Final Transcript - Lloyed Lobo
[00:00:00] Katherine Watier Ong: Welcome to the Digital Marketing Victories podcast, a monthly show where we celebrate and learn from the changemakers in digital marketing. Great digital marketers understand that people are the most challenging part of doing their jobs. And this show focuses on the people part of digital marketing wins what tactics or skills the guests use to align people with their marketing strategy.
I'm your host, Katherine Watier Ong, the owner of WO Strategies, LLC. We focus on increasing organic discovery for enterprise-sized, science-focused clients. Thank you for joining me. Let's get into it and celebrate our victories.
So today we're joined by Lloyed Lobo. Lloyed is actually a co-founder of boast AI, the author of from Grassroots to Greatness, the host of attraction podcast. He runs the traction community of 1200 members. His experience as a Gulf war refugee. Almost dying from COVID and struggling with depression and mental health issues is a live demonstration of resilience.
That's what the show is going to be about today. All about how can you build your resilience. It's a soft skill that's going to help you bounce back from setbacks, adapt well to change, and endure hardships. It's been shown to positively influence work, satisfaction, engagement, as well as overall well-being.
It can lower your depression levels. We're going to talk about why community, potentially a social media one, is crucial to building resilience and how it can help you build your social skills. And how to start building this community of supporters for the brands you work for or yourself. And I think this is.
Absolutely relevant as here in the U S we're seeing Google showing more social media posts and profiles and search results. I'm excited about today's episode and you should be too. Lloyed, welcome to the show. 
[00:01:44] Lloyed Lobo: Thank you so much for hosting me. I'm excited. Always a pleasure as a podcaster being on other podcasts.
[00:01:53] Katherine Watier Ong: Awesome. So tell all the listeners a little bit more about you. I gave a little bit in the intro, but your background, how you got to where you are today. 
[00:02:02] Lloyed Lobo: Definitely. I would say I tell people that I'm an accidental entrepreneur. My family members, parents, nobody's an entrepreneur. Their definition of success is you go to university.
You do postgraduate studies, you work through the ranks, you work till 65, you retire, and that's the way to live, right? That's society's definition of success. But I did everything opposite that. I was a very rebellious kid growing up, and I didn't finish high school. I missed all my exams, don't have a high school diploma.
Now, most kids who don't have a high school diploma would never apply to university. I did the opposite. I applied to every university college that there was and this was in Canada and a couple colleges reached out saying, hey, can you write the entrance exam? I sent the previous transcripts. Anyway, the entrance exams went well, and one university said, hey, why don't you start the semester?
And because, because we're in a hurry, and we're getting started soon, and give us the transcripts within a month, but if you don't, then you're going to have to un enroll. I made up some BS excuse as to why the transcripts were taking a while. Now, luck would have it, They never followed up and I graduated without a high school diploma -- with a bachelors of engineering and software.
So the key, the key realization is luck and risk are two sides of the same coin. A lot of people say I'm lucky and you know, tell me, "Oh, you're lucky”, and all kinds of things. And I'm like, “Yeah, I'm lucky, but you know what?” Luck and risk are two sides of the same coin. The ones that get lucky are the ones that never stop flipping risks, that never stop putting themselves out there.
And I just did something that most people wouldn't. They would be like, okay, I'm not going to apply. I'm just going to accept my fate that I was a bad student. And I did the opposite. Now, when I graduated engineering, I didn't want to go and do a nine to five job. Everything I'd done, all my life since childhood, was against the grain and said, I can't work somewhere nine to five.
And I asked a few people I know in business that, “Hey, what's the best skill I could learn if I want to be an entrepreneur?” 
And they said, Hey, you got to learn communication. You got to improve that. Like everything from convincing your spouse that you're not going to bring money to convincing customers that you have nothing, but please buy me, buy my stuff to convincing employees to work on low pay to eventually convincing investors, media, et cetera.
It's all communication. And here's the second realization I had. I knew I wasn't very self motivated. All my life I jumped from thing to thing to thing, like as rebellious kids do, right? And I said, Hey, I'm not very self motivated. And I actually believe that self motivation Is the biggest BS hoax that society feeds you.
Like, we berate the people that, that can't be self motivated. And we're like, oh, you gotta need to have self motivation. It's not easy for most people. Like, if you wanna fix something, get better at something, you gotta change your environment. If you got a pantry full of junk, let's face it, you're never gonna get fit.
Okay, like, I don't care what self motivation you have, eventually you're gonna cave in. If you hang around with a bunch of drug addicts, let's face it. Eventually something's gonna happen like why put yourself in an environment that forces you to cave in right and so I knew that because you know all my company was bad so I said if I took a public speaking class the chances of me dropping out the first time three or four people laugh me off stage would be very high.
So let me find a job that forces me to communicate day in and day out. Let me find a job that just forces me to communicate because nothing else, nothing else, like I won't stick otherwise. I can't take a class and then five people laugh at me and I'm embarrassed. And everything I researched was sales.
Like the only job that forces you to communicate day in day out is sales. And here's the thing, graduating as an engineer. No big company would give me a sales job. They're like, you know, this is 2005. Why do you want to go in sales if you're an engineer? You might be a bad engineer. That's why you don't go in sales.
