21
2008
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My interview with Alejandro Reyes aka Successfool was the bomb this rockstar is so smart and has so much passion. Take a listen to the interview above or read the transcript below!
Garrett: Hello Everyone, Garrett Pierson here. I am here with Alejandro Reyes. How are you buddy?
Alejandro: Good, thanks for having me on your show.
Garrett: No problem; it’s a pleasure. I just wanted to tell everybody that I’m so excited to have you and talk with you for a little while. I’ve been totally impressed with you, what you do, and I think of you as the “master connector” and “relationship builder”. That’s what I call you.
One thing that has impressed me is that you’re not afraid of anything. Would you agree with that?
Alejandro: Wow! You’re reading my mail.
Garrett: You’re not afraid. You love to connect with people. I think that’s so powerful. In some of the questions I’m going to be asking you today, we will get into a little bit more of that.
A little bit more about Alejandro; he is a social media marketing consultant, entrepreneur, blogger, connector, speaker, family man; he has a little girl, four months old. Is that right?
Alejandro: Yes, little baby Sadie.
Garrett: Awesome! He runs Successfool.com. For all those listening at iTunes, or anywhere else, just go to YourSEOMentor.com, search for the Alejandro Reyes interview, and you can get all the links to his stuff.
Successfool.com is a blog for entrepreneurs and internet marketers for understanding how to use social media to better connect with the audience. It’s an awesome, awesome blog. You all need to get over there and check it out. One thing that Alejandro helps people with is he helps them become rock stars online. Isn’t that right, Alejandro?
Alejandro: Yes, they have to get the exposure, become famous online.
Garrett: Everybody, get over to Successfool.com and check out his blog. Check out what he can do for you.
Let’s start out with a very basic question, Alejandro. Tell us a little bit more about yourself, for those that might not know you. Give us some of your background in the social media industry, your family, hobbies, or anything else you want to talk about.
Alejandro: I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version. You’ve been on a lot of the live shows that I do. I love to talk and we could sit here for hours and chat. The Reader’s Digest version is that ten years ago I got into entrepreneurship; I was seventeen years old. I couldn’t believe that more people were not entrepreneurs. I couldn’t understand why my parents were working two jobs. I became very passionate about finding out more about entrepreneurship.
I ended up really going out there in direct sales offline marketing industry, about ten years ago. I didn’t know much about the internet. I was a young kid. We didn’t have a computer and couldn’t even afford internet access. I really started to read books like Think and Grow Rich, How to Win Friends and Influence People. I was on this journey of wanting to become an entrepreneur. Not only that, but I wanted to teach other people to have a better lifestyle. I got really excited about that.
The company I was with, Garrett, ended up folding. I got into the mortgage industry. Five years ago, it was great; it was hot. Everybody was making money. If you walked outside and said you were a mortgage officer, you were making good money. As the industry started to shift, when I was working for the biggest bank in the world, I started to see the industry from an eagle’s eye view. I saw it heading down. I knew it was going to go into a slump. I didn’t know how bad it was going to get.
I ended up meeting a friend. He spoke about me being a connector and building relationships. I had a friend that I talked to in 2005, that I hadn’t spoken to in about four or five years. He was really busy at the time, but he told me about a friend of his that was making six figures a month, not a year but a month, and I had to connect with him. He was another young guy. His name, by the way, is Russell Brunson.
Making a long story short, I ended up connecting with Russell Brunson at the end of 2005. He invited me out to a live event. I learned a lot about SEO that weekend. I started connecting with people, and really got interested and intrigued with SEO. What I knew was what they taught me. I didn’t understand the theory behind it. I just did what they taught me. In 2006, we did six figures my first year online. I haven’t looked back since. It’s been really fun.
What I’ve done since then is I’ve tried to understand the theory of SEO, understand how it applies to different sites. I studied it and asked a lot of questions. I tried to play dumb so people would give me their insights. I teach people how to get traffic. When social media started coming onto the scene, it’s been really good for SEO purposes, as you know, probably a lot more than I do. I’ve become very addicted to the technology of social media. Why? Because it’s enabled me to quickly connect and build relationships and network with people online. The SEO side of it has been a very big cherry on the top. That’s the evolution of Alejandro Reyes. We launched the blog on April Fool’s Day. It’s been very fun since then. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Garrett: That’s awesome; sounds great. Your story is very interesting. You talk about the “Zero to Hero” on your blog. Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about that, and how you became successfool, and how you became successful?
