In this Episode, David Siteman Garland shares insights on how he built his business smarter, faster,  and cheaper by using the web and social media.

We discuss some of the key concepts from his new book aptly titled “Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: Non- Boring, Fluff-free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business”

• The best ways to go about creating content
• Where to start with inbound marketing
• The importance of having a great looking site with an equally great user experience
• Why copying big brands might be bad for business
• Why the key ingredient of content creation needs to be passion

Full Transcript:

David Wells: Hey everybody. Welcome to episode number two of Inbound Now, an expert interview series put on by HubSpot. I’m your host, David Wells. Today I have a very special guest with us, David Siteman Garland of TheRiseToTheTop.com and a brand new author of “Smarter, Faster, Cheaper:  Non-Boring, Fluff-Free Strategies on How to Market and Promote Your Business.” Welcome to the show. I got the book on my Kindle.

David Siteman: Thanks for having me, David. It’s great to be on. I’ve got to tell you right now I’m loving the iPad in the background. I might have to steal that for future use. I will give you credit once when I do it. I love it. It’s doing different things. I don’t know what you have going on, some kind of automatic program, but I’m loving it.

David Wells: Nice. Yeah, I put it on a slideshow. I have all these different visualization apps. I was going to put one on. I don’t know if it’d be too distracting or if it’d be like, “Wow, that’s really cool.”

David Siteman: I like it, man.

David Wells: We’re all about the content here. I don’t know if I want to distract the viewers or what have you. I wanted to get you on the show today to talk about some of the key concepts in your new book, about becoming a trusted authority and thought leader in whatever your industry may be, and then dive a little bit deeper into content creation because you talk a lot about it in the book. You’re all about it over there at The Rise To The Top. Then switch gears a little bit and talk about what’s coming up in 2011 that we should be looking out for.

David Siteman: Sounds good. A lot to cover.

David Wells: A lot to cover and a little bit of time, so let’s jump into it. About the book, how did you decide to take the plunge and write a book? Who’s the book really geared for?

David Siteman: It’s a good question. I just didn’t want to write a book to write a book. I wanted to do something that I thought was very meaningful. I do a web show. I’ve done a show on ABC and a variety of different things all geared around what I like to call “the hustling entrepreneur,” which falls into a lot of categories from small all the way to big. But really I love creating content for people like me, people that are entrepreneurs. That is really who the book was designed for.

The idea came from this. I started to realized on my show that there was some distinctive ways that I marketed, not really necessarily even on purpose, sort of by accident, that built the audience and the community on my show from zero to 100,000 in less than two years. I started to realize that there were some patterns in there. More importantly, I do interviews on my show. These patterns weren’t me getting lucky or very unique to my situation. I started to realize that a lot of other companies were doing things similar in their own way, if you will.

So my big concept for the book is I wanted to, one, show people the insider way of building a community and audience by being smarter, faster, cheaper as opposed to dumber, slower, expensive. I didn’t want to write something that was the “David show,” if you will. I wanted to bring in stories from others. I wanted to bring in insight and ideas and have it as a buffet for entrepreneurs and business owners to pick through and get some concepts that they can use and implement right away with their business.

David Wells: Right. It seems like it’s a compilation. Over the past couple of years, you’ve done over 150 interviews with some pretty big name people like Tim Ferriss, Chris Brogan, Gary Vaynerchuk, Seth Godin the marketing mastermind, Tony Hsieh from Zappos. You lay out those real-life examples in the book. I thought it was really useful.

David Siteman: Thank you. I think it’s interesting because, as you know and you work with small businesses, big businesses, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs are a little bit different. It was like that Jeep thing that used to go on like in the ’90s where it was like “it’s a Jeep thing. You wouldn’t understand.” Those stickers that were everywhere. Entrepreneurs, what I’ve noticed is that we learn a little bit differently. If you tell us what to do, we’re going to cry and run away and do it differently anyway because that’s why we’re entrepreneurs and we’re weird. In the book, I thought if you tell people how to do something, there’s a tendency for it not being applicable to people in different industries or whatever it may be. I thought it a better approach as opposed to the how, because I think that’s a little overrated, was go with stories of other people and takeaways and things that would kind of spark the imagination and say, “Oh, wait a minute. I don’t want to do it exactly like that, but that was a great idea that I can use in my own way, if you will, for my business.” That was one of the key, overarching things that I wanted to do with the book.