Well, you can't communicate either. Now, luck would have it. Startups was just starting to come up as a thing, right, in the early 2000s. And there was this startup founder in telecom that needed cold callers. And he didn't care what my education was. He just needed to fill a seat. So I took a job in cold calling.
My parents lost it. They're like, your friends are working at Johnson and Johnson and Microsoft. And you're like making minimum wage cold calling. I kid you not fast forward today. Everything I have is because of that first job, because I, you know, the first call I cold call I made, I practiced a few hours, of course, when the decision maker showed up on the line.
I fumbled, I hung up, like all kinds of stuff, but I needed to make money. And my environment was a bunch of young people just starting out cold calling. So that was the environment we're in. We're just cheering each other on and we kept practicing and practicing. You are what you repeatedly do. If you look at Mr.
Mr.Beast's first videos, they all sucked. He is like, like an icon today. Right? So it's like consistency is the secret ingredient that turns those small actions into big outcomes. So I got better and better and better. Communicating on the fly, pivoting my messaging, it got really polished. And then now, because my first job was in cold calling, my girlfriend, now wife was in medical and med school in New Jersey.
So I had to move, started applying to jobs in New Jersey. I couldn't get any big company to hire me, but another startup founder hired me in sales. And then after that, the next job I also applied to, I only could get, I went from being a cold caller to being in sales and the next job after that when she got into residency at Drexel in Philly was running sales and marketing.
So my trajectory was very fast because when you work for a startup you or a small company operate in dog years, right? Everything is moving really fast. You're forced to learn if you're one of the first few because You need to get acquire customers. You need to build product and you need to move fast.
And like things are moving at a very fast pace and iterating. So you learn a lot more and you grow with the company. So I had that opportunity going from doing cold calling to being in sales and product to being head of sales and marketing for three startups back to back in a very quick succession.
And so when my best friend from university called me with the idea for boast, I jumped at the opportunity. I'm like, why work for somebody else? Like these, like, you know, they were all venture backed investor funded companies. I knew the risk. I'm like, I knew exactly what it takes. I knew the risks. Cause I work alongside the founder.
I jumped at the opportunity because I'm like, why take low pay? And, you know, work to build somebody else's destiny when you could build when I could build my own. And that doesn't come from, you know, something you're born with. It's not talent. That is your environment. If you hang out with five entrepreneurs, you'll be the sixth one.
If you hang around with five people who have a six pack, eventually, you'll be the sixth one, right? That's your environment. Your environment matters. The most, so that's, that's how we, that was the journey of me ending up with both very accidental, but came from, you know, I think there's a lot of kids out there who are rebellious.
There are a lot of people out there who are against the grain and they feel like, oh, they don't fit in this box that society creates. Like, oh, you need to fit in this to be successful. Like, today I wear a hat. I wear a earring. I sit on the board of a public company. You know, I, I eventually. I think if you just focus on being consistent and delivering value and being successful against the grain, then nobody's going to question you.
[00:09:57] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah. Yeah, it really reminds me anybody listening who has a kid who's dropped out of high school. It's very possible that you could go to my, my undergrad college in Amherst, Massachusetts. I believe they well, first of all, you don't get any grades test or credits while you're there. So they love entrepreneurial type people.
And I don't believe the transcript is a really big deal. You write an essay and you meet with people and like, there's a whole other process to get into school. So if you're If you have a kid in that, in that environment, there's another school option for you. 
[00:10:24] Lloyed Lobo: This is 2024, right? This is like exactly 20 years ago, like SATs and all of these things mattered.
I don't think they matter anymore. I don't even think school matters anymore in the true sense of it, because. The pace and the evolution of technology and knowledge is so fast, right? The amount of time it takes for a curriculum to get approved through the regulation and make it to the education system by the time it's already yesterday's knowledge, right?
You can acquire knowledge at such a rapid pace in this day and age that to me, sometimes it feels and I have this argument with my wife. My wife is a professor at Stanford and she's a physician. And I'm okay for medicine, maybe, right? Of course, regulated industry. But if you're not in a regulated industry, like legal, accounting, medicine, you're, what you do and how often you do it, the skill matters more than a piece of paper in the long term.
[00:11:22] Katherine Watier Ong: And certainly like, so my undergrad required a thesis to graduate. So I did my first thesis at my undergrad which was hardcore skills that I took into my career and also made graduate school really easy. But yeah, I often, the kids on my team at Ketchum would come up to me and say, hey, do I need to go to graduate school for digital marketing?
And I was like, well, after you've been trained on the basics for me, no, just go straight into another career. I enjoyed my graduate program. It was a build your own program. I enjoyed doing my thesis, which was first person, the first researcher on wearable computers back in 2003, which was kind of helpful to kickstart my career.
But it’s a lot of money. I don't know. In retrospect, if I would go that way or not, I don't know. 
So let's talk a little bit more about your resilience because you've mentioned like, so how you got up to boost AI, but I'm kind of curious about both that your experience from the Gulf war, your experience with COVID this whole adaptability to change piece, which I think is critical for the crushing speed of our industry.
What tips do you have there? What, what's your experience there? 
[00:12:28] Lloyed Lobo: You know, I'll go back in the story, but I'll start with with the headline here. Pain is the precondition for growth. Anything great is a long freaking slog. It's a marathon of the heart and mind. You might get lucky, but if you just say, Oh, you know what?
