SHOWNOTES
Podcaster, artist, author, and online businesswoman extraordinaire, Miriam Schulman, joined me again on the show because we had so much to talk about!
In this episode, we talked about:
How confidence and self-trust are keys to increasing one's confidence and the mindset required to overcome objections in sales.
The importance of communication and connection on social media and automation strategies for online marketing.
Valuable insights into effectively reaching an audience.
Exploring innovative AI tools like Chat GPT, Claude AI, and Play HT for enhancing business communications.
Miriam’s unique strategy of "ego baiting influencers" that she employed while writing and launching her book.
RESOURCES
Connect with Miriam at:
Website - schulmanart.com
Instagram - @schulmanart
Podcast - The Inspiration Place
Purchase her book - Artpreneur
Connect with Jen at:
TOOLS
Don’t miss this episode and let me know your thoughts after you listen. I always love hearing from you. If you have any questions about this episode, comment below or DM me on Instagram @jen_lehner
[00:00:02.360] - Gary Vee Hey, guys. It's Gary. And you're listening to the Front Row Entrepreneurate Podcast with our girl, Jen.
[00:01:15.640] - Miriam Schulman Hey.
[00:01:16.750] - Jen Lehner Hey, Miriam. Okay, is your book now in its second printing?
[00:01:21.490] - Miriam Schulman Yes. So excited.
[00:01:23.520] - Jen Lehner That's really a big deal.
[00:01:25.330] - Miriam Schulman Yeah. Let me just explain for people who don't know what second printing means because this is something I was brand new. You didn't know that.
[00:01:30.990] - Jen Lehner Meant either, right? Well, not until I've... No, you taught me that.
[00:01:34.400] - Miriam Schulman Okay. With hard covers and color books, they use a printing press and they guess how many books they want to print run on. For me, they printed 8,000 copies in color and they were running out of stock a few months ago. They decided to go to the printing press again and reprint 2,500 books. Now, when those are gone, I'm not sure if they're going to go to the printing press again or if they'll just do it as a print-on-demand. Like on Amazon, if it's a paperback, you can just order a print-on-demand.
Read more...
[00:02:11.540] - Jen Lehner So cool. And while we're talking about that, I was going to save this for the end of the show, but I'm going to say it now so nobody misses it. So if you leave an honest, sincere, five-star review for this podcast over on iTunes, I am going to send you a free copy of Miriam's book so we could get her into the third printing. What? Okay, yes, I want to do that. Honestly, Miriam, it is such a good book. We're going to talk about your book. We're going to talk about lots of things. But since we started with that, let's stay here. The book is called Artpreneur, and it's for artists. But honestly, it is the best all-around marketing book. I have recommended it to so many people who are not artists because you cover so many fundamentals. And then also you really have a lot of, I don't know, profound insights on things that I think a lot of other people in this industry have missed. So while we're talking about the book, I want to pull some of the things out of there that I think really apply to everyone. You have this whole chapter that is all about starting before you're ready.
[00:03:18.350] - Jen Lehner That's a principle that I've always felt strongly about because I think so many people just wait for everything to be perfect, and that's a bunch of wasted time. But not that you have to summarize a whole chapter, but let's start there.
[00:03:32.580] - Miriam Schulman Okay. I love this because really what's going on with most people is they're afraid of failing or sometimes, by the way, they are afraid of success. But either way, what they're imagining is a negative outcome in the future. So in order to avoid that negative outcome, they think, well, it's not ready yet or I don't feel ready. And the problem is readiness just isn't even a feeling. There is a quote that I absolutely love. I forget which artist said this, that good art is never finished, only abandoned. Jen, what you were saying earlier about this isn't just for artists. My publisher made a point that they didn't want me to just talk, and my agent as well, she didn't want me just talking to painters. She didn't want me just talking to fine artists. They wanted to make the book general enough that it could apply to anybody who has a creative product. Well, once you do that, then anything can stand in for what you're creating. Then it's like, well, you're creating a sales page or you're creating a coaching program or whatever it is you're putting out in the world that it's coming from your imagination as entrepreneurs.
[00:04:47.830] - Miriam Schulman We are creating things from our imagination that didn't exist before. So in that way, we are all creatives.
[00:04:55.290] - Jen Lehner Absolutely. So what about this starting before you're ready?
[00:05:00.120] – Miriam Schulman Yeah. So absolutely. Everything that I've ever done, I've always done it before I really felt ready to do it, like the podcast. I remember your podcast started just because you had heard a bet with Gary Vanerchuk. Isn't that right?
[00:05:18.910] – Jen Lehner He was like, Anybody who starts a podcast right now, I'm going to come on their show, but you have to start it right now and upload three episodes. So that's how mine started. I absolutely had no clue what I was doing. But what is the benefit to that as an entrepreneur, I mean, for an entrepreneur if they really don't have everything already figured out?
[00:05:40.620] – Miriam Schulman Okay. One of the things that comes up in my world over and over again, but I can also show how this works in just the general business world, is artists will say to me, Well, my style is evolving. Shouldn't I wait until it's fully evolved before I start marketing it? Or they'll say to me, How do I know if my art is marketable? And the only way you're going to know is if you start marketing it and getting feedback from it. But it's also true in the business world. Jen, I know this with you all the time. You're always doing your beta version and to a small group, you see what the feedback is, and then you iterate. When I talk about an entrepreneur, I liken it to the Disney Princess movie, Sleeping Beauty, where the ferries take the little baby and they bring her to the woods and you don't see her again until she's a fully grown, beautiful princess. We never saw puberty. We never saw the pimples. None of that ever happened. That awkward stage that we all go through. But here's the thing is, us artists, us creatives, us entrepreneurs, we just want to hide our business baby away and not take it out until it's a fully grown, beautiful princess.
[00:07:04.240] – Miriam Schulman You have to love your baby now. You have to love your baby as it's growing up, as it's evolving. That's the only way you can know what's working is if you put something out so you can get feedback.
