 I'm so excited to be here with a couple of kindred spirits of mine, Richard and Kylie. So they have a ton of experience with helping businesses launch, you know, courses and websites and, you know, group programs and things like that. They have 15 plus years of experience doing over 250 launches. So way more experienced than me. I mean, these are, they have some, some major clients, including, you know, Eckhart Tolle, Sounds True, Jack Canfield, Marianne Williamson, Tara Brock and others. And so I'm just really looking forward to picking their brain a little bit here, their brains here a little bit about launches and how to make it successful. The other thing that's very important is that their business is called Conscious Marketer. They have a great Facebook group too. Be sure to check it out. I'll link it below. And so that's why I feel like we're kindred spirits because not only do we understand the importance of marketing and how to do launches, etc., but to do it in a way that's aligned with values and soul, spirit, etc. So Kylie and Richard, great to have you both here. Thank you for making the time. Thank you. Thanks, George. Great, great to be here. Totally. So I, there's so much we could, we could spend out, you know, days talking through different aspects of conscious marketing, but you had three skills that I wanted to have you kind of touch on and in our short time together for launching well, basically. And I'll probably have questions for you along the way, but do either of you want to start with that? Well, maybe I can provide the framework for how the skills came about, and then I'll pass it over to Kylie who'll give you the first skill. Oh yeah, yeah, that sounds great. Yeah. So we do, we do about 30-ish launches a year, and then we help hundreds of other peoples in our group programs. I think last year we sold over 250,000 units. That's just last year. That's a lot of programs being sold just to kind of give you the scope and we help a lot of people who are kind of just getting off the ground and also people who are more established. But for people who are kind of doing it with us and learning to launch themselves, what we found is that if we can teach them these three core skills, then they're off to the races. So it'd be kind of like if you wanted to do a play basketball and you didn't learn how to dribble the ball first or you didn't learn how to shoot a free throw. And so these three skills are things that you can teach yourself and this is what we do in our group training programs. But it's really useful to know that you need these. And the nice thing is you can learn these, you can learn the basics of these in a couple hours. And then once you have that, then no matter what you're doing with your launch or with your programs or with your marketing, whether it's like your Facebook feed or you're shooting a video or you're doing an interview like this, you can rise above everybody else because you have some basic fundamentals that nobody else has. And so I'm going to pass it to Kylie here, who is going to share the first one with you. Absolutely. So Richard referred to it earlier as conscious hooks. And we were talking amongst our team just even this morning about the idea of a conscious hook versus clickbait, which you don't thankfully see as much now. But for those of you who don't know, next time you're at the grocery store, just look to the left in the line. And you're going to see a lot of clickbait. So it's a good example. But a lot of people in the transformational industries, I call it, don't even like the word hook. They're like, oh, that feels manipulative. So I looked it up and because I like it. So I looked it up in the dictionary one day and I found out that it actually means to attach. So I really, really appreciate that aspect of what a hook can be. But essentially it's just the art of getting attention. You know, one guy in our podcast Garrett called it stop the scroll. So with billions and billions of pieces of content being uploaded to social platforms every single day, how is the beauty and the amazingness and the depth of what you're doing? How is that then getting people to not just stop and pay attention, but want to stop and pay attention, which is a totally different thing all together. And so I have nine ways that I've come up with over the 10 years that I've been a copywriter. One of them, I'll just give you one of them real quickly and we'll also talk about that in a minute. But one of them is, can you tell a story in a sentence? Can you actually get a story in a sentence to where it shows the beginning of a transformational arc all the way to an end of one, but it attaches a face to it. It attaches a name to it. It attaches a real human to it. That's usually the best hook. That's the hook I've used the most in ads. And it does get people interested and intrigued to learn more. Is there an example that comes to mind for you? Maybe there's something you recently wrote. And if not, we can always put the link below to an example of a recent ad. Absolutely. So the first ad I ever wrote in the first campaign I ever worked on was about a psychotherapist who couldn't get any clients, was living in her parents' basement and then learned how to coach, became a transformational coach and was able to build a lifestyle business and bring it to seven figures. And so, you know, that story has probably been a little played out since then. But even with stories that are quote-unquote played out, when you put that name and you put that face and you put that picture and you put that scene, people do love it. And then another ad I wrote for a client named Brendan Kane, a former client, was about how Bria Tech struggling stay-at-home mom was able to get 30,000 followers in six days. And that could quote-unquote sound like clickbait. It's like, is that really true? Like that sounds ridiculous. So the rest of the ad has to justify it. Like, yes, this actually happened. Here's how it happened. Here's the problems and challenges that she had on the way to making that happen. And here's why it could be. We're not promising anything. Here's why it could happen for you too. So I love Bria. I talked to her on the phone. She's from Missouri. She was super cool. Just like, yeah, I can't even upload a photo. Yeah, I can't even plug in a computer. And I have that same problem. So I really related to her. Oh my gosh, that's amazing. Yeah, I love when Kylie tells stories because you just get drawn in. It's like effortless. What I'd say also