Cloris Kylie ClorisKylie.com Reveal your magnificence! This is the motto of performance coach Cloris Kylie. Her mission is bringing out the talents and passion we all possess to maximize our business potential. She works with individuals and corporations, and she has appeared on numerous television, radio, and podcast programs. A contributing instructor for Work-At- Home School, Cloris will share her wealth of knowledge on influencer marketing along with her magnificent, inspirational stories. Caitlin: Well, hey, everybody. I am here with Cloris Kylie from ClorisKylie.com, and Cloris helps coaches, consultants, trainers launch and grow their business online. She shows you how to put all the pieces together so that you can build authority and make an impact, grow your email list, and then monetize that list. Because what s a list unless you can earn money from it, right? They say the money is in the list. So as an influencer marketing specialist, Cloris has been featured on network television, on top-ranked podcasts and YouTube shows, including the number one podcast for entrepreneurs called Entrepreneur on Fire hosted by John Lee Dumas. Hey, John. Cloris articles have been published on websites with millions of followers such as Tiny Buddha, mindbodygreen, and Addicted2Success. So you re going to want to listen to what Cloris has to say, folks. I m super excited. Welcome, Cloris. Tell us a little bit about who you are a little more about who you are and what you do. Cloris: Caitlin, I m so happy to be here today, and I m very excited about this project. I have grown my business in a way that most people grow their business, just by we do one thing, and then it leads you to another. So I had my offline business for about ten years, and I never thought I was going to transition to the online world until I wrote my personal development book. Back then, I didn t know anything about online marketing, and soon I realized that the book wasn t going to sell itself, that I really had to learn whatever it took to build an audience and then to have people read my book, and that s how I started to learn everything about online marketing. And as I started to learn, then I created my podcast and started to learn about guest blogging and those connections that s what led me to eventually focus on digital marketing. So it s quite a journey. Caitlin: Yes, yes. And I ve been to your website and in one of your courses. I m very impressed with what you ve been doing, and you re from Venezuela as well, so you re able to connect to audiences in two different languages too, which is really cool. Influencing I think it just spans the entire globe, and so if you can do that in multiple languages, you re much more powerful, which I love that. And you use the word magnificence, and I can see it in your background. You use the word magnificence a lot, which is so awesome because that is what everybody has, and we just don t realize that we have it, and we just think, oh, we have this business. And especially, if you re in the corporate world right now, or you have an offline business that s in a brick-and-mortar building, we don t realize what we have to offer the world.
So the next topic we re going to talk about is leverage, and that s such a buzzword in the internet marketing world and in entrepreneurship world and the freelancing world, so we re going to talk about that. So I want you to tell us now what leverage is, and how we can use it even beginners how we can use that to grow our business. Cloris: Yeah. Well, leverage really is about tapping into connections that you have with people who already have an existing audience, to build instant authority, to grow your list, and to attract the right clients. And when I talk about that, people immediately have this preconceived idea of what connecting with an influencer is, what applying this strategy entails, so they say, I m not ready. It s not for me. Especially if you re making the transition that you actually said you re in the corporate world, you want to start your business, or your business is still small. You feel like that s okay, I ll do that later. That s not important. But the truth is that you can do influencer marketing at a really small scale with what I call niche influencers. So I would say, anytime you have the opportunity to connect with somebody who s reaching the people you want to reach, you are doing influencer marketing, and those connections can be started today. I m going to share an interesting story I have. There was a study done by Canon Australia, and the study was called Decoy, and you might have heard about it because millions of people actually heard about this study. But basically, they had different photographers six photographers do a session with a person, right? And they described the person in a very different way to each photographer. So he was a convict to one photographer. The other one, he was a retiree and all kinds of different occupations and personalities that they described to the photographer. And it s incredible to see how at the end of these sessions, the photographs are entirely different. The product that these artists created was based on their perception of the person, what they wanted to capture about that person, and what they thought was true about them. So it just shows you the power of perception. So when you connect with somebody who already has an existing audience even if that audience is ten people