Today’s show guest is Brian D. Evans who is an Inc. 500 entrepreneur who was named number seven marketing influencer at Forbes, startup advisor, growth hacker, branding strategist, and the founder and CEO of Influencive. After being turned down by some of the larger publications such as Forbes and Inc. Magazine, Brian launched Influencive as a way to showcase himself as a writer, and in just over a year, he’s grown this content platform to attracting 1 million readers per month.

In today’s episode, Brian gives us some key tactics and actionable insights on how to increase your chances of getting featured at larger publications, including how to come up with the best title for your article and exactly how long your post should be. Let’s jump right into this episode.

Jay: Brian, thanks so much for joining us and coming on The Jay Kim Show. We’re happy to have you. For our audience who might not have heard of who you are, can you please give us a quick introduction? Who is Brian D. Evans and what do you do for a living?

Brian: Yeah, thanks for having me. Really appreciate you having me here. I’m an entrepreneur. I made the Inc. 500 list couple of years ago of one of the fastest growing advertising agencies in America. I run a motivational platform called Influencive.com, and I’ve been doing a lot more personal branding lately, and have sort of inadvertently stumbled across this combination of brands, meaning personal brands. I’m a writer for a lot of different platforms. I write for Forbes, Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, and of course, my own site, Influencive.

Jay: Right. Yeah, so Influencive is actually really taking off. I mean, for our audience listening, if you follow the online marketing or entrepreneurship or pretty much anything online, digital, marketing-wise, you’ll see Influencive pop up as one of the places where a lot of the attention is going to and so it’s quite an impressive feat that you pulled off, Brian. Maybe you could take a step back and give us a little bit of background, sort of how you came up and were you a born and bred entrepreneur from the get, like baseball cards, lemonade stands type guy or did you stumble upon this entrepreneurship somewhere along the way?

Brian: No, actually the story for me started in school. I struggled in school big time. I basically didn’t fail, but I just didn’t do very well. I wasn’t good at school. From the get-go, they took the pencil out of my left hand and put it in my right hand and everything was backwards for me, so I really struggled big time in school, so I had to learn how to learn myself because I felt like I wasn’t getting … I was in very small town. No offense to the school system there, but it was old school, so they were used to teaching for the masses, not teaching individually, so I struggled a lot in school. Basically, video games taught me entrepreneurship.

Jay: Wow.

Brian: I learned from video games that you can fail and you can lose and then still come back and get up again and give it another go, so I learned that from video games, and I had this mindset of, okay, what can I do? First Fast and the Furious came out, I was into cars. I just got my driver’s license at that point, I think, or I was close to it. I was into that whole world of import cars and modifying them and things like that. I realized that people wanted these flamethrower things that came out of the back of the car for the car shows and stuff. So I was like-

Jay: Oh, yeah.

Brian: Yeah. So I was like, okay, let me figure out how to make these. So I went to a friend. We figured how to make them. I started selling them on eBay. They did pretty well. They sold quite a bit for a 16 and a half, 17 year old kid at the time. Embarrassingly-

Jay: I’ve always wondered what … First of all, are they legal?

Brian: Well, today, no. I mean, not on the street. Back then, there weren’t specifically laws, like necessarily that you couldn’t do it, but the pitch was that it was for car shows. Whether people use it for that or not is anybody’s guess, but anyway so they did well, they sold really well. Somebody came to me when I was 18, 18 and a half and said, “Hey, we want to buy your business.”

At this point, I didn’t see myself as an entrepreneur, so I was like, “Okay. Cool.” For 18 and a half year old at the time that really disliked school, I was like, this is cool, okay. I’m going sell it. So I sold the business, not a huge amount but a good amount frankly at the time. So then I was like, “Okay, what else can I do online? I sold these things on eBay, what else is out there?” I got into early SEO and figuring out how to get lots of traffic online.