I want to be in and out in two years. This is definitely not going to happen. It's a long slog. So you better enjoy the process and brace yourself for the long slog. And maybe you'll get lucky and the long slog doesn't end up being so long, right? But anything good, lasting, anything worth doing is freaking difficult.
But think about it. I'm going to give you an analogy to working out. To, to the gym. When you go to the gym, the heavier weight you lift, the stronger you get, right? Because it puts load on your muscles, your muscles tear, then it repairs and you get stronger. And as a function of lifting heavier weights, you're better for it.
You're stronger for it. The same thing as your brain, the same thing is how you are in life. Taking on the hard challenging tasks makes you more resilient. And makes you stronger and makes you prepared for harder challenges. So it's just a function of, you know, growing up to immigrant parents. My parents were not educated, both from India.
My mom grew up in the slums of India, Mumbai, and my dad was a farmer. They weren't educated. So they couldn't go out West. And the only option was go to the Middle East. So my dad went to Kuwait. And I think he started as a dishwasher and learned to cook and eventually became a very celebrated executive chef, but nonetheless, very lower middle class family.
My mom stayed at home to look after the kids. Cause of course, you know, couldn't afford a nanny. And, and that was life, right? And so our summer holidays were not spent in Europe or somewhere fancy. They were spent in the slums of Mumbai. And, and so what I realized is though, the less you have, the happier you are.
Every summer I'd go to the slums of Mumbai where this house that my grandparents lived in, he had 10 kids shacked up in this house. Now grandkids as well, no bathroom. So you got to. Line up every day to go to the toilets and no water. So you can line up every day to pump water enough water. Watching TV was a communal activity.
Going to the bathroom was a communal activity. So I experienced that as a kid and everyone was happy. Like, you know, when you're a kid, you're naive. You don't know what's right and wrong, right? You don't know what's luxury and what's not. And I think everyone, when they're embracing a new career and a new business, they got to be naive because sometimes like having too much knowledge just makes you afraid of taking on a risk, right?
Happy being naive will make you jump into things because you don't know like say I got a two year old Yeah, three kids ten five and two my two year old He'll just do anything if, you know, if he gets hurt, he may be deterred, but the first time he won't be and any kid for that matter, right? They're not deterred when they're when they're new, but if it's not as painful or they overcome it, then they take on bigger and bigger leaps.
Right? And the key is that naivety. Right? And and so for me, Being in the slums was a great experience. Every summer when it was time to go back to Kuwait, I'd grab my parents by their feet and be like, listen, I don't want to go back. Leave me here. I had the best time of my life. Then a few years later, Kuwait was hit by the Gulf War.
Wake up one morning and my mom's like, can't go to school. My first reaction, of course, is as a young kid is yes, I don't have to go to school after a long summer vacation. But then it started to sink in that, hey, there's worry on their faces. Something's up. Right, currencies is invalid. You don't know if you're going to live or die.
But one thing was very interesting. When I went down the building that day, people were coming together to just solve and find solutions. Hey, I'll guard the building from X to Y time. I'll organize food supplies. If you have displaced family members, I'll organize shelters. Every building became a sub community that communicated with the next building and the next building and eventually communicated with different embassies and governments.
And probably one of the largest grassroots movements to evacuate people. From a war zone to safety, the security had completely elapsed. And so that was a very good experience. And as we were going on this highway of death from Kuwait to Baghdad to Jordan, and you can Google search highway of death, you'll see buses bombed and everything, the adults should have been worried or crying or stressed, right?
No currency. Don't know where we're going. Not sure you're going to live or die. Who knows what's going to happen. But one thing that's very interesting is they were singing and laughing and playing the guitar. And I realized that day, as I was reflecting back on, on my journey, is we often talk about. The outcome the destination or we talk about the journey and I came to realize I think that that day was it was a key point for me that that trip from Kuwait to Baghdad to Jordan is it's neither the destination or the journey is the companions that matter the most.
You could be on a crappy journey on the way to hell. but great companions will make it memorable. I mean, have you ever been in an environment where you just toxic people and you want to get out of there? 
[00:18:09] Katherine Watier Ong: I think I've talked on the show about how my agency experience has given me some PTSD. So I guess 
[00:18:16] Lloyed Lobo: We, we, we all have that.
Right. And then you're in a conversation with people you don't know really well, but you're vibing really good and it's ours and you don't want to leave. Right? So I think your companions matter the most in terms of your mental health, your physical well being and everything in between. And for me, despite going through all of this and a few years after the Gulf War, we immigrated to Canada.
I never felt anything was difficult and nothing felt like a hardship. One, because I guess my parents never made me feel like we're going through some hardship or financial turmoil, but more importantly, they were always people in that situation, cheering each other on, like everything's going to be okay.
Or like nothing even happened. Like it was a normal course of life. And I think a big part of that resilience, mentally, physically, Is who you surround yourself with now in that same environment, if you're around a bunch of people who are crying and moping and just saying, Oh, we're just awaiting our fate and we're going to die, then that's how you're going to behave, right?
