Episode #200: Authenticity and Digital Marketing with Miles Beckler - a podcast by WordPress business specialist Troy Dean featuring Seth Godin, Michael Gerber, Guy Kawasaki, Joe Pulizzi, Andrew Warner, James Schramko, Brian Clark, Ed Dale, Dan Norris and many more.
from 2019-02-03T23:20:49
It’s easy to get distracted from crazy headlines and overnight success stories. The truth is, that these stories almost always just focus on the highlights and disregard the challenges and hardships people go through. Today’s guest, Miles Beckler truly represents a rags-to-riches journey.
Miles Beckler is a digital marketer, world traveller, and content genius. He runs Ask-Angels, a meditation website which has over 150,000 subscribers and attracts 8 million visits per year.
In this episode, you’ll learn how to get through hard times, grow a loyal audience and build a business that you can be proud of.
Background
In 2009, Miles and his wife co-founded Ask-Angels, a spirituality website selling guided meditations and other meditation products. After some success, friends and colleagues started asking Miles how he was able to travel the world while working on his digital marketing projects. This prompted Miles to start offering insights and coaching via online video on how he was able to succeed as a digital marketer.
Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, his father came from the IT world, so he was always around computers. Like many of his friends, after high school, he went straight into the workforce, working in customer support. But after the economy slipped, he quit, borrowed $50,000 and took 7 years to go to college. After college, he worked in the real estate industry. Soon after, the global financial crisis hit and real estate was no longer a viable industry. Miles was left broke and without a promising career. But he didn't let that stop him. Miles felt a great surge of motivation to jump into digital marketing which offered much higher margins and much more promise. Miles and his wife, who is also his business partner, ventured out together into the world of digital marketing and realized that success was most likely to come if they serviced an audience. That's when they thought of Ask-Angels. To deliver their content, his wife used keyword research and search engine optimization on Wordpress. While she hustled their content, Miles ran an agency specializing in marketing and wordpress services to support their endeavour.
Perseverance and Resilience
There's no question that Miles is incredibly resilient. He was knocked down a few times throughout his career, but managed to fight through it. He uses a “hat over the fence” analogy to describe how he's able to keep his cool, it means to commit fully to something no matter what gets in your way. Any challenge he came up against, he was able to figure it out. He even says that, on the other side of the challenge is the breakthrough you're looking for. Motivation can come from a desperate situation, whether it's a dead end job, losing your job or just being fed up with your line of work. When Miles first got into Facebook advertising, what kept him going was visualizing getting through to the other side and what that would look like. He discovered how scaleable authority businesses can really be and he now lives an incredibly rewarding lifestyle.
Building an Audience
As mobile devices become more and more prominent, face to face communication is now a very rare thing. A lot of authority businesses have tapped into the human need for a “tribe” and Miles stresses that this is an important aspect to building an audience for your business. This tribe is a place where people can interact with their own kind, use the same language and relate around the same topic of conversation (spirituality in Miles' case). Another thing he points out is building trust at a large scale. How are people going to trust and continue to trust your online business? This can be a tricky part of digital marketing and is something worth looking into if you're just beginning your business.
How To Sell Your Product
After some career difficulties, Miles started meditating. He then met his wife who was also a regular meditator and they bonded over their practices and metaphysical interests. His wife trained with a mentor in “guided meditation creation” and brought this skill to their project. What proceeded was a lot of trial and error. As his wife created the content, Miles optimized it with keywords and kept putting it out consistently. They published their best content over and over and they eventually were picked up by Google. A key Miles says to getting noticed is being consistent. He followed a 90 day challenge where he posted 90 blog posts in 90 days and 120 videos in 120 days. If you post every day and commit to it, you will get noticed.
The main products Miles and his wife sell on their website are mp3 recordings of meditations. When they first started, they’d keep track of the people visiting their site and would send them emails creating their first conversion. They then started sending out emails, offering free conference calls and other products. Through lots of testing and consistent content creation, they now receive 30,000 visits a day to their website. Currently, the website sells 180 different products like training courses, lessons and speciality meditations.
Competitors
Miles' brand and channel is unique enough that he can post videos only three times a week as opposed to every day. But he knows that if someone comes along with similar information and posts every day, he could be nudged out. There are several points Miles makes about competitors:
- Stay aware of your competitors’ behaviour.
- There’s room at the top for everyone.
- If you stay focussed on giving value to your audience, you will eventually become their trusted advisor.
- Do not underestimate the power of consistency. The hard work you put in, in the early years of your business will build trust with your audience and will no doubt pay off.
Using Facebook Ads To Your Advantage
Facebook ads can be powerful. Miles has become an expert on this type of marketing and he says the key to it is to tell a “story.” A long-form, 700-800 word hero's journey story will get a potential audience member more committed and interested in your product than a basic ad. People interested in improving their lives will either be able to envision themselves going on the same journey as the hero in the story or they won't. You want the right people to be invested in your product emotionally and a story is a great way to do that. Another way Miles optimizes Facebook ads is through a purchase conversion campaign; those who click on the purchase icon are added to a specific opt-in list to receive more content specific to them (free offers and shop-related content). But at the end of the day, Miles says long copy ads and video ads are the main type of ad that he and his team are focussing on.
What Advice Would You Give A Young Miles Beckler?
Commit fully. When he started Ask-Angels, there was a lot of doubt surrounding content and whether their website was even going to work. As soon as they both decided that this was their purpose, they fully committed to their website and things just seemed to take off. His wife started posting every day and Miles focussed more on his video content as he found he was more effective writing than creating videos. It’s important to focus on your sweet spot, do what’s in your DNA.
Tune in for that and more on this week's WP Elevation Podcast!
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