[00:07:17.340] – Jen Lehner Yeah, that is so true. And you could just... And sometimes you need to hear it from other people. But here is the fact. 90% of the time that first iteration is going to be garbage. Whether it is your first podcast episode, the first time you live stream, the first time you... I mean, maybe not. I'm just saying the point is like, nobody is good at something the first time you do it. The first time you put on roller skates, you're not a great roller skater. So it's like coming to terms with the fact that it's probably going to sink and you're going to hate the way your voice sounds the first time you hear it, and you're going to hate the way you look on video. Most people tell me they do. That's part of the human condition, but it's just necessary. The good news is in this world that we live in with so much noise is that when you do decide to finally do that TikTok, it's not going to go viral the first time and nobody's going to see it. When you launch your podcast, you're not going to have 50,000 listeners.
[00:08:15.120] – Jen Lehner So the beauty of that is that as you grow, your audience grows. By then, you're going to have it pretty much figured out.
[00:08:23.190] – Miriam Schulman I had this with my book. I was pretty motivated and I didn't have any inner demon problems when I was going after the publishing contract, the agent, all those things. But once I signed the contract, oh, my gosh, it was really paralyzing to me with all the creative anxiety. What really set me free, Jen, is I had a podcast guest because the podcast is really so we can get free coaching, right? Absolutely. Okay, 100%. I had a Doctor Eric, myself was on my podcast and I was talking to him about this and I said, Well, I understand the concept of shitty first draft. He said, Miriam, you have to be willing to embrace shitty first book. When he said that, that is what set me free. My book isn't shitty. No. I'm very proud of what I do. But if I was waiting until I don't know what I was trying to be Brené Brown or what the heck I was trying to be, look at the 8,000 people who have benefited from the book so far. They would have missed out because I was trying to write the book that will be the next Julia Cameron and reach millions or whatever.
[00:09:44.420] – Miriam Schulman So you have to just put out something because it's going to help people, even if it's not perfect.
[00:09:52.400] – Jen Lehner Yeah. I love something you said in your book about confidence. As you said, I procrastinate because I lack confidence. And you said to this client, No, you lack confidence because you procrastinate.
[00:10:09.000] – Miriam Schulman Right. So the very definition of confidence, if you look it up in the Googles or dictare. Com or whatever, the very definition is self-trust. So every time you don't do what you say you're going to do, in other words, you procrastinate, you are eroding your self-confidence. And if you want to increase your confidence, it's very easy. All you have to do is follow through with your commitments because every time you do what you say you're going to do, you're going to increase your self-trust, which will increase your confidence. And it's not about the result. That's the good news. It's not about the result. It's about doing what you say you're going to do.
[00:10:50.340] – Jen Lehner Okay, I left silence on the end of that because that's going to be a soundbite. That was really good. That's going to be a soundbite. How does this fit into... You just planted the seed in my ear. I know nothing about it, but does this feed into what you hinted at earlier about the belief triad? Does this fit in there at all? So the.
[00:11:08.980] – Miriam Schulman Belief triad is a little bit different, but all of it is so much as mindset throughout the book. Yes, the book is practical. There's lots of strategies in it. Lots. But we both... And sometimes I like to joke that the book is a self-development book in disguise as a business book for artists.
[00:11:29.010] – Jen Lehne Yeah, I think that's true. But there are tons of really practical, tactical information there as well. 100 %.
[00:11:34.860] – Miriam Schulman And this is one of them. So it's both mindset as well as practical. So the belief triad is there's three parts. And the first two, and they sound very banal and cliché and that's done. You got to believe in yourself and you got to believe in your product or your art. But what all those guru leave out who are pushing that self-belief, just believe in yourself and raise your prices, is you have to believe in your client. You have to believe in your customer or your collector, whoever it is. That's what's usually missing from people's belief systems that can sabotage themselves. Let me just illustrate this for you, Jen. Please, yeah. If you were going to buy a painting from me, that's $10,000, you're not trying to decide, Jen, if my art is worth 10,000, if I'm worth 10,000, what you're trying to decide what's behind that purchasing decision in your mind is you're trying to decide if you want this painting, you're trying to decide if you, Jen, are worth investing $10,000 in. And this is even more true when we're talking about selling things like coaching packages, weight loss packages. Does the person believe in themselves and believe in the results that you're offering?
[00:12:58.630] – Miriam Schulman And if you, as the seller of that, have any doubts about your customer or them getting the results, you will sabotage that sale. They will pick up on.
[00:13:09.950] – Jen Lehner Your
[00:13:11.100] – Miriam Schulman Uncertainty and the brain hates uncertainty.
[00:13:13.810] – Jen Lehner So what does that look like, Miriam? Let's say I'm on a discovery call and somebody is interested in working with me one-on-one.
[00:13:22.260] - Miriam Schulman Here's my favorite example. All right, in the movie Pretty Woman, when Julie Roberts... I'm just going to go through the plot points in case people don't know it because you and I know it. But Julia Roberts is a hooker, and Richard Geere wants her to dress very nicely. He hands her the gold card. He says, Go shopping. She's still dressed like a hooker. She goes to Rodeo Drive, and the mean salespeople won't wait on her. Why? Because they don't believe that she has the means to pay for. They don't believe in her. We all think we're not that mean salesperson, Jen, but how many times have you offered the smaller package to somebody? Or have you thought they're a tire kicker? Or you've had any of these negative thoughts? Now, they're all coming from our own insecurity when we're having negative thoughts about clients and customers. When I get on a sales call or when I'm selling a piece of art, I have to keep reminding myself I love my customer, I love my buyer. You have to love them. You have to believe in them. You have to believe in their results.
[00:14:25.920] – Jen Lehner That's so good and it's so true. It takes me back to a long time ago when I was getting some coaching from Todd Herman. And I was saying something like I was trying to price a course and he suggested maybe a price. And I was like, no, my avatar, no, they can't afford that. They can't afford that. And he said, It's not up to you to decide what people can afford. You have no idea what people can afford or they can't afford. You're looking at it through your own lens or whatever. But that really stuck with me. It's not exactly what you're saying, but…
[00:15:03.260] - Miriam Schulman It's selling from your own pocketbook.