That's how you go. Your brains are going to process it. But if everyone's saying, Hey, it's going to be okay, things are going to be fun. We're going to work through it, finding solutions. That's how your brain is going to process it. And for me, I've had those experiences of spending the summers in the slums of Mumbai, where there was nothing in the hardest of hardships and the Gulf war.
And people were always solution oriented. And that was a key part of my environment, my nurture. And you can call it resilient, resilience. You can call it perseverance, any number of things, but I think it was shaped by the environment I surround myself with. And I found myself that through all the hardships in life, nothing really felt hard because I always was surrounded by companions who were, Hey, we're here for you.
Everything's going to be okay. And if not, we'll work through it kind of thing. The only time I actually got depressed and hit rock bottom was after we sold half the company. And I left the day to day of the business. It also was the first time I came into any meaningful money. I went from like living on my wife paying life salary, being a startup founder across 233 startups over 10 years to, you know, coming into millions.
And I got depressed. Actually, I hit rock bottom, became a drunk, insufferable character. And when I started to analyze that, I realized, you know, I felt like I lost my tribe. I lost my companions, right? That's, I built my whole journey of 10 years in business around this community. Say boast was a community led business.
When we got to 10 million in revenue, we had no marketing team. Marketing was the traction community we built. And as a function of that, we did SEO and everything else, but it was all centered around entrepreneurs who we bring value to and building that community. And as a function of that, we would get.
Featured on blogs and get do events and webinars and the whole gamut, right? But it was a very community led business. Our salespeople were. essentially glorified community manager. So when I left the day to day, I just felt lost, right? And because as an entrepreneur, also, you're not very balanced. You spend 90%, 95 percent of your life on the business.
And then if there is anything left over, maybe it's for your family and friends and health in, in some order thereof. So when you leave, you just feel this lull. And so, so that's what I experienced. And then what uplifted me out of that was again, joining a community of fitness minded people, positive people.
A big part of my journey coming out of depression was actually cutting out all negative energy from my life. I don't listen to the news, news happens, right? But I think the media perpetuates negative energy because I don't know if you've noticed on social media and on news. On any form of media, negative content perpetuates and festers and turns into new monsters.
People are more engaged. 
[00:22:34] Katherine Watier Ong: It does engage people more. It's just, that's the psychology of it. 
[00:22:38] Lloyed Lobo: Yeah. Good news doesn't carry on. 
[00:22:40] Katherine Watier Ong: And everything's filtered to the end user. So if you click on negative stuff, you'll end up getting potentially more negative stuff. 
[00:22:48] Lloyed Lobo: Yeah. I could say, “Hey, you won the Grammys, right?”
And, and everyone's like, yeah, you won the Grammys. Yay. And then it's not a discussion point three days from now. But if it's like a negative thing, like, Oh, somebody got killed or, you know, there's some bad thing happening, then it's a discussion point today. And then tomorrow, Oh, then did you hear about it?
Like, if you've worked anywhere, right. And, and been in the American workforce and workforce around the world, every morning, I think like a conversation started. Or did you see that on the news? Or did you hear about that? Did you, did you see it's all negativity. Very rarely, it starts with like, did you hear a positive piece of news?
And if it is, then that conversation ends very quickly. But if it's a negative piece of news, office gossip, whatever, it just carries on and carries on and turns into cancer. And so a big part of that was cutting out negative people from my life, negative energy that sort of thing. And and doing that just changed my life.
And, and, you know, I think. When you talk about resilience, there's two key factors. And I was just actually just did a flip on this on Instagram yesterday. Most parents that I know, and even growing up, especially the Indian parents, we praise and reward the outcome or the results. And we reprimand based on the outcome or results, even in the workforce, right?
Like you suck because you didn't produce the results or what a great job. Nobody appreciates the effort, the process. And I think, especially with kids, because a big part of what you do is how you're nurtured through your journey. Is appreciating the effort, the process, because when you just reprimand like a harsh reprimand or a huge reward on the results, people then start to have a fixed mindset and they're like, Hey, if I don't get this result, I'm going to get destroyed.
So then they have this fear of failure and that deters them from taking on challenging tasks. In reality, you know, this in business, in life. Nothing is an easy road, especially in business or any endeavor where you're on your own. It's a journey of ups and downs and wins and losses. The ones that are rewarded are the ones that keep showing up consistently.
And, you know, what may look like a big challenge and a potential failure could just be a turning point if you overcome it. Yeah. If you have this fear of failure, you'll just like abandon and move on. 
[00:25:27] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah, we, we actually luck out because we homeschool our kids mostly due to COVID stuff. But I've been an entrepreneur and entrepreneur my entire career.
And my husband plays for the President's Own Marine band at the white house, which are basically those top musicians. You have to audition for the role. 
And so both of us got to where we are because of our growth mindset and practice. Lots of practice. And so we're really focused on making sure with our kids, like the most important thing when we sat down and we said, what are we, what do we really want to teach our kids?
And the big thing was growth mindset. Definitely. 
[00:26:02] Lloyed Lobo: Exactly. And you know, that combination is Consistency, a bias for consistency and a bias for urgency, velocity, action, whatever you want to call it. Right? If you combine velocity with consistency, you can build something big. You can you can get somewhere. So, I think I think a big part of this is nurture and who you hang out with.