This is over 12 years ago at this point when SEO was just becoming a thing. It wasn’t even really … I don’t think it was called that at that point. I was figuring out how to get traffic online. I started generating lots of traffic. Started putting ads up and making quite a bit of money from ads, but then I said to myself, “Okay well, how else can I make money? Someone is making money off me from these ads,” so I got into selling other people’s stuff, everything from health products to just various physical products, eventually got into apps that way because I realized that people wanted marketing. They wanted traffic, right?

What I learned was how to get people to buy things, how to get people to take action on specific things online in addition to getting all this traffic. I went down this whole path and I got into apps when they came out. I worked with some of the big games early on and just driving lots of traffic to them. They would pay me every time I got an install. Again, I’d work with the health products, they’d pay me every time I got a sale.

Jay: Okay.

Brian: Then I said to myself, “Okay well, someone is making a lot of money off me again. I should start my own thing.” So I started this health company. We sold a whole bunch of white labeled health products online, everything from women’s beauty products, to weight loss products, to men’s muscle gain products. Just no real brand behind them though, just random names like nothing anybody has ever heard of and just selling as much volume as we could using the psychology of getting people to buy things online.

Jay: Great.

Brian: I kind of got bored with all that because I was like I’m not putting my name behind this. I don’t really believe in it, just some random brand that I came up with last night. It wasn’t a whole branding thing. I eventually had this moment where I was like, “Okay well, I want to do something for a bigger purpose rather than just making money.”

Jay: Right. Was the stuff before that that you were doing with the driving traffic, was that just you yourself or did you actually work with partners or a bunch of?

Brian: Pretty much. I have a partner who is still my partner to this day that we did a lot of the health stuff with and some of the app stuff, but pretty much up until a few years ago, I was pretty much a one-man show. I would hire like VAs and contractors and things like that to sort of help me do specific tasks, but I never had any employees. I had a business partner at one point, but most of the time it was kind of this solo journey.

Occasionally I’d partner with people on certain specific projects, but mostly kind of a one-man show. I was always the person that just didn’t really like to explain things to other people and kind of slow me down so to speak. My mind worked in weird ways, so I was like no, I’ve just got to run with it, which is good and bad, right?

Jay: Right.

Brian: Sometimes you fail even bigger because you think you’re onto something and it’s a horrible idea. Other times it works better, right?

Jay: Well, it’s funny because I think a lot of entrepreneurs suffer with the same, with a similar thing this sort of “superhero syndrome” or whatever word.

Brian: Of course.

Jay: You can do this stuff the best and a lot of times it actually is true. For example, just something as simple as like using a concierge service to book a reservation, rather than send the email back and forth, it’s so much easier for me to just pick up the phone and call the restaurant myself, right? I mean, that’s a very simple example of that, but there are times where it’s good to outsource. If you can learn how to let go of some of that stuff, I think it really is helpful.

Brian: Yeah, totally. I think it really comes down to an individual level because like one example is for me people always ask me like, “What are your routines?” It’s weird to say, but I don’t have … I have a couple of routines that I do, but I don’t … I think again it comes back to the individual basis, like whatever works for you. For me I just love not having specific routine sets, because to me having the exact same thing on my calendar or doing the exact same thing everyday is kind of like torture for me.

If I have too many things scheduled, like if I have more than four or five meetings scheduled in a day, I just freak out. I just can’t do it. I’m more spontaneous. There’s many examples of really successful entrepreneurs that are more on the spontaneous side, like Warren Buffett is an example. He doesn’t even schedule … I’m not this extreme, but he doesn’t even schedule meetings more than a day in advance. He says, “If you want to meet with me tomorrow, just call me tomorrow.”

Jay: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get that. I mean, the funny thing, Brian, is these days there’s such a focus now on trying to hack everything and streamline and cherry-pick tactics from successful people and blah, blah, blah. A lot of times it doesn’t scale like that, because every person is unique.

Brian: Everybody is unique.