[00:15:05.640] – Jen Lehner Right. Oh, good one. Huh, another bumper sticker for Miriam Scholman, Selling from your own pocketbook.
[00:15:12.580] - Miriam Schulman One thing that I go through an entrepreneur and I have a whole table of this is the Overcoming Objections chart. The whole point of that chart, Jen, is not to get a yes no matter what. It's to understand what may be going through your customer's mind when they're presenting objections to you. Because when you can step into compassion for where they're at, that's when you can more lovingly close a sale.
[00:15:40.380] – Jen Lehner Wow! That is so good. I definitely think everybody needs a little more confidence when it comes to closing the sale, not just artists. Artists are famous for not being able to sell.
[00:15:54.650] - Miriam Schulman But I think- That's the myth.
[00:15:58.010] – Jen Lehner The myth? Yeah. Okay. I want to talk about some interesting things that are happening right now in the world of marketing, how you might be applying it in your own business and the stuff that you're seeing. Because we should tell everyone, like in addition to this book, Miriam has a thriving online business of her own. She's an active artist, so she sells paintings. But I would say you spend most of your time in your online business, which is again, she has this amazing podcast, but also she has programs that help artists to grow their own businesses. Like, digital courses and masterminds and all that good stuff. Correct me, jump in atany time- Yeah, that's right. -if I said anything wrong. Yeah, that's right. You spend a lot of your time figuring out what is the best way to reach people with the best messaging at the best time, and how can we do it efficiently, what's working, what's not working. You and I have shared lots of fun AI tools. Let's start there. Are there any AI tools or any AI stuff that you're doing right now that people should know about?
[00:17:13.500] - Miriam Schulman Yes. Well, I really love ChatGPT, and I'm using it also not just on my own messaging, but helping my clients. If I could say one thing about it that most people get wrong is they start from scratch too often when they go to ChatGPT, and that's when they come back with basically garbage, generic stuff.
[00:17:36.060] – Jen Lehner Do you.
[00:17:36.520] – Miriam Schulman Know what I'm talking about?
[00:17:38.140] – Jen Lehner No, 100%.
[00:17:38.750] – Miriam Schulman Yeah. So mostly what I work with my clients and what I do myself is you really have to prime the algorithm with everything very specific to you and give ChatGP something to work with. That's when it really works the best, is when you're using it to iterate for something better.
[00:18:01.110] – Jen Lehner Right. Educated a little bit on who you are, what you do. Have it ask you questions about what you are and what you do. That's the famous prompt right now. It's something like, I want to bring you up to speed on what I do. So ask me all the questions you need to know to give me the best content that you can create for my business. So then ChatGPT asks you 20, 30 questions. Then you answer all the questions and it knows a little bit about your business. And the conversation lasts forever. I shouldn't say forever, but the conversation is there and it gets better all the time, the more information that you give to it. But I'm loving even more-.
[00:18:36.420] – Jen Lehner I didn't know that, actually. I'm glad you told me because I didn't know that. I actually create a different thread for each of my clients. So whenever I'm helping them, I'm always going back to that same thread that where I store everything. But I love what you just shared.
[00:18:51.940] – Jen Lehner My favorite tool right now is Claude. Ai. Have you been using Claude at all?
[00:18:58.010] – Miriam Schulman No. What is Claude?
[00:18:59.650] – Jen Lehner Okay, Claude is like ChatGPT, but better in the sense that it is current data. So it's been trained up until now, and you could put in larger amounts of text. And even though it said that it can't read links, it did. So I was just messing around and someone asked me to review one of their sales pages. And she led with a paragraph question about like, what do you think about the sales page? And I'm having trouble with blah, blah, blah. And I was thinking about doing blah, blah, blah. What do you think? Link to sales page. I copied and pasted the whole thing and just plop it right into Claude. Claude did go to the link.
[00:19:51.690] – Miriam Schulman So he crawled the link
[00:19:52.890] – Jen Lehner And was able to- Yes, and looked at the whole sales page and gave me the most incredible, realistic and helpful suggestions that my mind was like, I couldn't believe it. So I'm loving Claude. Ai. And I've made a little folder on my browser, on my Bookmark bar that is AI. And every time I find a really good new tool, I just slide it into that folder. Because the other thing I recommend doing is, and I'll put the links to these in the show notes because, of course, I don't know them off the top of my head, but there's about three really good AI newsletters that I subscribe to. It's nice because they're condensed and it's in bullet... You could scan it. You don't have to sit there and spend 30 minutes reading it. They'll list about three or four really helpful, useful AI tools or Chrome browser plugins that are AI or whatever. It's all about automation and AI, and it's just amazing. And if you're an AppSumo person or a product hunt person, God, I have such sympathy for those people over there because it almost feels like infinite, like an infinite number of new tools every day.
[00:21:16.100] - Jen Lehner I mean, thousands of new tools. I don't know how the App Store is keeping up, how the Chrome Store is keeping up. These tools are just like... Remember that episode in Star Trek? What were those things called? Just you added water and then they kept reproducing.
[00:21:29.950] – Miriam Schulman Until- You mean Gremlins?
[00:21:31.750] – Jen Lehne No, it's like Gremlin's. Gremlin's copied the Star Trek episode.
[00:21:35.310] – Miriam Schulman I'm not a techie, so I don't know.
[00:21:37.440] – Jen Lehner Well, I'm not either, but somebody. You went to MIT, so it just seems like- So I should? Yes. You should know all the Star Trek episodes.
[00:21:46.830] – Miriam Schulman No, I'm a potterhead. Okay, all right. But you know which tool I love that you turn me on to? I used it today is play. Ht.
[00:21:56.430] – Jen Lehner Oh, I haven't used that in a while, but talk about that because it's super cool.