If you hang out with people who are just constantly putting things off, or, you know, just exiting at the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Difficult turn, then you're going to be like, it's going to be normalized for you and you feel like it's okay. It's like, you know, you remember Napster back in the day? Yeah, it was illegal.
It was it was illegal, right? But everyone was doing it. Why? Because if everyone's doing it, it's right. So if the 10 people, five people you hang out with all the time are just like job jumping or like quitting at every difficulty, it's going to be normalized for you. And you're like, yeah, it's okay. Right.
And so I think you got to create the environment for yourself that will put you in the best position to achieve your goals. 
[00:27:21] Katherine Watier Ong: And for the SEOs listening to the show I've been in the industry for almost two decades now, and there used to be a lot of negativity online. It was hard to find your tribe and people were pretty.
Focused on cutting you down. I do remember on purpose, sort of not asking for help with questions in various forums, but all of that has shifted a bit recently. So I want to give you two tips. So one I've plugged before. So the Women in Tech SEO group is amazing. It's a Facebook group. It's also Slack. It's nothing but support from other women who do SEO globally.[a]
Full stop. So if you're female, join the group. The second one is actually, there's a different SEO Slack[b] group called, I believe, SEO community. There are Google reps in there, which is helpful because at one point John Mueller answered a question of mine, but also it's really focused on making sure that everyone's positive and supportive and it has been positive and supportive.
So if you're looking for your tribe and you're in, in SEO, there's two free Slack groups that would be a great place for you to check out. 
[00:28:18] Lloyed Lobo: So that's a great, great resources there. 
[00:28:20] Katherine Watier Ong: Yeah. So, so you've shared this traction conference. So do you think conferences or sessions are a good place for social skills, building your community?
What have you seen from people that attend? I know we talked a little bit before we start recording about how you've grown your network with events. Talk to me a little bit about that and whether you've seen it shift any in this COVID world. 
[00:28:44] Lloyed Lobo: You know, when we started the company, it's, it's funny when we started boast.
So boast is a very obscure offering, right? We help businesses that build technology or products or services, get money from the government globally, hundreds of billions of dollars are provided by governments. But it's a cumbersome broken process is prone to audits and receiving the money takes a long time.
So we automate that. So when you start a business, your first thing is, I need to get some customers. How do you get customers? First, you need to understand who you're going to sell to. So we said, Okay, let's sell to manufacturing and construction and oil and gas, because there's a stable businesses that pay.
Reached out to them, nobody would talk to us. It would be so hard to get meetings with them. So we said, let's go to their events. When we started going to their events, it just fell out of place. We looked like two young guys who threw a suit jacket on top of a hoodie. And they felt like, they felt like the Cigars Club, right?
Like. 
[00:29:38] Katherine Watier Ong: Totally visualize this. I worked for a utilities telecom at one point. So it's, it's a lot of white, older dudes, not a single female anywhere. 
[00:29:49] Lloyed Lobo: Exactly. So we, we just couldn't resonate. So dejected, we started going out to the Start up new business events. And we felt like we found our tribe. They were starting out.
We were starting out similar challenges. We started spending more time with them, hanging out where they do eat, breed, drink, sleep, where they do host events together, participate in hackathons together. And we felt, we found our tribe. And you know, when you're in the thick of things, it's always like, I'm throwing spaghetti on the wall and God makes something work when you look back, when you've achieved some success, it's a framework.
So when you're starting out, the first step is. I got to figure out who my tribe is going to be and the way I distill that to four or five points. One is, do I love this audience or the problem set or the content? Because like we said, through this conversation, doing anything successful is a long slog. If you hate your audience, you will not sustain.
I do. Do I love this audience is key. And see, because I love that audience. We built post as a community led business. Traction is still going despite me leaving the data of the business. I wrote, I wrote this book for, for the same audience, right. On community led growth. It's never left me cause I love that.
It's my tribe. I love that audience. The second is, is it a small, but growing niche? A lot of people. They want to start with the biggest niche because they try to copy others who are already at a specific destination, but don't follow where, what they're doing when they're at a destination. Like don't follow Airbnb today.
Follow Airbnb's struggles when they started and what are the steps they went through, right? And so if you follow somebody just make sure you're following the journey to where they got and not the journey now, right? Because it's not relevant to you. And so we said we got a niche down so We didn't go after All businesses.
We went after tech businesses and we didn't go for all tech businesses. We went after startups and we didn't go for all startups. We went after startups in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and Vancouver. That's where we started eventually scaled across us in Canada, because my co founder happened to be living in Calgary.
And so when you niche down, you become very 20 people. And that's what your first tribe is, right? Like, is it a small niche that can eventually explode? You need to have conviction on that. Because when you are connected with that small niche, you can make your content extremely relevant. You can make your interactions extremely relevant.
You can make your communication extremely relevant where it feels like, dude, it feels like we know each other for long. And the same goes for like SEO and any sort of marketing you do out there, the more relevant you are to somebody and you land in somebody's face, They just feel like, Hey, this was for me.
I feel like this is speaking to me. 'cause we're in the same sea of sameness today, right? With this chat. GPT, Hmm. Yeah. And the and the, and the, and I'm seeing, I don't know if you're seeing this, but I'm seeing like LinkedIn comments and Quora comments where it's so obvious, like the 10 comments back to back are different versions of the same comment from chatGPT.
