But if you get a third party to talk about you and say the same thing, but third party talk about you, then it changes the perception. So I can say I'm the best looking bald guy with a salt and pepper beard on the planet. About yourself. About myself. Right. Which I may believe it. Now, if suddenly on GQ, see my mug on there, suddenly people will start believing it. Jerome, I'm super glad that we're here today because we're celebrating 10,000 episodes with Valiant CEO. And so for those of you that are listening for the first time, maybe don't know the show, my name is George Wright III, and this is Jerome Nashefsky. He's the founder and CEO of Authority Magazines. Jerome, 10,000 interviews, that is a big deal. 10,000 founders and CEOs that you've had come through the interviews in the magazine. Yeah, did not see that coming. I think it was in four years total. So that's quite a bit. Yeah. I mean, people would see that and think, man, the amount of knowledge that you've been exposed to. But before we get into that, let's back up. Tell us the story of how this even came about because you were not looking to start a magazine. No, absolutely not. But it became a point of interest. And actually, it started in France. There's a TV show called Les Racines et les Ailes, The Roots and the Wings. And this show is fascinating. They just follow some guy, some gal that has some sort of passion, whatever that may be, can be making forks, can be collecting stamps, can be milking goats. I mean, literally a little bit of everything. Remodeling, restoration of castles, whatever that may be. And they just follow these people and they just let them do their thing. And the people who talk with fire, with zeal, with enthusiasm about like how to make a bucket, like literally, legit. And I would sit there as a kid. I was fascinated by how much passion there is in the weirdest things. So that's always been in me, and I always started conversations to know why somebody does what they're doing, which is super strange to me. And at some point in my business journey, I serviced a lot of entrepreneurs with online marketing, with online reputation, and other stuff. And a lot of them needed to have their story told. and it was very difficult to get them featured in big publications, those legacy media, so Forbes, USA Today, whatnot, because they're little folk. They didn't have much PR to themselves. Their story may be not super exciting to a big publication. Or people are getting the wrong story told, right? Exactly. And on top of it, to get in, oftentimes you had to pay a lot of money to get in. And so it was like a hurdle for somebody who had a cool story, that deserved to be told, and they didn't have a place to express it. So they would put it on their own website. Sometimes they would blog about it or whatnot. But in reality, it didn't bring any credibility, any authority, anything. So I said, you know, I went to entrepreneur.com. I look, this is a WordPress site. I went to another authority website and also was a WordPress site. I'm like, WordPress is WordPress. Let's WordPress something up. and we designed Valiant CEO with that in mind. Let's make it look as good as the other guys or at least in the same range and let people get published. Tell me your story. Yeah. And we never charge anybody to be published on our, that's why we got 10,000. It's open door. Come, tell us your story. Well, and I love to, I really want to highlight what's different about Valiant CEO, but I wanted to kind of back up to one thing I've heard you say a lot Because you say tell your story, but you like to say control the narrative, though. So when you tell a story, because the way you tell the story, you felt that it needed to be done the right way. And maybe this is what makes Valiant CEO different as well. So talk a little bit about that. When you publish in a publication, they have very strict guidelines. So the only guidelines we have on our publication, there's no cussing. That's going to make sense. I don't cuss. I don't want to read cussing. There's no politics. There's no religion. There's no lewd content. There's no promotion of any porn star or any OnlyFan or any of that stuff. None of it. We don't have any big pharma items. None of it. We don't have any casino and stuff like that. We just don't. Sometimes it may fall through the cracks, but usually we take care of it. We don't want to have any of that stuff because in SEO, search engine optimization, certain topics can turn the website into a bad neighborhood. And then when you link back to your own website, it may be detrimental, which we don't want to cause any detriment. Yeah, but I also noticed with over 100,000 online readers, you're not running ads, which was kind of interesting. Why is that an actual policy that you have for the most part? I think you're not littering the pages with advertisements that are distracting people. So we have maybe a couple sponsors that sit there all year long, but we don't have any flashing, any pop-ups, anything that distracts the reader from reading the content. Because if you think about it, you go on any of these big websites, they are designed to distract the reader. For sure. They are designed because they make money with the advertisement. So the advertisers need to have their ROI, so they need to disrupt the user experience of the reader. That's the whole thing. And you have to satisfy those advertisers. so in a way you're trying to put articles out but you're trying to satisfy your advertisers by distracting people from reading the articles you're putting out and i find that first distasteful to disrespectful disrespectful to the reader who's trying to go through the article and they literally need to jump over the obstacles of the pop-up they had to close something they got to wait for something yeah to quit splashing they got to click a yes they got to click a no it's like a nightmare