but ten people who really trust that leader of that audience, and they introduce you as the expert then you immediately become an expert, and that is how you don t have to convince them to associate with you, to buy from you because they trust you. So that s the whole essence of it. Caitlin: Yes, I love that. And actually, before I met you and learned about really what influencer marketing is, I didn t realize that I d been doing it for the entire existence of my online business. I think back to when I first launched my first course with Proofread Anywhere. I did exactly what you just said. I went through and I found some people in the work-at-home world who had blogs, like Anna at Real Ways to Earn Money Online.com and Money Saving Mom and some of the speakers that are here in Work-At-Home School. They were reaching the people that I wanted to reach, and I approached them, and I was like, Hey, I m an expert proofreader. I have an excellent course to teach people how to do what I do. And just told them a little bit about me, and they decided to interview me on their blog. And I actually, at the time, called it building trust by proxy because these people already trusted Crystal at Money Saving Mom and Anna at Real Ways to Earn as their leader. So when they introduced me as their friend and proofreading expert, then the people who are reading that post or watching that video or whatever it was automatically trusted me because of that relationship that was already built. And I didn t even
know that that was considered influencer marketing until I met you, so it s just kind of funny, and I can absolutely say that what you teach works because I ve done it. Cloris: Definitely, yeah. I was thinking when I first started my business, I think I was kind of forced to do this, right? Because I didn t have a huge budget to spend $1,000 a day on Facebook ads, and I found that way to really get that momentum I needed to then build the audience to get the income coming, and then I was able to advertise as well. But even then right now, my advertising spend is minimum just because of those connections I ve created. So it s a lot easier, as I said, to connect with somebody who already knows about you and trusts you than somebody who has no idea who you are, and then you re trying to just do the whole process from hey, this is who I am, and this is why you can trust me. Caitlin: Yes, absolutely. It was because of those first affiliates those first influencers that I connected with at Proofread Anywhere that I was ever able to put together something like the Work-At-Home School because I was able to build my name through the success of my programs. And I would only be able to build my programs through those first influencers because like you, I didn t have a lot of money to start out. I had started Proofread Anywhere with $500, and I spent that over the course of like three months, and I was so hesitant to spend money on anything because I didn t know that it was going to work out. I was really fearful, and so it s like I m going to do this the cheapest, totally bootstrapped, cheapest way possible, but I did say I would be willing to pay somebody for a sale if they re willing to promote me. And that was a risk that I was willing to take was to work with influencers and pay them if I made money too. I think that s the fastest way to grow your business is working with other influencers that are in your space and knowing that they re not competitors. A lot of people might look and be like, Oh, they re reaching people I want. They re a competitor, and we re a team! We have the same goal is to help people, especially if we re in the work-at-home world and the marketing world. We all want to help people with the value that we add. So I want to ask you now about your coaching and consulting business, and how you grew that using leverage like what we ve just been talking about how you did that for yourself. Cloris: Yes. Well, basically, what I did at the beginning of as I said, I had this book. I wanted people to read the book, and I didn t know how to start. So the first thing I did, I started a podcast thinking, all right, I m going to start a radio show that was back in the day, it was in Blog TalkRadio, and people are going to listen to my show. Once again, I had that preconception. I was going to have the show, and people will listen to it. So I started doing a lot of monologues, and they were all personal development stuff, and I realized that I had only a few listeners. So I said, Okay. Yeah, I ve got to find a different way to do this. And that s when I thought about having guests. And I thought about it just because I was seeing other people do that. I said, Well, what if I have guests? So I started to have the guests. The guests would promote my show, the interview, with their audience, and then right around the same time, I heard about guest posting from another person who posted on Facebook. So that shows you one thing, though, that you really have to keep your eyes peeled for opportunities out there because one of the guests I had on my show her name is Anita Moorjani and Anita is a person who actually had a near-death experience. She had a terminal cancer. The doctors told her family that she only had less than 24 hours to live. She was that close, and she actually died