It's ridiculous. So how do people feel like, you know, authentic, like an authentic, genuine interaction with you, your brand. It's when you niche down and you make it very relevant for them. It's better to be an inch wide and a mile deep than vice versa. So we started with like startups in a, in a small city.
And when you niche down, you also find white space because nobody else is providing them that, right? Like nobody wants to target startups in Calgary, Alberta in 2012. So we did. And we found two big white spaces. One was they were not getting any love from any service providers or media. Nobody cared. And number two, all the events that were happening for startups were high level CEO platitudes, right?
It was done by event organizers who would be like, let's bring the most famed speaker, but a famed speaker is going to talk about high level aspirational stuff. There's only so much Elon Musk. You're going to listen to. When you need to put food on the table, when somebody's starting out, they need to solve their specific challenges.
The inspiration is good. Once in a while, listening to Elon Musk and Alex Aramosi and all these guys are great. But how do I get my first 10 customers? How do I get my first employee? How do I crack that million dollar enterprise deal? That's what I want to know when I'm starting out. So we found those two white spaces and you know, we begged and convinced the local newspaper to give us a weekly column, which we call Startup of the Week.
And you know, this is something a lot of people don't do when they put their content out there. They just hope that the platform that put the content on or the blog, they put the content on. We'll distribute them, but what you got to take the extra step on is distributed yourself. So when the blog went on the local newspaper, it was part of the big national newspaper on the Herald.
I went to everyone in my phone book, my whatsapp book, my groups, my LinkedIn, everyone I knew email. And I said, Hey, I wrote this column. Can you give it a retweet? I like to share Instagram and stuff wasn't big for business back then. Podcasting wasn't big for business in 2012. It was mostly third party blogs and events that were happening.
And I knew if I tried to start a blog on our website with Neil Patel and all these guys, I mean, Neil Patel is a friend of mine now, but like all these guys out there. I would never make it. But getting backlinks from the highest domain authority website in the country every week to my new website would, would do a lot for it.
So I, I got everyone to like that post. And then the editor called me and was like, listen, you're I'll make it a recurring weekly column. If you commit to writing every week, I'll even turn it into a print column. So now what started to happen was every week I started getting people wanting to be featured, fill up our form.
I put a little form in their startup of the week and we'd get a backlink. From the Herald newspaper to our website every week, and two guys who nobody knew now went to getting some social proof. Hey, these guys are in the newspaper. They're probably not so bad. We should probably do business with them.
And then everyone who applied to be featured with then invite them for a meet up every week for a standing meet up at a corking space. And we invite a new speaker to speak on a very tactical topic. And the speakers we invite were not people like, who are like multi billionaires. So if, if I'm just starting out, I want to listen to an entrepreneur who maybe took his business to 1 million or 5 billion, because that's going to be more relevant and actionable for me.
And we just did that with consistency day in and day out. And that turned into a big in person community and it's 120, 000 subscribers today. And that evolved into a podcast and everything else. So the key lesson here. For those, whether you're looking to start a community or join one is go hyper niche, which is closest to your goals, right?
It's better to hang out with 5-6 people whom you love and want to spend all the time in the world with. I mean, Harley Davidson scaled this model and built an iconic multi billion dollar brand, right? The weekend warriors. And then they scaled from there. There's a small group of people getting together and getting together.
Your tribe is a small group of people you can get together with and then scale from there or start very small by nailing down your niche. And and I guess niching down as much as possible and then grow from there. If you want to start a community or want to join one. Otherwise, you're just going to feel lost in the crowd.
I feel now with so many events and conferences and whatnot happening, right? 
[00:37:59] Katherine Watier Ong: Definitely. So this sounds like tips that you would be getting from your book from Grassroots to Greatness. So can you give me a little bit more of a teaser about. What you cover in the book. 
[00:38:09] Lloyed Lobo: Yeah, definitely. So one of the things I talk about, right, is every obscure idea that eventually became a global enduring phenomena from Christ and Christianity to CrossFit went through the exact same four stages.
People listen to you or buy your product or service. You have an audience. When that audience comes together to interact with one another on a regular cadence, it becomes a community. When the community now comes together to create impact towards a purpose that's beyond your product or your profit, it becomes a movement.
And when that movement has undying faith in its purpose through sustained rituals over time, it becomes a cult or a religion. Audience, community, movement, religion. And I unpack that. Through different tips and strategies, but I'll go through really quick on some of the steps. The first thing is you got to figure out an underserved niche, which we talked about and identify their pains.
Figure out where they eat, breathe, drink, sleep, figure out their pains. And their aspirations to their pains and goals will give you maybe product one or two, right? Like, but their aspirations will give you multiple content ideas for the long haul. And that changes over time. So you've got to keep understanding audience.
Once you have that ICP nailed, ideal customer profile, or ideal community profile nailed, write down the three F's around them. Who do they follow? This will give you a list of influencers. You can either invite as speakers to your events, or you can interview on your podcast. It gives you social proof as a function of their brand rub, right?
Then, who do they fund? Meaning what other services and tools they pay for. This will give you a list of potential partners, somebody you can co host with, somebody you'll sponsor. And then, where do they frequent? Meaning events, magazines, platforms. This will give you a list of places you need to distribute your content or be present.