is just the reason this is so important is because these things are embedded everywhere. And so these hooks that draw you in, they're in the subject line of an email. They get the click inside the email. And then once you get to the sales page, they're in the video. There should be video hooks and forward hooks and backward hooks. We have like a whole thing. And then every bullet point, if you're selling something, should have a hook. And so these things, it's like grammar for sales or grammar for persuasion to get people interested so that they're going to want to go deeper with you. So even like the title of this, we named it the three core skills any marketer needs to create an extraordinary launch. So if you saw that in a title or in a video, you'd want to know what are those three things. And then when, because if you don't go in, though, I think the problem we solve with this is we have people have extraordinary programs, but they send an email and nobody opens the email, right? Or they open the email, but then if it's not written in a way that people click it, then they never go to see the offer. Or they go to the offer and it's written in a way that's maybe descriptive versus drawing people in and inviting them in. And so this really solves the problem of helping bring people into your program so you can create the transformation for them. Amazing. So the second core skill, what is that one? Maybe Kyla, you want to lead with this one because you're the master storyteller. So the second core skill is really how to tell your origin story. And so this is Kyla is a master at this. Yeah. And I love what you said earlier, Richard, that it's owning your origin story also. And it's not just writing it, it's not just telling it. It's like having it in your body, having it in your spirit and really being able to say, like, this is who I am. This is what I stand for. But usually I talk about origin stories in terms of how I earned the right to carry my medicine. And that's like what a spiritual teacher of mine said one day. She's a Cherokee medicine woman and she was like, how did you, you have to earn the right to carry your medicine. You don't just get to do it. So in terms of if our work is our medicine, then how did we put in those 10,000 hours to then say, hey, I'm going to pass this on to you. I'm going to help you with this. I'm going to support you in this way. And so I think that's a really important thing. And I think also the origin story, which is simply just like, where did you come from? Who are you? How did you get good at what you do? But it also allows an audience to then connect with you because the way that I teach origin story at the very end of the story, you then bridge why. You bridge a why. So after I share with you how I got great at what I'm doing, now I have to say why I care about you. Because if I don't say why I care about you, then why does it matter? You know, I watch you go through this great arc of transformation and so what? So it's really also about I'm doing this work today because I went through all of this. I learned all of this through my life experiences. Here's why I want to share it with you. Here's why it's actually very important to me to share it with you. Yes, absolutely. And I think also the origin story connects to hopefully connects in some way to the audience to say that part I can relate to or wow, that part is memorable. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So anything else, anything about storytelling, Richard, that you want to mention? Just that I think that something I've struggled with a little bit as an introvert. And I think that, you know, for your audience, I think if you're listening to this and you're saying to yourself, nobody cares about my story, which is pretty common, actually. Or my story is just average or whatever. What you need to realize is it's normally not. Normally people actually care about your story and the backstory gives your audience a context for who you are. And this story, you're going to have to retell a story over and over and over again in podcast or on Facebook or when somebody introduces you. And so you might as well get really good at it, you know, and rather than go weak and kind of mumble through it, I think get really proficient at it because it's in a lot of places and it's through stories that you can draw people in and then change their lives. If you think of the people that you respect, what's interesting is you normally know their origin story and it's part of why you're connected to them. So yeah. Yeah. Makes them human. Makes them, you know, makes you more interested and invested, I think, in their continuing journey, right? I think that's how I feel about that. So the third core skill is blocking content. I love to hear you share more about that because I'm a big fan of content marketing as well. But yeah, either of you want to take that on. I'll lead with this one. So when kind of in the early days, this is like 2007, 2008 when I had to start to do videos and these teachers would turn to me and say, what do I say? And I would start to block out the marketing videos for them, basically. And what I realized was that it was kind of like there were different types of blocks in a video. And like so one block might be an authority block. Another block might be to tell your origin story. Another block might be a teaching block. Another block might be an intro. Another block might be to mention the next video and set the hook for the next video in the series so that when they get the email, they're more likely to open it and they already know that they've already have a seed planted. And so you get a higher open rate and a higher watch rate on the next video. And so this is really kind of an interesting skill. I developed this kind of in the late 2000s and then taught it. And that's a really unique way, because once you have this skill, it makes doing a video really easy actually. And you know that for every section of a video, there's a specific intent for that section. And then you can learn the formulas for how things are ordered and there's a better order and then there's a worse order. And it makes recording videos easier. It makes the effectiveness of them better. And then once you have the blocking, what you can realize is any website is just a series of blocks. You can realize a sales page is a series of blocks where each section has an intent. So we have what we call a conscious offer formula that we teach in our programs that has 20 