David Wells: Right. So taking those stories and taking the nugget from here and that and piece it all together. I thought it was put together really well. It was a great read. I actually bought it for the plane ride back to North Carolina for the holidays. It was pretty good.

David Siteman: It passes the time. I like it.

David Wells: Exactly. Another concept in the book that you talk about is the barriers to successful marketing are kind of crumbling. Instead of outspending the old mantra of how marketing went, it’s time to think about out-educating, out-hustling, out-giving, out-caring, and out-creating to get in front of these people and really, really maximize your marketing. This sounds like a ton of work and it is. I know it is from experience. What would you suggest for someone starting out getting into this mindset? Where should they start?

David Siteman: It’s an interesting situation. If I were to add another word on the book, it’d be “Smarter, Faster, Cheaper, Patienter.” That’s the key thing. You can do all this stuff now by being smarter, faster, cheaper, but yes, it’s time consuming. I’m a big believer and I’ve seen this from other examples too. I’m clearly not the only one. I’m an inbound marketing person as well. I’m a big believer that one of the best ways to really build trust and longevity of a brand now, being a little guy and not wanting to spend a zillion dollars, is really by creating interesting, entertaining, and inspiring content. A lot of times that can be overwhelming, because you look at it and you say, “Well, where do I get started? What do I talk about? Is this going to take all my time away from my business?”

If you look at people like myself or HubSpot or Gary Vaynerchuk or Chris Brogan, it can be a little bit intimidating because we all create a lot of content. We all create like five to seven days a week of content. You might look at that and you’re like, “I’m going to go cry myself to sleep as opposed to doing this.” I say don’t do that. Start with one thing that you can do that’s replicable. This is one of the most important concepts in here. What I mean by replicable, David, is this. If you’re going to run out of content in 10 posts or if you’re going to run out of content in 30 posts, it’s going to be hard to be successful, because the winners in this content game are the ones that are consistent. They keep doing things.

I like to call it like the late-night talk show model, if you will. Jay Leno has been on the air. The model’s been on the air. Why? Because there’s always some stupid celebrity to interview and a little band. Of course, it can be changed within each segment, but there’s a format that’s replicable that you can do over and over and over again.

I think that’s the challenges of business is choose one thing that you might want to try and get started with it. It might be a web show. It might be a blog series. It might be video. It might be audio. There are all kinds of different mediums. People watch, listen, or read all of them. I don’t think one is necessarily better than the other. I love video because I think it shows your personality more than anything else. But I would choose one piece that you can do. Get started with once a week, Wednesdays or whatever it may be. That’s going to be your content day where you’re going to put stuff together and you’re really going to focus on getting the content up. You’re going to spend 20% on creating the content and 80% of your time marketing and promoting that content and building relationships. I think a lot of people miss the mark on that 20-80 rule and end up doing it the reverse.

David Wells: Right. I think being consistent about it is, like you were saying, key. It’s like it transferred from the old methodology kind of like you were saying the talk show where every night it’s the same format. People get used to it. They want to see something new. So you’ve got to keep up with that. Play to where your strengths are like you said. If you’re not Shakespeare, like you say in the book, not everyone is Shakespeare. Think about creating video content and then having someone do a transcription of that show to get that text in there for search engines.

David Siteman: Right. You don’t have to be Spielberg to do the video. You don’t have to be Shakespeare and Spielberg. I’d arguably say the more human you can be, the better because we connect with humans. You don’t need the green screen and all that kind of stuff behind you to do it. What’s interesting about video that I find, and again, this isn’t necessarily true of the other mediums, exactly what you said. Once you create video, whether it’s a tip series, a web show, an interview series like this one or mine, whatever it may be, you do have the other formats now. You can take the audio and you can also transcribe it into text. Now you have the triple threat, if you will. I think that’s one of the interesting and appealing things about video. Is it for everyone? No. But it might be for you. If you’re listening or watching and thinking, “This is for me,” don’t fight that. If it terrifies you and it’s something that you never ever want to do, you know what? There are other things you can do. You know what I mean? Play to the things that you enjoy or think you might enjoy. It doesn’t matter whether you’re good or not. That good can happen over time.

