the Bombay Institute of Technology for a startup conference, and after speaking there, I was just surrounded by dozens of these young king startup entrepreneurs at Wannabees, and I love that. But there's something that really annoys me about you guys. You keep beating the Aussies at cricket. And I heard there's a game tomorrow. But before I start, I want to ask a few questions. Hands up, those of you who think they're like, you know, fantastic digital marketing, like if you ranked it out of zero to 10, you're between eight and 10. Who's fantastic digital marketing? I'm still looking. Come on. I'd like to see some confidence. Okay. Let's go for average. You're like between six and eight. Hands up, those are sort of like six-day digital marketing, who actually really sucks at digital marketing. Okay. Good to see some honest people here for a change. So I want to share some stories about what I've learned along the way since I started publishing online and creating content in 2009, but I want to share a story first. In 1998, a journalist called David Issey decided to capture the stories of ordinary people because he believed that the stories of ordinary people needed to be shared. So he went along to the poor houses of New York and he took along with him his photographer friend and they took these images. And he also captured their stories, he sat down with them, sat next to them, and he interviewed many of these men. These were very ordinary men. They've been living for decades in these rooms that were more like chicken cages. And what he decided to do was just write their stories up. So he sat down, he went away, he wrote their stories down and when the book was ready to actually be published, he took along a few copies and sat down with some of these men and he showed them their stories in black and white. And as he was sharing the story to one man, the man saw his name, he saw his story captured, his eyes lit up, and he grabbed the book out of David's hands and ran down the corridor and said, I exist, I exist, I exist. We as human beings want to be acknowledged. We want to be validated. And that is what the social networks allow for us. They give us a voice to be heard. And we no longer have to wait to be discovered by a journalist. We no longer have to beg permission for someone to write our story. We can write our own. And in 2009 when I started, that's what excited me. This intersection of humanity and technology that gave us all a voice. And that really did excite me. And that's what I love and that's what I like to see as I travel and speak around the world is that all of you here have a voice. You can share your creativity and hearing the stories today is that we now can do that. And the democratization of publishing, the democratization of marketing, and we're still trying to work out how to use these new powers, these superpowers. That's effectively what it is. So I would like to propose a new mantra, which is I create, I publish, I exist. Because I truly believe as human beings we should be sharing our magic with the world. A lot of people are going to work for a corporation. They're going to work for a company. And they work there for years. They may be getting to senior position of authority and then they leave. And what have they got to show for it? But if they took the time to actually create and share their ideas and knowledge with the world, then magic happens. And it validates us as human beings. And this is the power of the networks. But I want to share some stories about what happened along the way. When I discovered the web in 1995, used the browser, what happened was I went, wow, this is going to put libraries out of business. And that was good. And I was doing consulting and I was working in that space. But in 2008, I was invited by a friend to go into Facebook. And I went on to Facebook and I joined up, gave them all my information. And as I, after I'd signed in, all these people I hadn't seen for 20 years or more started popping up in the screen. People that I'd gone to college with, people I'd worked with. And I went, wow, this is a game changer. So this intersection of humanitarian technology, it's because basically the social web humanizes tech. No longer is it just about the geeks inheriting the earth. It's actually about giving us as human beings a voice. So I started noticing certain behaviors on Facebook. People were obsessed. They kept going back. I noticed the same behavior when I joined Twitter in December 2008. People were obsessed by this new social network, this new medium. So I stumbled upon a book by David Meehm and Scott called The New Rules of Marketing PR. He talked about the power of content to attract an audience. And I've been used to building companies by cold calling, knocking on doors. And it's hard work. And David talked about the power of content to actually have the world show up at your front door. And I like the sound of that. Then I also came up on a blog by HubSpot. You've heard of HubSpot here. Okay. HubSpot is an amazing story. Now, in that blog post, they said, if you have an inkling of what you want to write about, just start a blog. So I did. I just started writing. I started to share my passion about social media. And I sat down and tried to think out about a brand name I should use for my blog. I did a workshop with myself. And I came up with a really creative name, JeffBullist.com. So I started. And it cost me $10 for the domain name. And that's what is so great about the world we live in today is you do not need big dollars. You don't need a big budget if you've got the passion and you want to share it with the world. So I want to share some other things that I