Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - Why Every Entrepreneur Should Write More | Yaagneshwaran Ganesh - Award-Winning Marketer & Author

Transcript

Lessons - Why Every Entrepreneur Should Write More | Yaagneshwaran Ganesh - Award-Winning Marketer & Author · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  In this episode, you'll discover why entrepreneurs should embrace writing as a tool for growth and brand building.
• 0:05
  Key insights include how writing can clarify your ideas, help you deliver consistent value,
• 0:10
  and create lasting connections with your audience.
• 0:12
  You'll also hear practical advice on staying grounded and how persistence can open doors in unexpected ways.
• 0:17
  So when you started writing books, when I look at Yag right now, you have a strong personal brand,
• 0:34
  you have your own website, and you've done all these things that seem like personal branding items,
• 0:40
  and I don't mean to turn this into like a personal brand chat, but you didn't actually go into
• 0:43
  writing books on purpose to augment to sell yourself as this marketing guru. This was not the
• 0:50
  goal. Absolutely not. In fact, I have my own gripe about personal marketing. I'm in personal branding.
• 0:57
  A lot of people, the things that they do in the name of personal branding is a bit annoying.
• 1:03
  It's not even personal branding to say. So yeah, going back to the part, I wrote my first book
• 1:10
  and to my surprise, they read about 800 to 900 people who actually paid and bought that book,
• 1:14
  and I was like, wow, this is amazing. And then in the meantime, I also wanted to start speaking
• 1:20
  in the public. So I went to my business school. I asked my professor that I would like to do a
• 1:27
  guest session, and they were gracious enough. And they said, hey, give it a try. And it happened.
• 1:33
  And from there on, I quickly realized that talking to this audience was not my core because,
• 1:40
  you know, people are still studying. And I was more talking about things at work and how you could
• 1:45
  do certain things, you know, the mistakes that I learned from and all of that. So I thought,
• 1:49
  I need to pivot to a business audience. And the moment I started getting invited to
• 1:53
  speaking at different conferences and all of that, my publisher gave me a call. He was like, hey,
• 1:58
  if you're going to write a fiction book again, I'm going to charge you double. But on the contrary,
• 2:03
  if you write a marketing book, I'll publish you for free. And I was like, this is amazing. But
• 2:10
  then I was like, can I even do this? Because I don't consider myself an expert. Can I write books?
• 2:14
  And he was like, just go give it a try. Your first book is going to be bad. But by the time you figure
• 2:20
  your figure, your things out, you will be amazing. I gave it a shot. My first marketing book was
• 2:25
  is your marketing in sync or syncing, you know, because that was a good title. It's not a bad title.
• 2:33
  And there was also the dilemma that I was in. And from there, I consistently started writing
• 2:37
  marketing books. You know, my career started becoming more focused towards marketing stuff.
• 2:42
  I was working only specifically for martyck products and then slowly and steadily things fell
• 2:47
  in place. And at some point, I started a LinkedIn show called Coffee Conversations. It was a five-minute
• 2:53
  LinkedIn show that I posted every morning. And it took off. And then a lot of people came back to
• 2:59
  me and they said, hey, you should, you know, do a little more detailed version of this maybe start
• 3:04
  a podcast. And in 2019, December, I started the podcast. I had no clue what is a dynamic mic. What
• 3:13
  is a condenser mic? You know, what is what? I just had a topic in my mind. I went to a nearby
• 3:18
  studio and I thought, let's record this first episode. And then to look back now, having, we don't
• 3:26
  come into think that I've done about 115 episodes now. And I've had people like, say good and
• 3:31
  guy, Kawasaki, David Cancel, Ranfesh, can you name it? All the stalwarts of marketing have been
• 3:36
  on the show. It's so humbling and so rewarding. But the fun part is not even one day I try to
• 3:43
  reach out to these people thinking that, hey, if I have these guys, I'll get more downloads or
• 3:48
  more listens. That was never the thought process because after every episode, you know, people
• 3:53
  used to come back and give me a very detailed DM on my LinkedIn. And it would be like, yeah, I
• 4:00
  completely disagree with what this person said because of this, this, this, or I completely agree
• 4:05
  with this. And they used to write such detailed posts. And I realize people are so invested in this,
• 4:10
  you know, they are coming back and which is a good thing, positive or negative, they're invested,
• 4:15
  right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they're giving us so much of time. And which means whatever I do,
• 4:21
  I make sure that any guest that I bring in, it needs to make sure that I'm giving value to
• 4:26
  these people who trust me, you know, I need to focus on a single topic and go as deep as possible
• 4:32
  because they come in for the promise of the topic. And if I don't deliver on that, it's on me.
• 4:37
  So I started to look out and reach out to people based on specific topics. And in that virtue,
• 4:43
  all these things happened. And today, you know, the show is part of the HubSpot podcast network.