blocks. And so once you have this, you can start to look at everything in blocks. And then when you're reading an email, when you're watching a video or when you're reviewing somebody else's sales page that you really respect, you can go, oh, that's a quote block. They've just quoted and brought some authority. Oh, that's a testimonial block. Oh, there's a case study block there. Oh, there's an offer summary block. And so you can kind of see that once you have all these pieces, it's kind of like putting on a nice pair of sunglasses. It changes how you see everything online. But it also helps you decode what everybody else is doing and it helps you get intentional on what you're doing. It's really an amazing method to have under your belt. That's awesome. Yeah. And it's, I think for the person who's writing it or scripting a video, it's probably more calming too. Just instead of like, oh my God, I could talk about anything, everything. Just say, okay, well, no, there are these blocks that I can just kind of plug in, plug and play. To say, okay, well, did I cover this of all the blocks? And I imagine you could choose from the blocks too, depending on what you feel the purpose of the video or the sales page is. It's like, okay, let me choose this block. Oh, now I can write just to that. I call it temporary constraints. You know, it's like, oh, okay, I can just write that. Yes, that I can do instead of, let's write a sales page. Well, what's interesting is when we record people, we often, I mean, we've been kind of the zoom world the last couple of years, but normally we're with like three digital cameras. And so we just go block by block and then we'll do that first block like two or three times. And then with a zoom in or a change of camera, we just cut the next block in. And so it makes the video editing really easy. And so you can, when you put the blocks together and nobody does, nobody's gonna know that you didn't do that in one take if the editing's done right. And it looks, you look seamless. And a pro on the backend, and it makes the video easy and it makes everything easier. And I guess this would be similar in terms of like, you know, the storyboard movies and things like this, but this is like a really easy way you can do it with an Excel spreadsheet or you can draw it out, you know, and it's a really useful tool. Wow, that's awesome. Really great. Anything else for Kylie? You want to add to content blocks? And I think for me, because this is more Richard's domain and I have actually seen our clients and one of our masterminds that we don't have anymore sit there and create a sales video in like 15 minutes just following the blocks. I mean, it needed work, it needs work, but it was, it was there and it made sense and it was compelling. So I love the idea of that structure. For me, my writing is a little more intuitive. Like I get to know who I'm writing to and I'm like, what do I need to say to them right now? And that's it. But I do use those blocks because they're fundamentals to marketing, right? But I don't necessarily, I'm not smart in the same way that Richard is. So he's got this whole genius system that is definitely his forte, but the one thing I will say... We're all smart in different ways. That's very true. The one thing I will say about it is I think that what most people need to work on is the transitions. So there's these like beautiful pieces of content, but how can I make sure that it flows from idea to idea to idea in a really beautiful, concrete way? And that kind of goes along with learning hooks. Like how do I keep attention while I'm moving from this to this? Or it also reminds me of something that Stephen King said because as a copywriter, we read all these different books, take all these trainings. For me, the most compelling book I ever read was Stephen King's book called On Writing. And one of the things that he said is you want to take two seemingly unrelated ideas and relate them. So that's also another way you can take these different blocks and you can weave them together. He actually, this is like a nerdy fun fact, he actually couldn't sell a single novel until he really understood that idea. And then the first one he sold was Carrie and it was like a best seller. I got a movie, but he was talking about how his wife was working at Dunkin' Donuts and they couldn't afford medicine for their daughter one winter. And he had been writing and writing and writing and been rejected, been rejected, been rejected. As soon as he figured out that strategy, that technique, boom. What has he written, like 100 books or something like that, 100 best selling books? And they're all, they all play off of that idea. So I think that I never thought about this before. So I'm not going to say I've taken Richard's content blocks and busted out on some Pet Cemetery on it or anything like that. But I actually think it's an interesting idea to play with. Yeah, amazing. So there's so much you all can teach and I know we're just scratching the surface. But I wanted you to also touch on this idea of myths of marketing. I think you have like eight of them or something like that. But were there any that you're able to just kind of briefly share to give us a taste of what a myth of marketing might be? Richard, what about you? Yeah, we actually have like 33 myths. But and you can mention our Facebook group later. But there's two presentations in there. One is the seven myths of marketing and the other is eighth myth. And they basically came about because I realized there's good news and bad news here. The good news is that the tech has become an easier and that the strategies that you need to succeed as a coach are easier. The methods are easier. The bad news is it means that you're actually responsible. The only block is normally you and your mindsets. And so what we realize is when you first get online, later on it's a little bit different. But when you first get online, actually the things that are blocking you are just whatever is going on in your head and your internal game. So the the first myth is just what we call the manipulation myth. And we find within our community, this isn't in all communities, but in our community there's this idea that marketing is manipulative. And you know, you can go take it to the extreme that it's evil and that it's like a scourge on the world. And that the creator doesn't want anything to do with marketing because it's pushy. And we like to take that myth and help our tribe, our community to see that there's another