Alejandro: When I first started my blog I said, “Read successfool, my sight; be successful.” That was a play on words I was going to use, but I don’t think I really use it. I love that you asked that question. It’s a very important thing for entrepreneurs. I don’t care if you’re SEO or a social media person. People online need to understand. It’s a phenomenal question. Stories are absolutely important.
Seth Godin spoke in his book Meatball Sunday “People are looking for an authentic story.” There are certain things I’m sure you can attest to that, there are certain things you hear and you say, “Wow!” You hear a lot of things throughout the day and you think, “Those are like appetizers.” You hear some things and you think, “That’s like some sweet stuff there. I have to chew on that for a bit.” I started to think about that.
I started to think about Oprah Winfrey. All that she’s done over the last twenty or so years, that she’s been doing what she’s been doing, has made her one of the most influential people in the world. She has brought a bunch of stories to life, through transparent, real, and authentic stories, Monday through Friday, of peoples’ lives. What happens is that people in America and the world are inspired, motivated, associate with that, and that is her secret to success.
I said, “I have to be who I am.” I told you the evolution was ten years in the making. That’s my story, but it wasn’t always great. I had a lot of failures. There are still a ton. I like to say I sucked at a lot of things. I tried to be someone I was not.
A friend of mine, Gary Zelesky, who wrote a book on passion. He has a book called The Passion Centered Professional. He told me, “You have to find out what you’re most passionate about, and figure out a way to go out there and get paid to do it.” The more I thought about it, the more I asked my close friends and my wife, “Who am I? Who do you think I am?” They told me, “You’re a people person. You connect with people. You connect others. You build relationships. You’re a communicator.”
I started to take all of this and combine it for this blog of mine. I said, “I’m going to be authentic, real, talk about my life, talk about my daughter. I’m going to talk about things I struggle with.” It became “successfool”. The reason it was “successfool” was the fact that when I was growing up, a lot of my teachers used to tell me, “You’re such a fool. You act a fool. You’re the class clown. Why do you always have to be a fool?” My mom jokingly would say, “You’re a fool.” That always stuck with me.
I had success in there because obviously I wanted to become successful. It’s a play on words. The whole thing about a fool is that sometimes an entrepreneur has to look foolish to their family and to the rest of the world in order to succeed. I can prove that because ninety-seven percent of the people out there do not succeed online or offline. In order to be a successful entrepreneur, sometimes you have to do things out of the ordinary, something kind of different or against the grain, to be successful online or offline.
Garrett: That’s what I love about you. You have so much passion. I love that! That’s what I want to talk about next. You talk a lot about passion. Last night, on your live video at Successfool.tv and everybody needs to check that out. When are you usually live?
Alejandro: We do about three or four random ones a week. We have a live scheduled one that became a featured show on UStream.tv. It’s on Thursday nights at 7:00 p.m. I’m actually going to be switching that to 6:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, within the next couple of weeks. By the time people listen to this, I’ll probably be at 6:00 p.m. PST, at Successfool.tv.
Garrett: Last night you had already spoken about him just a minute ago, but Gary Zelesky. You were speaking about passion. Why don’t you give us a little more information about why passion is so important to being successful?
Alejandro: Passion is everything. It really is. What I mean by passion; I’m not talking about someone that is a seventeen-year-old kid on American Idol, who can’t sing. You and I know that they probably can’t sing. That’s passions, plural. A passion, I believe, is that God-given talent. There’s an old proverb that says, “A man’s gift makes room for him and brings him before great men.” I really believe, and this is a personal belief, we have something inside of us that is very special, greatness that if we tap into it, we can really elevate ourselves to another level and another position in life.
What happens is growing up we are told, “Get good grades so you can go to college; get good grades in college so you can get a job. Hopefully you’ll work forty years.” They tell you that so you can have something to fall back on, as if you were going to fail in the first place.
