Marketing Your Business - Marketing Strategies for Business Owners

Russell Brunson stood up at a charity mastermind in Nashville — $5,000 a seat, 100% to charity, 30 people in the room — and he never pitched a single thing. He just told a story. By the time he sat down, people were lining up to be part of it. That moment taught Stu three lessons about selling that most creators never figure out. Nobody wakes up wanting to buy your thing. They want to become someone different. And the fastest way to show them that's possible? Not a feature list. Not a price breakdown. A real person whose life changed because of what you do. In this episode, Stu breaks down what Russell did, why it worked, and the exact steps to apply the same approach to your course, membership, or service. In this episode, you'll learn: Why Russell never pitched the Kenya trip — and how the room ended up begging to be part of it anyway The three-lesson framework Stu extracted from watching it happen in real time Why listing your features informs people but telling a story moves them — and the brain science behind why that's true What Stanford's Jennifer Aker found: people remember stories up to 22 times more than facts, and 63% remember the story vs. only 5% who remember a statistic The "Find Your Jane" action step — how to identify the one real person whose life your work has changed and turn their journey into your most powerful selling tool Why showing beats telling every time — the role of photos, voice memos, screenshots, and real client words How Jason Gaynard used the same show-don't-tell approach at his book launch party TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Cold Open: One Story Outsells Every Pitch 0:32 - The Nashville Mastermind (Village Impact) 1:39 - [INTRO GAP NOTE — see flags below] 1:39 - Setting the Stage: Why Russell Was There 3:53 - Meeting Jane in Kenya 5:00 - Jane Becomes Part of the Family 6:34 - The Room Reacted Without a Pitch 7:01 - Lesson 1: People Buy the Story, Not the Thing 7:53 - Find Your Jane 8:29 - Lesson 2: Your Brain Is Built for Stories 9:12 - The Jennifer Aker Stanford Research 9:49 - Lesson 3: Show, Don't Tell 10:37 - The Jason Gaynard Example 11:22 - Your Next Step: Write Jane's Story 12:08 - Stop Describing. Start Storytelling. CONNECT WITH STU: Website: https://membership.io Book "Predictable Profits": https://www.audible.com/pd/Predictable-Profits-Audiobook/B0DJTJJHKG Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stumclaren/ Podcast (Apple): https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/marketing-your-business-teaching-entrepreneurs-how/id1299443864?mt=2 Podcast (Spotify): https://open.spotify.com/show/0LHzoXLyImec4AbB1ZeYfW?si=5b57a4fc0fba4868 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@stume?sub_confirmation=1 RESOURCES MENTIONED: Village Impact (Stu's charity): https://villageimpact.com Russell Brunson: https://www.russellbrunson.com Amy Porterfield: https://www.amyporterfield.com Jayson Gaignard (book launch referenced): https://jaysongaignard.com Subscribe and leave a review if this episode gave you something to use.

Most communicators think they need to be better speakers. They don't. They need to practice three skills that almost nobody ever talks about or works on. In this solo episode, Stu breaks down the real difference between communicators who land their message and those who leave audiences quietly tuning out. The key isn't confidence or charisma. It's three distinct skills: Expand (the long form), Condense (the short form), and Connect (clarity at any length). Most people have only ever practiced one. Stu shares the story of a one-day mastermind with Amy Porterfield, Russell Brunson, and Eileen where Russell asked for three hours, got offered 90 minutes, and delivered on the fly without missing a beat. That ability to fit the message to the time is the mark of a professional. Stu also shares the Ken Davis singular-focus framework he learned on Michael Hyatt's recommendation, and the Blaise Pascal quote from the 1600s that explains exactly why condensing is harder than expanding. In this episode, you'll learn: The three skills great communicators master that most people have never practiced (and why mastering all three changes everything) Why fitting your message to the time you've been given, not the other way around, is the mark of a true professional Why short is harder than long, and what Blaise Pascal wrote in the 1600s that explains it perfectly The Ken Davis singular-focus question you should ask before every presentation or piece of content you create Stu's 4-part teaching framework (Hook, Story, Lessons, Summary) that he uses for every episode of this podcast The practical workout Stu assigns for this week: one idea, three lengths, plain words CONNECT WITH STU: Website: https://membership.io Book "Predictable Profits": https://www.audible.com/pd/Predictable-Profits-Audiobook/B0DJTJJHKG Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stumclaren/ Podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/marketing-your-business-teaching-entrepreneurs-how/id1299443864?mt=2 Subscribe and leave a review if this episode gave you something to use.