[00:21:59.410] – Miriam Schulman All right. I am planning my Halloween episode. Here's how I use plate. I use these tools very creatively. So it's not like this is hampering creativity at all or replacing me as a human, as a creative being. I have my Halloween episode, and it's me talking. The first thing I want to do is I want to read a letter, an email from a customer. Instead of me reading the email, I plot his email into play. Ht. And play. Ht is basically you can pick from how many voices? Tons of voices. Tons. With male, female, whatever accent you want. I love doing this because it adds texture to my podcast. Then the other thing I use it for is since my book's out, I like to have the Amazon reviews read on the show. But I really never liked it when I hear other podcasters reading reviews. They're reading their iTunes reviews or their Amazon reviews or whatever. I have the robots in their British accent reading Amazon reviews as commercials on my podcast. It's just so much more fun that way. I think it just adds a different texture to the show.
[00:23:19.250] – Jen Lehner I love that idea. We should add that these are not your robot voices from even six months ago. The quality of these voices you really would never know are AI. Even you can reproduce your own voice by uploading about 45 minutes of your own voice talking, and it will clone your voice. I have used this in situations where I have not been able to do my flash briefing and my team will take the script from the flash briefing, plop it into play. Ht, use my voice, my synthetic voice. We do tell the audience that it's fake gen is what we call it. And we've used that when I've been on vacation because in the past I would just play a recording for a week that just says, The flash briefing will be back next week. Not ideal. So now I'm able to be there and not be there. So it's really quite incredible.
[00:24:19.330] – Miriam Schulman Do you know you can do that with video now, too?
[00:24:21.880] – Jen Lehner Shut up. Well, with your face? Yeah. Tell us.
[00:24:26.570] – Miriam Schulman The- Yeah, I have. Okay. It's called Hey, Jen. Jen, not spelled like your name, but like, generate a lead. So, Hey, J-E-N. And basically, you pose in front of it. And so you can literally just type in your V. S. L. And it will generate the voice and the video of you
[00:24:45.790] – Jen Lehner Vsdl means video sales letter. Yeah. Okay, that is- I have to try it. -i'm looking at it. This is amazing. Do you.
[00:24:52.340] – Miriam Schulman Know how many times I don't do a video because my hair doesn't look good?
[00:24:56.220] – Jen Lehner Yeah. Today, for example, for me, I'm like I was supposed.
[00:24:59.550] – Miriam Schulman To do a video. I did my hair for you because I thought we were meeting on video.
[00:25:03.060] – Jen Lehner I'm sorry. I don't do video podcasts. I find it distracting because I'll use a lot of hand motions and then the listeners don't know that I'm flipping you off or whatever I might be doing in them. Okay, so no, this is really cool. And we have used a fake person, like an avatar, to do a video, some training videos, and they were really pretty good. It definitely looked like you were like a real human. The mouth, it was a slightly bit off from the mouth movements. But I mean, it's so good that you figure in six more months this is going to be... And audience, listen, we understand also the dark side potential of all of this, right? 100 %.
[00:25:43.880] – Miriam Schulman Because as you're saying this, I so miss some of my favorite shows because of the writer strike. So I totally get why the actors and writers... And I feel guilty.
[00:25:53.440] – Jen Lehner I know. I feel guilty for all the reality TV I watch and that I don't even…
[00:25:59.210] – Miriam Schulman No, but it's like you don't. That's a whole other thing. That's a whole other thing. But it's like, I don't want this to replace real actors and actresses. I don't want it to, for movies to go away and original content to go away. I don't think it really is a replacement for that. But in terms of me not getting in front of camera, I don't know. That's something I might want to try.
[00:26:26.510] – Jen Lehner I know. No kidding. All right, we might think of some other AI thing we want to visit. I want to talk about Threads. I want to talk about X.
[00:26:35.930] – Miriam Schulman All right. First of all, I'm not using Threads because it's like I am not doing any more social media, new social media. I'm done.
[00:26:44.960] – Jen Lehner I'll talk you out of that.
[00:26:46.300] – Miriam Schulman And then X, I am absolutely not using Twitter anymore because of the anti-Semitism that is all over that platform.
[00:26:55.830] – Jen Lehner I know.
[00:26:56.570] – Miriam Schulman I just can't. I can't. It's just like not... It'sso misaligned with my values.
[00:27:02.310] – Jen Lehner Well, he is really, I don't know. I think everybody thought he was odd, but all this other stuff that has come out is just really super…
[00:27:10.680] – Miriam Schulman It's dark and I can't contribute to a platform that does that
[00:27:14.480] – Jen Lehner It's really.
[00:27:16.700] – Miriam Schulman The.
[00:27:16.980] – Jen Lehner Doors wide for- You're.
[00:27:18.150] – Miriam Schulman Going to cut all this out, aren't you?
[00:27:20.170] – Jen Lehner No, I'm not going to cut it out, any of you. I never cut anything out. Are you kidding me? No, it's totally stayed. It's true. I can't leave yet. He's going to start charging across the board for people to use it. And here's what I will say. As much as I can't stand him, I can't stand all the changes he's made to my favorite social media platform because it really was. I even had a course about Twitter. There were so many things that I love about Twitter. But what I will say is that at first I was like, really, he's really crazy. He paid $43 billion for this, and he's just completely cutting it off at the knees, and it's going to be completely bankrupt. That's what everybody thought. He laid off all the workers. But actually, if the world has learned one thing about this guy is not to underestimate him. I really am not trying to say anything positive about him, so I don't want it to come out positive. I'm just saying as a matter of what I think is more matter of fact is that what he's trying to do is to create an everything app like Wechat in China.
[00:28:22.760] – Jen Lehner He's making all these changes. It won't even be recognizable as the Twitter that it once was. I think if anybody can pull it off, it will be him. I'm not saying I want to be a part of it at that point. I'm just saying that's a little bit of news of what's happening in the moment. Let's pivot a bit and talk about what you are using in the way of digital tools for your marketing and what's working: YouTube, Reels, email marketing, and we want to hear
[00:28:51.050] – Miriam Schulman Okay. Youtube, we made a commitment this year, 2023. We're going all in on YouTube. I've invested a lot with my team, converting... Start. Oh, that's me.