Growing up, I used to tell people all the time, “I want to be famous. I want to be like Michael Jackson (not in the negative way).” I wanted to be on stage. That was my dream growing up. I couldn’t play baseball. I wasn’t the best singer. What I did love doing was acting. That’s why I do my shows. There are a lot of people that have things inside of them, growing up.
Randy Pausch wanted to work for Disney when he was growing up. He wanted to play for the Steelers. These were passions of his, something he was very passionate about. He ended up passing away a few weeks ago, but he ended up fulfilling those later on in life.
I believe too many people have buried their passion because of whatever reason, because of the position they put themselves in, the choices they made, or what life has brought their way. I’ve seen it not only in my life, but some of the people I coach with; I’ve seen their lives, their marriages, and their income start to shift because they’ve tapped into that passion.
Passion is a very interesting thing. It’s a journey. A lot of people get so excited about the end product; they don’t like to go through the process of finding their passion. They give up so easily. I’m on a mission to help people bring that passion to life. Not only that, but to figure out a way to include that in their lives, to their business, and maybe if it’s the right type of passion, to figure out a way to get paid to do what they’re passionate about. I’ve done that myself.
Garrett: I totally agree with you. It’s all about doing what you love. When you do that, the majority of the time it ends up you are helping somebody. You are helping somebody else. That’s what’s fun.
Alejandro, if you could give one gold nugget of advice to a newbie, or a new entrepreneur, when they’re coming into social marketing, or starting a business, what would it be?
Alejandro: It goes back to that passion. Figure out your story. You’ve got to know your story. You have to be comfortable and confident with who you are. The thing about social media is very interesting. Web1.0 was read only. People could stand behind a computer and communication wasn’t as fast. It wasn’t as wide spread. Now with social media, it’s like a magnifying glass. It’s like the movie The Truman Show. People are following your life.
You have to be real. What ends up happening is if you’re not who you say you are, people will eventually figure that out. If you could really tap into that story before you really go out and start doing anything, it would be the first thing, from a mind-set, or an offline type of thing, with yourself.
When it comes to social media, the first thing I always tell people to do is to really listen. So many people jump into social media and join the conversation without even knowing what’s going on. It’s like an offline social networking mixture where someone comes to a party and they’re interrupting all these other conversations, talking about themselves. The smart person would strategically listen to specific conversations and choose, based on commonality and like mind, to join the right conversation.
You don’t see me on Twitter speaking with programmers. I’m not going to jump into this conversation because it’s completely irrelevant to what I’m up to. Yes, I might need a programmer to outsource, but to carry on a conversation; I will look like a dork.
Revolve it around your passion. When it comes to online and social media, I would say the biggest key to success is listening to people and to what they’re saying. What you get out of that is you get RND, research, ahead of the pulse, insider information on your peers, the influencers in your industry, as well as your potential clients and customers in the future. It’s really cool to just go out there and listen.
Garrett: That’s awesome. Thank you so much; that’s great advice and tips there. In your opinion, Alejandro, what’s the most exciting trend in online marketing and social media, and these industries today?
Alejandro: I’ll say two. Fast – anything that is fast, I believe that’s where we’re going. Think in terms of what is fast. People want information very fast. The two kind of industries that I would say are huge in social media, and going to get bigger, is video. Video is just getting bigger. They’ve estimated that 50 percent of Americans would watch at least one video this year.
Last year Forrester Research did a survey with a hundred thousand people in America. They asked them if they read blogs, chat, get on forums, subscribe to RSS, or watch videos. Twenty-nine percent of the people said they watch videos. It was more than any other thing in social media. Video is just going to get bigger.
Live streaming is getting bigger as well. I would say anything that has to do with video is great. I’m actually revamping my blog, going more toward a video blog, and for SEO purposes, writing some hot tips or bullet points of that post. Video, in my opinion, is absolutely ridiculous and it will continue to get big.
To add to that, I would say mobile marketing. What I mean by mobile marketing is that with the iPhone, it really revolutionized the industry. People are now streaming from their cell phone, putting them on sites like 12seconds.tv, as well as Qik.com.
Mobile marketing is becoming very big as well. You’ll start to see companies come out with auto responders for mobile marketing. I would say video first, and we’re going to start transitioning into mobile marketing; those two kind of go hand in hand. Those are some predictions based on the trends I see; the upward graphs.
Garrett: What is your favorite social media site online, and why?
