Transcript • The Download, with Ant Hodges • 27th July 2022

INTRODUCING THE DOWNLOAD

Welcome to The Download. If we've not met before, my name is Ant Hodges, the managing director of HodgesNet and your typical marketing geek. This private podcast is a download of my thoughts, reflections, and even suggestions to help you grow in your online business.

I'm excited to be creating these and sharing my thoughts of working in the online and digital marketing space for over the last 20 years or so, so much changes in this industry! And so quickly, we all need to stay on top of our game.

If you're not subscribed, but found your way over here, some other way, other than from an email from me, click the button at the top of this page to subscribe. And I'll send you an email with a link to each edition of The Download as it goes live. You cannot subscribe to this on Spotify or apple music or anywhere else.

It's only available here. The best part it's free. And as I said, I'll bring my decades of experience in looking at the online business. And put some of my thoughts and yeah, my opinions into this private podcast use the thoughts, strategies, and tactics that I share to grow your business and achieve the success you are looking for.

So what is The Download all about?

Download is really just me reflecting my thoughts into this microphone. Ultimately, The Download is going to be a private podcast hosted here from HodgesNet, which is my agency and where we learn a lot about the digital marketing landscape, what we should be doing, what we shouldn't be doing, even some of the tactics and strategies that many people use that we've tested, and we've seen work or not work. We going spill the beans!

I've been working in this digital marketing industry since my teenage. And I'm now 41, I've seen a thing or two. I remember when I first started out kind of in this kind of marketing world, social media really didn't even exist in the space that we know it has today. And I remember going to chamber of commerce meetings when I set my first business up in 2007, and I was talking about this new-fangled thing called social media and.

I was getting backlash from those that in the room, accountants and lawyers who literally would have conversations with me afterwards saying “this is just a flash in the pan.” And “we've seen so many fads and flash in the pan things over the years, this is not going have legs.” Well, look at it. It's 2022. We are 15 years on for me doing those talks and look at where it's all at.

You know, over 90% of the population of the world have engaged in social media in some way, shape or form. It's a phenomenal way in which social media has infiltrated the world as we know it, and people who are spending hours every day, on social media. Our audiences and our customers they're on the platforms, whether it be LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, whatever the social platform, or even video hosting platforms like YouTube, which some would say are social media platforms, but it's a video hosting platform.

You’ve got to move with the times.

One of the big things that I see that's happening at the moment. There's a lot of funnel marketing training is evolving. I've been championing this for some time now. And saying, you know, things such as lead magnets, they don't exist anymore. In the reality of how they were originally created the PDF or checklist on your website, isn't going to generate you the kind of leads that you can market to your lead magnet.

Today is your public content out there in social media, your video marketing content that you put out there in social media, and then. What you can do to drive people through to your website is position small offers, low cost offers. So when you start thinking about why we use lead magnet suits to build our lists, if we do that today, we build lists of freebie hunters.

But what we can do is use our public content to magnetize people, to us. That's the true a that's the true nature of a lead magnet. Something that magnetizes people towards you. Give that valuable content and then point people in the direction of low cost offers or time to spend more time with you calls or webinars or things like that, that will enable them to invest some time or some money, because if they invest time and money in you, they get value.

You've got a customer in some way, shape or form. Lead magnets and checklists and all that kind of stuff on websites. They just clutter up inboxes and hard drives. And it's just pure shelf development, digital shelf development, hard drive development, more than anything else. It's things like that, that I want to talk to you about on these private podcasts.

I want to share with you my thoughts on how I've seen the industry changing, how I've seen things, pivot how I believe we need to be stepping into things in a big way. One of the conversations I had this week was about LinkedIn newsletters and how. Someone said to me, “why don't I use a LinkedIn newsletter because I can send something out to all of my, first level contacts.” The reality is you've still got to get someone to subscribe to that newsletter. And if you've got a newsletter of any kind on your website, my question to you is how many people sign up to your regular newsletter? It's not very money. And the reality is LinkedIn. They're providing a newsletter type service.

You've still got to market the newsletter after you've created it. So it's just another thing that you've got to market. And what they're doing is they're creating tools for people to stay on the platforms rather than click away. If you want to keep people on LinkedIn, do it. If you want a, a newsletter that you have to market do it, but me build assets in your own business.

Look at ways in which you can give value, but draw people to assets in your business. Your list of customers is the most, a valuable asset that you can build. So for me, I want to share tactics strategies, thoughts like this just like a Download from my brain to you. That's why I'm calling at The Download because it's the thoughts that go through my head. The thoughts that I wake up with in the morning, the thoughts that keep me awake at night, that I scribble down. And I think, no, I've just got to share that.

If you are listening to this, and you want to subscribe, you can click the button at the top of the page and enter your name and email address or scroll right to the bottom, enter your name and email address that will get you on our list so we can send you these.

My plan was to do one of these every month, but, I'm going to do the a couple every month to be able to help you to, to move things forward in the business, because I believe there are ways in which things change so frequently. I don't want to just do these monthly. What I want to do is I want to share my thoughts with you every time I kind of have something to share. It's not going to necessarily be weekly and as a team, within HodgesNet, we are going to be doing our own podcast which will be a public podcast and that's going to be coming up very soon, but I wanted to open this up, start sharing with you guys!

I hope you can see the value in what we're going to do moving forward. I think next week is the August podcast. That's going to come out. I'm going to be talking about gold mines in your business.

I'm really looking forward to opening up more of a dialogue, more conversations with people like you. Um, yeah, we look forward to speaking to you again real soon.

Bye for now.