[00:29:06.560] – Jen Lehner I don't know what just happened on my phone. Hold on a minute.
[00:29:10.120] – Miriam Schulman Hold on. Yeah, it sounds like we're hearing.
[00:29:13.110] – Jen Lehner Okay, we're hearing you read your book. Okay, start over.
[00:29:15.780] – Miriam Schulman Is that me?
[00:29:16.550] – Jen Lehner That didn't sound like me. Yeah, that was you. That was because it was on one and a half speed. I listed all my books at one and.
[00:29:20.650] – Miriam Schulman A half speed. I haven't listened to my own book.
[00:29:24.100] – Jen Lehner Oh, it's so good. You really should. And listeners, she has these great quotes that you clearly spent a lot of time making sure that you picked exactly the gems that you wanted to be in your book. But also she had other people, other marketers, other influencers, thought leaders, whatever, who she likes and follows or who she has partnered with. I'm talking about you like you're not here. But what I love is that you and the audiobook had them read those quotes.
[00:30:00.800] – Miriam Schulman Wait, record scratch. What I did was when I was writing my book and I knew I wanted to somehow ego-based-hate influencers. So smart. I wanted to use quotes for them. But then my publisher was warning me. She was like, You got to be very careful about using people's or quote-quote grams, things that they say that they say because who knows it could actually be Maya Angelou who said it, not Rachel Hollis or whoever. What I did was when I wrote my outline for my book, and let's say I'm talking about email marketing, I'm like, okay, who's come on my podcast to talk about email marketing? Then I went back to that podcast and I pulled out things that flowed into what I was writing about. Then when I went to record the audio book, we pulled those clips, those audio clips out of the podcast to incorporate them into the audio book. We had to get everyone who we were including to sign off on it too. Like, legal aid, since we were selling it as a product, they had to give us permission to sell it without them benefiting monetarily.
[00:31:24.390] – Jen Lehner Can we go back to the brilliance of the ego-bating and can you just talk about that? Because that alone is like, whether you want to self-publish, you want to go with a traditional publisher. This is just really, really smart. Can you talk about that?
[00:31:36.790] – Miriam Schulman Yeah. Okay. So it is a smart idea that I didn't come up with. I did remember hearing somebody else, and unfortunately, I can't remember what her name is. Ashley something something. If you want, I could find out later, Jen, if you want to include it. Yeah, sure. But somebody else was talking about how the promotion of the book starts when you write it. I saw other people do similar things where they include case studies of other influencers. When I was quoting other influencers in my book, and I'm not talking about the quote that goes right before the chapter. I'm talking about as the content inside the book, what I'm really talking about. Now, when I went to go and seek out endorsements, I said, Hey, Todd Herman, you're included in or you're quoted in chapter 11 of the book. Would you like to endorse my book?
[00:32:32.760] – Jen Lehner So smart. Did it work?
[00:32:35.490] – Miriam Schulman Yes, it did. It worked for the people it was going to work on. Let's put it that way
[00:32:42.900] - Jen Lehner Right. Oh, I love that. That's great. You're going heavy into YouTube.
[00:32:51.690] – Miriam Schulman Committed to my own podcast. We are very heavy social media advertisers.
[00:32:59.900] – Jen Lehner So Facebook ads primarily and Instagram?
[00:33:03.440] – Miriam Schulman Instagram and Facebook, correct. And wherever it is that they show, you really need when you're doing Instagram advertising, even Facebook advertising both, whenever people see your ads, the first thing they're going to do is they're going to go to your profile and check it out. So you better have good stuff on your profile page. You can't just do social media advertising in a vacuum. So the content is important for them when they come to check you out to see those authority pieces that are there to see that you are consistent and doing all the things. The primary way I love to use social media platforms, and I tell my clients sees it this way as well, is to be social and communicate and connect. That it's way more important to spend your time connecting with and creating clients and customers than it is to be creating just content.
[00:34:01.120] – Jen Lehner Okay, let's pause there. On that note, send a DM to Miriam on Instagram, and she is at The Inspiration Place?
[00:34:10.060] – Miriam Schulman No, it's at no, Shulman Art, which is hard to spell.
[00:34:15.940] – Jen Lehner I know. S-c-h-u-l-m-a-n-art. Okay, so send her a DM. Send me a DM. Also not easy. It's J-E-N_L-E-H-N-E-R. Send us a DM right now and tell us if you're listening. And that's something that you do on your podcast is that you get people to reach out to you in the DMs on Instagram. Why do you do that?
[00:34:36.980] – Miriam Schulman Yeah, I do. So there's a couple of ways that I use it. One way is if you DM me the word believe, you being the listener. I will send you chapter one, choose to believe absolutely free. Now, the first part of that is handled by the robots. But if you do send me a personal message, I do answer it.
[00:34:57.450] – Jen Lehner Well, I like the robot answer very much.
[00:35:00.390] – Miriam Schulman I think that's the- Well, here's the thing that was happening. This is why we use robots is because I found that I was using the same canned responses and canned things all the time. And people are asking me, Is this a robot? Then if you are accusing me of being a robot anyway, I might as well.
[00:35:16.020] – Jen Lehner Automate it.
[00:35:16.790] – Miriam Schulman But I do answer. If you send me something personal, I will respond personally.
[00:35:23.640] – Jen Lehner Okay. You have this bot set up through mini chat? Yes. Okay. That's M-A-N-Y-C-H-A-T if you've never heard of it. But it's so great. So people text the word Believe to Miriam, and Miriam says, do that. I'm going to send you this... What's the gift that you give them?
[00:35:39.540] – Miriam Schulman Chapter one, absolutely free. But also, if you're a fan of Jen, then you're going to love to see this automation at work because it is a work of art, this one, mini chat automation for the chapter one. It's a beautiful thing.
[00:35:54.920] – Jen Lehner Okay, I'm definitely going to check it out just as soon as we hang up. I think I've done it before, but I want to do it again because..