for a short period of time. Died like she was completely out, and she had this experience, and she wrote a fantastic book that I definitely recommend too. When she came back from that, because she miraculously healed like after only a few weeks, she was completely free of cancer. Caitlin: Oh, wow. That is crazy. Cloris: It s a very interesting story. She told me that she realized that here in this world we have a flashlight, and whatever we point the flashlight to, that s the world. That s the way we see the world. But if you decide to point that flashlight in different directions, then you see new things that you didn t know were there, just hidden by darkness and same happens to opportunities. That s why you ve got to keep your eyes peeled for those opportunities because they re there. They ve been there all the time. I m sure I had seen guest posting a million times before, but I just wasn t paying attention. But because I was looking desperately for a way to get more readers and an audience, I noticed that, and I researched more into it, and I started to look for blogs that could be ideal for my audience. And that s how I first connected with Lori Deschene from Tiny Buddha, and that was actually, I would say, the most important thing that I did to promote my book back then. Caitlin: Yeah. I can definitely relate to that. I feel like I ve never heard the flashlight analogy before, but it is very true. I think that there a lot of it too has to connect with who s speaking your language too. I know there s probably a lot of people watching this right now, and I ve been this way before it s like, oh, well, there s already somebody out there teaching such and such or doing such and such. Or my prospective students at Proofread Anywhere will ask, aren t there enough proofreaders? Well, no, there s going to be people exiting and entering at all times, but in terms of creating an entrepreneurship or coaching program the way you ve done well, look at it from my perspective. I ve heard about influencer marketing a gazillion times before, but it wasn t until I connected with you that I really started to connect the dots because you spoke my language, and I was really attracted to your style of presentation and the way that you spoke about it. So I think that bridging the gap between where you shine your flashlight and who s speaking your language and just opening up your ears and your eyes at the same time can really connect people to the opportunities that they re meant to be connected with. I really like your story about how you grew your business as influencing marketer coach/personal development. What kind of other influencers are there? Obviously, I m doing work from home, you re doing personal development and influencer marketing. What other kinds of influence are out there? Cloris: Well, there s a right influencer for every business owner you have to. That s one of the things I m saying. I m now writing a book called Beyond Influencer Marketing, and it s about finding the right influencer for you because this is not about just kind of finding somebody who has a bunch of followers or a big audience, having them promote your stuff, and then you re done. This is about creating long-lasting connections. So as I said, it s a process you can start today because those relationships take a while to be nurtured and to grow to a point that you can actually tap into them and use them to grow your business.
So it s a process that starts by you asking yourself, well, first of all, who has my same audience? Right? So you look for those people. But then, it s not just that. It s about people who have an alignment with their values, their style, that is just perfect for you, that you feel good associating yourself with. Because think about it they might be so-called influencers, but it s your personal brand. It s your integrity and your message. You ve got to make sure you re associating yourself with the right people for you. And I always give an example. For example, if I wanted to associate or to join forces with Gary Vaynerchuk I think that s his name he has this very abrasive style. I don t doubt his abilities, and he knows his stuff. He has millions of followers, but it wouldn t be the right audience for me because the audience would listen to me and they d say, oh no, she s just definitely not who we want to listen from. So it s about finding somebody who aligns with your values, with your style somebody you feel like you actually want to be like them. There s something I always remember that Dr. Wayne Dyer said. It s like, I only hang out or I only have friends I want to be like. [sic] So I only associate myself with people I want to be like. If you re with somebody and you ve said to yourself I would never want to be like that person, then that s not an influencer you want to associate yourself with. So ask yourself, as I speak, who do I know who I really don t want to be like because it s not worth really spending your time with them. And then, going back to the kind of influencer then, you have, of course, you have podcasters; you have people who have blogs who promote you with a guest post. It could be a joint venture partners. For example, a life coach, and you re a person who teaches people how to overcome a certain challenge, and you could associate with them as partners because you don t teach exactly the same. It s something that has some sort of synergy in it. And it could be something face-to-face. It could be a leader of a meet-up. It could be the director at the library so will you give a presentation? It