learned on this journey. Number one, when I was a kid, I had really bad asthma. I'd be in bed for days fighting for breath. And back then, there were no, you weren't sent off to hospital. You weren't given oxygen. You were just told, suck it up. Fight for breath. And I'd be fighting for breath for days. And I went to a doctor. And the doctor said, Jeff, if you actually go and run or swim, that can help. Some research shows that that will help. And I went, okay, I'll do that. So I was old enough then. I was about 11 or 12. So I started running around the block in front of the park in front of our house. And then I tried to get my brothers to join me the next day. And they joined me once. And then they never decided to come along with me because they didn't have that pain. They didn't have that issue with asthma. So I kept running. And I kept running. And my asthma started to get better. But I showed up every day. Some days I'd come back from school. I'd go running up into the hills around our home. And I'd be gone for hours running. Maybe you don't know it, but I was the original Forrest Gump. So I kept running. I came quite good at running. I was winning championships. And this is in my hometown of Adelaide. And it was quite easy to win championships. There's only three people live in the town. So we kept running. But what I learned was this, is that the power of showing up every day, the power of persistence, and it's no different to digital marketing or starting a business, is that it's a marathon. It is not a sprint. So what happened was, I started writing. And for four years, I created content before I went to my day job. And I wrote from 4.30 in the morning to 9. And I just created content. And as I created content, I got more traffic, more traffic, more attention, and then started to be asked to speak and also consult. In fact, I got so distracted by my blog, I actually got myself slowly fired by my day job. Because I said, Jeff, you're taking leave without pay. You're so passionate about what you're doing. You're not really helping us. I said, look, I really want my job. So they cut me down to three. They cut me down to one. And suddenly, I didn't have a job. I just had a blog. But I was free to create. And it's been an incredible journey. But I'm not standing in front of you saying I'm the one with all the ideas. I have looked at some of the best in the industry and shamelessly copied it. Steve Jobs, the iPod, was just a downsized digital Walkman. Okay? You executed pretty well, didn't you? But the reality is that go and look at some of the best in your industry and so outside your industry of doing. And look and emulate them. And I did that. I looked at what HubSpot were doing. I looked at what CopyBlogger was doing. Social Media Examiner. But if you actually just want to go beyond improvement, you need to do more than just work from your industry. You need to innovate from the outside in as well. So go and look at the best and learn from them. The other thing I learned was we do need to think like publishers. And we publish four to five times every week. And it normally goes out at 1.01 a.m. which is when Americans are waking up because I wrote for one of the biggest audiences first. And even though in Australian I use English, I use American English. And the Americans, a lot of them today even think I'm American. But they're surprised when I open my mouth and start speaking. So the idea is you've got to find the biggest market. You guys have got an enormous opportunity here in India because you've got a home ground market and you've got some incredibly passionate driven people and you've got a great education system. And the world is at your fingertips. But you need to think like a publisher. Now, I kept creating content. I started to get these emails and I was asked to speak in Italy. This was about six, seven years ago. And I went and spoke and they actually paid me. And as I was sitting down over a glass of red wine as you do in Italy, I said, why did you invite me? And they said, we saw you everywhere. We saw your content on Slideshare. We saw your content on Twitter. We saw your content on LinkedIn. You've got to hustle your content out there. A lot of people think create content and the world is just going to show up. You've got to keep hustling it out there. And it's a really interesting research by Edelman which puts out the trust program and it hasn't been doing it for the last 10 or 12 years. Is they show that if you're seen once or twice the trust factor and your credibility is about two to three percent. If you're seen three to five times your credibility and trust goes up to over 50 percent. So you've got to keep putting your content out there. So content marketing is two words. Content and marketing. You've got to hustle it out there. But there's some challenges and I think there's a really interesting one that is sort of creeping up on us. And I think it's going to be a challenge for all of us who have websites and we're used to the web as we knew it and grew up with it. And this challenge is this is that we are now moving into an internet of apps and platforms. Most people do not go to a website anymore on their mobile. They go straight to an app. And this is going to transform, this is transforming how we are going to market in the future. It's more than just mobile. It's about platforms as well. The other scary thing is that in any industry over time there is consolidation. And today 90 percent of advertising growth globally is owned by two companies. Facebook and Google. And they're the ones that control the algorithms. Your challenge as a marketer is going to be able to battle the algorithms. Unless