051 Josh Elledge: "Up My Influence” with Social Media

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In this episode, Barbara and Josh discuss:

Why physicians need to have a social media presence and how to choose your social media platform.
Working with influencers in your community with a targeted and engaged audience.
Being conscious of your marketing, social media, reviews, and other content talking about your business.

Key Takeaways:

You are responsible for your own branding – don’t stress about being on all channels, but focus on one and dominate that one.
Even when the current crisis is over, telehealth will not be over. It is a trend that will continue and will not go back to what it was before.
Video always strips away 10% of your energy – you have to add in 10% more than you are used to. People don’t want polish, they want approachableness.

“Most people overvalue the visibility of being on TV or being quoted in Forbes or being quoted anywhere, and they undervalue the authority that they get from that sort of placement. If I were being really smart, and I wanted to get a lot of return on investment, I would totally max out squeeze every single bit of authority you can get out of every placement you get.” — Josh Elledge

TRANSCRIPTION

Barbara: Welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales.

Today, we have Josh Elledge with us. Josh is a U.S. Navy veteran. He became a serial entrepreneur launching Up My Influence to help entrepreneurs like himself attract the perfect audiences and grow their brands without high costs. Josh believes UMI has a moral imperative to help entrepreneurs own their expertise, share their wisdom, and serve the world with their collective messages while helping members grow revenue. UMI was the natural outgrowth of his first startup savingsangels.com which grows more than $6 million in sales with less than $500 in advertising spend. He did all through building authority and serving audiences in the media.

Josh is a frequent speaker at business and startup conferences including social media marketing world and a Tony Robbins event for his Business Mastery grads. He’s the weekly consumer expert on Fox 35 Orlando and News 13. He writes a syndicated column for nine newspapers with total readership above 1.1 million readers and regularly appears on more than 75 TV stations across the country. All told, Josh has appeared in the media more than 2000 times. So we really have a powerhouse here for you today. Passionate about his family, physical fitness, he is an avid fitness geek and 5K to marathon runner and breaking out of Escape Rooms. Josh now lives in Orlando with his wife and three children. Welcome to the show, Josh.

Josh: Thank you, Barbara. I appreciate it.

Barbara: Josh, tell our listeners why do physicians need to have social media presence?

Josh: Yeah. And this comes down to, so for 13 years, I’ve studied and led consumer behavior. And so, I’ve been a syndicated newspaper columnist, syndicated TV consumer expert. And my job is to help consumers make smart decisions. Now, sometimes that means, you know, where they buy their groceries. Other times, that means how they choose a physician. And so you know, I know, we all know that consumers read reviews. Consumers look for cues.

Consumers want to know where do I go, what do I buy, who’s had a great experience, who’s had a great story, who has a physician that they love. And that’s the way that consumers do their thing now. It’s not enough to just be listed in a directory. Although that doesn’t hurt, it’s not enough to just have all sorts of accolades on your wall because if those accolades are only on your wall, well it’s a little hard to get there until someone is actually engaged to do business with you.

It’s really just a simple act of understanding where are consumers looking before they decide to engage. And it doesn’t matter if you’re just like one name as part of a big practice. You are responsible for your own branding. And if you just leave this to somebody else to worry about and take care of, well it’s not going to help you because at the end of the day, people don’t do business with hospitals.

People don’t do business with products. People don’t do business with services. People do business with people. And at the end of the day — You know, my wife just went through this and, you know, there was a specialist that she needed. And she did a lot of research. She talked to a lot of people. She read all the reviews online. And that was a part of her decision making process. Then we actually went to the office and essentially interviewed the physician. And did we feel a comfort level? And if we didn’t feel that comfort level even if it meant that we needed to drive to the other side of town, we would have done that to make sure that we’re working with someone that we felt comfortable with.

Consumers in many regards, in some regards not but in many regards, consumers have more options and more decisions when it comes to who they do business with. But it’s not just a matter of choice and having more choices. It’s the fact that consumers have never felt more empowered. So, we expect to be able to see the ratings of healthcare professionals before we do business with them. I think ultimately, we’re going to expect and demand more transparent pricing, you know, things that again are just more consumer-focused and consumer-friendly.