could be a leader of a networking group in your area. So there are many leaders that you maybe haven t thought about because they don t have hundreds of thousands of followers, but they have a captive audience. That s what you want. People who have a leadership position in an audience that is perfect for you. Caitlin: Yeah. I hope you guys are all taking notes, man. I think I was thinking, as you were saying I was thinking, like just popped into my head, probably the biggest mistake that people think of when they re considering influencers and looking around in their space, in their niche of who s there, and they see somebody that has their audience they consider them a competitor. And I used to think that way, but now I have the Work-At-Home School where I m working with other influencers whom I used to some of them used to consider competitors, and we ve built something great together. So when you make that switch in your mind from looking at influencers as competition to potential teammates, where you can all grow and you can all influence people together in huge ways that you never would have I never would have been able to do this by myself. Are you kidding me? I d have to I don t want to reinvent the wheel. I don t need to make a course on influencer marketing to be able to feature it in Work-At-Home School. I m going to connect with the people who are amazing at what they do, and then we can all work together and just help a ton of people. But I wouldn t have been able to do that if I had the mindset of considering Cloris a competitor, for example.
I think that s a big mistake that people make when considering approaching influencers or they automatically assume that you are going to get rejected, so you never branch out. And I ve dealt with that too. It s like, I really want to ask this person. I think they d be a great affiliate for Proofread Anywhere, but I m afraid they re going to say no. And I ve dealt with that a lot, especially when I was first getting started, but then you just do it. And then, you re going to get some no s, but in the end, you re just like, okay, well, it s their loss. And you move on because no never means no, it just means next, for you. Yeah. So can you think of any other mistakes that people have that you ve seen people make in terms of reaching out to influencers and trying to form partnerships and whatnot? Cloris: Definitely. I think the mindset is a big obstacle that entrepreneurs face when they re trying to do this. One of the things you said, yes, you consider the other people a competitor, but the mindset of saying, okay, we re here to help each other, and that s important. Actually, that focus on helping first because that s another mistake actually, is just one of what s in it for me from day one, right? You re there to help each other, and when people see that you help them, then they naturally want to reciprocate. So that s one thing. Go into it with an attitude of helping. And then, also going into it with an attitude of, I have a lot to offer. Because you might be again thinking, oh, they re the ones who have the audience. They re the ones who have it all. No, you have a lot to offer even if your business is really small. Because what do you have that nobody else has? Your ideas I mean, even if all you have is your ideas, that s huge. That s huge. I always talk about James Altucher, who he calls himself an idea machine. He says he just sends ideas to people and amazing stuff happens. So he sent this complete document with ideas to Amazon of how they can improve their business, and they loved it so much that they actually flew him to Amazon headquarters and had him over, and all he had was a bunch of ideas. So if that s all you have to offer, you don t have to have an audience. You don t have to have a big business. Then, that s huge. So I would say, first question to ask yourself is what do I have to offer? And to do an assessment and be clear on your magnificence before you go out and reach out to influencers. And then, I would say another big mistake is to not follow up. You got to be persuasive because people maybe they didn t get your message. Maybe they re super busy. They didn t have time to get to it, and they just kind of forgot about it. But if you follow up and you persist, in many situations, you will be successful. And thinking about that I have actually another story that I recently read about. Estee Lauder, the giant of the cosmetics industry, when she was starting her business, she went to pitch her idea to the store in Europe. I think it was Paris. Galeries Lafayette, I think, is the name of it. She went to talk to a manager, and he dismissed her because oh, who is this woman anyway? Like, no. No, thank you. We don t want to carry your products. She was tired of following up nothing. So then she grabbed she had her Estee perfume with her, and then when she was on the ground level of the store, she saw there was a demonstration. So she accidentally spilled the perfume all over the floor, and then everybody who was there at the demonstration it s like, what is that? What is that scent? They all wanted to know, and she said, Guys, it s my scent. And everybody tried it, they loved it, and eventually, that led to her products being in the store. So it just shows you the power of persistence, and that s an important thing when you start, just follow-up. Of course, if you follow
