You don’t need to establish a large corporation in order to make a name for yourself. Sometimes, it’s as easy as going online and using the power of affiliate marketing. This is the business model that John Crestani did and became an expert in. John is a growth hacker known for his contributions in helping companies reach more people and sell more products through paid advertising. In this episode, John talks with Dr. Diane Hamilton to share his insight on how affiliate marketing has changed his perspective on business. Believing that the future of education is online, John wants to perpetuate that by sharing his knowledge and skill in the field.Â
I’m glad you joined us because we have John Crestani. John is a digital marketing genius. He knows everything there is to know about affiliate marketing and much more. This is going to be such a great show.
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Affiliate Marketing: The Future Of Sales With John Crestani
I am here with John Crestani, who is a growth hacker known for his contributions and helping companies reach more people and sell more products using the business model of affiliate marketing. He is an online expert in all areas of paid advertising from Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, YouTube Ads, you name it. It’s nice to have you here, John.
I’m happy to be here.
I am happy to have you. I was listening to a couple of your interviews. John Lee Dumas has been on my show and I thought that was a great interview you did with him. Affiliate marketing is such a fascinating thing to talk about. I know I have an affiliate program on my site for my Curiosity Code information. A lot of people are confused by what goes into those programs? How to get into them? You’ve made a career out of doing well as an individual and not necessarily having a huge corporation behind you. I want to know a little bit of backstory on you for those who don’t know your work and if you can say how you got interested in this.
Some would call me a street marketer because I originally started marketing, not online, but on poles and classrooms putting up flyers. I had to get good with that outside of my college. I read this book back in 2008 called The 4-Hour Workweek. I was in college at the time and looked at what my future was going to be like, which was going to be probably about 10 to 15 years of working my way up the corporate ladder, not traveling and not making much money. I said, “There’s got to be a more efficient path than this.” I decided to be an entrepreneur and eventually started an online business, but it seemed to be where all the freedom in the world of fun was.
Your PR person had contacted me and I wanted to find out more about you, the first video I found was titled Is John Crestani a Scam? You created that video yourself, which I found interesting.
If you read the article, it’s positive. I probably have the biggest audience of affiliates following me because I put up a ton of free content on YouTube. I believe YouTube is the future of education and people don’t fully get it yet. I believe much of education is online. I know you used to be on the board of Phoenix, which is awesome. I’d love to know your thoughts on what the future of online education is and all that stuff because it’s a field I’m interested in. I’ve always wanted to be a part of the future of education and help teach that. I’ve been teaching affiliate marketing and I have such a monster following of affiliates. I have guys putting up fake profiles of me all the time to sell my product. They write things because they know to say, “Is John Crestani a scam?” is going to be a catchy headline. They do all stuff to sell my products essentially and to get people’s attention but it all ends up being positive. At the end of the day, they’re selling my products. There are 250,000 people following me doing random internet stuff and I can’t control them all. They’re selling my products at the end of the day.
I have worked in a lot of different forms of education. I flew back to New York and Verizon had me come out to create some videos for their training, 120,000 of their employees. What they were trying to do with my videos, they wanted 2 to 5 minutes. We made these quick videos as part of their training because they see their employees want quick things. They’re doing them in a modern hip way too. We went to a loft instead of a talking head in a studio. When you ask me about that of what I think of the future of education, we talked about it a lot when I was an MBA program chair at Forbes. We talked about, is it going to be bits and pieces of content? Is it going to be where everybody has degrees in the future or is it going to be certification programs? I agree with you that it’s going to be different. It’s going to be a lot more à la carte pieces of these and little bits of that, maybe blockchain tracking. Do you think the same?
I think all of it. I don’t know exactly which one’s going to be the biggest. A couple of years ago, I started some blockchain-based certification company. It’s going to be some mixture of certifications and some open-source engine. Maybe it’s a blockchain that tracks people’s skills. I believe it’s going to be more teacher-based. For freelancers, it’s going to be more teacher-based as opposed to institution-based. I have a Princeton badge. Also, I think it’s going to be taken over by corporations. Big corporations are providing training saying, “These are the people we want.” As opposed to letting the universities define those programs for them.