you don't even know what you are reading i'm very add and very dyslexic by the time the first pop-up shows up, I can't remember what I read in the paragraph above. Well, but besides the distraction, I think it's really important and interesting to note that you built this magazine around the idea that the number one goal was to get the story of the founder, entrepreneur, CEO out, not create a business that makes revenue that has to cater to advertisers. So knowing that story is the number one goal, that's very unique in the industry, especially in magazines and authority, right? That is the number one focus. I want to make sure that whoever publishes an article, publishes their interview, publishes their story, when somebody lands on that page, they can go through it and actually read it without being distracted by anything that is designed to disrupt the experience. That's why we don't have advertisers that really disrupt it. I'm curious because before we get into sort of the growth and the stuff that's happened with Valiant CEO, including 10,000 interviews, what else makes it unique? I feel like when you work with individuals to get their story told, over time you've really developed the best way of telling that story, and that's been super important to you, which is why I bring that up. And I think it another reason why you attracted other opportunities and covers and things like that So what else do you feel really the way you tell the story is unique for individuals when they tell it What important for them? Because I do think a lot of people just think they can go out and get PR and press and get out there. And you're crafting a story for people. We try to encourage whoever publishes an article, we give them like a how-to sort of formula. And we guide them with questions and that support their stories so that they help them to pick, because most of them are not represented by publicists, so they're novice, you know, they don't know. They don't know what to say, right. So we help them to kind of how to craft that narrative so that it benefits them without sounding pompous or arrogant. I'm the best in the world and so on and so forth. So we try to help them kind of wade through it. Let me ask you this because you've said this to me before. What's the difference between getting featured versus just going out and telling your story yourself and being out there and telling your story versus a place that's featuring you, third-party like Valiant CEO Magazine? If you go on your own website and you make a claim, whatever that may be, well, that's good. But right away, it actually raises a suspicion. Yeah. Like people don't believe what you say yourself. About yourself. No, they just don't. However, if you get a third party to talk about you and say the same thing, but third party talk about you, then it changes the perception. So I can say I'm the best looking bald guy with a salt and pepper beard on the planet. About yourself. About myself. Right. Which I may believe it. You know, people may laugh. Now, if suddenly, you know, on GQ, see my mug on there and say I am the whatever I just said, suddenly people will start believing it, which is super weird. Isn't that weird? It's super weird. So that's kind of the power of third party validation. The reason I bring that up and the reason I think that's so important is everybody hears right now you need to create content, put it on your social media and get out there talking about your story. but there's a huge power in having someone else talk about your story because everyone starts with I'm going to do a bunch of social media talk about myself who I am what I do and how I do it but you've seen it I've seen it when someone else is saying that same exact thing about you there is a pretty big power so over time it's grown and what took what do you think was the pivot pivotal moment for Valiant CEO where it really started to make it grow was it credibility of like when Grant Cardone came along? So let's zoom back, because you just said something that is interesting. When you said when somebody talks about you, it has some power. And one thing that I find fascinating, talking about fascinating things, when you write a book, people fight to get an endorsement or a preface or some sort of review by some celebrity or authority and they put that on the back of the book, they put it on the front of the book, they put that everywhere, endorsed by or comment by, whatever, and that is what increases dramatically the sales of the book. Right. Not the content of the book itself. The content is good. But if you remove all that endorsement and you just have the content, it often falls flat like a pancake. But as soon as you put those recommendations and the preface written by whoever and all that, suddenly it packages the item in a way that it becomes a must-have. That is a very fascinating thing because it legitimizes it. Is it because other people like to see other credible people saying it's good? I mean, all of the above, right? Because we're social animals. We need social proof. We need to have somebody that knows something about something, that says something about that something, so that that something makes us believe that something is worth something. Yeah. I guess you did it in a way with Valiant CEO because you were highlighting all of these individuals, but all of a sudden, third-party credibility, celebrities' names and stuff started coming, right? So we were an online publication, and we were growing pretty fast, looking really good, being very cautious on the details so that it looks really good. And one day, we had a submission. Actually, we had a few submissions that were interesting. It got me like, huh, that's kind of cool. So we had the CEO of one of the big branches of home services of Berkshire Hathaway that just showed up. I'm like, CEO, Berkshire Hathaway? Pretty cool. That's kind of