I can tell you right now, when I started on video, I was awful. I was spray tanned. You have no idea, man. It was embarrassing. I still leave it up to this day as a reminder. Just because you’re excited about it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be amazing. So don’t let that be a setback. Like everything, it takes practice and time to get better at it. You can’t just expect to flip on the camera and be, I’m looking for a terrible example, Larry King or whatever it may be. Younger probably, unless you’re not. It takes time and practice.

David Wells: Right. That’s one of the things you mentioned in your book that keeps people out of the game because they’re afraid. It’s showing your flaws, having a mix-up in the video here and there. It shows that you’re human. It puts a human face on your brand. It just makes people like you even more. Like you said, over time, you get better and better.

David Siteman: I 100% agree. It’s funny. On my show, doing 150 video interviews online and we’ve done 100 plus in person and just all kinds of different interviews and all different kinds of formats. I’ve had a TV show where I was like, “Okay. We’ve got to get this entire guy’s life story in four minutes.” I’m like, “What am I going to do?” To video online where there’s more authenticity because you can do all kinds of different lengths. What I’ve noticed is when funny things happen that are humanizing, it creates a much better connection with the viewer. We’ve had cats and babies and random people walking in and power going out. We’ve had all kinds of interesting things happen during the interviews. I think what it ends up doing is people are like, “Well, this isn’t some kind of ‘guru on a mountain’ talking down to me or some jerk. This is a human.” I think that we’ve seen that with social media. We’ve seen that with what’s going on online. We want to connect with people. I think that that’s an amazing way to do it.

David Wells: Right. Switching gears a little bit, in your book, you mention product pushing and the hard sell are out and the smarter, faster, cheaper way is to become a trusted resource and an authority figure that someone knows, likes, and trusts. That’s who you buy from. What are some ways time and time again that you’ve seen that can help build that authority and trust within and around a community?

David Siteman: It’s interesting because someone asked me this question the other day and I think it was very important. We have a community of hustling entrepreneurs. People also say, “Well, that’s also resulted in things that have happened good for you.” Like David, you’ve done stuff so now you’ve built your personal brand. You can replace personal brand with business. It can just be me or it could be a bigger business. They asked me, “Did you focus on building your brand or the community? What’d you do?” My focus was always on the community. It was saying this, “Look, I’m going to build up the community. That’s going to be my focus is creating things interesting for a very specific niche of people. That’s what I want to do. I want to create interesting content for those people. Good things will happen as a result of that.” When you build a community that trusts you, then there are all kinds of things that can happen. You might get referred to someone. If you have a product or service, they might purchase it. It’s the soft sell. It’s people not leading off with, “Buy this. Buy this. Buy this,” which is not replicable. You might put it on Twitter or Facebook one day.

You see people that have success in this space, the big people that are really successful like Chris Brogan. We all know Chris Brogan. If you look at Chris and dissect him down, sorry Chris, we’re dissecting you, to little pieces, you can see the kind of smarter, faster, cheaper methodology working where he built this community of small business owners and entrepreneurs that read his content. He never asked for anything. When his book “Trust Agents” came out, everyone was receptive to it because he had already built this community. Then he was also able to build businesses as a result of the community without directly selling them. For example, he consults with big brands. He does other things that aren’t directly selling to his community as a result of his experience building it. You have a network. You have trusted people.

Every community needs a leader. That leader can be an individual. It can be a business made up of individuals. What I’ve noticed just on a business level, as soon as I focused everything on community, all kinds of good stuff happened. Google hired me to do some work. There’s been a variety of different awesome things that have happened on an economic level by focusing on giving people awesome stuff. I think that’s one of the critical things that we often overlook because we try to reverse that. We try to go for the sale right away or try to do that stuff without building that trust with a community.

David Wells: One of the things in your book, you talk about how you did it and also 37signals where they started building up a community before they even had a product. I thought this was pretty interesting. Would you mind diving a little bit deeper? It’s kind of like the mantra you network to get a better job before you’re out of a job. It’s like building a community before you need it. How did you go about doing that?

