Clients From Hell Podcast

Michael Greenberg talks about establishing your authority in the market, letting your clients know you’re the expert on what you do, and how to establish yourself as an expert with Kyle Carpenter on the Clients From Hell Podcast.

Kyle Carpenter  0:26  

Welcome to the Clients From Hell podcast. I’m your host, Kyle Carpenter. My guest today is Michael Greenberg. He runs an agency called Call For Content. He literally wrote the playbook on Authority Marketing. His method kind of blew my mind. It’s all about going out, finding the clients you want, interviewing them, and then turning those interviews into more content so that you can market yourself as an authority. I said it in the interview, it feels like Steven Soderbergh met an Ocean’s 11 movie, about freelancing. It was awesome. I think you’re really going to dig it. We’re brought to you once again by Easily, the Infographic Design Service. Easily will turn your data into beautiful infographics within 24 hours. They look awesome. They’re really professional. We’ve got some great examples up on the Clients From Hell website. I think you’re really going to dig them, and you should check them out.

Michael Greenberg  1:31  

Yeah, I started as a B2B growth strategy consultant after some startup stuff, and I was working with B2B SaaS and a few agencies. And then I got hired by a podcast network based out of Atlanta called Business Radio X. I saw some potential with podcasts. Put together some plans for them, and then moved forward. So I had a lot of podcast based plans lying around. While I was on the engagement with them, they had shipped me all the equipment for a local podcast. So I started recording one. Enough time passed where it was clear, they weren’t taking forward any of the stuff that I had worked on with them. The engagement was over. I had launched a little B2B content marketing agency called Call For Content. We were doing all right, but I was still making most of my money consulting. And then, we launched a white-label podcasting program to other agencies and to podcast producers. To take our services and layer them on top. And that started just to explode. And so from there, we went all-in on podcasting. 

Kyle Carpenter  2:55  

Beautiful, but you’re here to tell us about Already marketing. Can you kind of define that for us and tell us how you go about doing that?

Michael Greenberg  3:06  

Really authority marketing, at least the way I used in the systems we’ve built out, is designed for that solo business owner, you are the expert, you are the knowledge of your business. And how do you take advantage of that and build lead gen out for B2B? We start with a podcast. And there are two pieces to why we start with a podcast. The first reason is that a podcast creates content for us. And the second reason is that a podcast lets us get in contact with the people we want to be talking to. In order to actually develop a podcast. You have to know who those people you want to be talking to are. And that means you really want to be talking to prospective buyers on your show, especially if you’re a solo business owner. If you’re a freelancer to know that you’ve got to do some research. And you’ve got to get yourself into a market. And so we start with the podcast. But really what ends up happening is most people I speak with most freelancers aren’t specialized enough. They don’t have a targeted enough service for a targeted enough market for them to really develop any sort of authority. One of my favorite examples, because this is a guy with a digital presence you can really look back over, is Neil Patel. He started as an SEO expert, and in the software, and then over time, he’s become a marketing expert. And how that happened. Well, he talked about one thing, he made some money there, and then he paid a bunch of people to get them talking about the other stuff to people, the key there is paying a bunch of people because it cost a lot of money to be a general marketing expert. But if say, you’re the guy who specializes in Facebook ads for massage therapists, that’s something you can be the expert in looking at, who you’re talking to and who you want to be talking to. And looking at the skill sets that you have that they don’t. That’s before you start finding your expertise. Really, the guy who I think talks about specialization best for freelancers, is Philip Morgan, he just put out a book, but he’s been writing about specialization for web designers and developers for years now. And that’s a highly competitive market. And so t