And so if I were planning for the future, I would get ahead of that curve. And what I would do beyond, Barbara, just being accessible in social media is that I would find a way to just produce lots of content. And written content is okay but honestly if I were you, I would really, and again if I were a healthcare professional that really wanted to have a lot of authority in my local market, I would just become much more visible. And I would tell stories and I would share information. I would you know try to — You know, what are the most common questions that people come in with? What are the biggest misconceptions of people? What are some of the most ridiculous stuff that they’re reading out on the internet?

And you can share your point of view in a very helpful caring way. So here’s what’s great about this. I love high touch content like video because it’s about the best thing that people can experience short of being in the office. And again in 2020, I think one thing that we all recognized is that if you are not, you know, e-health or, you know, what I am thinking, telehealth ready, I mean, if you’re not ready to do as much of your stuff as possible over Zoom and over live video, you kind of get left behind because consumers are going to be expecting and demanding it. I have to go into the office?

I just want to ask you a couple of questions, right? And so, you’re going to hear that more and more and more. We don’t want to go there. I just assumed I’d talk to you and get the answer I need and be on my way especially, you know, millennials and Gen Z-ers. Like eh, I don’t want to mess, I don’t want to do that. Just give me the answer. Right? And so, they’re used to having instant access to all of the information that they want. The advantage of course being a physician is you can give them personalized information regarding their situation.

Barbara: Well, doctors are now increasing their telehealth presence so that they could see and react to their patient load while the virus is going on. But as you and I know when this horrible crisis is over, it’s not going to be over for telehealth because patients have become accustomed to it.

Josh: No way.

Barbara: They want it and they want to continue that. It’s one thing to go to the doctor’s office if they need to evaluate something physically. But otherwise, if it’s something that could be handled online, patients are going to want to continue this trend. So, the box has been opened. Pandora’s secret is out and that’s it.

Josh: Oh yeah, oh yeah. You know, it’s like, you know, people like in general, I think generationally, you know, there’s going to be the generation that lived through COVID-19. And I think that like kind of like people that went through the Great Depression, you know, people, even to an extent, people that experienced either 9/11 or the 2008 recession, like it affected consumer behavior. It affected just how we did things and this is one. If you’re expecting it to go back the way that it was, Barbara, to your point, I agree. It’s not going to happen. There’s just — I hate this phrase, new normal, but it’s what, you know, we all know what it is, right? This is just the way that it is now. And you know, the world in many ways, look at like a lot of like the way that a lot of business is done, just fast forward it two to five years is all it really did. And so the things that were already, you know, more accessible are just the way we do things today.

Barbara: But just think of these stories that millennials will be able to tell their grandchildren. Like they tell me that by staying home I would be saving the world.

Josh: Yeah.

Barbara: So I’m the hero. How do doctors find out which social media platform their patients most hang out on?

Josh: Yeah, for sure. And this is really important because, you know, don’t waste all your time making TikTok videos if nobody’s, you know, your clients are never going to be there. You know, what I always look for is — You know, obviously the biggest thing you could do is you can ask your patients. You know, where do they spend the most time? I could tell you probably right now I would be paying a lot of attention to Instagram. I think that Facebook’s kind of an old standby although you have to understand that Facebook pages are entirely pay to play. So, if you don’t mind putting a budget behind that stuff, then your audience is there. But I would say Instagram again is, you know, again becoming another one of those pay-to-play platforms owned by Facebook. So you could also say, you know what, you know, we learned that in fact a lot of our patients spend a lot of time on TikTok. And like so can you commit to producing content on a regular basis?

And so, one thing I would do is don’t stress out so much about being on all channels. Pick one. Dominate that one. Really work hard to build a name for yourself. It’s okay to repurpose it onto the other channels but I would absolutely become, you know, the Instagram physician of Lexington, Kentucky or something like that. Like if you can do that and you can really be consistent at it and you can create the kind of content that people actually enjoy on a platform like Instagram, then nobody can compete with you because they already — So what you want more than anything is you want proximity. You want your patients to spend time with you. You want to make it fun. You want to make it informative. You want to make it engaging. You want to make it super shareable. Try to come up with those really clever things that make people go, oh wow. Right? And that’s the kind of stuff that makes for really good sharing. I will tell you that Instagram, generally, behind-the-scenes kind of stuff usually plays pretty well on Instagram. You know, YouTube would be more of like where you put your finished kind of video contents, much more polished. But Instagram, you could do all your behind-the-scenes type stuff.