And so what happens then is, let's say you do an event. And they see the influencers they listen to all the time. And they see the partners that you've invited that have boots. There are tools they pay for already. They feel like they've entered their tribe. It's their circle, right? But a lot of this, you can just engineer by nailing down an ideal customer profile and then drawing their circle of influence and then building relationships with that.
And then from there, you start by creating an audience through content, because I think doing events. Today is a little more expensive endeavor unless you have a free coworking space. I still love the in person because anytime you incorporate more than 2 senses, you build stronger connections. We're sound insight.
If we were in person, we'd be taste, taste, touch, smell kind of thing and would stay longer. Right? I mean, we've seen this with people you meet in person. You just build stronger connections with, but nonetheless, if you don't have the budget or you don't have a free coworking space, start by creating the Audience online through content, right?
You can either be a curator. So summarize content from experts or a niche, like by interviewing on a podcast, you do a podcast like this, you can record the audio and the video, the audio you put on all the podcast channels, the video you can put the full on YouTube. Then you can slice it into multiple short form content and put it on YouTube Shorts, put it on InstaShorts, put it on TikTok.
And then the text you pull out from it, and there's tools to do all of this right now. You can turn it into a thoughtful LinkedIn post and a Twitter thread. The key is though doing this very consistently. And so you can, and, and, and then you can summarize everything and start a newsletter, subscribe, sub stack newsletter, for example, right?
Over time, you'll start to build this audience. And now the key is, can I turn this audience into a community where they're interacting with one another? If you want to do it online, maybe you open up some of these sessions, you make it live and interactive. So you maybe do a 30, 40 minute interview, and then you open up for audience interaction with the guest or with one another and do it on a cadence.
We were. Exclusively offline until the pandemic and the pandemic hit. I'm like, you gotta do something, right? We can't do a big conference anymore. We can't do events. So reach out to all the conference speakers and ask them if I can interview them on zoom every week and we'll invite the audience. So we had a live audience.
That 1 so week live webinar turn into 2 and over time, I think, entering the pandemic, we had 30, 000 subscribers and exiting it. We had 100 plus. So I think that consistency, because now we're getting the social proof of the speakers. And it's like a TV show every Tuesday, Thursday, they're tuning into the traction live at 11 and we don't do that anymore since I left the day today, but that was a big lift, right? People are joining the tuning. They're interacting with one another. They're learning. And those are things you can do very easily. Now people will be like, Oh, how do I drive audience email? Email is not dead.
Email is the biggest converter of everything I've done in my life. You know, your ideal customer profile, reach out to them, look at your phone book, look at the email contacts and, and. Send them an email saying, Hey, X, Y, Z, we're hosting a webinar or an event on this specific topic. Here's top three things you learn very tactical.
If you've niched down and you understand the audience, you'll come up with the content that's relevant for them. Would love for you to join and give them a link to sign up. And if it's a good speaker, they'll join right or they'll come. And I think you know, if you want 100 people to show up, you got an email, maybe.
A thousand people, if you want 10 people to show up, you got to email a hundred people, but don't think that you can just throw something out there and it goes viral on its own. That's very rare. You've got to seed it. You got to seed it. And then doing the rest of it with consistency. And a lot of people are like, oh, I don't have content ideas.
Well, do this. Write down a hundred burning questions that your niche, your audience has, right? So think about if I had to write the ultimate guide to XYZ, what would be the chapters, sub chapters, the topics, and the tactical takeaways it would include? 
[00:44:36] Katherine Watier Ong: Well, and I don't think there's I don't think there's any excuse now for not knowing what those questions are.
So Moz.com is free. I think it's 50 queries a month. So you can spin up a keyword research account and go ahead and start. Brainstorming some questions and 2. ChatGPT is great for this. It's in Bing and free. You can totally give Bing your persona and the topic, and it will actually tell you questions and subtopics that your persona is interested in.
Then you can ask it, what are the uncommon ones? I mean, there's a thousand prompts. Y'all know I've got a prompt database[c] but there's no reason that you can't come up with these questions in today's day and age. You, you know, you've got a brainstorming partner now with AI, and if you know how to prompt it well, you're going to have plenty of ideas.
So let's talk about a little bit more about, we've talked about the community bringing success to you. I think the only thing we sort of haven't covered, which is sort of new, maybe to some folks that are listening is influencer outreach. Only because we've got here in the U. S. with the perspectives and then just plain old search.
We've got social posts showing up in search and perspectives. We've got all this social feed and video and tick tock and whatever. And so suddenly, if you want to appear for your topic in the U. S. you might actually need to be out reaching to an influencer who could. Produce that content for you, potentially, or talk about you as they're producing their content because most of my clients are starting with a social media profile of like zero or tiny.
So what are your tips for starting some influencer outreach? 
[00:46:10] Lloyed Lobo: You know, I think first in parallel, try to build your own influence. It's so hard to reach out to influencers. The big ones anyway, because why should I talk to you? Yeah. If you don't have a very expensive gym membership or don't hang out where these people hang out, like I have the fortune, good fortune of living in Dubai and they launched the influencer visa and I keep running into so many of them, but nonetheless if you are not, don't have one of.