It’s hard at the university level because I teach for multiple universities still. What you’re trying to do is create your programs. We take years sometimes to develop certain things. Usually, you get a whole year once you’ve even decided what you want to offer with the development and the courses. You’ve created this content and then you don’t even know what the jobs are going to be by the time they graduate. It’s hard because of the rate of change. There are certain core things that are super important no matter what that will always be what I hope to see, and I’d like to see more soft skills training. My biggest concern in the future of education is that if we make all bits and pieces, we’re losing the glue of the soft skills, the humanities because people pick and choose what they want to learn. What about your behaviors? You end up being an idiot that people don’t want to have around because you’re difficult to work with.
I don’t think people should be forced to learn things they don’t want to. I went to Southern Methodist University, a lot of people from Arizona there. I went to a local college for two years and everybody’s on their phones. I don’t think people should be forced to learn. Education should be exciting like a Batman movie and capture more of those people. Corporates need to take more of a lead in providing free education for the roles they want to fill.
Since I’m the curiosity expert, I’m working with Novartis and they have a focus on creating a curious work environment. What they’re doing requesting that people get 100 hours a year of learning. Whatever it is they want doesn’t have to be anything specific. My point of what I’m worried about, I don’t think anybody should have to take courses they don’t want to take. Most of the people in organizations are hired for their knowledge and fired for their behaviors. If that’s the case, how are we going to get them better on their behaviors if we don’t incorporate it into some of these training programs and the people who need it won’t want to take it? My dissertation was on emotional intelligence. When I was thinking about this, the people who need emotional intelligence training aren’t going to be the ones who go, “I want that. I need that.” It’s going to be forced upon them a little bit either in education or by their leaders because they have a problem they don’t recognize. That’s the only concern I have for the future is that we leave out that stuff.
I love what you’re saying. My wife is an MFT, a Marriage and Family Therapist. A lot of emotional intelligence is important in her field as any field, mind and anything. I don’t think it’s stressed enough in society. I was thinking about myself because I’m teaching affiliate marketing, which is what I call Bare Basic Commissional in Marketing for those who don’t know what affiliate marketing is. I do the same thing. My students, I know the biggest success factor for people that want to get into a commission-only marketing position essentially is oftentimes the training they don’t want to take. They want to hear the fancy tactics or the specific thing to their job. I ended up teaching a lot about mindset in my courses because I’m targeting this basic level of entrepreneurs. I know how important mindset, confidence, tenaciousness, and talking about people’s why is for my audience to succeed. They don’t necessarily want to hear it. Once they buy into one of my programs, I still force it down their throat because I’ve seen tens of thousands of students. I know which ones are successful. I know which ones aren’t. I know that sometimes it’s not always the factors that you would think of.
Carol Dweck’s work on mindset is something that was inspiring. She talks about having an open mindset to having the ability to think that if you work harder you can improve. If you have a closed mindset, you think it’s all your genetics and, “Too bad for me, I wasn’t born to get it any better.” I had decades of sales. Your mindset is important and when you’re dealing with other people. A lot of what you deal with is interesting to me based on my experience of what I’ve done at Forbes with creating a brand publishing course and some of the marketing stuff I did. It showed me what you do is challenging. What people don’t get is how you can be successful working by yourself without having this huge company. You did a lot of this alone. You’re doing it a lot with affiliate marketing, which confuses people. Let’s talk about affiliate marketing.
I’ve been in business for a while, which helps. I’ve been in business since I was in college many years ago. I would say I’ve always looked for my leverage points. It’s simple for me. One component is I set goals, I’m stubborn at them and I keep going. The other component is I write down what I’m going to do at the beginning of the year. I write down what I want that year and also what I don’t want. What has always made it on the what I don’t want list is employees. I’ve been forced to be lean and look to my leverage points, my strengths, and played those strengths and the leverage points that I have. Being able to use essential affiliates. I’ll use realtors as an example. It’s a large commissioned only sales force. In something like Keller Williams’ case, they have offices, they have the training, and they have a lot of far costs to build commission-only sales force or marketing force online. You don’t even need to have an office.