You know what I’m a big fan of, Barbara? The biggest thing is I’m a big fan of repurposing. So, do it one time. You know, have a good assistant, a good social media assistant who can do good work at getting it everywhere it needs to get. It’s not that you’re going to get much engagement on those other ones. What I would do is — If you say, okay, well Instagram is going to be my main thing. What I would do is go ahead and post on LinkedIn if you want but let everyone know, hey, I do all my stuff on Instagram. If you want to engage with me, it’s always — And just every time you post on all those other social media platforms, just send them whatever your main one is. And it might be YouTube, whatever your thing is, right? You got to decide. Barbara, I think a lot of people stress out about this because they just are overwhelmed with this. It’s too much, right? It’s too much to do. I don’t really have anyone that does a really good job at that or at least I don’t think so or I don’t know, right? I don’t have any evidence that it’s worth the return on investment.

Here’s what I know for sure is that if you do pick one and your audience is there and you have an opportunity to develop a presence there and you’re consistent with it — See, that’s the problem. Most people aren’t consistent with it. They give up way too early. But if you’ll stick with it, I usually find by about four months, that’s when you really should start to see traction. I could tell you that’s for sure on YouTube. The other ones, again, I already talked about Facebook. It’s pay to play. So on a Facebook page, I mean, you can do a group but good luck on that. I’ll tell you my experience is, you know, I’m not going to put all my apples in a Facebook group basket in this case like if I’m just in a position because I’ve seen Facebook pull the rug out, you know. They say, ah, you want to talk to your people, ah. That’s going to cost you. So yeah, so just be wary of all of those rules and trends that are happening right now.

Barbara: Well, even my dog has his own Instagram site. That’s where he talks to all of his other, you know, dog buddies.

Josh: Yeah. Instagram’s good because you can have it automatically post to your Facebook anyway. And because they’re owned by the same company, they’re both owned by Facebook, you know, Facebook usually will give you about as good a lift from that as if you shared it originally. So, you may as well.

Barbara: It’s good to podcast which we’re on right now. Why do you think that doctors should be applying to be podcast speakers or podcast guests?

Josh: Oh, yeah. Well, I’ll tell you that if you are wanting to get on podcast — Again, this is one where you have to look at who the audience is. Most podcasters don’t have very big audiences. And a lot of times, they’re going to be kind of spread out all over the place. If you’re a doctor, a physician and you’re mainly concerned about attracting more of your local audience and you think that you’re going to do the podcasts because you’re concerned about the visibility, you’re going to be pretty disappointed. It’s just you’re probably not going to get a whole lot out of it. Now, there are a number of reasons for being a podcast guest. Visibility is toward last. It’s kind of last on the list. I do podcasts. Yeah, I love going out and serving on stages. But primarily, Barbara, for example, does a little podcast inception here, get a little meta. In us having this conversation today, I’m honored to be of service to your listeners but I know that usually what most listeners are going to do is they’re going to take the information. They’re going to apply some of it in their life and that’s probably it. There’s going to be a few that will say, who’s this Josh Elledge guy? And they’ll go and they’ll find me. And I make it really easy for people to find me. But my big prize is my own audience.

So even as a guest, one thing that you’ll want to do is you’ll want to capture that appearance as many ways as you can. So, like if I share something on this. It’s so inception right now. Like if I say something, I’m like, oh, I want my own audience to hear that. So, a podcast host gives you the opportunity to be in the interview chair and to share your wisdom and to look smart and to look significant and look generous and successful and all that other stuff. So make sure that when you get done with that podcast, by the way, you’re only halfway done with the job. Now, you want to become masterful in making sure that your own audience sees that appearance. If you’re a physician and somehow you get to do something with Barbara, whoa, yes, you absolutely want to make sure your own audience sees that because they already know they can trust you a little bit. My audience knows and likes and trusts me a little bit. I want to make sure that when Barbara’s podcast goes live, everybody knows about it. I promote really, really heavily because my own audience who might have a casual relationship with me, they’re going to hear me now. And this is just so meta right now. But, yeah, I want my own audience.