up forever and the person never gets back to you, then look, it s time to move on. Like you said, you move on to the next person. Caitlin: Mm-hmm. Yeah, you just say next. And you reminded me when we were talking about follow-up, recently or, I can t say it was probably about six months ago, I had reached out to somebody to potentially do some writing for me, and it ended up falling through at that time. It just wasn t the right time or the right project, where timing just didn t work out for one reason or another. And a lot of times it is timing. I ve noticed that, and a lot of my students at Proofread Anywhere noticed that as well. That it s just so much has to do with timing. But about six months later, she followed up, and it just so happens that I was just planning the Work-At-Home School, and I needed to have a writer to help me put together some ideas for how we were going to get the word out to people and work with influencers and share this idea with a lot of people. And she followed up at just the right time because then I ended up paying her $2,500 to help me write, and it just so happens she has an email list that is a perfect fit for as a partner for Work-At-Home School. So she got a huge opportunity just for following up, and it goes far beyond the money I paid just for the work. But that s so true, and it always blows my mind how seldom people actually follow up. I ll get tons of pitches for stuff all the time, and very, very few probably less than 10% of the people that send me pitches for one thing or another, whether it s to promote something for them or for a job they want or something like that they don t follow up. And there s just so much power in that. Just responding to an email in general, I think, is really, really powerful. Well, I know there s a lot of people in the audience, and I was in the audience at one point, but people have asked me all the time, how do you become a somebody? What if we don t have a list? Can we still use this thing called leverage to grow a brand-new business, or is this influencer marketing only for well-established businesses? And that s on my list of questions, and we touched on that a little bit, but let s talk about people who don t have a list and how we can still use leverage to grow our business when we re just beginning. Cloris: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, the fact that you have an expertise because I think that s the hardest part of the whole process to define your expertise, to define that magnificence that you want to reveal to the world. So you already know that, and if you don t exactly know it right now, you will very soon. So that s the first thing you have, and with that, then you can come up with a way to contribute to the influencer s business that is not necessarily sharing stuff with other people. It could be ideas that you have. It could be just talking about their book or their podcast with your friends it s just like people in your network. It could be posting a review of their book. And if you write a review on Amazon, that author is going to notice right away. And if that review is a video review, then they re definitely going to notice. So anything you can do that is above and beyond, that is not what everybody does, will set you apart. And once you re in that group, that they kind of start to know you because you comment on their blog post, when they do something on social media then you comment again with insightful comments. It s not just like, oh, this is great, nice. But something that shows that you actually care, and you do whatever you can to support them and to be an advocate for their business. Then, they ll immediately want to help you. That s what I did at the beginning of I didn t have a
list. I was just starting from zero. I needed to get new podcast guests. I needed to connect with these people who had never heard of me, and it was just by supporting them that they got to know me. And then, because they knew me, I said, Hey, would you like to be on my show? And that s how they said yes. Even now, recently, you had Chris Brogan on my show, and if you re not familiar with him, he has a pretty large business. He s considered an influencer, one of those with a large audience and so forth. And I just connected with Chris by subscribing to his newsletter. He sends one every Sunday, and I actually love the newsletter. That s important, that you actually feel like it s a true thing that you re saying. I love the newsletters. Every time I would reply and say, Chris, I think this and that blah blah blah. It s like, oh yeah, good point. So we went through that process for I don t know how many months, and then I said, Okay. This is the right time. Chris, would you like to be on my show? He s like, Yes, of course, I would. So he was on my show, and he says he doesn t really accept requests for interviews that often, but he did it because he knew me. So that s just an example of what you can do today. Caitlin: Yeah. I love that. Especially the idea of, if you read somebody s book and you leave a video review. I think that s huge. I think that s a really, really good idea. Yeah, so I really identify with that. I think a lot of people will go into I love the idea of contributing something of value and letting them know and being supportive of them. Because a lot of people, especially the ones who pitch me, it s all about when I look for somebody to hire onto our BCP Media team, for any reason that we re bringing on any kind