• 4:48
  So very happy about that as well. All right. That makes sense. I want to pull a few things out of
• 4:53
  this because I think there's a few different drugs that we can take it. So there is like book writing
• 4:57
  lessons. There is podcast lessons. And then there's also like just conversational intelligence,
• 5:02
  which is like a very smart, tactical, forward thinking marketing discussion. But first,
• 5:07
  I am curious about a few things. This is how I'm going to structure it. So I'm going to do,
• 5:11
  I'm going to do book lessons featuring one of your podcast guests. I'm pretty sure you had
• 5:16
  an interesting conversation with him. Then we can go into like podcast lessons. And why what I'm
• 5:21
  talking about is you wrote how many books total, eight books total, and then you spoke to Seth
• 5:28
  who's like, he's written an incredible amount of marketing books. So first of all,
• 5:35
  what have you learned personally from writing books? And then what was the most important thing
• 5:41
  that you took from a conversation with Seth Gordon that you're going to start using for maybe
• 5:46
  your framework or your process for writing? Right. So first question, what did I learn from
• 5:52
  writing books is that, you know, most people think writing a book is a difficult thing. Actually,
• 5:58
  it is not. You know, you can, and if you look at my style of working, I am not a very structural person
• 6:06
  if you think about it. My first book, I just randomly started writing. I did not even think that
• 6:12
  I'm going to publish it. Yes, there was a coordinator of me that told me that he I want to publish
• 6:17
  this book. And that's why I kept writing on a daily basis. But I was still, you know,
• 6:21
  rambling on my laptop. And at some point, I realized that he there are about 150 pages now.
• 6:27
  Let me go back and read how it feels. And I shared the copy with my wife and I said, hey,
• 6:32
  take a read and tell me what he feels. And she was like, yeah, you should go ahead and publish it.
• 6:36
  And so I went about it. And my biggest takeaway, I would say, is that
• 6:42
  after eight books, now I would say it's important to think about what is that singular value
• 6:47
  that you want to communicate through your book. It could be a story or it could be a framework or
• 6:51
  it could be, you know, something that people can take away. And one thing that I've done with my
• 6:57
  books is I've kept most of my books very short because as I told you, even from my podcast and
• 7:02
  everything, you know, a lot of things that I do also come from my frustration of experiencing
• 7:07
  those things and I want to do the opposite of that. So, for example, when I read books, you know,
• 7:12
  if I read 20 pages and if I feel that the next 200 pages is going to be saying the same thing
• 7:19
  with different examples, I'm not going to read any further. So I wanted to make sure that I keep
• 7:23
  things crisp and I don't repeat too much. But at the same time, it's not like I just say it once,
• 7:29
  you make it so actionable, you make it so clear that people can take that framework and use it
• 7:35
  for their work. And then from there, you can expand that into, say, some podcast talks or you can
• 7:42
  extend it to your speaking or you can expand it. I know, expand that into your training programs or
• 7:48
  all of that. Then that works. And from there, going back to said Gordon, you know, I mean,
• 7:53
  there is, I'm so happy to talk about this because at the outset, it looks like yeah, you had said
• 8:00
  Gordon or the show, but the secret or the reality of all of this is that the very first time I
• 8:06
  reached out to say it, Gordon, for something was way back in 2009. And I kept reaching out to him
• 8:11
  for one thing or the other. And finally, I got him on the show in 2021. So, you know, it was
• 8:17
  been, it has been a persistence of 11 years. 11. 11 years, but he's a popular, he's a popular
• 8:25
  marketer. He's a marketer. And you know, if I have to take one thing from said, you know, as you
• 8:31
  asked, more than anything about his writing, as a person, he's a wonderful, wonderful human being.
• 8:38
  And, you know, the reason why I have so much of respect is I've reached out to so many people
• 8:44
  and pretty much everyone that I've reached out to have virtual assistants, assistants, you know,
• 8:49
  you never talk to them directly and they are the ones who are okay. But in said case, you know,
• 8:54
  being who he is, he will reply to every single email that he gets. He might say no,
• 9:00
  that's fine. It might be a one or two liner, but he'd politely say that and he would be the person
• 9:05
  who is responding. And that to me, you know, I was like, this is how I need to be, you know,
• 9:11
  wherever you go in your life, you need to be grounded. And all of his examples, all of his stories
• 9:18
  come from real life, you know, every single thing that he says is from first principles.
• 9:23
  When you hear him talk about something, there is no one jargon that you would hear in that sentence.
• 9:28
  If it's a third grader who's listening to what he say, we'll still get it. If it's a granny,
• 9:34
  still she's going to get it. So that simplicity is something that I would like to take away
• 9:39
  from that conversation and implement it in everything that I do.
• 9:42
  Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so
• 9:46
  you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the
• 9:51
  links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.