So again, we do a lot of media placements without my influence. And so most people overvalue the visibility of being on TV, of being quoted in Forbes, of being quoted anywhere. And they undervalue the authority that they get from that sort of placement. I would say if I were being really smart and I want to get a lot of return on investment, I would totally max out, squeeze every single bit of authority you can get out of every placement you get.

Barbara: I think that’s great advice. One thing, Josh, that people don’t think about in addition to the benefits that you mentioned is that by having backlinks to each other’s sites from the podcast that you’ve done as a guest, you are helping to improve your search engine optimization and you’re boosting your rankings online.

Josh: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And all of that helps, for sure. And so, you know, what I want you to do though with all of this is it’s really important to be thoughtful and have a plan and actually stick to that plan. You might say, well, look, my goal is to appear, you know, a total of four to five other platforms every single month. Well, what does it take in order to get that? Well, I have to do a lot of reaching out and I have to reach out in a way where it’s not self-serving. If you want to appear on a podcast, you can’t do so thinking that oh, I’m just going to do this because I want to sell my stuff to their audience. You’re not. You’re providing as much value as you can to that audience. You’re giving, you’re capturing, you’re repurposing. And it all helps. And listen, if you do five guest appearances every single month, that will move the needle but only if you leverage the authority that you get with those appearances.

Barbara: Absolutely, yeah.

Josh: Same thing for all social media, right? Just make a game plan, stick to it and say, how do we get to five? We’re probably going to have to reach out to 20 other like local Facebook influencers or any social media influencer and offer to do something in a way that’s much better for them than it is for you. You’re just offering to be of service.

Barbara: How does a doctor who wants to reach out to influencers identify who they are?

Josh: Yeah. So again, what I would absolutely recommend is start by communicating with your own audience. So, if you are producing content, for example, let’s say a video content, you’re posting it onto Facebook or wherever, toward the end of that, you can say, listen, I need a favor. Who do you know locally that provides a lot of value, like, who do you know? And then what I would do is I would see if you get any responses to that. Now, of course, you can use software and you can hire experts and you can also find this information out that way. Like who’s in my zip code that has decent engagement and a large following? You can do that and you can hire local agencies and they could probably get that information for you or you could just ask your own audience. Like, who do you know that actually produces really great stuff and they happen to live in our area? So we’ve done a lot of this. So, you know, the two things that we do really, really well without my influence are that we turn our clients into media celebrities. And then as long as, if they do B2B business, we make them a lot of money. We build sales systems for them. But one of the things that we’ve done a lot of is influence or engagement.

And when we research influencer engagement — I’ll give you a great example. We had a dentist that we worked with. And so, here’s what he did is he identified and we did a lot of research and we found a list of like 100 top influencers who had over 100,000 followers in the Phoenix area. And so then with that group of 100, he reached out. He said, listen, I appreciate everything that you do in terms of content. You also live here in Phoenix. I live in Phoenix. I love the area. Listen, totally up to you. But if you and/or your partner were ever interested in a whitening, I’d be honored just as a way of like just supporting other people that support our community to offer you a free whitening. And this is where you got to show a little bit of courage here. And not all healthcare professionals can do stuff like this. But what he did is he offered a $300 whitening treatment pro bono with the hopes that they would post it on social. Now, if you when engaging with influencers say — And you don’t have to say anything, you don’t have to do anything. It’s like this is our whole approach with working with the media and why it has worked out so well and why I’ve gotten in the media over 2000 times is because when we reach out, we say, I don’t need a backlink. I don’t need this, whatever. I’m just happy to be of service. That causes the influencer to relax and then they’re going to be like, oh, okay, cool. Right? Because if you start talking about what you want in return, they’re going to be like, okay, my rate is $3000 and I’m happy to do it. Right? And so however, a lot of times influencers will work with you on just product or stuff like that but you have to be a cool person going into the relationship. Don’t go transactional too quickly.