David Siteman: Chicken or egg, right? It’s one of those questions I asked a lot of people that built a community. I said, “Did you have a product first and service? Or did you not have a product or service first and develop it later?” There’s a mix. There are successes on both ways. I think that second way is an even more interesting way, which is no product or service yet and we’re going to focus on building a community.

The 37signals example is this. They created signal versus noise. That was the first thing they did. These guys were working at other jobs. They were developing stuff on the side. They decided to create this community of designers and developers and a very specific niche by talking about creation and stuff that those people would find interesting. They’ve now evolved. They got a podcast. They’ve got a variety of different content they create.

I always thought that 37signals, which creates all these cool web apps, started with web apps and then said, “Let’s build a blog.” It was the other way around. They built this community and then started asking them questions like, “Hey, we’re working on this product that can help you do collaborations. Is that something you’re interested in?” It started to become the community essentially told them what they wanted. They built it in their own way and then sold it back to the community. Everyone’s happy. The trust was there. They got to buy in, to be part of the product or service, meaning feedback was actually listened to which is a big difference than a lot of other companies. It’s really propelled them.

You can make the argument on the other side with people saying, “What do you do for revenue now?” That’s a long-term strategy. I think those guys and another guy I know named Timothy Sykes and there are many other examples have been smart with it. They find other ways to make revenue at the moment while they build the community. Meaning the other way might be bagging groceries, probably not, but it might be that you’re doing consulting on the side, you have a day job and you’re working on this in the after hours, or you save up enough money. That’s something I did when I started my company. I had enough money for, I want to say, like six months or somewhere around there that I had saved up so that I could survive even if I wasn’t making a nickel. I think once you take that mentality and you can focus on community, this stuff flips. It flips and the people become successful. Look at 37signals now. They’re one of the most successful software companies. I want to say they have two million paying subscribers. It’s something insane.

David Wells: Yeah, it’s pretty big. They’re making a lot of money over there.

David Siteman: They’re making a lot of money, and they’re not pissing off anyone. They’ve got a community of raving fans that continue to increase every day. I think that the takeaways from that, besides the way they went about it, were look what they did. They didn’t create the 37signals product community because no one would have cared. No one cares about your products and services except you. They do have a product blog now, but that was later on. Instead, they said, “What is the thing that the people we want to track are interested in and we’re interested in?” It was a simple question often not answered. What are they interested in? Developers like design and usability and blank and blank. Great, that’s stuff we love. Let’s talk about it. If it doesn’t work, if you don’t have buy in from both ways, like meaning you create something that no one cares about, that’s probably not going to be fun, and if you create something you don’t care about but someone else does, it’s also not going to work. So it’s finding that medium of an interest, a passion, a hobby, or whatever it may be. That’s what the content gets created on. Later on, that’s where people buy the products and services.

David Wells: So it revolves around your product. You’re educating them on how to do better at their own job, tips and tricks on how to make their life easier, and in turn, you’re going to become a trusted resource. When push comes to shove and they actually do need a product like yours, you’re going to be top of mind.

David Siteman: Exactly. That’s the key thing. I have yet to find an industry where you can’t come up with something that people will find interesting in the demographic. It might be trickier for some industries than others. There was a gas company here. Nothing more boring than gas and snacks. No one’s sitting there saying, “God, I can’t wait to watch a video about a gas pump.” There’s probably that one creepy guy who’s like, “I can’t wait for the gas pump video.” For the most part, that’s something that isn’t an interest or hobby. I went to them and said, “What is an interesting hobby of the type of people that you’re trying to attract?” What it ended up being was local sports teams. It’s in St. Louis, Cardinals and Rams fans are who they do a lot of promotions with. I said, “You just answered your question. No one cares about the gas and the chips. People care about the Rams, the Blues, and the Cardinals in St. Louis. So that’s where your content needs to go, the direction towards that, building a community of raving local sports fans and oh by the way, you sell gas, products, and services.” I think that’s an interesting way to deconstruct the smarter, faster, cheaper marketing strategy, if you will.

David Wells: Cool. In the book, you say that content is king, marketing is queen, and your website is your throne. What do you mean when you say “your website is your throne”?