of contractor or employee there are a lot, probably about 80% of people, will preface their email or not really follow directions or even make some kind of joke that kind of digs at me or something. They re making it about them and what they can do for me and laying it out, like this is what I m not going to do, and this is what I m looking for, for me. They do not preface it or frame it in a way of like, this is how I can help you. I ended up actually hiring my full-time assistant Elizabeth she s our operations manager for BCP Media because she wrote to me, and she was very enthusiastic. She answered every question that was in my job description, and she had a full-time job already. She was working for Salvation Army as an executive assistant, and I was so impressed that not only did she not allow the fact that she had a full-time job stand in her way from going after what she wanted, but she made it about how she could help me, not how I could help her. And I think that is huge, especially now that I ve become an influencer over the years. Never thought I would say that about myself, but I think that is huge because now in my own influencer marketing, even when I was reaching out to affiliates, very beginning, I did make it about them. I m like, this is how you can win. I m going to pay you to for me to create content for your blog, and then that s all you have to do. And it just made it really easy, like a no-brainer for them. And Elizabeth made it a no-brainer for me to hire her. So approaching it with, like you said, the aspect of how can I support this person and let and you really do have to make sure it s you re not just trying to connect with them so you can have access to their audience or whatever. You want to make it very clear that or you have to make sure that you really do appreciate what they re doing, and they ll be able to see right through it. I know I can see right through it if there s somebody who s just kind of fishing around
for my support of what they re going to do, but they ve never read my emails or whatever. And I can check that. I can look you up and see if you re actually reading my emails, so don t just BS me. And I can see how long you ve been on my email list too, so Cloris: Oh, yeah. There are many nuances that us as humans can detect or perceive, and it s something that we re just kind of born with that. And those nuances can be and if you re having a video conversation with somebody their gestures, just like micro-gestures. That people would say, oh, I m not doing anything, but you are. Or the inflection of your voice, or when you write, the words you choose. That person can tell whether you want to help them or not. And it s the same process, the decision-making process, that somebody makes when they want to work with you, when they want to hire you for whatever it is. If you re selling them something and you go your number one goal I m going to make money today, right? I m going to sell this stuff. Then, of course, that person is going to perceive that, and they will not buy from you. But if you go with the goal, okay, I m going to find a solution for this person s problem. I m going to do whatever it takes to help them. Then they ll be very likely to want to work with you. So it s the same process. It really is a sales process. Caitlin: Yeah. That s all a business is, is selling stuff that solves people s problems. So if we can flip that switch in our minds to solving people s problems and away from, I m going to make money and solve my problems, then you can be so much more profitable. So if we already have a list, is there anything that we need to do to get ready to connect with leaders of existing audiences? Let me rephrase that because we talked about finding out what your thing is, what you magnificence is, and you have this magnificence that kind of motto in your brand. So what steps do we take to figure out what our magnificence is if we have no idea? Like finding your passion, I guess, is how do we find that? Cloris: Well, I would say if there s something that you would do for free they say that that s a good quick question to ask yourself what would I do for free? That s a good indicator that s a passion, right? And would you do it for at least two years on a consistent basis? Would you dedicate your life for at least two years to that, and would you be happy with that? So the best thing you can do is to do a visualization process and just imagine yourself. For example, if you re passionate about let s say running, and you want to start helping people who want to run a marathon. Then imagine yourself just coaching these people for two years, talking about running all day, doing running drills, and creating programs. And if this sounds exciting, then definitely that s one of your passions. If it doesn t, then move on to the next thing because what s important though is that you don t go into something in a rush manner or just to make money, with the thought of, okay, let me just get this going, and then we ll see. It has to be with that excitement because it is hard work. I always say it takes ten years to become an overnight success, so you re going to learn that yes, it takes a lot of work, a lot of dedication, and long hours. So if you don t have that passion, then you ll quit. It s normal. If something is just not fun at all, and you re really not passionate about it, you ll just want to quit. So that s a good way to figure that out.