But in answering your question, how do you find them, you know, you just got to have to do a little bit of searching. I really can’t even tell you the tools like I know you can use. I think BuzzSumo is one. There are a lot of tools out there if you just search, find local influencers. Be very careful about the pricey. You could spend a lot of money on this stuff. And it’s always risky when engaging with influencers anyway. I can just tell you, Barbara, that I don’t aim for celebrity-level influencers. I love smaller influencers that have a targeted engaged audience, right? So it’s specific to a certain topic and those make really great people to partner with because usually they don’t have too big of an ego and they’ll work with you. So in the case of the dentist, he invited them into the chair, a $300 treatment. They all posted on Instagram. They all posted on social media. And so that’s mainly all he does for advertising. That’s all he has to do. And he gets way more business out of that than he does out of billboards.

Barbara: Yeah. That’s great advice. How do you use marketing to increase doctor’s medical practice?

Josh: Okay. Well, marketing is a really broad term. I look at marketing as I think comprehensive of influencer marketing, social media marketing, paid advertising. I put PR under marketing. So it’s a really, really broad subject. You want to break that down? Or I can speak a little bit more generically?

Barbara: However, you like. If you’d like to give us a story. You know, everybody loves a story.

Josh: Yeah. I would say when it comes to paid advertising, I believe that advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable. I’m a big fan — And that was the founder of Geek Squad that said that. I’m a big fan of I like to spend my money on providing more value to people pro bono, finding ways to give it away for free rather than just trying to like buy them, you know, buy people. I mean, I’m not saying don’t advertise but just know that it’s a tax you’ve paid because you just don’t have enough momentum otherwise. So perhaps in the early days, you could spend 80% of your budget on advertising, 20% of your budget on building your authority and building your community and, you know, I don’t want to say PR but, you know, just being on stages locally or working with people that have influence. And what’s going to end up — And your own content, really important, right, on as many platforms as you can. Okay. And then maybe that goes to 70/30, then eventually 50/50. And then you’re going to get to a point where you no longer need to be on the hamster wheel of advertising. That may never happen but I kind of look at it — I play one game, I play Civilization. And the idea is getting your civilization to evolve means that you’re not the hunter-gatherer anymore. You’re not just running around with a club just trying to hunt and forage for food. You’ve actually built cities. You have authority.

Imagine — I’ll just ask it this way. Imagine what your life would be like if you had 10 times the industry authority that you currently have. What do you think would happen to your inbound sales, your inbound phone calls, your referrals, your partnership opportunities, your invitations to speak at prestigious conferences? You know, it would all likely significantly increase, I would imagine. And so that’s our goal. That’s our — You know, you can get there as fast as you want. You know, for me, I pretty much put all my chips in that basket. And short term, it will feel like not a lot is happening but eventually, you’ll get into this growth where the thing will take over on its own and everybody wants to work with you. So what else would I do? Well, I would be very, very conscious of reputation management. I’ll be very, very on top of every single review. I would have a masterful system for evoking those reviews and not just, oh by the way, you can leave us 5 stars here. Like to get reviews, you have to ask people personally. You can’t just put that in your odd responder drip sequence and expect that you’re going to get much momentum there.

I do a lot of work with travel and tourism. I live in Orlando. And the most successful companies use Tripadvisor and Yelp and those sorts of reviews religiously. And what they’re very good at is even if it feels uncomfortable at first, they say if — And you got to, again, I think there are some rules about incentivizing and stuff like that. So, you have to make it just ridiculously easy for someone to leave a review for you on the spot. And you say, listen, this was so wonderful having you in. Do you know that we actually get a lot of patients just like you that don’t know whether or not we would be the right office for them? Can I give you a QR code that you could scan right now? And pull it up. And while you’re waiting and then blah, blah, blah, I’m going to get this stuff or whatever, two sentences, really just like whatever. You know, most people will say they love our customer service. They love scheduling or maybe they like that we can answer all of their questions. Those are three very common things. If you don’t mind, here’s the, you can just scan this with your phone right now and it’ll automatically come up. And well, I’ll leave so you don’t have to feel uncomfortable and I’ll be back in a couple of minutes and I’m going to get that other stuff or whatever.