cool. Then we had another one that was the founder of Xbox that popped up also. I'm like, that's cool too. And one day, one of my team members, they say, we have a submission for an interview by Grant Cardone. I'm like, well. You're like, what? Well, it's not just what. Is it real? Yeah, that's the thing. Is that real? Because Grant is a very strong personality who doesn't have just friends. Yeah. So I did not want to publish something without making sure this is really Grant's answers, voice, and we can credit that. So I contacted whoever submitted that, which is his PR agent. and indeed that was really Grant, really his questions, really his answers and really his thing. So actually that cover shows up there. So I told the team, let's make a cover. Let's just make a cover. Let's start making a real legit magazine. Like people look at us. Because it was online to this point. It was online only. I'm going to do a digital, real magazine with a cover. Print. Wow. Yeah, it was print. I want to have the thing in my hand. So literally I just like, this is interesting because I want to make I want to make a note of this the magazine started as an online reputation seo optimized focus solution for people to tell their story first then it became recognition credibility cover I think a lot of magazines kind of the opposite like I don't think because as you said a lot of magazines you get into none of that online value really even exists so so keep going because Grant Cardone you decide to make a cover decide to make a cover make a whole magazine. So we went back into the previous interviews we did. And I told my team, sift through it and find cool stuff. And they did. And as we were going through it, we found some really, really cool people with really cool stories. And that totally lit up my zeal to just, let's do it every single month. We have to do this. So we did the first one with the grant, turned that into a PDF, the PDF into a printable item. We printed the thing, we sent it to grant, we did what we got to do and we just we had that thing and i was like let's do it again so we went through you know the the all the interviews we've done and we started seeing very interesting people and we start like scheduling next cover next next cover and as we start doing that more and more start showing up the credibility started to snowball right yeah yes because because you've had a lot of what are some covers that have showed up oh we have like kevin harrington several billion And the individuals they went through incredible trials to get where they are And that why the title of the magazine Valiant CEO Matters is so dear to me is because to be an entrepreneur, I'm just looking at the scroll, the faces we have. Because being an entrepreneur, being a CEO in this day and age, I think, I don't think it was ever easy, but it is really complicated. It is. It requires a great deal of courage. And even though I like the word courage. Yeah. I love valiant. Ah, I didn't know that. So that's how the name came about, is you really believe. Valiant. I love that word. Courageous CEOs. The valiant men of David that would go out there and slay the enemies. And I just love the thing. I just like the sound of valiant. Yeah. It's interesting, though, because I have heard, we've talked about this, these covers you have like Grant Cardone, Kathy Ireland. I've heard comments from many of these people that say this is, because they've been in a lot of magazines. They've been on a lot of covers. Kathy Ireland was on a lot of covers, and she said your magazine was just so different and so unique. Tell me about that. Why did they, even the people that have PR and credibility, is it just because of the way you portray them and you really take a lot of detail and time into how you position them? It's not just a picture on the cover to try to get attention, right? I'm looking at the cover. That's a good question. And I think what really impressed upon them and impressed them. So I impressed upon them and impressed them that I want to make them look good. I want the experience to be good. And I want them to express what they want. I did not want to impose my narrative on them, my questions on them, my stuff on them. I wanted them to have the freedom to express whatever they want to talk about. and usually the publications you know when you're featured in a publication they tend to send a journalist contributor that kind of like tries to get stuff out of them yes which there's a place for that and I think it's great but for me no I said like I want to know tell me like tell me so now if you sound like an idiot I'm not talking about the big names we have but anybody that shows up on a publication if you sound like an idiot you sound like an idiot on your own you earned that yeah like I want you to be able to tell us, to tell me what matters to you, where you're going, you know your audience, what do they care about, and so on and so forth. And all of them went through this little exercise that I call the perfect interview. They come up with their own questions. They come up with their own answers, obviously. And then we just review and then steer a little bit or dig a little deeper or kind of like ask additional questions to kind of like get the gist out of it or a little bit more substance out of it sometimes or a little contrarian, a little thinking, because I love that. But, you know, for the most part, they provide their own stuff. And I think that's why they love it. But also I think that's why people that read the publication are surprised by the content because it's quite different. We're not trying to steal controversy. We're not trying any of that stuff. I'm not interested in the clickbait stuff. I'm not interested in any of that, you know, like the normal stuff that those publications do. Yeah, with that said, though, because we've had this conversation before, something that