way. And we call it EMC. It's educational marketing content. So it's just creating value content. And every piece of content you put out, we believe changes consciousness. And so there's a karma of everything you put out. And so we want to be giving value whether that person becomes a customer or not. And then we share ways that people can do that in ways that really feels good. And there's this line like there's the marketing here and then there's the teaching here. And we like to take that wall between those two and just annihilate that wall and just see it as one thing. And then give some value up front so that the customer knows what to expect and gets the value up front. Yeah, I 100% agree. I started to talk about how some time ago like marketing is part like particularly for like spiritual teachers. Like marketing is part of your ministry, man. It's like we touch so many more people with our marketing. In fact, if marketing is successful, it touches way more people, creates more karma than the relative few who convert, gosh, 1% conversion or 10% conversion. Like gosh, it's like what about the other 90% to 99% who didn't convert this time? Have they been left in a better place? We hope so. So no, I love that. And I'm looking forward to seeing the other myths as well. And I know it's in the Facebook group. So I want to just spend the last few minutes to make sure people know how to, you know, what kind of programs and offerings that you all have. So first of all, your website of course will be below and you have a podcast as well. Be sure to check that out folks. And you have a Facebook group, which I think is actually where I first met you all. Because there were some people I knew in your Facebook group and they mentioned it and they got a lot of value out of it. So I'll be sure to link that below. You have a, oh, do you want to say anything about the Facebook group, by the way? You mentioned that there were presentations in there. The Facebook group is called the Contrast Marketers Path and we do a live training most weeks. We're in there just giving content, kind of like what I just said, we're just trying to give some content and some ideas. And it's people who want to do marketing in a different way. And like you said, George, they want to make an impact and they know that if they could get more people in then they could create the change in other people's lives. Awesome. And you have, of course, you have your private clients which we've talked about. There are some big names. But I would imagine you also work with people who, well, actually, I don't want to assume that. So you've got your group programs, you've got your one-on-one. Most of the people who are watching or listening to this are probably too much in the beginning of their business to actually work with you all. But let's say somebody is, well, let's talk about two different groups. Let's say somebody is just starting out, like they have a skill set, maybe they've got some training, maybe they have some experiences they want to share and they're kind of starting a business right now that could turn into group programs, online courses, etc. How would you recommend they engage with you? That's group one and group two. Let's say somebody has been doing it for a while, maybe a couple of years. They already have had dozens or maybe hundreds of clients. They may even have run a couple of small group programs and maybe launched a few online courses. How would you recommend they work with you? Well, I'll just say briefly the first group, Kylie and I run something we call the conscious launch accelerator and so we have the processes that we take people through. We train people in hooks and story and then it's really meant to be an action-based program. I think another myth that I would share is that people think that they need another certification and they need more knowledge and really most people are ready and they just need to take the action and as you launch, you learn and then you evolve. And so we've tried to, as Kylie, this is your saying, not mine, but she says we put everything in there that you need and nothing else. So we just try to distill it and then we wrap that in a really good community experience and you're working directly with us on weekly calls. So that's the conscious launch accelerator. On the latter one, we have a higher end mastermind group that we ran out last year and we're going to be starting that up again. That would probably be the place. Occasionally, we'll find somebody in our one-on-one or our private agency, which is pretty much closed right now. Occasionally, we'll take one client a year kind of thing to add into there. Yeah. So occasionally, we're called and given an assignment and we're like, okay, we need to do this to help people. Yeah. Awesome, awesome. Well, thank you for the work that you do that you're serving people with such value, whether it's in your podcast, your Facebook group, your website, et cetera, and your programs, of course. Yeah. So I guess anything else you want to say before we finish this conversation? I would just say, just to piggyback off what Richard said, you are ready. You know, you can do it. You are ready. Just take the action and people really need you. I always tell people, there's people that are really suffering out there that need you specifically. I think a lot of times people think, oh, anyone can do what I do and it isn't true. So that's what I want to leave you with, everyone with. That's awesome. Thank you for that. Yeah. And Richard, anything, any other parting words for the audience? You know, just to figure out what's yours to do, you know, like not necessarily from the mind, but what you're being called to do, how you're being called to be of service in the world. And then follow that because the universe has your back on that and it'll create the magic for you. So create from that state of presence or that state of knowing that you've got to do this thing, whether it makes sense to anybody else out there or not, just go for it. Kind of like Kylie said, you're ready. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Amazing. Well, folks, the links are below. Check out the Facebook group, the podcast, their website, and maybe one of the group programs might be really great fit for you. So thank you both for being here. Really, really great to connect and looking forward to. You know, let's get out there and do more, bring conscious marketing out there more. So thanks so much, guys. Thank you. Thanks, George.