you have got a big budget and want to just pay for all your traffic. So we're in the middle of an incredible shift of the web and we will see what will happen but your challenge as a marketer is to work with how the game is being played today. And that is the internet of websites is becoming an internet of apps and platforms. This is the other big challenge. I see this all the time. I see brands. They are so in love with themselves. Look at me, look at me. It's all about look at our product. People don't care about your product. What they care about is what your product does for them. That's it. And once you stop doing that or the message doesn't include that you're in trouble. You've got to help people run towards pleasure or run away from pain. It's not complicated and your content has to do that. Now I grew up building businesses as well cold calling and I hated it. Who's done cold calling here? Love it? I'm hiring you. The reality is that today content is your salesperson. The medium, the sales process is no different. In fact 75% of marketing is education and 25% is selling. And guess what does the education for you? Content. So the sales process hasn't changed. It's just the medium. We are in the middle of enormous change like we've never seen before and your challenge is to keep adapting. And if there's ever proof of someone being able to evolve it's me. I'm not a millennial if you haven't noticed. So the reality is that is going to be one of your biggest challenges. The other thing is today people don't talk to you or catch up with you on Facebook because you're a pretty face of whether I close. On the social web you are defined by your content. That's it. Whether it's a video whether it's a blog post whether it's a tweet you are defined by content in this virtual world and it's becoming more virtual. Now you are measured by data. So if you get put on an industry magazine as an influencer guess what it's not because you're wearing the right shirt or wearing the right dress it's because the big data machines are measuring you. You are measured your influence is measured by big data. So the reality is with this fast evolving and changing environment you have no other thing but to keep failing. I'm not saying stuff everything up but you've got to keep making small mistakes and find what works and what doesn't. And I love this quote by Woody Allen if you don't fail now and again it's a sign you're playing it safe. And I have tested the boundaries of algorithms and I woke up one Friday morning and Twitter had shut my account down. That was my best to the world. I was horrified. Didn't they know who I was? What happened was I sent off an email and luckily there was only three people on Twitter back then. So they actually got back to me. I actually had my Instagram account because I tried to log in with the wrong password a couple of times and they shut me down. This is about two weeks ago in Portugal and I was trying to access via my mobile. Try sending an email to a 700 million user platform and try and get a response. Guess what I did? I acted like my account, I died so I said look I've died I'm my account maybe in memoriam and I sent an email to that particular user account on Instagram. Guess what they responded. So the reality is Instagram responds faster to dead people than to real people. Now if you ever get banned from Facebook or Instagram you can steal that tactic, okay? Just say look my brother died, his name is Jeff Bullist can I have my account back? It works. So I keep making mistakes. But this is the biggest one you're going to face is that we're all trapped with habits and beliefs about how the world was working and because we've got such a fast-moving web landscape here in the ecosystem the reality is you've got to actually try and escape your old beliefs. And there's many of them. How business is done. It's not business as usual anymore. It's not marketing as usual anymore. We are in the middle of an incredible shift. What are the opportunities? This is the other thing that really I would really like to get across. Creating digital assets is exactly that. It's an asset. It's not an expense. Advertising the past was an expense. In reality you can see why it was because when you actually created a campaign, ran it on TV this is before the days of YouTube you actually put it up there and then it was pulled down after you'd run out of money and it was gone. You put an ad to the newspaper the next day your rad is lining the bottom of a bin. Today as you create content you are leaving a digital footprint. You are building digital assets one word at a time, one video and there's a great quote by Bill Gates. He says that most people overestimate what they can do in one year but they underestimate what they can do in 10 years. You've got to play a long game and even though I started just me and a blog I've got about 3 million words nearly 2,000 posts and built a following of over half million Twitter followers. That is an asset. You can go and pay for attention and that's great to amplify and accelerate brand awareness and we all have to do that now where the algorithm of Facebook is all about pay to play. But in parallel we should be building digital assets that will endure into the future. I really loved about social the opportunity is crowd source marketing. People share your stuff for free. If you create great content it can go viral. That's pretty cool. Invoke the power of the crowd. Joseph Sugarmoon was a copywriter and the sales person came up to him and he said I love Joseph what you do because Joseph was this copywriter that wrote ads for newspapers and what was really the salesman liked about Joseph's you