David Siteman: Number one, we’ve always heard content is king. Number two was made popular by Gary Vaynerchuk where he kept saying all the time, “Marketing is the queen.” You know Gary. “Marketing is the queen.”

David Wells: Crush it!

David Siteman: Yeah, crush it! The third thing that I think that we miss is you forget that you need to have a hub, pun intended, that you own, that someone else does not own. It’s your slice of real estate on the Web. I think this is one of the most simple things that is also one of the most overlooked things. Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, all these tools, they are fantastic stuff. I use them all. Most people I talk to use many, many tools or are focused on a couple. Again, we do not own that stuff. If tomorrow Twitter goes down and everyone is like, “Peace out. It’s now Flitter,” and you start with zero people, you’re screwed if that’s all you focused on. When you have your own home that is also creating content, you’re going to own the subscribers. You’re going to own the followers. You’re going to have the e-mails because people are coming to you. Those other outposts can be used to form relationships, to bring people in, to do other things, but when you don’t have your home, it can be quickly taken away from you. So I think that’s key.

Whether you’re starting a show, blog, a tip series, I don’t know what kind of content you are, for Lord’s sake, just promise me one thing. Just get it on your site somewhere. There are a lot of other things out there like BlogTalkRadio and a variety of different things, but you don’t own it. Own something. Own the space. Make it yours. If there’s one thing that you want yours, it’s your content on your house.

David Wells: Yeah. You really need that home base. Like you said, if Twitter were to go bust tomorrow, which I don’t think it will but you never know, and also for SEO. You want to be building out those pages on your site to be found by search engines.

David Siteman: Right. A trick that I do is I do video a lot. So I use a variety of different video hosts. I use Blip.tv, YouTube for certain things, but I always, first of all, have a hard copy of every single video. I also have dedicated space by a company, they’re about to come out with a new name, it’s Widget Realm. It’s about to be called Da Vinci I believe. You know this company. They are something that I own. I own real estate on their site. So I upload videos there as well just in case YouTube tomorrow says, “By the way, goodbye,” or Blip says, “By the way, goodbye.” I’m not going to lose my videos. I can quickly go back and re-embed what they are. The key is I don’t rely on those sites. I put the video on my site. People come to it. Then if something changes in the future, I still own my content. I think that’s something that every person that’s creating content needs to think about. You really got to take ownership of it.

David Wells: Not even to mention your in-house e-mail list and building that up. Facebook may change its terms of service tomorrow and you can’t market to your fans anymore. So that’s very important to think about.

David Siteman: Out of your control. RSS, e-mail, there are so many different ways. I’m a huge fan of Twitter and Facebook. I use them both all the time. That’s been one of the massive ways that I personally use to build my brand because I didn’t have a marketing budget when I got going. That’s what I did. I got in there and hustled and connected with people on Twitter and Facebook. I continue to do it every day. I see it as a few of the things in the big pinwheel. I see that as yeah, some people want to subscribe there and that’s great. I see it as “subscribing” too. Let people do it in a variety of different ways. iTunes is one of them. Again, you don’t own it. I think that it’s critical to have that base. I’m so glad you mentioned that, David. I’ve done probably 100 interviews at least about the book. That is the first time that someone’s asked me about that. It’s one of the most overlooked concepts, I think. We all think, “Oh, let’s create the content. Let’s get it out there.” But you don’t think about we have to bring it to our own house.

David Wells: It’s important where you house it. Another thing I thought that was interesting in the book that you said that kind of flew in the face of what I’ve heard other people saying is a lot of people trying to break into social media emulate big brands. You see this is as the wrong approach. Can you explain why you see this as the wrong way to do it?

David Siteman: Rant. First of all, in fairness, I work with some big brands. I don’t hate big brands. It might come off like that in the book. What the thing is, big brands are big brands. Don’t worry about them. Those are the Goliaths in the business world. We’re the Davids, literally, sitting here. The two Davids. We’re the Davids in the business world. The rules that apply to those big brands are different. Big brands have spent a lot of money on advertising over the years, on retail, on market share. There’s a specific way of doing things. Even when they move into the social media spectrum, some are doing it great. Other ones, it’s a low go, it’s a little weird. It’s all customer service. That’s great, but for the hustling person trying to get a business off the ground or really get in there and get some traction, I think you have to learn from entrepreneurs and people that are doing it well, the Tony Hsiehs of the world that are now very big, the Sarah Evans, PRSarahEvans. I tried to pick people that did this without a big budget, without a big recognition beforehand.