Alejandro: My favorite social media site right now is Twitter. Twitter gives you the ability to connect with people very quickly. I’ve connected with so many people. I’ve connected with Guy Kawasaki, Robert Scobel, people that I’ve looked up to, Gary Zelesky so many people, the owners, vice president and CEO’s of one of my favorite shoe stores from years ago, Zappos.com. It gives me the opportunity to connect with people and build an audience so quickly.
The reason I love it so much, and the reason I love social media, and this is something you have to write down, email’s deliverability is starting to shift. People are starting to spend a lot of time on social media sites. When you have a lot of followers on a site like Twitter, or even a lot of friends on Facebook, you can get message out to them with just 140 characters. Because of email deliverability being as bad as it used to be, I think the trend is going online. On sites like Twitter, you can really build a presence online and build a huge fan base very quickly, if you do it the right way. I would say Twitter.
Garrett: I’d say about ninety percent of the people I’ve interviewed and spoken to agree with you. That’s one of my favorites as well. I know you will probably leave some people out, but who are some of your favorite people in the online marketing and social media industry, that you continually follow online, that blow your mind with the valuable content they give you?
Alejandro: I read a lot of different blogs every day. For technology to news, one of the first sites I look at every day is Techcrunch.com. It is so awesome. They pump out so much content. They are like the first to really hear news about new companies and new technologies. They provide a lot of Alpha or Beta invites when a new technology is coming out in social media. Michael Arrington is doing such a phenomenal job with that blog. I love it. Techcruch is tremendous.
A couple of other people; Gary Vaynerchuk of Garyvaynerchuk.com, Garyvaynerchuk.tv, just doing some awesome things. That’s really to the “foulest”, what your passion can do for your business. He took his family’s business from a four million dollar company to a fifty or sixty million-dollar company in about twenty-four to thirty-six month using social media.
Chris Brogan, Robert Scobel, Guy Kawasaki, those are probably the people that I like to follow. For social media, I like to follow the early adopters, people who have been doing this for a while. Hopefully, whatever your niche or industry is, you are following the influencers, the first people, not necessarily the people talking the most or the person who might have the most followers, but the people you know and everybody is talking about as an “early adopter”. They are the people who really shaped social media, and they are the people I follow. I don’t really don’t follow people.
I’m also in the internet marketing industry. I really don’t follow anybody in that industry, when it comes to social media because they kind of get second-hand information. I like to go to the horse’s mouth and figure out at the top, what’s going on with the industry.
Garrett: Those are some great tips again. Thank you. Finally, if my listeners or those who are reading the transcript at my blog would like to find out more about you and your services online, where should they go?
Alejandro: Successfool.com is the best way. I don’t promote any affiliate links like a lot of people do. If I ever promote something or share something, it’s because I think the service or whatever it is, is great. Successfool.com is probably the best play to go. I have a show every Thursday night at Successfool.tv. I also run a coaching program called SocialMarketingRockstars.com. I’m very accessible. You can contact me. I usually get back to people within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. I love speaking on the phone with people. For those who are listening or reading, if you ever have any questions, definitely contact me. I’d love to chat you and see if I can help you find your passion, and take it online.
Garrett: Thank you so much, Alejandro, for taking time out of your busy day to talk with me, and share some wonder tips and valuable content. Again, you’re the “master connector”, the “relationship builder”. It’s been a pleasure to follow you and to learn from you.
Since you started your live streaming, I think I have been there from the start. I’ve enjoyed it; your random ones, your fun ones when we do the “Name that Tune”. It’s been very fun. Through you, I have connected with a lot of people. You and they have helped me build my business. It’s a wonderful thing. To all those, check out Successfool.com. Check out Alejandro. He’s the “bomb”. Thanks again for being with me.
Alejandro: Thank you. I appreciate you folks for listening and chiming in. It shows that you are very serious about your businesses. It goes to show who you guys are. Thanks so much, Garrett. I appreciate you for all you do. You rock, man. Thanks for having me.
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Tags: Alejandro Reyes, Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary Zelesky, Russell Brunson, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Rockstars, Successfool, Twitter
August 21st, 2008 at 3:28 pm
This is a good one, thanks for sharing, and a nice design besides.