know, copywriting was that by writing a really good ad he can attract an audience of thousands and millions and attract it. Something that was one to many. Whereas a sales person we all have to just one phone call at a time one door at a time so what's great about the social web is the scale it gives you. Now everyone likes to get it just right you know just you've got to get it almost perfect before you hit publish or anything okay that's great but the reality is that perfection is the enemy of done so the reality is you need to get out there and just keep creating content and sometimes I can be perfect I'm not saying put bad content out but make sure that it actually and I used to have so many people especially in the early days of the blog my spelling wasn't as good, my grammar was a little bit poorer than it is today and it's still not perfect I'd have what I'd call the grammar and spelling police turn up and give me a hard time. How dare you publish a blog post that has three or four spelling errors and I went well it's done isn't it where's your blog post so make sure that you don't make perfection when you're writing things done in fact Facebook is just in constant beta they get stuff wrong all the time and sometimes it gets noticed and sometimes they're far and big I'm going to touch on the first pillar you've got to get attraction in other words you've got to get attention that's called traffic all right if you're dating you've got to catch the eye of that girl in the corner of the bar you've got to get attention first without attention on the web so how do you do that well social and my weapon of choice is Twitter and people still don't get sort of what Twitter's about but it's one of the best ways to actually create a fantastic top of the funnel brand awareness and you can do it at scale I automated Twitter about six, seven years ago and actually started to send out tweets every 15 minutes and the social media purist turned up and said how dare you automate social media and I had these stones thrown at me from the side virtual stones of course but I kept going and guess what research shows today that tweeting every 15 minutes actually increases your engagement rate by 87% so I tweet every 15 minutes and I must really tweeted twice since I've been standing here with no hands but it works and guess what we have today? Social media or digital marketing automation platforms it's the only way you can scale in a complex digital world but I discovered a tool about Twitter recently that revealed what my first tweet was does anyone know what their first tweet is or was there's a tool that actually allows you to find it so I put my account name in and I thought this tweet is going to be really insightful deep and meaningful wise I was watching the cricket but as I shared this post with the world Jim from somewhere in the world said Jeff what was the cricket doing? I said Jim I don't think he's from India he's not from Britain and he's not an Aussie guess what he's an American sorry Jeff the reality is that was my first tweet three words really simple but that's the power of Twitter it's simple simple suits me I'm not a complex guy I like simplicity the other thing is other platforms work very well as well and if you're going to do B2B again if you want to be really good at advertising the digital world you're going to have to master Facebook advertising there's no other way but there's another few things that I think that especially those of us and most of us have grown up in this really social media centric world is that we get blinded by these shiny new toys and one of the latest shiny new toys is Snapchat I've got an account and I think I've done one but we've got to do some of the basics well now the reality is social media is great and I've built a business based on it but you make sure that you're not blinded by all the shiny new toys that have stopped you doing the basics I came across a blog post by I think one of the top SEO bloggers in the world I think at Search Engine Land or something and they said that if you have a look at your traffic you will find that in most cases you get 300% more traffic from search engines than from social I'm talking organic traffic right so guess what I went to my Google analytics plugged it in and guess what I found about 55% of my traffic was from search engines organic and about 15 to 16% was from social that transformed my thinking about my digital marketing the reality is that if you're just playing with your platforms you are at the mercy of changes in algorithms Facebook changed the rules a few years ago on their organic traffic some websites lost and businesses closed down lost 90% of their traffic overnight so don't forget to actually be building a digital asset which is earned authority with the search engines email is another one it's not sexy it's been around with us in the 1970s it is still the business messaging platform of choice 4.2 billion accounts so don't forget to make sure especially if you're in B2B and even in B2C that you are building an email list quick case study these guys Mavodo a little real estate blog had about 1700 visitors a month they decided to go and basically look at what Buzzfeed was doing and just emulated them copied them they did all the same things they built an email list they created great content they hustled it out they built the website for sharing they just did what Buzzfeed was doing a few days later two years later these guys now get nearly 18 million visitors a month to their blog okay and they did it through email they did it through social number two seduction you've got to be interesting you've got to keep a girl or a guy interested