[00:35:59.920] – Miriam Schulman You definitely have done it before. I don't know if it'll work twice. I guess it would.
[00:36:03.670] – Jen Lehner Well, we're about
[00:36:04.400] – Miriam Schulman To see. Yeah. Okay, the other way I use it, if I may. The idea for this came from... What's our girl? Seagram. I was going to say, what's our.
[00:36:15.010] – Jen Lehner Icelandic friend? Seagram, S-I-G-R-U-N. Wears a red dress, she's from Iceland.
[00:36:19.110] – Miriam Schulman Yeah. This was her suggestion, and I do it all the time. It works really well. Whenever I'm doing a webinar or my boot camp or even when I'm on a summit, I choose a keyword. I was on this Momprenewer summit, for example, and I said, DM me the word momprenewer. That way that everyone DMing you that word, you know…
[00:36:47.410] – Jen Lehner Where they came from.
[00:36:48.640] – Miriam Schulman Where they came from. So smart. Now you can set up automations also for this. For some things we do, like we have an Evergreen funnel where I ask them to DM a keyword. I'm not going to say what it is on the air because then people will send people a link sent it. All right. So if I have a webinar keyword, I do have an automated response from mini chat like an hour later. It says, Hey, thanks so much for watching. Do you have any questions about my program?
[00:37:17.370] – Jen Lehner That's great.
[00:37:18.080] – Miriam Schulman So what I was doing before is I was automatically just doing that same can response. So that's like, no, just if you're acting like a robot, just automate it.
[00:37:29.120] – Jen Lehner So you're having them send a keyword. Where did that fit in the webinar? And then how does the bot-
[00:37:34.450] – Miriam Schulman Okay, it's right at the beginning. So during the time where you're asking them to, right before you tell them to eliminate distractions, that's when I do it. So before the eliminate distractions slide, I say, okay, I really want to connect with you when this is over. So just take a moment right now, take out your phone, DM me the word, whatever the keyword is I made up for that thing, and I'll connect with you after this is over.
[00:38:03.440] – Jen Lehner I can't remember if mini chat allows you to set a time.
[00:38:09.300] – Miriam Schulman Yes, it does. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. You don't want to do it while you're on the webinar? No. Because then they'll be distracted. Yeah. So it's like an hour later or whatever you want it to be.
[00:38:19.220] – Jen Lehner Okay. Right there. This is why I have a podcast. I know, right?
[00:38:23.800] – Miriam Schulman So that.
[00:38:24.120] – Jen Lehner We can get coached. I can get free.
[00:38:25.520] – Miriam Schulman Marketing.
[00:38:26.000] – Jen Lehner Advice at that level. That is so good, you guys. If you have an evergreen.
[00:38:32.050] – Miriam Schulman Webinar- You know how many people who sign up for your webinar never follow you on Instagram? So in order for them to DM you, they have to follow you first. Actually, they may have changed that on Instagram. That's something you can check. But it used to be that you couldn't DM somebody unless you were following them. So all those people would follow me, too. So I would get hundreds of new followers, too.
[00:38:55.450] – Jen Lehner And that's important also because if you are advertising and Facebook or Meta sees all this activity in your DMs, it's just.
[00:39:05.570] – Miriam Schulman You- Yes, it affects the algorithm. So that it's so much easier to retarget them. Once they DM you, they're more likely to see your organic posts too.
[00:39:16.290] – Jen Lehner Yeah, it's just all around good. That's just fantastic, Miriam. Thanks for sharing that.
[00:39:21.920] – Miriam Schulman Yes. I have closed sales in the DMs.
[00:39:25.680] – Jen Lehner That's just amazing. All right, now I want to ask you, are you seeing anything these days that's bothering you, annoying you? Any trends, good or bad, that is on your radar?
[00:39:39.160] – Miriam Schulman Everything annoys me. We were talking about this before we hit record.
[00:39:42.380] – Jen Lehner You sent all these messages, and then there were eight messages. But by the time I went into my Voxer, it was like, unsend, unsend, unsend.
[00:39:52.020] – Miriam Schulman Well, I got embarrassed. I'm like a walking Seinfeld episode. I live on the Upper West Side. There's all these weird characters. I joined Equinox, this fancy gym. I was there the other day, and I always like to take the same corner locker because I can never remember my locker number otherwise.
[00:40:13.880] – Jen Lehner Yeah, I have accurate. Yes, I can relate. [00:40:16.950] – Miriam Schulman There's this woman, older woman there, not that much older than us. Maybe she's in her 60s. I had told her that once. The next time I saw her there, I said, Oh, you must have beat me to the locker because the whole corner was all locked up. She said, Oh, no, I reserved four lockers for myself so that I could spread out.
[00:40:38.640] – Jen Lehner What?
[00:40:39.640] – Miriam Schulman I know, right? I'm like, That's so mean of you. I'm like, Elaine, just telling her to her face what's wrong with her. That's like half the episodes are Elaine being self-righteous and telling people off.
[00:40:49.930] – Jen Lehner Did you tell her that or you just said that in- I did. No, I did out loud. Wait a minute. You said that was mean. I said that was so.
[00:40:56.760] – Miriam Schulman Mean of you. Then she was defending herself by saying, Oh.
[00:41:01.260] – Jen Lehner What if she told you she was an ampute and she needed it for her two legs? Then you would have been felt bad.
[00:41:07.250] – Miriam Schulman No, she was there to work out. Okay. She says, Well, I come during peak hours, so I need to make sure I have room. I said, That makes it worse.
[00:41:18.030] – Jen Lehner Exactly. That's even worse. Like, oh, my God.
[00:41:20.970] – Miriam Schulman So inconsiderate of you. I had put all this into our voxer chat and nobody responded. It was like radio silence. Then I felt silly like, Oh, well, maybe I'm the petty one for caring about this. I deleted all.