Jay: What works for one person definitely doesn’t always work for the next. You’re absolutely right. It’s a personal thing, right?

Brian: It really is, yeah. I tell people that all the time. I think we idolize people, right? We take a look at someone like Tim Ferriss or Tony Robbins and we say, “Wow, Tony Robbins jumps on trampolines and does this priming exercise every morning and it’s fired up.” That’s cool, like that works for Tony. That might work for many other people, but it might not work for you, right?

Jay: Yeah.

Brian: I think you really have to … It comes back to knowing yourself and just seeing how your body and your mind and everything works, and just responding to it. I think people are so used to just taking a system and going with it, that they don’t actually slow down to be present in that moment and say, “Is this actually working for me?” Like a relationship, right?

Jay: Yeah.

Brian: You could have the hot guy or the hot girl and be super excited about it, but at the end of the day that’s only going to last so long, right?

Jay: Right, yeah.

Brian: 10 years, 20 years from now they might not be the hot guy or the hot girl anymore, who knows, right?

Jay: Yeah.

Brian: You have to slow down. It’s the same thing there, you have to kind of slow down and say, “Is this the right sort of fit for me after a certain period of time,” right?

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that’s a good point. Okay, so after you were doing your sort of health supplements and white labeling, what was the next step? You decided that you wanted to do something a little bit more personal with your name behind it.

Brian: Yes. There was one more step between that and sort of the personal side of branding for me, was I had a whole bunch of people coming to me and saying, “Hey, we want you to do what you just did for us.” That’s how I got into starting my agency, but with the agency what I learned early on was hey, I can pick projects that I really want to work on. I had been lucky to be relatively successful up to that point, so I was like, okay, if I’m going to do this agency thing, I really want to be able to hand-pick clients and projects that I work on.

That was a good warm-up because I was working with a lot of other personal brands and bigger companies and brands that wanted to do branding and getting their message out there. I had a lot of warm-up before I got into a lot of my own stuff. I was working with celebrities and just different people.

Some of them, most of them I can’t talk too much about, but just working with a lot of musicians and actors and just CEOs and just helping them with their branding, helping them do writing, and getting their personal message out. Because here’s an interesting thing, if you look at any of the most successful companies in the world, what do you think of? A person, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, right?

Jay: Right.

Brian: Apple, Steve Jobs.

Jay: Right.

Brian: Microsoft, Bill Gates.

Jay: Right.

Brian: If you look at any of these companies that are still doing really well and if you think about some of the ones that are not doing well, you don’t think of a person. I realized at one point that hey, the person and the message in the actual story is not really the company’s story. It’s kind of the people. Microsoft’s story is like the Bill Gates’ story. Facebook’s story is like the Mark Zuckerberg’s story. It’s like been made into a movie.

Jay: Right.

Brian: Snapchat even, like the guys behind them, so people connect with people. They don’t connect with some mysterious brand at the top of the mountain that’s got dark sunglasses on. They connect with people. That’s how I got into sort of doing my own. I realized at one point I said, okay I’m doing all this stuff for everybody else. I need to do something for myself.

I wanted to be a writer for different platforms. I started so many content, got rejected, rejected, rejected. I tried to get into like Forbes and Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, all those kind of business motivation kind of sites, and just got rejected. I was like okay, what else should I do? I had this domain, it was called Influencive.com I knew I wanted to do … I had it for like five years. I knew I wanted to do something with it.

I just said okay, let’s use this. I’m going to put a solo author kind of blog. I started posting content and after a while, the first content honestly wasn’t so good. I got a lot of not negative feedback, but just super critical feedback of, “The ending wasn’t so strong, blah, blah, blah.” What happened was in time it got better and better and better. At one point about a month in, this is January 2016, about a month in, I started getting requests and said, “Hey, can we write for this site too? I can’t believe how awesome it’s become, blah, blah, blah.” I said, “Okay.” I started allotting other people to write for the site.

Jay: Right.