Caitlin: Yeah. I think looking back I ve been a proofreader since 2007, and if I didn t love proofreading, there s no way on God s green earth that I could have become the blogger at Proofread Anywhere. There s no way that you can fake that. And that actually has helped me sell more stuff because people are like, well, I can tell you love it. There s no way you would have put all this work in if you were faking it or if you were trying to peddle some scam. So people can tell when you re being authentic and passionate, and my passion has since expanded to beyond teaching people proofreading skills to something through the Work-At- Home School. I could talk all day about how much I love the power of skills, and that comes out when I talk to people. I just get so excited. I m like, you don t need a job. You don t need to live in a certain place. You don t need to have no kids. You don t need to be married to a certain person. You just need skills, and with those skills, you can make money. And it starts with one skill. Just like a business, it starts with one paying client. You don t need to have ten paying clients to have a real business. You just need one client, and it s the same thing with skills. You need one skill to start, and that s what I started with. I started well, I started as a cashier at Winn-Dixie in Florida, but I started with a skill of proofreading, and it is something I did for free for many years, and a lot of my students are the same way. But it just starts with one skill, and you branch out from there. I think that s really good advice, to figure out what you love doing so much that you would do it for free, and then it really never feels like work. I think that s another misconception of starting your own business is that you start your own business, and the business owns you. And if you talk to anybody who s started a business that they didn t like, then it is. It s like my father-in-law, for example, he had a business for quite some time, and when we were starting our own businesses, he just kept going back to that whole idea of the business is going to run you. You re never going to have a life again. But business has changed a lot since brick-and-mortar stamp businesses as I ve found as we both found out. He definitely had some great advice in terms of balancing your life and your time and stuff, so I definitely respect that advice as well, but business has changed a lot. So definitely, you want to make sure you love what you do because then it doesn t feel like work. I don t feel like I go to work every day. I feel like I get up, and I do what I love, and I get to help people and impact people and talk to people all day, and it s just my dream job. My dream job, and I didn t get there overnight. I definitely think it s well, it s 2018 now, time recording, and it s been ten years since I started proofreading, and you re absolutely right ten years at least. And a lot of people will look at someone like you, someone like me, with a business and even somebody that s a year ahead of you, and they ll think, I m never going to get there. And you have to remember you have to look back and remember. Those people were beginners. Experts are always beginners. They don t ever wake up with a business in one day. You have to be willing to put in the work and start and to be to put in the work to even figure out what you want to do. I think you have to be willing to put in that work. You can t just sign the dotted line and boom you have a business. Right? Cloris: That s true. And if you think about it, as long as you re a step ahead of somebody else, then you can already teach whatever you ve learned to that person. So you don t need to be this renowned expert with 40 years of experience. All you have to do is have done something that
works. Have an expertise in something that you love to do, and then be willing to share it with other people with the mindset that yes, you have value to offer, always remembering that. Because if you don t believe in yourself, then, of course, you have that in the back of your mind when you re communicating your message, when you re talking to people, when you re selling your stuff, when you re trying to connect with influencers, so it will not work. So it all starts with your own belief in your ability to succeed. Caitlin: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I think back to when I first started Proofread Anywhere. I just come right back to that. And I knew that these influencers were going to want to help me, but I knew that I had to believe in it. And I believed in my product. I didn t I wasn t even the best proofreader. Yeah, I should mention that as well. A lot of my students are much better proofreaders than I ever was, and that is both humbling but also encouraging for anybody watching this who thinks they have to be the absolute best before they can start a business. That s not true at all. I train, and I have testing, and these proofreaders find stuff in even my practice material, and I m like, crap, I can t believe I missed that. It s a humbling experience, but I really want it to be encouraging to you because I was able to build Proofread Anywhere not being the best proofreader. I