Utilizing affiliates and having been an affiliate myself, basically a marketing hitman. I said, “I’m going to leverage affiliates. I’m going to have a huge army of other marketers selling my product for me and I’m going to teach them on YouTube and other places they offer free education, how to market my products.” That’s worked out well for me. I haven’t had to spend money out of pocket to get people marketing my products. On the same note, it allows me to leverage myself and my own knowledge of marketing and what marketing works into a large army of people marketing my products for me. We get almost three million people visiting my websites a month and I don’t spend a dime on it.
I worked for Keller Williams and they had the best training program as far as education. That’s what I think is interesting.
I’ve heard a lot about Gary. I’ve heard it’s the best training you can get in almost any corporation. I’ve heard great things about them.
YouTube is the future of education; people just don't fully get it yet. Click To TweetAs you talking about they’re selling your products, what are your products?
I sell online education, teaching people marketing. Teaching people more specifically how to be a commission only marketer, which is like door-to-door sales. Kirby vacuums or whatnot is one of those base-level positions you get. It doesn’t cost the company a lot of money and you’re going out and you’re selling products for people who are starting and don’t have any connections or advantages. Door-to door-sales is used to be the place you start whereas affiliate marketing is equivalent to internet companies. There are lots of companies out there that are willing to say, “If you sell one of our products for $100, we will give you $25 of that commission.” You’d have a workforce across the entire internet that’s willing to do that. That’s how I started off in the business. I worked myself up to making millions of dollars per year marketing other people’s products. A few years ago, I said, “Why don’t I create my online information course? It seems like a large leverage point, $0 cost a good sold. I could teach people these real specific marketing tactics that I’ve been using to market dozens of other company’s products over the years.” I did that and it took off. What I do is I sell a six-week online course about how to do marketing and earn commissions.
Let’s say you signed up to be an affiliate for me for example, how do you market my product? What advice do you give to people?Â
I would get specific on who your audience is. I’d do a lot of time spending research, plugging in your website to as many demographic analysis tools or similar website tools.
Which kind?
I’d put it in Quantcast. I’d put it into a few other things as well as ask you, “Give me a makeup of your customer.” If you provided any information on that, I’d get everything. I get an idea of what YouTube channels does your audience watch? What Facebook pages do they follow? What groups? I look at your Facebook and see what pages you follow, and see what groups you’re in. I’d go to your Facebook page and I’d start clicking on individual people to get an idea of your fans to see what do they look like? What do they feel like? Where are they based in the world? What companies do they work for? I’d go deep. I figured out who they follow on LinkedIn? What groups they’re part of on LinkedIn? I’d look at the same what websites do they likely visit? It’s a lot of work.
I’m thinking if I’d have 20,000 people following me, how do you figure it out on LinkedIn?
It’s part science, part art. I get specific to every single website that your people use. I’d probably only open up 5 to 10 people, but I get deep on the person. What I used to do when I was an affiliate marketer for a large mortgage company out here in California called Greenlight Financial. I’ve talked to them, I’d go to their office, and I’d listen to the sales calls. I want to hear what the customers are saying on the phone because they give the best insight. They give information to the keywords they’re looking for, what they want? They want to know closing costs and mortgage. They don’t want to pay any closing costs.
You get that, then how do you deal with that?Â
I would start looking into the places that I place traffic. An example of that would be I’d say, “Where are the holes?” Maybe I’d look up the keywords on Google and I’d see, “Here are specific keywords they’re looking for, California refinance rates.” If I have an advantage there, “That keyword might be $50 to bid on.” I’d say, “Okay.” Maybe there are some blogs or maybe there are some Facebook groups on refinancing your mortgage that I could post in. Maybe instead of paying $50 a keyword, I could talk to the owner of that Facebook group. Maybe it’s a refinancing calculator and I could say, “Could I somehow come in and buy inventory on your blog or your calculator for money? For cheaper than it would be to pay-per-click.” I’d find where my advantages are and where I can hit this audience in a specific way. In my case, I’d start throwing ad dollars at it and be on those places, on YouTube. What shows up when you type in Refinance My House on YouTube? I’d show up on those channels for dirt cheap. I find more targeted words on Google maybe. I do whatever it takes to find where my advantages are because I know I’m a better marketer than the companies themselves. I teach people to be better marketers than the company themselves are advertising.