[00:41:36.380] – Jen Lehner My messages. You are hilarious. Yeah. For our listeners, we have a group Voxer chat with several other women, which by the way, I highly recommend, don't you? I highly recommend having your own little mastermind of people who you trust and who give you sound advice and be a listening board and that thing. Obviously, with your friends, but I'm saying a professional group chat. That's what this is, which clearly Miriam was being very professional and sharing. That was.
[00:42:06.150] – Miriam Schulman The other reason I deleted it because I think you should have left it. I thought maybe people don't want to hear about this.
[00:42:12.900] – Jen Lehner No, I would have loved it. I got there late and then everything was gone.
[00:42:17.000] – Miriam Schulman Now, the women in this Foxer chat are the only ones I'll listen to audio messages. The thing is the Foxers, you can speed it up inside the app if you want to, and you can pause it. But one of my pet peeves is when people send me audio messages either on my DMs or on text because you can't pause them, you can't speed them up. I never know what they're going to be. It actually gives me anxiety to see like, voice messages in my inbox. I feel like it's a one way convenience for the other person.
[00:42:49.210] – Jen Lehner Maybe that's why I like sending them, but I don't like receiving them. I just do not like typing on my phone. I'm not good at it.
[00:42:57.810] – Miriam Schulman You can do.
[00:42:58.280] – Jen Lehner A voice to text. Oh, yeah, I can. But you know what? That ends up... I mean, more times that I can even tell you. I've gotten myself into so much trouble because I do voice to text, and then I move on to the next task, and that phone is transcribing every word that I'm saying in the next conversation.
[00:43:16.950] – Miriam Schulman That's happened.
[00:43:17.820] – Jen Lehner To me. Oh, my gosh. And then it's like, oh, wow. I mean, if I would have sent that, that would have been the end of me. I don't know. Yeah, I guess I could do that. But I won't send you any voice messages.
[00:43:29.360] – Miriam Schulman Okay. I'm in Enneagram 8, and on the Enneagrams, that's the one that gets pissed off. So pretty much that's my go-to. I'm always pissed off about something.
[00:43:40.190] – Jen Lehner Well, you don't strike me as that. You don't strike me as always pissed off. You're a keen observer of life.
[00:43:48.750] – Miriam Schulman Okay.
[00:43:49.600] – Jen Lehner And I just am in awe that you... That's you. No, that's true. But I am in awe that you told that woman to her face that she was being a jerk.
[00:43:57.440] – Miriam Schulman Well, because it was my corner, too. And you better believe I went to the gym today. She had chosen a whole different bay.
[00:44:04.190] - Jen Lehner She's staying away from me. She's afraid of you. Watch out. Here comes that Miriam lady. It reminds me of the old ladies at my gym who... I like to be on the front row, as you know. And definitely if I'm taking a workout class, I need to be in the front row because I want to watch all the moves so I can get the moves. So I get there early. It's not like I elbow my way up to the front. I get there early, and then I will plant myself front and center right in front of the instructor. Oh, man, that really makes people mad because there's some of these women who have been going to the gym for 30 years, and that's their spot. It's like their unspoken spot. I respect that to some degree, but sometimes it's just a little bit ridiculous. I feel my heart beating really fast like I'm going to get a dirty look. But then I'm like, look, nobody owns these spots.
[00:44:50.860] – Miriam Schulman No, it's whoever gets there first. And that's like the thing with this woman, I wouldn't have had a problem if she took my one corner locker or even two. You can argue if it's raining or if it's winter and you have a winter coat, which by the way, is neither of those things last week, but you can make a case for that. So it's not that she took my one corner. It was that she took four, like the two bottom and the two top. It was like, really?
[00:45:15.970] – Jen Lehner Yeah, that's obnoxious. I mean, that's the only word. It's just obnoxious and a little bit selfish. I hope she's listening.
[00:45:22.390] – Miriam Schulman Okay. But in the world of marketing, one thing that I thought that I was going to do for my book launch is I thought I was going to do Instagram Lives. At one point, that was a thing. We all remember that was a thing. I don't know the last.
[00:45:37.070] – Jen Lehner Time you've done Instagram- It still is. I never got into it, but go ahead. Well, okay.
[00:45:42.120] – Miriam Schulman So back in January, I had all these lives scheduled. And every time I was going live with the other person, right before you hit the live button, and I'm going to do it right now just to see. So right before you go hit the live button, Instagram tells you how many of your.
[00:45:58.880] – Jen Lehner Followers are.
[00:46:00.540] – Miriam Schulman On the platform. Not live, but actually on the platform. So back in January, the most I ever had was 65. Not tuning into my lives, let's be clear, but available to become live. And I have 27,000 followers. Jen, would you like to take a guess? Right now in, I don't know when this is airing, but we're recording September 2023. How many do you think are active right now and we're recording in the afternoon?
[00:46:31.820] – Jen Lehner I don't know. But I just went live. I'm live right now. And it did.
[00:46:35.530] – Miriam Schulman Not- It's not 65.
[00:46:37.550] – Jen Lehner It didn't tell me. It didn't give me that number.
[00:46:39.400] - Miriam Schulman There's probably nobody. Okay. You want to know how many are active right now? Fifteen. 15 people. That's it.
[00:46:47.560] – Jen Lehner But do you trust... And plus it lives there. Our lives live on. So I think it's still worth it.
[00:46:55.210] – Miriam Schulman Well.
[00:46:56.180] – Jen Lehner You don't think so?
[00:46:57.940] – Miriam Schulman I'm too self-conscious when there's no one showing up to my life like, Hello, and leave a comment if you have a question. It used to be that the live automatically went into your feed and everything stayed, the comments stayed there. The way it works now is that you have to reshare it and starts from zero anyway. You lose that juice.
[00:47:21.210] – Jen Lehner Oh, okay. Yeah.
[00:47:22.590] – Miriam Schulman It's a disappointment.
[00:47:24.110] – Jen Lehner Are you doing Facebook lives? No. Are you doing… [00:47:28.180] – Miriam Schulman You're doing reels. I told you before we hit record that this would be a fail if you wanted to ask me about what.