Now, this, what I just went through, might feel incredibly uncomfortable for you to ask this for the first time. After you do it about five, 10 times and people are like, yeah, sure, no problem — And you let them know just like, hey, you know, especially right now we’re really trying to reach out and connect with more people just because everything is kind of up in the air and I know that this is not your first time that you’ve been here and we’re so grateful for that, we just want to let other people know who might be, maybe they’re new in town, you know, maybe they have a child like yours. And again, work on your authenticity. It’s better to be unpolished about the ask and authentic than it is to say the perfect words. But this is one thing that I would become masterful at and I would train your team to be masterful at this as well and reinforce it. Because if the person collecting the credit card at the end does it, it’s going to have much less impact than if the physician themselves says, oh, if you could do this for us, it would really, really help us out. You know, we’re all — And I think right now in 2020, you can really lean on the sentiment of, you know, we’re all working together to help one another. I think a lot of people are sympathetic to that.

Barbara: I think having the QR code available for people to just scan so that they don’t really have to work at getting to the site is really brilliant. Now, in your bio, you said that you appeared on more than 75 TV stations across the country. How do you get those gigs or how do that come about?

Josh: No. I’ve done actually over 700 TV segments total. And my syndicated TV segment runs across the country. I haven’t done it in a little while. But yeah. I got that gig by just being available. And again, when you reach out to media, you have to like way, way, you got to be really, really, really careful about not selling, right? And so most people when they get PR, they’re like, oh, I’m going to talk about my new book. You could be a winner, you know, whatever. It’s like all they care about is selling their thing. I’m telling you what. Journalists can smell that a mile away. And if they feel like you’re just there to promote your thing, it’s going to be like, eek. They don’t want to work with you. They really, really don’t. And instead, you know what their job is and your job is to make them look good and your job is to truly serve that audience. It’s just going to work out much better. That’s the first thing. Your heart needs to be in the right place. That’s number one.

Number two, you have to have good authority online. We talked about how important it is to have a great bio, have great headshots, have an engaging social media presence, have — If you want to be on TV, you have to have video of you. If you don’t, it’s not going to work out. Like they’re going to say no to you. Now, one thing — I’m going to give you a tip here. You’ll notice that I generally have pretty good energy. This is a lot of experience in doing this. I don’t normally talk at this high energy level in my day-to-day operations, you know, unless it’s happy hours or something like that, maybe. But what I’ll say is that video always strips away 10% of your energy. It’s like video is the deflavorizer. And so, what you have to do is you have to add in 10% more than you’re used to. If you’re a buttoned-up, you know, I’m a professional physician, that’s fine. But you still need to engage a little bit more than that, 20%, 30%, 50% more but 10% more because — So what that just means is smile. Try to look into the camera lens. Try to —

You know, again, you don’t have to be polished. People don’t want polished. What they want is approachableness. They want to see authenticity. And so even if you’re like — And I got some notes here because I didn’t want to forget anything. But as long as you smile and you just like — And even when you screw up, go, well, I didn’t mean to see that. So, like all of this stuff will be really helpful. Now, I’ll tell you. If you really want to get much, much better at this, and this is going to sound crazy, but if you ever see an opportunity to take an improv class, like a little eight-week improv — Again, you’re not going to be able to right now. But even like if there’s a community group and you got a teenager or something like that you can go with, it’ll really help you with skills of being very aware which is really important and being able to be in the moment, you know, be very attentive to that audience and then being able to not take yourself so seriously and laugh at yourself and point out to be — You know, people love self-effacing. They really do. And so if you’re a physician that is imperfect and personal, oh my gosh, please take my money but as long as you’re competent. Don’t be imperfect with the knife, with the scalpel.

Barbara: Yeah.

Josh: But be willing to be impersonally unique and approachable.

Barbara: Would you —

Josh: Can I tell you the best physician experience that we had was actually with my wife’s specialist that we just had. He was a total nerd professionally, like he geeked out on the science of what’s going on in the industry right now. And it was his passion for the latest trends and the latest studies. And we’d ask him a question, and he goes, oh, oh, that’s actually a really good question. And I was like, wow, this guy really loves what he does. Like we love — People love that personality, you know. Like people are passionate about what they do and they kind of geek out on what they do, it’s so attractive. So back in the ’80s, it wasn’t cool to be a nerd. Oh, it totally is now because all the nerds have risen to positions of power now.