Brian: Then before I knew it, there was like 10 people, 20 people, 30 people, 50 people, 100 people, and all these people wanted to write for this site. It kind of became like this marketing channel too because all these writers and people wanted to write. Some of them were really established.

Then about two, three months in, I resubmitted to Inc. Magazine and they were like, “Yeah, cool. We love what you’ve been writing, et cetera,” so I got a column on there. It started all coming together. This is kind of Influencive and my sort of personal branding. People in the industry who knew me, knew me. They knew a lot about what I’ve done, but like in the public sense nobody really knew much about me.

Jay: Right.

Brian: It all started coming together when I started writing on all these platforms, because I was sharing my experience combined with a message of how someone else can go and do that thing. Influencive really took off that year. It was largely, I think, due to not just my personal brand, but all the people building their personal brand that were writing for Influencive. Some of them now have got, I’m not saying it’s only due to Influencive, but some of them have now become relatively famous, super famous in some cases and have these huge audiences online. We have writers that reach 20 million people a month.

Jay: Wow.

Brian: Across their different columns. Before I knew it, I had got my goal of reaching … I had got my Forbes column. I had got my Entrepreneur Magazine column. I had got my Inc. and my Huffington Post, and I got all those columns in addition to Influencive taking off. It kind of all happened at once, then I started getting podcast requests. People wanted me to write books with them and publishing companies started reaching out asking me to write books, and all these things started happening and take off at once.

Jay: That’s incredible.

Brian: Yeah.

Jay: Let me ask you something. Let’s say you probably launched Influencive as your solo author, your own blog website.

Brian: Yeah.

Jay: What would you say that was like end of 2015?

Brian: It was like end of 2015, early 2016.

Jay: Okay. At that point, how much content were you publishing? Were you writing like every day, every week? What was the cadence of your output?

Brian: Same thing we were talking about earlier, it was pretty random. It was sometimes I would publish like dailies, other weeks it would be like once a week. I think I went one period where it was like one article in two or three weeks. It was pretty random because I was trying to figure out the formula for it, but there really wasn’t a formula.

There’s different schools of thought there. There’s the school of thought of yeah, you’ve got to publish tons and tons of content, and some of these sites do publish tons and tons of content, but what happens is and what the benefit right now at least for Influencive is, we’re only publishing a couple of articles a day. Each individual article is getting a lot of traffic and a lot of exposure across social media, across the website, across different platforms, email lists.

As it grows and grows and grows, we’ll inevitably have to publish more content, more and more content, but it’s kind of at that sweet spot at least today of a couple of articles a day. Yeah, up until six months ago, it was really random. It was like testing all sorts of different wild theories and really what I’ve settled on at least today is that just a couple of articles a day is kind of the sweet spot at this point.

Jay: Right. Let’s say when you started having somewhat of a database, so to speak, of published blog posts or articles, was that …

Brian: Yeah.

Jay: I mean, at what point did you … Were you actively still pitching some of the larger publications like Forbes, Inc. and stuff like that? Or was it kind of you were just mostly focused on Influencive and then some of your articles just kind of fell into their laps, so they kind of reverse inquiried you?

Brian: Yeah. What happened was, it was kind of like a social proof thing I wanted. Influencive wasn’t Influencive then. People didn’t see it like that. It was just kind of a smaller site. I wanted to establish myself and prove that I could be a writer on these other sites still, so I was kind of still in this like proving myself mindset. I wanted those other columns to show people that, “Wow, Brian is writing for this and this site. We should definitely check out Influencive next time we see an article.”

It indirectly helped build Influencive because they saw me at least personally as wow, he’s writing for Forbes? That’s amazing. Then what happened was I got this following of people now in the hundreds of thousands, I have 260,000 people that follow me on Twitter, 100,000 on Instagram and different platforms and I’ve got this whole following of people that just doesn’t really matter at this point where I publish something. They just want to see what I’m writing.

Jay: Right.