That’s the other problem with this. I saw a guy once giving Twitter advice. He shall remain nameless. My opinion, by the way on Twitter and all these sites, is do it your own way. We can, of course, learn from people and what they’re doing. This guy said, “I only tweet once a day, four days a week and I’ve got 10,000 followers.” Great. Good for him. Let’s give him a cookie. But the problem is he had a very recognizable brand before Twitter, built in different ways. So when he opened a Twitter account, people knew him.

What I tried to do in the book was take examples from companies also that had no presence. They just emerged in the last few years or no one knew who they were, and they utilized social media and digital schmoozing, which I call it, to really build up a following and brand. I found those people to be much more interesting because I felt like it was much more realistic for someone else that wants to say, “Hey, I’ve got to get going here. Who’s someone that’s doing this right?” I think that sometimes we get poor advice when it comes to that.

David Wells: Right. They have the underdog story, as it were, where they came from nothing, whereas if Oprah jumps on Twitter, she gets five million followers in a day. That’s because the brand is already built up. I think that’s important to distinguish between the two.

David Siteman: That took years and lots of money and lots of effort. You know what? They deserve it. We’re going to get there too. You got to get going in your own way.

David Wells: We will be there. We’ll get there. We’ll co-host a show, The David Show.

David Siteman: Sounds good to me.

David Wells: In the book, you say the perfect storm for marketing smarter, faster, cheaper includes these three qualities:  passion, personality, and knowledge. In your opinion, which of the three is the most important for success? Of the people that you’ve interviewed, who embodies this principle?

David Siteman: Passion. I think passion is the most important. There are many reasons. One is knowledge can be gained over time. You can increase your knowledge over time. I would argue this, when I started my show talking about entrepreneurship, I was certainly not the guru, I’m still not, on entrepreneurship. I loved it. I had experience with it. I started talking about it. That increased over time. Knowledge can increase over time. Personality is another thing that can also change over time a little bit or, more importantly, get brought out of you. What I’ve noticed is even if you take the most introverted person in the history of the world or non-people person, as soon as you get them talking about that one subject that they enjoy, you can see that personality start to come out. I don’t care who it is. It could be a mime. You can find a personality.

The key thing that I think that trumps everything here is passion. I think that is the secret sauce. Someone with more passion and less personality and less knowledge is going to probably win, if that makes sense, as opposed to the other way around. A lot of knowledge but no passion is not going to win. A lot of personality and no passion is not going to win. If you’re high on the passion Richter scale, you can do a lot of good things.

There are a variety of people that I think exemplify this. I’ll steer away from Gary Vaynerchuk, who I think is a very obvious answer for this.

David Wells: That’s what I figured.

David Siteman: He exudes it. He crushes it. That’s what he does. You know the guy loves wine. You know the guy loves people. Here’s another one that’s a little bit different and someone I interviewed for the book. That’s the Millionaire Matchmaker, Patti Stanger, who has built this unbelievable brand. She’s got a show on Bravo TV. It’s all about the high-end dating market. That’s her niche. She works with millionaires on up, mostly men, but now a little bit of women. She’s built this multimillion dollar empire all centered around that dating market. Yes, she’s got the perfect thing. If you talk with her, in person, immediately you notice that she’s got a passion for it. She’ll start pointing out things in the room. I was out there with my girlfriend, right now fiancee, and she immediately was asking all kinds of dating questions. You could just tell that’s what she loved to talk about regardless of whether she was on a camera, writing something for a website, doing a TV show, or talking to a client. She had the passion for it.

What I’ve noticed is that passion goes way beyond products. I think that’s one of the critical things to think about. If you’re thinking, “Oh man, I don’t know if I’m passionate about a product,” well maybe that’s the wrong product for you. Or maybe you’re passionate about something bigger.