You mentioned getting into blogs and I often have people ask to have guest’s blog posts. Do you do things like that and how much are you willing to pay to do stuff like that? How do you know what it’s worth?
First of all, how much do you know it’s a worth thing? Generally speaking, they’re willing to pay up to maybe 25% of the profit margin of any product. In the case of skincare, maybe the product is $100. Maybe the cost of making that product is $40. The company might be willing to offer a $20 commission for a new sale. $20 the sales marketer makes and the company makes the other 40% as profit. Usually, I’ve seen 33% of the profit margin is a good amount to offer or a sale of the product. You can always back out those numbers to leads if your company is based on leads or phone calls.
How much do you pay to be a guest blogger to get that impact?Â
A lot of it is based on research. You’d figure out how many visits or how many views maybe does the average article on this blog get. What’s been the average view count over the last month or so? How many views can I expect to get in this article? I would then look at, what would be the average cost maybe per click on display inventory or news inventory? Generally in the United States, you’d figure about $1. Let’s say the average blog of this blogger got 10,000 views on average, if you could pay anything less than $10,000 for people to view that to put up a guest post, that would be profitable.
It’s interesting how this whole system works and I was listening to how you’ve been successful with some of the videos and ads that you’ve placed. I found one of your examples of the Christian sites where you did the GodFind.com story. Do you want to share that?
Is it my first profitable ad?
You said you put a picture of a little girl.Â
People shouldn’t be forced to learn things they don't want to. Education should be exciting. Click To TweetIt’s was a crying little girl holding an American flag and it said, “This video may be banned.” I put it up. I’m always testing creative, which is my ad. I was selling an all-in-one information survivalist product. If it’s the end of the world, you want to have solar panels. You have fish that poop into the water, then that poop is a fertilizer for the plants above it. You have a self-sustaining power, water, and food ecosystem in your backyard. There is a large segment of the population that is interested in creating that survival preparedness for themselves and their family. I had to figure it out. I did a lot of research on this segment and I found out they’re religious. That was one thing that stuck out. There are different groups among them. It wasn’t like they were Mormon or they were Baptist. I said, “Let me look for some of the religious sites.” I found a bunch of religious sites. The other thing I teach in marketing is congruency. If your ad is not congruent with the product you’re selling. Even your medium is not congruent with the product you’re selling. If your company wants people watching videos, you should be advertising on YouTube. Many people go about things backward. Make sure the message is congruent throughout every step of the funnel.
This product was being sold by a video sales letter. I said, “I’m going to find a Christian or religious video sites to put my ad on.” What I’m trying to get them to do is watch a video about survival preparedness. I was able to find cheap remnant inventory on GodFind.com, which those ad representatives weren’t able to sell it. They put it on an open market. I was able to find remnant inventory on a religious video site. I created a catchy ad for this survival preparedness product, which was that girl with the patriotic flag and it worked. I started making over $1,000 a day, and that was my first big win. Because it was a small site, it only lasted for about a month where I was able to make $1,000 profit a day. I was only getting paid $6,000 a month at my job. That was a big deal for me.
You say it only took you three days to make that much money. Did you think, “This is easy, I’m going to be able to do this everywhere?” That’s hard to repeat that.
I was projecting into the future. I’m going to be rich. I went to the nearest place called the Bungalow. I bought my first table and I thought it was the best thing on the earth. That was a one-hit-wonder for a little bit. I wasn’t able to repeat that until many months down the line. It was exciting.
As you’re talking about where to put these ads and you mentioned YouTube, how do you keep people from skipping and all the things that happen on YouTube? Do you watch ads on YouTube? I’ve seen YouTube ads about ads. I teach marketing, we look at some of them for that respect alone. A lot of it is the beginning where you have the skip option. Can you address that?