you've got to be interesting okay that's the art of seduction that's content how powerful is content Johnny Moll this is Johnny Henriksen sorry from New Zealand he started a company called Shuttle Rock 5 years ago and he asked me to come and speak early on in that his experience he read my content and invited me to be on the board of his startup today we've raised over 3 million dollars and we have got about 25 staff that came from creating content content will actually get people interested in you and your brand if you don't have the time to create it curate it create lists of the best blog posts from different bloggers in your industry the other thing you've got to learn too is the art of the headline and I see so many bad headlines every day this is one of the guys from Madison Avenue one of the gurus David Ogleby understand that your first job of the headline is to get them to read the rest of the copy and the job of the first line is to get them to read the second line now I learnt the power of writing controversial headlines a little while back so I wrote this headline why should you forget Facebook now this is almost sacrilegious it went quite well on my blog but then I put it on LinkedIn it exploded it had 1,000 comments nearly 300,000 views in a week it was the top article globally on LinkedIn for a week obviously people on LinkedIn hate Facebook so controversial works now what does Green Hex and Ham by Dr. Seuss got to do with marketing well I'll tell you what it comes down to simplicity Dr. Seuss has added a challenge to write a blog with only a book with 50 words so he did and this became his top selling book the other thing that is interesting about simplicity too is that the great fiction writer Stephen King used an example of an article a sentence by Mark Twain it was 52 words and Stephen King said look at this powerful piece of writing he said 38 of the 52 words are single syllable so don't write for PhD students you need to write for grade 5 students right so include images as well that's the other thing you've got to do in your content to get 600% more traffic the other thing with content is give it endurance at Evergreen I learnt this from Tim Ferriss great idea provide free premium content that gets people to give you an exchange of value to build your email list and your content creates credibility and trust before you ask for the order one great example of content that IBM uses and Andrea Ames their content strategist said that from this case study before we just finish the last pillar content is your new salesperson that's it and that exists both in B2C and B2B last pillar is commitment and this is where I believe a lot of social media markets fall down we don't we're all about vanity metrics traffic, shares, views but we're not asking for commitment from our clients and our potential clients and I had this ah-ha moment when I bumped into some hard-nosed digital marketers, direct marketers in Chicago two years ago and I realised I had a lot to learn about getting small commitments and getting people to make those commitments at the sharp end of the funnel so your first goal is to and paid and earned and owned that's your email list along with other things your final marketing goal is to convert leads into sales so your most of your selling should be actually done before you even show up and they show that 60% of it is done that way last case study I want to leave you with is this HubSpot generates 75,000 leads a month through content that's worth gold and that's why they're the business they are today so what they want to do is they want to take people from top of the funnel brand awareness right through to actually making a decision and there's another thing that really gets me about just using the term funnel we use it in a variety of ways you know what it's actually a matrix we don't move down this wonderful linear path to buying we come in from here, we come in from there okay that's the reality so some quick trends that I want to leave you with to finish and these are important to understand what you should be thinking about for the future you've got to start working with robots okay marketing is now an art and a science that's the reality and you've got to embrace it this should be your next hire the mad data scientist who can tell you and get insights from the big data so you know what works and what doesn't because we've got lots of data work with influences influence of marketing is in early days and there are different ways of working we won't go into that now but learn to use influence of marketing but use it wisely number two, the last one here is artificial intelligence we're seeing that with chat bots and others, some done well, some done very poorly but this is going to be a big part of marketing in the future and also it's going to help us with algorithms so you need to get traffic, that's attraction you need to seduce people with your content and you need to actually then get commitment if you do the first two you will fail and that's where I believe you really need to focus on so I just want to leave you with this I want you to steal all the stuff I've shared with you today feel free but remember, nothing happens until you start and look forward to seeing you get stuff done thank you Jeff absolutely, nothing happens until you start and well I've started already while you were talking so tweeting every 15 minutes increases my reach by 87% that's a huge price in the last 10 minutes so thank you so much ladies and gentlemen a huge round of applause for Jeff Pulas and I'd like to invite Neha Culver CEO, Admetad India to kindly present a token of our gratitude to Jeff once again, thank you Neha