[00:47:33.620] – Jen Lehner I'm using. It's not a fail because this helps people. For one thing, it makes people feel better about not being all the places.
[00:47:41.500] – Miriam Schulman I tell people that it's more important to spend 10 hours connecting and talking to potential customers than it is spending 10 hours creating content. The person who spends 10 hours not being sleeping beauty, but going hiding in the woods until you're perfect, getting your logo and your soundtrack and all that stuff perfect. But actually going out in the world with your pimples and talking to people, that's going to be more successful entrepreneur than the one who's spending the same amount of time creating content for the Zuckerverse
[00:48:15.060] – Jen Lehner Okay, well, I have to weigh in here and say that I agree with that, except I think you can have both. I think if you have a team creating content for you, that frees you up to go out and do the important face-to-face connections with customers.
[00:48:31.780] – Miriam Schulman And clients. Well, 100 %, because whenever I say that, people call me out on it. They're like, Well, aren't you talking to us on a podcast right now? And how does that happen?
[00:48:40.160] – Jen Lehner Good point.
[00:48:41.930] – Miriam Schulman Yes. I even said so earlier, if you're running social media ads, they can't show up to this empty storefront or whatever, the diner with no cars in the driveway. You have to have something going on on that platform. Yeah, the bulk of my investment goes into monetizing it.
[00:49:04.670] - Jen Lehner Well, whatever you're doing is working. So is there going to be a book number two?
[00:49:10.730] – Miriam Schulman Oh, you know what? It's like after you have a baby and you have amnesia about how hard the trip it was the first time. Yeah, maybe. Yes. I'm thinking about doing one more on creativity.
[00:49:23.600] – Jen Lehner Will you stay with Harper Collins?
[00:49:26.140] – Miriam Schulman I don't know. It depends if they're interested in my new topic. So the acquiring editor is the editor who makes the decision that, yes, we want to publish this book and usually they have to go to a higher up and get the monies and all that. Sarah, who was my acquiring editor, they closed my imprint. They closed my branch of Harper Collins, so she's no longer with them. I don't have a cheerleader over there, but the book has done well.
[00:49:58.410] – Jen Lehner The dollar are the cheerleader.
[00:50:01.430] – Miriam Schulman Yeah, that's true. Yeah.
[00:50:03.660] – Jen Lehner Okay, before we sign off, I want to get to the really important stuff, which is are you watching the new season of Rony?
[00:50:11.040] – Miriam Schulman No, I'm not. Is that a disappointment to you?
[00:50:13.840] – Jen Lehner I can't even believe you haven't watched Mrs. Maisel and you live on Riverside Drive.
[00:50:18.300] – Miriam Schulman No. Okay. I mean, my watching habits are really a horror show. My husband and I got him to watch Hoarders the other day.
[00:50:27.900] – Jen Lehner I can't watch that show.
[00:50:29.590] – Miriam Schulman That is a really good show for self-development. You watch one show of that and your house will be clean. You will question all your life choices.
[00:50:38.940] – Jen Lehner Yeah, that when they get to the kitchen. [00:50:40.950] – Miriam Schulman We watch it and then we go and we clean up the whole apartment.
[00:50:43.480] – Jen Lehner They find dead animals in the kitchen that have been... Oh, my God, I can't even. No, Real Housewives of New York, the new season is not too bad. It's not as good as.
[00:50:52.670] – Miriam Schulman The original crew. So you think I'd like it?
[00:50:54.730] – Jen Lehner I do. There's a couple of girls on there I think you would like. All right, I'll go check it out. Okay. They're also super annoying.
[00:51:00.540] – Miriam Schulman But I'm listening to Bethany's podcast.
[00:51:03.420] – Jen Lehner Oh, so good. Just Bee?
[00:51:06.080] – Miriam Schulman I can't tell the.
[00:51:06.900] – Jen Lehner Difference between them. She puts the same content on four different podcasts.
[00:51:10.000] – Miriam Schulman I don't know. Then why? Yeah.
[00:51:12.700] – Jen Lehner Oh, no. But yeah, I bought so many new makeup products, and I even bought vegan caviar the other day at her suggestion.
[00:51:20.810] – Miriam Schulman It
[00:51:21.510] – Jen Lehner Was really, really, really good. It was made from truffles. It's from Italy. I mean, it wasn't made to be vegan. It was actually just made to be this delicious truffle that was very much like the consistency and saltiness and flavor of caviar, but it just happened to be vegan. So I was like, Oh, I have to try it. But anyway, okay. So we've really covered 42 topics. Writing the summary of this show is going to be fun.
[00:51:44.490] – Miriam Schulman Are you going to use ChatGPT or are you going to use or something?
[00:51:49.400] – Jen Lehner You know what? I'm going to throw it into ChatGPT and Claude, and I'm going to ask it to pull out the main points to give me the hook, the title, the summary, all of the things. I'm excited. So thank you so much, Miriam, for being here. Remember to check out Miriam's podcast. It's called The Inspiration Place. You could get it anywhere you get your podcast. It's really fantastic. She has amazing guests on there, and she's just a gifted host. Don't forget to leave a review on iTunes for this podcast. Take a screenshot and send it to me through Instagram since we talked about that as a way of connecting with our audience. And that's Jen, underscore L-E-H-N-E-R. Miriam, thank you so much.
[00:52:35.650] – Miriam Schulman And you're sending them a free book, right?
[00:52:37.490] – Jen Lehner Oh, yeah. And I'm sending you a free book. And the reason you're going to do that is because I am going to send you a free book, Entrepreneur by Miriam Scholman, which you need to get anyway. It's just such a good book. Miriam, thank you so much.
[00:52:52.000] – Miriam Schulman And they have a deadline for doing this, right?
[00:52:54.680] – Jen Lehner This has to be submitted by November first to qualify for the free book. Miriam, thank you so much for joining us again today. As always, it was so much fun and I learned a ton.
[00:53:07.000] - Miriam Schulman Thanks, Jen. I learned a lot, too.