If you’re doing a good job on YouTube, only 1 in 100 people will not skip your ad. People can skip the ad after they’ve viewed it for five seconds. It’s a competitive market, having 1% will be a good barometer of doing well. How do you get people not to skip ads? We put out dozens of YouTube ads per year. We also spend millions of dollars on YouTube as advertisers ourselves. The things I’ve seen that work out best is a few folds. One is you’ve got to make whatever statement it is you’re trying to make in the first five seconds. Let people know why they should stay around for the next ten seconds. You’ve got to say something strong that’s going to rock people’s world. If you’re selling mortgages, you’ve got to say something that’s going to rock their world. Maybe the lowest mortgage rates in history and we are refinancing people with zero fees, which sounds good. If you can get in, at a lower rate without paying anything, that would be a good sounding thing to get out in the first five seconds. That would keep people listening for the next ten. The other thing you have to do, saying that catchy headline to get the right people sticking around. Second of all, there’s got to be what I call a pattern interrupt. Meaning you’ve got to use something visually stunning. Showing a salesperson in a suit isn’t going to be enough or some stock footage.
You’ve got to show something that maybe it’s an upside-down house that you found. Maybe it’s a pallet of money dropping on some homeowner’s front yard. Something visually stunning where you say, “Whoa.” In my case, where I’m teaching people to be entrepreneurs, I’m teaching people to start their internet businesses. It’s straightforward for me. I’m sure you and everyone else can guess it’s Lamborghinis, travel, sitting on a beach in a hammock. It’s a nice big mansion with a pool and a waterfall in front that goes into your jacuzzi. It’s showing off stuff like that because that’s the dream of many people who decide to go on the entrepreneurial path.
This is all great advice and I was listening to some of the other advice that you were giving on other shows, and I want to make sure we touch on how you find good affiliate programs if you want to work and promote other people’s products. You said you went to ClickBank.com for one thing. Do you have any sites that you think are good to find products that you want to sell?
ClickBank is one affiliate network. They do about $500 billion a year but they focus on information products and digital products that are business to consumer. There’s a much wider world out there. One thing I do is I would look at ClickBank and I would look at other large affiliate networks to see the best-selling products. Some other large affiliate networks include stuff such as CJ, which used to be known as Commission Junction. There’s a bunch of affiliate networks like A4D and ShareASale. For specific programs, I like looking at the top ten websites. Let’s say I’m looking to sell B2B SaaS software or a CRM. I used to work for a CRM company, maybe I want to sell CRMs and start a blog about it. I would go to Google’s top ten CRM companies.
Oftentimes these ranking sites are based on the person who offers them the most commission and has the highest converting internet funnel. Usually, the top ten sites place them at number one because they make the most money. They may earn the most commissions from recommending that product. I always look at the top ten websites because usually they’ve done all the research on the products and you will see that the number one product is the one that offers probably the best commissions. I do exactly that in the website hosting niche. I’m an affiliate for website hosting companies. If you search the top ten website hosting companies, oftentimes you will see the company Bluehost as number one. The reason it’s number one is that they have the best affiliate program that converts the best, that offers the most commissions that pay out their affiliates on time. That would be the way I would start. I’d either look at top affiliate networks and the top products there or I would Google top ten in your niche.
Let’s say you have an affiliate program but you haven’t had a lot of people signed up yet. You’re trying to get people to recognize your affiliate program, what advice do you give people who are on that position?Â
If you’re trying to get people to recognize your affiliate program, I’d say it’s two-fold. The one-to-one approach is I believe the best approach. It’s how I kick-started my affiliate program too. There was a time when nobody had heard about my affiliate program and I hadn’t started YouTubing yet. I started putting up education on YouTube before I had a big influence. I would message people that were in my niche that were successful affiliates of other products and I talked to everybody.
How’d you know they were?Â
I’d look at the top programs in my niche that were all online marketing and education products. I would Google the terms, I’d say best online marketing education or best affiliate marketing education. I’d look at what blogs showed up. I would reach out to every one of those people through their contact form, their LinkedIn, their Facebook or their Skype, through every way. I’d reach out to the people who had the top websites for my keywords. I went to Facebook and I looked for the people who had groups about marketing education.