Brian: I’m not saying that’s the only reason Influencive is what it is, but that’s just one of the contributing factors that helped get it up till that point.

Jay: It was like a retro cycle almost where people would notice you and it would drive organic traffic back to Influencive, which was your initial goal anyway.

Brian: Yeah, exactly.

Jay: Yeah, pretty cool.

Brian: Yeah.

Jay: Okay, so let’s say because I know there’s a lot of listeners and myself included who would love to publish on not only Influencive, but maybe write a guest post for Forbes or Inc. or one of these. I think people want that as social proof. In your experience, how long does it take once you start trying to publish and you’re writing consistently, whether it’s on your home blog or on your medium or your LinkedIn or maybe you get one or two larger publications that you pitch and they publish your stuff?

I hear both sides where it’s like you have to write for three years and then you’ll get your chance. Then when I hear your story, that you extremely quickly were able to not only build up Influencive, but also become quite an authority amongst all the big names. What would you say is the best, most effective way to streamline that process?

Brian: I would say first of all, everybody is on their own sort of time path but one thing I want people to really know, don’t fall into the trap of saying, “Yeah, I’ve got to get a hundred rejection letters before I’m going to get published,” because then that can become like … You can subconsciously cause yourself to fail by thinking that oh, I need a hundred rejections or I need to be rejected for three years before I’m going to get anywhere.

Jay: Yeah.

Brian: For me, there’s a couple of things that I realized that helped me go faster and I think this is what will help other people as well. The first tip that I realized, the simplest way to create good content was like take questions that people commonly ask you. No matter what you’re an expert in, it doesn’t matter if you’re an expert in cameras, Rubik’s cubes, internet marketing, social media, whatever it happens to be, it can be even the most random thing because you will have other people that want to know about that. Take those questions that they ask you, if you see it more than once depending on the size of your audience, use that as a basis to write about something.

I literally still use this formula to this day. I’ll hear somebody say, “Well Brian, how do I get to 100,000 followers on Facebook in 30 days, if I really had to do it in 30 days?” I had that question like a number of times, so I wrote an article about it. I said, “If you want to get 100,000 followers on Facebook in 30 days, this is how you would do it.” I made an article about that and it took off, and people wanted to see it, but it came from just people asking me that question.

Whatever people ask you commonly, use that as the basis of what you’re going to write about. It does help to have a body of work. What you can do is if you don’t have access to a platform to write on yet, you can get access to like a medium. You can write on LinkedIn. You can even write a post on Facebook. You can write a post on Instagram. Instagram is kind of like a blogging platform now. You can put a picture up or something, and then you can leave a long comment that’s basically like …

Look at someone like Andy Frisella, or even Gary Vaynerchuk does it too, they leave long sort of captions rather that’s basically like a blog post. You can test whatever platform you have access to and you will have access to something to put that body of work out there. Then as that stuff starts to do well, what you can do is to help reinforce your pitch to other platforms. You can go to them and say, “Hey, here’s my other articles that are out there. They’re doing pretty well. I think if it was on a bigger platform like yours, it would be doing really well.”

Having that body of work, which everyone can do, I think what people make the mistake with writing is they try to create this perfect thing, right? It’s kind of like throwing darts at a wall honestly. If you think about it like you’re going to put out your … It’s not writing a book. Writing articles online is not a book. It’s like you’re not spending two years of editing to put out this perfectly polished product. That’s not a book. It’s less polished than that.

It’s hey, people ask me this question. I’m going to write about it. You’re going to misstep sometimes. Sometimes it’s not going to work. You’re going to put out articles and they’re just not going to get any traction. People aren’t going to like it. What you’ll realize, what people will realize after a while too is that the headlines and how they see them before they click on them is super important. There’s a number of tools that will help you. There’s one called CoSchedule Headline Analyzer. It’s free. People can Google that and it will give you like a score on your headline. It will say, “You need more power words or you need more emotional words.”

Jay: Co, what did you say it was?