A few things to give. They don't want you either money or any influence, right? And a lot of people don't have the money or the budget to spend on influencers. So then there's another category of influencers. And those are micro influencers, 10 to a hundred thousand followers on LinkedIn, on Instagram, you can reach out to them, but all of these people actually want money.
I'm a big fan of spending the time and energy to create your own influence. If you don't do that, you're going to have to keep paying for somebody else. And the way to do that is to just keep creating daily. You know, put a camera like, like we do have right in front of us, stick your phone under a ring light.
You have those hundred burning questions, record 30, 60 minute shorts. Use something like Video. ai, or like Latte Social or Opus Pro use CapCut to edit and throw captions. And put it on Instagram, the thing is you won't have anyone view it the first time, the second time, the third time, the fourth time, you got to do this for 100 days, commit to doing this for 100 days, identify the ideal customer profile, provide very specific knowledge value to that niche.
And the third thing which people don't do is reach out to everyone in your contact list and ask them to follow you because you. 
[00:47:58] Katherine Watier Ong: Leverage your own network that you already have, which is the other benefit of being in some of these communities. So, the Women in Tech SEO group actually has an amplify section, which I try to go into regularly where I amplify other people's smart thinking on LinkedIn or Twitter.
So, you've already got this sort of community that wants to amplify smart female stuff related to tech SEO. All right. So this has been super helpful, just about out of time. So what kind of win or resource would, do you have that you could share with our listeners today? Other than your book, which will obviously put in the show notes.
[00:48:32] Lloyed Lobo: Definitely. What kind of win or resource? So a lot of what I'll share is soft skills related things, right? Because the hard skills, you guys are the experts of your industry. You know where to go. The landscape changes so regularly. Actually, I don't know if the landscape changes regularly. I still believe.
In 2024, SEO is all about, if people are looking for a piece of content, Google pulls the worldwide web and says, when this content is being talked about, who is the most relevant person they're talking about? I don't know if that that's changed or not. There's all kinds of hacks and everything else, but ultimately. 
[00:49:11] Katherine Watier Ong: Until AI becomes, until the search gender of experience becomes live, that is sort of the basics of how Google pulls stuff.
Yes. 
[00:49:19] Lloyed Lobo: Yeah, and I'm, and I'm worried now what happens is, where does this go if Google search turns into a ChatGPT like interface, right? Where it's giving you answers and not links, right? And giving you a series of links, it might change the experience in a little bit. But nonetheless, you guys know where to go.
You guys are the experts and you got Katherine here to guide you. So I'll give you a lot of soft skills, one of my favorite books to read and I read it every so often. Is How to Win Friends and Influence People[d] by Dale Carnegie. It's a fantastic book. All I've learned eventually, like started there. It got, it got its roots in there as this kid who couldn't communicate coming out of university and needed to learn.
So that's a great book. Influenced[e] by Robert Cialdini is also another book, very good book, similar. And this book is called Spin Selling by Neil Rackham.[f] A lot of us. You know, we think marketing and sales is separate, but what does marketing exist for to accelerate sales, right? And if you can't communicate, not just to educate and entertain, but also convince people to convert, then what is the point?
And that book actually has a lot, has a good questioning framework. That you can adopt into your style of writing or for convincing people to convert kind of thing. Convincing them to buy into your solutions. It's a lot about like framing the situation, then framing the problem, then framing the implication of the problem and then framing the payoff.
So people feel bought in kind of thing. A lot of what I talk about is advice is learning from that perspective. Alex Mosey's book, 100 Million offers and 100 Million leads. His podcast is really good. And Stephen Bartlett's podcast is also very good. So some, some resources here that as you're walking, as you're thinking and have a spare time, just tune in.
I listen to everything on 2x.
[00:51:27] Katherine Watier Ong: I'm not at two X yet. I'm at 1.5, but I'm there with you. It's in my ear constantly. So how can people learn more about you? 
[00:51:35] Lloyed Lobo: Definitely. Just I've taken, I'm on a LinkedIn sabbatical. And so you can follow me on Instagram, double L L O Y E D L O B O. I'm trying to be active. They're posting some nonsense every day, whether it's life, whether it's fitness, whether it's business kind of thing.
And I'm on LinkedIn, Lloyed Lobo. And then my website, lloyedlobo.com just has the book right now. We'll have a bunch of resources probably in the next couple of months there. All the podcast appearances and a workbook for the actual book. Yeah. I think. 
[00:52:05] Katherine Watier Ong: Awesome. Well, so this has been amazing. Lots of great tips for the listeners.
Thank you so much for being on the show. 
[00:52:11] Lloyed Lobo: Thank you so much for having me. 
[00:52:13] Katherine Watier Ong: Thanks so much for listening. To find out more about the podcast and what we're up to, go to DigitalMarketingVictories.com. And if you like what you heard, subscribe to us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.
Rate us, comment, and share the podcast, please. I'm always looking for new ideas, topics, and guests. Email us at digital marketing victories at gmail.com or DM us on Twitter at DM victories. Thanks for listening.
[a]Add links to these resources in the landing page
[b]The other one that needs a link from the landing page
[c]Link to SEO prompts landing page
[d]For the landing page
[e]For the landing page
[f]For the landing page