might be really helpful for our listeners is I've heard you talk, because you're very strategic in why you do things. You've talked about like three types of questions you will ask people. You know, you talk about questions and maybe you can refresh my memory, but questions that they want to talk about, questions that, you know, the customer should ask or questions that, you know, you're excited about, like what, there's different reasons that you do certain questions. Tell me about that. So oftentimes, I'm encouraging individuals when they start their narrative to start with FAQs because they're talking to their audience. I mean, it's good to talk to people that don't know you so that they get to know you, so that, so that, so that. It's very nice, very good. However, as soon as they get into the conversation with you, they have the same questions. That's what it's called, frequently asked questions. So address those questions instead of having like some page, obscure page lost on your website that people can click through to figure out stuff, you know, besides, you know, what's your login. But people have real questions. And answer those questions in your article. And then add another layer with a should ask questions. So people ask me a lot about this, but they should be asking about that because this is what actually makes a difference. And these are the things I encourage anybody, I mean, not just on my publications, but anywhere, to kind of work and be familiar with the FAQs of your audience and what matching SAQs should ask questions. You can plug into it because it engages, because people say, that's exactly what I had in mind. That's exactly what I was worried about. That's exactly what I was wondering about. Tell me more. And they keep on reading. I want to ask you about the fact that you said speak to your audience, but there's specific audiences you should speak to. But I like what you said because I think a lot of times if you really understand your audience, there are questions they don't think to ask. But you're helping them to ask them so that then, like you said, they're like, oh, my gosh, yes, I should have asked that question. I understand. Okay, cool. The FAQ is the one that comes to mind right away. You know, they have, I mean, sometimes any entrepreneur relates to that. You feel like you're Woody and you have a string on your back and you pull it. I got a snake in my boot. I got a snake in my boot. Hattie partner or whatever it is. And you repeat the same thing over and over and over. So use that concern and elaborate on it because they will ask you when they talk to you one-on-one, when they talk to your sales rep, when they go on your website. So answer that into an article where you address that point. and then steer them towards the question they should be asking because oftentimes the professional knows more than obviously the person that they serve and steer them into what they should be worried about. That way that question, the should question, might be something to ask your competition and let's see how the competition answers that. I can see why when you say now control the narrative, it's very specific, perfect interview, strategic conversations. And I think it is important to have these individuals that when they are being featured, have it be consistent. And I think you're right. A lot of founders and CEOs, they don't have their message really crafted. So they're randomly talking about all kinds of things. And so when they're found online, it's random conversation. So how many of these interviews that you've been working with, how many of these business owners and CEOs really have a strategic conversation that they – or a voice, right? A voice or a brand? Well, it's hard to give numbers, but we can go into minority and majority. The majority don't. So obviously all those that we have on the cover that just keep on scrolling over there, all of them have that dialed in. You know, Grant Cardone, he's dialed in. I mean, dialed in. He's been doing it a while. And he's a sales guy. He is good. And that's why I love to have him featured, because I think we had it on three or four of our publications, because he's a great example as to how to do that Several of them are Kevin Harrington has his message dialed in Super dialed in And that why it good to have the big covers the big names, because it attracts attention, gives credibility and all this. But also it's a great example. That's something that, you know, so there's benefit for me and my publication to have those guys up there because it draws the eye. However, the folks that just go on these websites should read how they answer the questions what question they chose to address and how they do it. And then I would even take that, put it into ChatGPT or whatnot, and kind of modify those questions so that it suits my business and my work so that you can craft better answers and better questions. Because some of them, I've seen scroll, are just masters of that communication. I want to ask you one more question because I know we're going to be coming back with some other episodes on the lessons learned from Valiant CEO as well as some of the other myths in the industry. But Valiant CEO, I just want to end with this last question, has really grown into authority magazines. And now there's a dozen publications that you have created. Why did you decide to create other magazines in other niches outside of Valiant CEO rather than just expanding the Valiant CEO by itself? What was the purpose for that? More of the same. Give more opportunity, more platforms. So Grant, great example. Grant was twice, I think, on Valiant CEO. His wife, Elena, was on Valiant CEO. And then Grant was involved in the wellness space, so we got him on Wellness Voice. And same with Kathy Ireland. She has so many ventures and so many things going on that it was fitting to create another publication