Barbara: That’s right.

Josh: I speak as a nerd myself, as a former and current nerd.

Barbara: If a doctor has the opportunity to write a column in a newspaper the way you did in the past, is that something that you would encourage?

Josh: Okay. Well, yeah. But keep in mind that very few people are actually going to see it. So it’s really important that if you do it that you work with somebody on your team so this doesn’t become taxing on your schedule. If you’re a very busy physician, it’s really hard to work these things in. What I would recommend is that you get someone to partner with. There are a lot of ways. If you have someone that can help write with you or you could divide the labor, a lot better. For example, you might have them come in with a recorder or their phone or whatever and you’re going to say, yeah, so let me just kind of tell you a bunch of facts about some stuff and maybe one story and then you write it into a column and that you do that with someone on your team. That’s a great way to get that done. Start by making it easy on yourself and it wouldn’t become something that just becomes something you dread and not fun. That’s number one.

Number two is that again what I was talking about earlier, most people overvalue the visibility and they undervalue the authority. If you publish this in a local paper, very few people are going to see it. So, you want to say on your website and on your social media this is a big deal. I am such a trusted source for our community that our local paper comes to me and publishes my advice or my updates on a regular basis. That’s valuable. Like if I got two doctors and everything else is equal and one of them writes a column and is seen here and there and the other one doesn’t, I’m probably going to go with, they must be respected. You know, as much as we say that we don’t trust the media, we do. We absolutely do because we look at it and it’s why so many companies would put all those logos on their front page. Oh, I was seen in Forbes. I was seen in Entrepreneur. I was seen in the Washington Post. I was on Ellen or Oprah or whatever, right? That stuff all matters a lot. And those, what these are, are indicators of authority. And what you’re doing is you’re transferring the trust that that we have with that brand onto yours. It’s like why Wheaties has athletes on the covers of their boxes of cereal. Like Nike, you know, hires athletes. We love the athlete; we love the brand. It’s the same thing. So, you’re kind of leveraging. Find ways you can leverage other logos, brands that people already trust. And they’ll figure, well, if they trust you, then I guess I can trust you.

Barbara: That’s great. Our listeners have learned so much today. I really enjoyed this episode and I hope that everyone else has too. Tell me, how can our listeners reach you?

Josh: A couple of things. If you are — Like if it’s your practice and you grew it or you’re like a solo professional and you’ve built up a successful practice, I would, if you don’t mind, Barbara, I would love to feature them as a guest on my show. And just please tell me that Barbara sent you. But we have a daily podcast called The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. We’d love to feature you generally again if you’re doing six figures or more annually and you grew something like your own dental practice, your own family office or whatever. I’d love to feature you. And also, at www.upmyinfluence.com, you’ll see — By the way, that’s where you go and you’ll see a little green button at the bottom Now Booking Guests. And then as well if I can help with any of this, we do scholarships for anybody that wants to learn the basics. And I’ll give you our free media influencer makeover. We used to charge $8000 for it. It’s now — You could apply for a scholarship and just tell me you heard it on the podcast. And we usually accept about 80% of people into our whole system where we’ll help you build a press kit. We’ll help you make over your LinkedIn. We’ll help you with your social media. We’ll help you with your conversion optimization. It’s all pro bono. But again, just mention that you’re connected through The Medical Strategist and we’ll make sure that I get you accepted for that. There are no weird upsells or anything like that. It’s just we don’t sell to earlier-stage businesses. We only work with more advanced-stage businesses.

Barbara: Well, that’s a great offer. Thank you so much. And thank you to our listeners. This has been another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors with your host, Dr. Barbara Hales.

Connect with Josh Elledge:

Website: UpMyInfluence.com

Show: The Thoughtful Entrepreneur

Twitter: @joshelledge

Facebook: UpMyInfluence

YouTube: UpMyInfluence

LinkedIn: Josh Elledge

Instagram: @upmyinfluence

Connect with Barbara Hales:

Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales

Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist

Business website:www.TheMedicalStrategist.com