I would reach out to those people and I’d say, “I see you are promoting other products. Why not give a gander at looking at my educational product and considering marketing it?” I’d say, “We offer better commission program. We convert higher.” I would say all the buzzwords that would get them excited to market my program. I’d reach out to people who were forum owners. I’d reach out to people who had YouTube channels in my niche. I reached out to anybody who was hitting my demographic. I have a targeted demographic and I’d ask them, “Would you be interested in looking at my product? I’m going to give it to you for free. I’d love it if you could promote it to your email list or talk about it on your YouTube channel, your blog, your Twitter, or your Instagram.” I did it that way and I measured myself. Every day I talked to 25 new people and I did that for six months and my affiliate program grew fast.
What percentage were you offering in your affiliate program? Do you give them 20%, 30%, 50%?
We have a continuity program plus 50% of lifetime recurring revenue. We’re aggressive.
If you're doing a good job on YouTube, only one in 100 people will not skip your ad. Click To TweetWere you always that aggressive or did you start off wise?
I’ve always been an athlete. I’ve always been competitive. Sports and business are very similar. Sport breeds confidence. Confidence is a virtue that travels anywhere. It’s important to curate that if you’re going into business yourself.
I know you and I would have much to talk about. I grew up in a competitive sports-oriented family and my sales background. We both have different things. It would be much fun to learn more about you. A lot of people want to know more about what you’re doing. John, you gave so much great free content to people to figure out how to do all this and I found this fascinating. A lot of people want to reach out to you. How can they find you? Where do you want to direct them?
Google my name, John Crestani, and check out my YouTube channel and subscribe. I put up videos every day. I want to talk more to you because I believe deeply in the future of education. I’m interested in where it’s going. I’m interested in being a part of the conversation of where it’s going because there’s a lot of opportunity in it for everybody.
Are you still working by yourself or do you have people who work for you other than independent contractors?
I don’t have anybody working for me. My model is I hire agencies and I train people. I prefer agencies because they’re more performance-based.
That’s a whole other show. This was a lot of fun, John. Thank you for being on the show. I hope everybody takes some time to check out your site.Â
Thank you for having me on.
You’re welcome.
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I’d like to thank John for being my guest. We get many great guests. I love that John brought up affiliate marketing because that’s such a confusing subject for many people. There’s much to it and it can be overwhelming at times. I know that we have our affiliate program at my site at DrDianeHamilton.com. I’d love to have you check it out. We’re talking to people who want to market the Curiosity Code Index, and that is getting quite a bit of attention since I was nominated to the Thinkers50 Radar, which was quite an honor. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Thinkers50, they’re the Academy Awards for business management. To even be anywhere near considered on that list is such a huge honor. The reason that my work got noticed is that curiosity ties into about everything that companies are trying to work on. If you think of engagement, innovation, productivity, every single thing that I talked to experts about on the show keeps coming back to curiosity. I think of curiosity as the spark that ignites everything that we’re trying to do. You have to have the curiosity to have engagement. You have to have the curiosity to have creativity. Also, motivation and drive everything else. It’s something that if you were considering giving the DISC or Myers-Briggs or any of those assessments.
If it’s an emotional intelligence test or whatever it is that you give to organizations. The CCI makes you much more relevant because it’s what we’re trying to fix with innovation, engagement and all the costs that people are experiencing from poor communication, soft skills, you name it. When I was writing the book, Cracking the Curiosity Code, I started to write chapters on each of the issues that kept coming up when people would hire me to speak. Things like emotional intelligence or soft skills, leadership, critical thinking, you name it. It kept coming back to curiosity as foundational to all this. In my research, I found that there are four things that keep people from being curious. Those four things are Fear, Assumptions, Technology, and Environment. As we look at those things, you can create a personal SWOT analysis to move forward to improve your abilities in all these areas. If you’re interested in becoming an affiliate, go to CuriosityCode.com and take the Curiosity Code Index. What that would mean is taking 36 question assessments. It takes about ten minutes. It’s quick. It’s like taking Myers-Briggs or an emotional intelligence or engagement survey. It’s usually a 26-page PDF that gives them all of their results on each of the areas of these 36 topics within the four factors of fear, assumptions, technology and environment.