Ricardo Teixeira ran 5 to 6 launches a year in Portugal (about 45 days each), then tore the whole model down and went evergreen. The surprise: his show-up rate went UP. In this episode he breaks down the evergreen pivot, the AI that calls every registrant the morning of day one, the sales team that turns a no into a 12K yes, and the mindset shift behind all of it. Ricardo built a business in Portugal around education and software and says he has helped thousands of entrepreneurs there. He ran a launch machine of 5 to 6 launches a year, then rebuilt everything into evergreen after seeing another marketer run an evergreen launch every single week pulling 10,000 to 15,000 leads. In this conversation, Ricardo reveals: - The clean three-tier offer ladder (and how a conversation in Kenya simplified it) - The out-of-the-box ads that made 30 percent of his audience dislike him at first - Why he tore down a launch model that was working - The evergreen pivot that made his show-up rate go UP - The AI voice tool that calls every registrant the morning of day one - What he does with the 98 out of 100 people who do not buy - His three-role sales team: setter, closer, farmer - The blended delivery model that took retention to 70 percent - The give-90-live-on-10 mindset shift behind it all FREE RESOURCE: Get the full Ricardo evergreen + sales-team playbook -> https://podcast.stu.me CONNECT WITH RICARDO: - Instagram: https://instagram.com/samurairt - Website: https://kiai.me CONNECT WITH STU: - Website: https://stu.me - Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz - Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren - Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me - Membership.io: https://membership.io Subscribe for new episodes every week.

Do you ever feel like you're getting punched in the gut when you look at how much you're spending on ads? Same here. And those costs just keep climbing. So our team sat down and asked a different question: how could we actually get paid to generate leads? In this solo episode, Stu walks through the four small experiments his team ran on an AI workshop funnel, the kind of tweaks that feel almost too simple to matter. Together, they took the funnel from covering 70 to 80% of ad spend to becoming genuinely profitable on the front end. You'll hear why raising prices didn't hurt conversions, how a tiny checkbox lifted average cart value, why the third workshop is the most overlooked spot in any funnel, and the famous jam study that explains why simpler offers sell more. None of these were huge swings. But stacked together, they made the difference between a funnel that breaks even and one that lets you keep pouring fuel on the fire. In this episode, you'll learn: Why raising your prices may not drop conversions the way you fear (and why it's the easiest place to start) How order bumps and a real back-end offer quietly multiply your cart value Why simplifying your offer beats stacking bonuses every single time RESOURCE: Grab the resources from this episode at https://podcast.stu.me CONNECT WITH STU: Website: https://stu.me Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me Membership.io: https://membership.io Subscribe and leave a review if this episode helped you.

Ashley Alderson spent 14 years building The Boutique Hub into a 7,000-plus member empire by doing something almost no one else does in the membership space: she names her enemies and throws rocks at them. In this episode, she breaks down the multi-tier membership model, the 30-ads-a-week Meta Andromeda playbook, the 500-opt-ins-a-week opt-in machine, and the radical-honesty content rhythm that turned her members into her best advocates. Ashley is the founder and CEO of The Boutique Hub, a membership for independent retailers and boutique owners that has grown to over 7,000 members across the world. She also runs Retail Bootcamp (a $2,000 course) and Boutique Black (her highest tier with one-on-one coaching). What started as an "online shopping mall of boutiques" idea in middle-of-nowhere North Dakota became a 14-year compounding business through one core principle: community over competition. In this conversation, Ashley reveals: - The chicken-and-egg pivot from failed marketplace to thriving membership - The Six Layers of Lasagna framework that powers her $2,000 course - The Meta Andromeda shift and why she launches 30 new ads every week - The 500-opt-ins-a-week target and the content engine that feeds it - How "Pink Friday" became a worldwide shopping movement - The Donald Miller wise guide vs villain framework - The Ask Ashley AI clone built on Delphi - Why $5 a day is enough to start with paid ads FREE RESOURCE: Get the full Boutique Hub playbook: https://podcast.stu.me CONNECT WITH ASHLEY: - The Boutique Hub: https://theboutiquehub.com - Instagram: https://instagram.com/ajalderson CONNECT WITH STU: - Website: https://stu.me - Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz - Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren - Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me - Membership.io: https://membership.io Subscribe for new episodes every week.

You wake up tomorrow, grab your phone, and your Instagram account is locked. Or the app is down. Or the algorithm just decided to stop showing your stuff. What happens to your business? Stu got reminded of this exact question this week after a conversation with Jeff Walker, the creator of Product Launch Formula. Jeff mentioned a few customers who had been on his email list for ten years before they ever bought anything. That one comment is the heart of this episode: most creators are obsessing over the wrong number. In this episode, Stu breaks down the three buckets of audience (rented, borrowed, and owned), the "landlord problem" that makes platform-built businesses fragile, and the simple test you can run on your last ten posts to see if you have a "bridge problem." It is a short, direct reset on where your real asset has been all along: the people you can reach without asking anyone for permission. In this episode, you'll learn: The landlord problem: why the algorithm is the landlord and you are the tenant The three audience buckets (rented, borrowed, owned) and why only one is truly yours The one-question test to run after every piece of content you publish Your next step: audit your last 10 posts for the "bridge problem" RESOURCE: Grab the resources from this episode at https://podcast.stu.me CONNECT WITH STU: Website: https://stu.me Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me Membership.io: https://membership.io Subscribe and leave a review if this episode helped you.