Brian: CoSchedule Headline Analyzer. If you Google that, the tool will come up. It’s free. Just basically copy and paste your headline in there and it will give you a score and it will say like, oh, it’s pretty low. It’s a 50, but it will take zero to 100 I think is the score. You want to be somewhere over like a 65, but it will tell you. It will say you need more emotional words, and power words, or stuff like that.

Jay: That’s pretty cool. We’ll have that linked up.

Brian: Yeah, how you frame the content is almost more important than the actual content, because if nobody clicks on it, if nobody sees it, what does it matter that you wrote it, right?

Jay: Right. What do you think about … So there’s the whole long form versus short form and medium form and what’s the ideal length of an article? What are your thoughts on that?

Brian: Yeah. Look, people have a short attention spans, okay? If your article is more than 800 words, you need it to be extremely authoritative. You need to quote famous people. You need to have pictures. Yeah, if it’s more than 800 words, it needs to be extremely, extremely good. Then you’re getting more into the category of like polished, polished work, but for majority of articles, 500 to 800 words is the sweet spot especially if you’re mainly sharing them on social media and things like that.

If you have a big built-in audience that wants to read 5,000 words about some super high tech or detailed topic of some kind, if you’re an expert in some kind of camera technology and you want to write a white paper on it, sure you can do that. But if you want to reach people in the business or entrepreneurial or motivational kind of spaces, it needs to be short and sweet because you have hundreds, thousands of sites and articles competing for their attention.

Just reading an article these days, there’s popups and things happening to try to distract them and get them away from the article, so what I haven’t seen as the sweet spot is really 500 to 800 words or so and people can read that in under 10 minutes more like five depending on a person. The formatting of the articles is also super important, more so than length, the formatting. If you put a giant block of text on the screen, nobody is going to read it. You need to have sub-headlines and bold underlined things.

Think about it like you’re trying to get people down to the next point, so you can have pictures in there sometimes, occasionally you can sub-headlines and different things to kind of keep them moving along. If you put a giant block of text, people will look at it and go, “Oh, man that looks like a lot of stuff.” Even though it’s the exact same amount of words, it just looks like more. It’s the formatting as much it is keeping it relatively short, at least to start.

Once you’ve built a huge audience that wants to hear about something in more depth, then you can go into bigger articles. If you’re taking it entirely the SEO approach where you’re trying to get traffic from SEO, longer content could do well. In terms of actually getting people to read and follow you and stay following you, you want it to be short and sweet.

Jay: Nice. Good tips, Brian. Is there one piece that you did that you remember in the first whatever six months that you knew just kind of was the tipping point or the turning point that maybe got picked up by some larger publication or maybe just went viral on Influencive?

Brian: Yeah. I wrote an article called Creating the Inevitability of Success Mindset and I think maybe the headline combined with … It was on Influencive actually, it had like 800,000 reads in like 30 days or something like that.

Jay: Wow.

Brian: It’s still to this day one of my most read articles. Basically the idea was, which is really simple but strong, is that people go through life. They’ll say to themselves, “I’m going to try to start a business,” or, “I might make a change in my job one day,” or, “I’m going to try to be successful one day.” They use all these conditional statements.

What I realized works for me and I think other people resonated with this, that’s why they read it, that’s why they shared it so much, was that if you remove those conditional statements, and it’s not an ego thing. It’s not like you’re an egomaniac and you think everything is going to be successful, but when you remove the conditional statements, you believe in yourself more. Every time I say to myself now, “I’m going to try to do this,” I reframe immediately and say, “I’m going to do this.”

Jay: Right.

Brian: That simple shift for me was a huge turning point in my life really of just believing in myself more. Going to the title, it sort of helped make your success inevitable because you actually believe in yourself.

Jay: Right.