Tony Hsieh, we mentioned earlier, from Zappos. It’s not like Tony Hsieh is walking around with women’s shoes on. He might be. That’d be a little creepy. If so, Tony, feel free to reach out. We’ll work on that. He is passionate about building a business with a great culture that he’s excited to go to work to every day that has this amazing customer service and they happen to sell shoes. The product is sort of a commodity. My advice on that is that the passion can come from a variety of different ways. It may be the product itself. It may the company itself. It may be the thrill of starting something. It may be the passion of talking about a specific subject. If you have one of those somewhere, I think those are the people that seem to be the most successful with it.

David Wells: That’s really the driving force. At HubSpot, our passion is to transform the way the world does marketing.

David Siteman: Exactly. You can see it.

David Wells: That’s what drives us. Yeah, we have a product that kind of helps you do that, but at the same time, we’re educating people out there. That’s one of the reasons why I started this show, to get people like you on to share your knowledge.

David Siteman: HubSpot is one of my favorite examples of it. You cannot fake passion. There are other things you can fake in business somehow. Passion, you can see it. If you’re in a video like this, you can see it and feel it in a variety of different ways. I think that honestly it’s contagious. It’s something that, again, is so often talked about but not often as much as we’d all like to see implemented. When Steve Jobs came out with that first Apple computer way back in the day, he was crying like a little baby when he got up there. Why? Because he loves it so much. I think if we had more people that cared that much, the world of business would be a lot better.

David Wells: I definitely agree with you. Switching gears again here, looking towards the future, 2011 is right around the bend. What do you see as an upcoming trend that we should be keeping our eye on?

David Siteman: It’s a great question. What’s going to be an upcoming trend? I would say that everything we talked about is going to continue to be stuff that we see more in the future. We are very much on the insider game of this. We are at the forefront, the bleeding edge of how people are using the Internet and technology to connect with people and to form businesses and do that kind of stuff. I think a big thing that we’re going to continue to see in the future is many, many, many more businesses that are approach themselves as half media source and half business.

I think we’re going to see a variety of niche web shows and more shows and more, what I like to call, content DJs which are something that I think is a little underrated. If you think about what a DJ does, a DJ doesn’t write the song. The DJ isn’t the musician. The DJ picks the best songs, puts their opinion or spin on it, and gives them to you. We’re seeing a lot of curating coming more on the Web. People that can make things easy and compact for people to understand and improve their lives in one way or fashion are going to win in this game. There is so much content out there that I think as more and more gets created, more and more is going to have to be curated or DJed. I see an opportunity there.

Again, I think that we’ll continue to also see the blend of online and offline. These worlds are not scary and different. They’re the same thing, just manifested in different ways. I think we’re going to see a lot of people that are 100% focused online with everything take a step back and get a bit more offline and mix that in. I think we’re going to see continually more people that are focused 100% offline get more online until we’re into this more connected world. That’s a few things. We don’t have crystal balls, so we can come back here next year and tell me how wrong I was. Those are a couple of things that I think we’re going to continue to see.

David Wells: Cool. That’s definitely something I’d want to see, the online meshing more with the offline. I think there’s a lot of value in connecting all the relationships you create online to an offline, in-life event. I don’t think there’s anything that can replace that. The more that you can bring that together and bring those passionate people around your community together, I think it’ll just boost your brand, boost your, and just help out in the long run.

David Siteman: Yeah. Bringing people together, that’s the thing in 2011 for sure.

David Wells: Yeah, for sure. Thanks for coming on the show, David. Where can people find you online?

David Siteman: The easiest way to find me, where you can find literally everything, social networks, the book, anything you want to check out, is you go to TheRiseToTheTop.com. You can find me on Twitter or Facebook. I’m more of a Twitter and Facebook person even though LinkedIn is linked up there. You can check out the shows. I do new content five days a week until I fall over and die. Enjoy that. It’s the best way to hunt me down. Make sure you mention that you hunted me down from the show with the wonderful David.

David Wells: Yes. Thank you for coming on. We’ll try to get you back on the show in the future.

Full Recap here: How to Market Smarter, Faster, and Cheaper with David Siteman Garland [Inbound Now #2]