You're posting consistently, but the followers aren't coming. You're running webinars, but barely anyone shows up. Or you're creating lead magnets, but the list isn't growing. Last week, Stu sat in a room with some of the smartest business owners he knows, and he walked out with three things that flipped how he thinks about content, lead generation, and webinars. In this episode, he unpacks all three so you can start using them in your business right now. First, a gardener with 1.6 million followers reveals the content mix that actually grows a personal brand, and why most experts have it completely backwards. Then, an SEO expert shows how he's using simple AI-powered tools as lead magnets to generate thousands of leads a day. And finally, a former photographer with jaw-dropping webinar numbers explains the pre-webinar work most of us are wasting. Stu shares why these lessons apply whether you sell courses, memberships, software, or anything else, plus why the real magic of a mastermind isn't the strategy at all. In this episode, you'll learn: The 60/20/10/5 content mix for growing a personal brand, and why being known for one thing may be holding you back How to use AI to build simple, free tools that convert at over 2x the rate of PDF lead magnets The pre-webinar email shift that moves people from interested to paying RESOURCE: Grab the resources from this episode at https://podcast.stu.me CONNECT WITH STU: Website: https://stu.me Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me Membership.io: https://membership.io Subscribe and leave a review if this episode helped you.

Ali Kay closed the doors on her membership and added 3,000 new members in a single week. In this episode, she breaks down the exact 5-day workshop launch, the $10 coupon that fills day one, and the charity day that turns cart close into her biggest sales moment. Ali Kay is a working artist who built a 6,300-member painting community by doing the opposite of what most online creators do. She closed the doors. She picked up the phone instead of running ads. She gave away her cart-close day to charity. And it worked. In this conversation, Ali reveals: - Why she went from an "always open" membership to a closed cart (and why it tripled her launch result) - The $10 coupon trick that makes day one of every workshop her biggest sales day - The charity-day strategy that turns hesitant buyers into confident members - Why the "wakeboarding while painting" ad worked when text-heavy creatives flopped - The exact moment she stopped feeling like she was "selling out" as an artist FREE RESOURCE: Get the full membership launch playbook → https://podcast.stu.me CONNECT WITH ALI: - Instagram: https://instagram.com/alikstudio - Facebook: https://facebook.com/alikstudio CONNECT WITH STU: - Website: https://stu.me - Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz - Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren - Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me - Membership.io: https://membership.io Subscribe for new episodes every week.

If you teach for a living and your students keep telling you your content is amazing, but six months later nothing's changed in their business... this episode might rattle you a little bit. And that's a good thing. A conversation with Scott Paley inside our Impact Mastermind cracked something open for me. Scott consumed all of our Summit content, but didn't show up live, didn't watch a single video. Instead, he ran the transcripts through Claude. And it made me ask a bigger question: what's actually happening to retention when people learn this way? The research is staggering. Students who used ChatGPT to study scored 57.5% on retention tests 45 days later. Traditional learners scored 68.5%. That's an 11-point gap, and it's not because AI is bad. It's because of cognitive offloading. In this episode, I'll share three things that stood out from the research, and then walk you through a simple five-letter test you can run your content through. I'm calling it the STICK test, and once you hear it, you'll see exactly where your courses, programs, and memberships are leaking transformation, and what to do about it. In this episode, you'll learn: Why AI summaries cause students to retain 11 points less than traditional learners (and the cognitive offloading effect behind it) The "passive learner trap": passive learners feel 62.5% prepared but only retain 79%, while active learners retain 94% The full STICK test — Space, Trigger, Illustrate, Community, Keep — and how to apply it to anything you teach Why the membership model naturally outperforms one-off courses for long-term student transformation The one shift that changes everything: you're not paid to teach, you're paid to make it stick RESOURCE: Grab the resources from this episode at https://podcast.stu.me CONNECT WITH STU: Website: https://stu.me Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me Membership.io: https://membership.io Subscribe and leave a review if this episode helped you.