Brian: That was one of the ideas of the article. Then the other idea is simple. Tony Robbins talks about this a lot, you’ll see somebody sitting on a couch slumped over, a bag potato chips in front of them and they’re saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong with my life,” huge frown on their face and Tony would say to them, “Well, maybe it’s your face,” they’ve got this huge frown on their face.

Our physicality is super important, our posture, how we carry ourselves, even our face. We have like 42 muscles in our face, I think Tony says, and something as simple as smiling or standing up straight, there’s one called power posing where you put your hands on your hips like Superman and stand up straight, and it literally changes your body.

You do that before like some important meeting or something and you’ll just be fired up. I think people just overlook some of these simple things, but that’s I think why that article took off is because it was just kind of short and sweet, but highlighting important things that people overlook.

Jay: That’s awesome.

Brian: Yeah.

Jay: Brian, we have to wrap up soon. Just a couple of more questions, what do you … I mean, you’ve made an incredible progress in say the last 12 to 18 months, what does the next 12 to 18 months look like for you?

Brian: Yeah. My struggle with Influencive, the one struggle, is that I started as this project that I was deeply passionate about. I’ve always said to myself, I don’t want to monetize, I don’t want to sell courses and products and I don’t want to make it into this thing where people see it as like … I don’t want to turn into another site where it’s just ads all over the place and buy this course and buy this thing.

My biggest struggle with Influencive was really not monetizing it as heavily as I know I could have. The next sort of thing for Influencive is we’re doing a mastermind group. Basically we’re taking 20 people that … This is not for everybody. This is for people that have already sort of seen and smelled that success, but there’s a contest for people that maybe haven’t been that successful yet or just haven’t made it on that level yet. It’s at Influencive.com/contest. They can win a free spot at this mastermind by going to that link.

Yeah, the next thing is sort of putting together some indirect ways to monetize something that I don’t really want to monetize, because I really want to keep it … As much as I am an entrepreneur, I don’t want this to be a business, but I know that I have to make it that. My goal with Influencive was always just reaching and inspiring as many people as possible. It wasn’t to make money with it, but it’s become so big at this point. My entrepreneurial mind is like okay, you’ve got to do something on the monetization side.

I’m not saying it’s not making money, but the next step, next phase is to expand out of just articles and we’re getting into video content now. We’re doing lots of stuff on Instagram. We have a huge YouTube channel, so it will be doing other types of content and then events, like this mastermind. We might do bigger events in the future, but to start with, it’s the mastermind.

Jay: That’s awesome. Yeah.

Brian: Yeah.

Jay: Good luck with that. I know you’re going to do well.

Brian: Yeah.

Jay: Okay, last two questions, and the last one is just where people are going to find you. The second to the last question is just one piece of parting advice, given what you’ve accomplished and how much success you’ve had, what can you leave our listeners with? Just a snippet maybe that you can leave for them?

Brian: I think for most people, and this is simple advice, but most people just overlook this all the time and it absolutely drives me crazy. Literally my goal in life over the last 10 years has been to make doing a super power, so doing things, taking steps forward no matter if it’s a small step or a big step forward has made me successful, because again, going back to my video game mindset thing that I was talking about earlier, you’re going to fail. You’re going to take missteps, but if you don’t take those steps, if you don’t actually start, you’re not going to get anywhere.

My advice to people is look at it like a video game. Unless you die, you’re getting stronger. You’re growing in some way or another, right? It’s okay to fail. It’s okay if your business doesn’t do well. It’s okay if you start something that doesn’t do well. It’s okay if you write an article and nobody likes it. It’s okay. The most important piece of advice there is think about it like a video game. You can take steps and if you don’t do well, you can start over again.

Jay: Awesome. Awesome advice, thank you so much for sharing. Where is the best place people can find you and connect with you, other than obviously Influencive?

Brian: Yeah, Brian D. Evans on any platform, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Brian D. Evans.

Jay: Brian D. Evans, great. Thanks so much again, Brian, really appreciate your time.

Brian: Thanks. Thanks for having me, appreciate it.