wasn t in the business as long as a lot of the other influencers in the niche of court reporting, which is the niche where I started, and I was still able to build a business. And some people did not like the fact that I made a business out of something they d been doing longer, but the fact of the matter is, I had skills in terms of marketing and creating products that they did not. So that s where skills really become the deciding factor. It s not how long you ve been doing something. It s what skills you re using to build that into a business in terms of your success. It s all about skills. So I have a few more questions on my list, and I ve been I have a notepad. I was like, I m going to take notes, but I m just like I ve been enraptured on what you had to say, so I haven t even been able to take notes. But hopefully you guys have been taking notes, and you can email me your notes because I need them. I want to know about so we talked a little about brick-and-mortar businesses. We just touched on it a little bit. I want to know if influencer marketing do you think that will ever replace traditional advertising, like Facebook ads or obviously print ads and stuff like that? Do you think somebody could run a business just based on influencer marketing? Cloris: You could potentially run a business just with influencer marketing. When I first started, as I said, I didn t have a big budget for ads. It was actually pretty small, so I didn t really do anything to grow my business through ads during the first at least the first year, at all. It was all influencer marketing, so it s possible to do that. At the same time, I think if you do a combination of both, then it s ideal. And just have a minimum spend. You don t have to spend a lot of money. But I would say, whether you decide to do influencer marketing alone or with ads, then you have to be ready for those people to come to you with the right product for them. And if you re growing your list, and with something that is enticing for them to actually join your list. Because a common thing that happens, you might connect with an influencer, let s say, for example, that has a huge podcast. And they say, oh, I d love to have you on my show, and you re excited. You
have your interview. But then, the day of the interview, you only give them your main website, for example. And on that website, you don t even have a place for people to join your list. Then, of course, your whole efforts go to waste, right? So you got to be ready. It s like when you watch Shark Tank and you have these entrepreneurs who go there with a site that is not ready for the traffic. They re going to go from being on Shark Tank to after the show airs, their website breaks and they sell nothing, so people leave. So you ve got to think about that. You ve got to be ready, whatever strategy you re going to use, and it s okay to use a mix. Whatever your budget is, you do what you need to do, and then, of course, you can always grow. But be ready, though. Caitlin: Yeah. Absolutely, you want to be ready. So I want to tell everybody watching, the best way to get started with influencer marketing is going to be working with Cloris, and I want to thank Cloris so much for joining me today and for sharing this information with us and everybody at Work-At-Home School. I know that I am inspired by it because there is a lot of influencers out there whom I don t know about yet, and they don t know about me. And I know that there s a lot of overlap and potential for both me and them to if we connect, and so I want to thank Cloris for giving me the push to get started, and hopefully she s pushed you to get started in some way, in terms of growing your business using influencer marketing. So for those of you watching right now and want to know more from Cloris, there are a few links on this page. The first one Cloris is giving everyone watching this video right now a free copy of her Influencer Marketing Guide, where you re going to learn 15 ways to get noticed by influencers, to start a relationship with them to grow your business just the way Cloris did, just the way I did. We ve got a link on this page for that. And she s also a contributing instructor for Work-At-Home School, and so those who invest in the Committed Package within Work-At-Home School, that includes access to Cloris Niche Influencer Training Program. And this is a program I m personally a member of, and it s absolutely wonderful to have Cloris, this person right here on the screen, with you to give you step-by-step advice and encouragement to initiate those powerful connections with influencers. So there s a link to learn more about that program in this page, and of course, a link to invest in the Committed Package within Work-At-Home School, so you can not only get access to Cloris training but also all of the amazing courses offered within Work-At-Home School. All of them are in the Committed Package, so it leaves no stone unturned when it comes to you and your success earning money from home or from anywhere. So thanks again to Cloris for being so awesome and thanks to you for watching this right now, for tuning in, and I will see you later. Bye, guys. Cloris: Bye. Thank you.