The playbook said our launch was done. We'd sent the emails. Hit the reminders. Ran the countdown. Most teams would have let the sequence ride out. We did something different. We opened a Zoom room for three hours with no slides, no script, and no pitch. Just over 100 people showed up. 30 sales came in. Over $100,000 in revenue. And most of those buyers? People we had never seen engage the whole launch. In this solo episode, Stu walks through the two moves his team made in the "in-between days" of a recent summit launch that completely changed how he thinks about the end of a campaign. You'll hear why the Rule of 7 has quietly become the Rule of 8-to-13, why confidence in your offer is the thing people can actually feel, and the one question that surfaces the highest-converting move you're probably not making. In this episode, you'll learn: Why buyers are taking longer to decide and what the new touchpoint research says How to sell without selling (and the one condition that makes it work) The simple question to ask your team before every launch ends RESOURCE: Grab the resources from this episode at https://podcast.stu.me CONNECT WITH STU: Website: https://stu.me Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me Membership.io: https://membership.io Subscribe and leave a review if this episode helped you.

Brandon Turner built a $1 billion real estate portfolio with 14,000 units. Now he's $700 million in debt with 3 years to build and sell a company for $50 million - or lose $100 million in investor capital. This is his comeback plan. Brandon Turner hosted the BiggerPockets podcast for a decade, owns over $1 billion in real estate, and runs multiple companies from Hawaii. In this conversation, Brandon reveals: • Why having a large personal brand is like being a "really hot girl" • The "cross point of two niches" strategy that built his audience • What happened when his Texas properties dropped 30% in value • His "this sucks, I'm sorry" leadership framework for crisis management • Why being down to your last dollar makes you play your best game • The $50 million company he needs to build in 3 years 📚 FREE RESOURCE: Get Brandon's Crisis Leadership Framework + Personal Brand Strategy Guide → https://podcast.stu.me CONNECT WITH BRANDON: • Website: https://beardybrandon.com • Instagram: https://instagram.com/beardybrandon • BiggerPockets: https://biggerpockets.com • Book "The Book on Rental Property Investing": https://a.co/d/6EWQ9Fm CONNECT WITH STU: • Website: https://stu.me • Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz • Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren • Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me • Membership.io: https://membership.io Subscribe for new episodes every week.

My wife posts something she believed in on Instagram. Within minutes, a woman comments, "I'm unfollowing you." Ouch. But then the post starts climbing. Comments, shares, new followers, people messaging her saying, "Thank you for saying this." One person left. Dozens leaned in closer. And that's not a coincidence. That's how this game actually works. Most creators are stuck in the middle. They're not loved, they're not hated. They're just ignored. And the middle is where businesses go to quietly die. In this episode, I break down the three layers of content that pull your people toward you (and push the wrong ones away). I share the Nicole Burke story from our summit, the Gary Vaynerchuk moment that made me define my values, and a framework you can use this week to stop blending in. In this episode, you'll learn: • Why vanilla content gets zero engagement (nobody drives across town for vanilla ice cream) • The three layers of standing out: opinions, values, and controversial takes • How Nicole Burke grew Gardinary Co. to 1.5 million followers using "conspiracy theories" • Why unfollows aren't losses, they're the filter working exactly the way it should • A simple framework: "Most people think X, but I believe Y" RESOURCE: Grab the resources from this episode at https://podcast.stu.me CONNECT WITH STU: • Website: https://stu.me • Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz • Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren • Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me • Membership.io: https://membership.io Subscribe and leave a review if this episode helped you.

Yesterday I asked a group of motivated entrepreneurs one question: "What is the voice in your head telling you about why you shouldn't move forward right now?" The chat blew up. I'm too young. I'm too old. My audience isn't big enough. Who am I to talk on this? Nobody's gonna buy from me. I don't have time. These aren't excuses. They are real beliefs that real people carry every single day. And here's what I've learned in 22 years of being online: you cannot out market a belief that says you're not worthy of success. So today is not about tactics. Today is about the thing underneath all of it. I break down the three ways I protect my own confidence as an entrepreneur, share the story of getting cut from my soccer team at 16 (and how my dad got me back on the field), and give you a simple challenge you can start this week. In this episode, you'll learn: • Why higher self-confidence boosts venture success by 27% (even after controlling for funding and experience) • How to "borrow belief" from a mentor when your own tank runs dry • Why founders in weekly peer groups double their revenue growth vs. working alone • The two Slack channels we use to capture wins and kill self-doubt in real time • The 90-day wins challenge: one win a week and see what happens to your confidence 📥 RESOURCE: Grab the resources from this episode at https://podcast.stu.me 🎟️ FREE EVENT: Join me at the Audience to Income Summit free at https://membership.io/summit CONNECT WITH STU: • Website: https://stu.me • Book "Predictable Profits": https://a.co/d/4GIi1uz • Instagram: https://instagram.com/stumclaren • Podcast: https://podcast.stu.me • Membership.io: https://membership.io Subscribe and leave a review if this episode helped you.