Once they have what holds them back, they can create an action plan to move forward. It’s not enough to understand the value of curiosity. We know that we’re super curious and as we grow older, at about age five, we start to have this sharp decline in curiosity. We need to know why it is happening. If you look out there are a lot of assessments that’ll tell you if you’re curious or not. That didn’t help me when I was doing this research. I have low curiosity, then what do I do? We need to figure out what’s stopping it. If you find out what stops it, then you can improve it. That’s what I intended to do and that’s why it’s getting a lot of attention because there’s nothing like it. There is no other assessment that has come close to what we measure with this. It’s great if you’re talking to organizations or you know people who give curiosity personality types of assessments to let them know about the Curiosity Code Index. You might as well make a little bit of money in the meantime if you have an affiliate account with us. It’s something that is relevant in the marketplace. It’s great to see some of these companies that I work with like Verizon and Novartis. All of the companies that I’ve talked to along the way who are working on developing a culture of curiosity and they’re embracing this. This has to come from the CEO on down. We at the top got to recognize the value of curiosity so that we don’t become a Blockbuster, a Kodak, and all the ones that they love to say are problematic.
A lot of companies hold on to the status quo ways of doing things, which can be detrimental to the overall health of the organization. Some companies are great at recognizing that something was a great idea for his time, but it’s time to move on. Ben and Jerry’s is a great example of that. They hold funerals for their flavors that are no longer popular. They celebrate them for what they were and say, “This was a great flavor for its time, but it’s time to give it a funeral and put it away.” I can assure there are some companies and leaders reading this. They think about what ideas, what things are you doing that maybe need to be celebrated, but maybe need a funeral? To recognize these things, it helps to go through the Curiosity Code Index training. What happens when people become certified to give the Curiosity Code Index is not only do they get five hours of SHRM recertification credit, but they learn the value of curiosity. They learn how to help organizations go through a couple of different processes. In training, they have a session where employees look at their own individual results and can come up with measurable ways to improve in all of these 36 areas within these four factors. As employees create ways to overcome issues that they have with their own curiosity, they get confident and then they work on coming up with ideas for leadership. The consultants and the HR professionals, whoever’s giving this assessment bring these ideas back to leadership.
These ideas are all curiosity-based solutions to all the problems that we talked about initially here as far as critical thinking, communications, leadership, teamwork, you name it. Every hot topic that leadership is trying to solve, they’re giving you their answers from the horse’s mouth. When Disney had issues with turnover in their laundry division, they went to their employees and they said, “What can we do to help you be more engaged in your work? What can we make do to make your job better?” What they found was that they got a lot of great answers that they hadn’t expected. They thought everything they’d get would be these expensive solutions, but instead, they had simple solutions like put an air vent over my workspace or let my work table go up and down so my back doesn’t hurt and things like that. That’s what they do in these sessions.
They come up with these brainstorming ideas where everybody says, “This is what we can do to help us be more curious to develop us in the area of communication or emotional intelligence.” The top issues that leadership is trying to solve. What Disney found when they got those answers is it helped them improve turnover, which was a huge cost saving and that’s what it could be for organizations. I wanted to share what we’re doing since we’re talking about affiliate programs. John did such an amazing job talking about that. I know I’m going to go back and read again because there was much content there. I hope you all got a lot out of it because I know I did. I enjoy all of our guests. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you join us for the next episode of Take The Lead Radio.
Important Links:
- John Crestani
- John Lee Dumas – past episode
- The 4-Hour Workweek
- GodFind.com
- ClickBank.com
- Bluehost
- YouTube – John Crestani
- Curiosity Code Index
- Cracking the Curiosity Code
- CuriosityCode.com
About John Crestani
John Crestani is a growth hacker known for his contributions in helping companies reach more people and sell more products using the business model of affiliate marketing. He is an online expert in all forms of paid advertising; from Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, Youtube Ads, and Native advertising networks.
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