because they need more of the same. if you can feature one time somewhere that's great but you kind of get lucky this is like the 15 seconds of fame just about today with social media anybody can do it but if you publish regularly with consistency and on top of it you control the narrative and on top of it you know that the team behind the publication will make you look good, will make you look great will make you look the best why won't you do more of it so we just kept on doing more of it because we have individuals that are, let's say, Thelman. Yeah, Jay Thelman. Yeah, Jay. So he is a doctor, legit doctor. So he has this place in Wellness Voice because he has a lot to say about it. But he's also an incredible marketer and CEO, so he has this place on that other publication. Ah, I see. It's interesting because you made a comment, and I think this is a really good strategy and tactic for people to understand the way you've explained it before is being featured, as we talked about, is very important. Being featured frequently takes it to another level. But when you're featured frequently and predictably to where you can also make it strategic, and we're going to have to have another episode on that because I know you're very strategic with people that have come into the ecosystem of authority magazines. But just to really finalize this thought you had is, so more magazines, more niches, more dialed in industries gives more opportunities for founders to tell their story. It was a request. It literally was a request. We got them once. They loved it. It ranks. It looks good. It's not distracting with ads. And they can say whatever they want to say and stick to the narrative. We have strong guardrails, so there's no bad stuff that shows up. There's nothing that is bad neighborhood type of deal. So they say, like, do you have another publication? I say, no, I don't. They say, oh, I wish you did because now I got to hunt for another publication again. I'm like, hold that thought. Hold my beer. and I got my team say, let's whip out another one. And I just purchased. Out of necessity, wow. Yeah, necessity and out of request because this is something that people request. So then we just offer another one and another one and eventually turn out to be Authority Magazines because now we have a dozen. A whole network. So Wellness Voice, Invest Courier, Founders Magazine, CEO Monthly, on and on, right? All of these different niches. I really love that. And I tell you what, we're in our next episode when we come back, I want to talk to individuals about how not just this is, we've now got the backdrop, the backstory, but how it's become a real engine for building authority for clients, as well as just helping people to be more strategic with their messaging. Because I do think a lot of people just get out there and they do branding, they hope it works, they do press, they hope it works. And I like how it's built from a foundation of strategy. So I really like- So I want to clarify also something because it can be murky real quick. So every article we have on our website is 100% free. There's no pay-per-play. Good point. No pay-per-play. There's no client relationship. People just post their stories, post their stuff. There's no charge whatsoever. The only time there's an upgrade, I would say, is when we need to accelerate because there's a need. Because when we have 10,000 interviews in four years, you do the math. That's a lot. and we don't have the manpower to whip out the thing, edit, proofread, do this, the composition and all this, and have this out in 48 hours. It takes four to six weeks. From the moment you submit, the time is actually live. Sometimes people need it now. They have an event coming up, they have something cooking, whatever that may be, they need it now. So now we allocate more priority to it, and there's a fee for it. But you make a really good point. That also came out of necessity. In other words, you built such a network of featuring at a pure purpose, mission-based reason, these founders and CEOs. But out of necessity, they're coming to you now and saying, hey, I really like how you did that. I need it sooner. I would like to go here. I would like to go there. A lot of these individuals hit you up even just for help in branding and things like this, which has kind of evolved into other things outside of the magazine network. But that's a good point and a good distinction because there are thousands and thousands and thousands of articles being done, which makes it a powerful network for getting your voice out. But also you do it in a way that helps them to get it out the right way. So I really appreciate that. We're going to come back and talk a little bit more about that. And we're also going to be, if you're listening to this, make sure to check out these episodes because we're going to be talking about the mistakes people are making when they're out trying to get their voice out. We're going to be talking about the myths that people believe when they're trying to do branding. And we're even going to talk about the lessons that you've learned as you've done these because you can imagine with 10,000, half of that, a tenth of that, the amount of strategies and tactics and knowledge that you've received from these individuals is unbelievable. There's some mistakes that just keep on repeating themselves. There's some patterns. You see the patterns? There's clear patterns of things that I wish people knew. Don't do that. Or do that more or whatever. So there's definitely a lot of lessons in it. Yeah. I want to encourage everybody to go check out authoritymagazines.com as well. And we'll put some links in the show notes because there's a lot of cool stuff coming out. You've got some free guides. You've got ways to position yourself. You really truly try to guide people in crafting their message. So a lot of great stuff to check out. you
