Bill Ross: Today I'm excited to have with us a business expert on the cutting edge of technology. Nate Herc is the founder of AI Automation Society and one of the world's fastest growing AI communities with over 120,000 members learning practical automation together, and as the co-founder of True Horizon ai.

Nate brings real world AI solutions and shares strategic insights across YouTube school and major events. He's dedicated to helping entrepreneurs harness automation regardless of their technical background to drive meaningful results and business growth. So Nate, welcome to our expert interview series.

It's a pleasure to have you.

Nate Herkelman: It's great to be here. You summed up everything perfectly, so yeah, I'm excited to chat with you today.

Bill Ross: Sounds good, sounds good. Alright, so this is, all about 10 minute quick hit interviews of what's great, practical advice. So I'm gonna ask you the one question we have for you that, that people want to get to and and then we'll just dive in.

So, what is the most effective strategy you recommend for business owners to increase sales while also strengthening their company's reputation?

Nate Herkelman: Absolutely, and I love that question. So what comes to mind first for me is creating consistent, transparent, and valuable content that positions you as a thought leader.

And the way that I arrived to that answer is because, I've, I graduated college about a year ago, so I haven't been in business too long. through high school, through college, I've, I've started different businesses. one was a car detailing thing. Some have been online and I found success, but I wasn't able to find actually an inbound, consistent stream of success until I started creating content.

And I think that it's a newer method, I would say. And what is content? it's not just about. Holding up a selfie stick and walking down the streets of, of New York City, it's, it's so much more than that. It doesn't even have to be video content, but just putting yourself out there and putting your personal thoughts out there, it just unlocks a, an absolute insane world of opportunities because not only do you have people that are reading your stuff, starting to trust you more and then reaching out, but in today's world with, the algorithms of social media, everything like that.

Your stuff will be put in front of exactly who you're trying to reach. So it's like just very powerful, free marketing. Because you don't have to spend all this, all these dollars on, on ad spend. you can actually just put out some thoughts, start to let the algorithm, do its job and it will just put your, your stuff in front of your exact avatar you're looking for.

And it's just a really powerful, use of time. And Google had this study called the 7 11 4 framework. I'm not sure if you've heard of it, but that one I haven't. No, go ahead. It basically just talks about the fact that if someone has seven hours of interaction with your content across 11 different touch points and on four different platforms, they just subconsciously have so much more trust in you and the ability to actually sell them and turn them from a stranger into a customer.

Is just significantly higher. And I think that that's something that me and my co-founders had seen, because I have zero sales background. I come from business analytics and a little bit of marketing, but when I started hopping on the on calls with, with, these, these cold clients, I was just selling like crazy.

And I think that's a mix of pricing too low. But also the fact that when people hop on these calls and they feel like they kind of already know me and trust me because they've watched so much of my content and they've interacted with it on YouTube and LinkedIn and whatever you have, so, I just think that it's insanely powerful and the amount of, inbound that we're getting for whatever offer we're trying to promote, it's just, it's completely free.

And I think that that is the most powerful thing that you can have once you've kind of established yourself as a thought leader or just, a business that people trust.

Bill Ross: Sure. So let me ask you, because as a person, well as a performance marketer, paid performance marketer who has done that for years and years and years, I have a few years on you.

My, graduation was a little longer than a, a year ago, that's for sure. But, but I, I got heavily involved with digital marketing and paid advertising and I've, run everything from, Facebook to Google and, and, native advertising, everything you can possibly imagine.

And, and there's a lot of, nuances to it to make it work essentially. And I think one of the things that's fascinating, for me is the whole concept that you're mentioning here of it's, it's free exposure, it's free advertising, and, and what I have found difficult, in that. In this generation, for me, looking at it or, or maybe more established business owners who have been around for many years, and even though social media and those things have existed, some people have gotten into it and become very successful with it.

Your primary example, but a lot are, are sitting on the fences or they're not really sure what steps to take, what actions to actually do. And I think. With your background and, and especially with your expertise in, in the whole, AI side of things with automation, what advice would you give to somebody if you had to give them practical steps like you're talking to me?

If I wanted to implement exactly what you're talking about in my business and bring more inbound attention through sharing my story and, and everything else, what would, what would I do?

Nate Herkelman: Yeah, that's a, it's a very good question. I think the first thing is, is the mindset about it, because I think that a lot of people will kind of quit right before they were about to get somewhere, because you have to understand that it's not like a, an overnight thing. You've got to let the algorithm warm up and figure out who you are.

What you talk about and who you want to reach, and you have to be consistent over everything else. And I think that if I was getting started right now with basically no personal brand or following, I would go straight to LinkedIn, is what I would do, because I think that there's a huge gap in the supply and demand on LinkedIn.

Where before this, all I would think about is, okay, I'm gonna go to LinkedIn and I'll announce that I got an internship, or I'll announce that I got a promotion and that's kind of all we used it for. Or maybe looking up people for credibility. But people are now starting to go to LinkedIn to consume content, but they wanna learn, rather than going to Instagram and kind of doom scrolling and having these brain rot memes.

Sure. People are going there to learn and It's, it comes with an extra stamp of approval and then it's obviously just I, I saw the statistic about LinkedIn. If you're posting once a week, you will already be in the top 1% of LinkedIn creators just because no one's really posting. So I think right now is a really cool golden opportunity to start posting on LinkedIn.

But besides all that, I think, the mindset is just that you have to do it once a week, just commit to it. You probably won't see results right away, but it will work. I think another mindset shift is that you're not optimizing for, for likes, you're not optimizing for views, you're optimizing for conversions.

And the way that works is you, I could create a video for example, my, my video on YouTube that got a million views that likely had a very low conversion rate to my paid offers because that was just a big broad, it reached everyone and it reached so many different types of people. And that was good for virality.

But if we really wanted to push a high ticket offer, we would make content that was so niche and speaking to exactly who we want to, that it would perform terribly on YouTube, but the dollar per view would be a lot higher than the dollar per view of a big, broad, trendy thing. So I think that people get very caught up on, ah, it didn't get many likes.

It's not getting many views. But really what you should be caring about and tracking is how many people from this video are clicking on my website link or clicking through to what I'm trying to actually push to people. So I think those two things, consistency and just having a good expectation of, I don't even wanna look at the views.

Let's just track our website, analytics. I think those two things will leave people a lot less feeling like they're failing when it comes to creating content.

Bill Ross: Gotcha. And so when it comes to LinkedIn specifically, do you promote and strongly recommend using video or, or long form or a combination thereof, or, or, what's your thoughts on that?

Nate Herkelman: Yeah, yeah. So there are I guess you could say some LinkedIn best practices. typically what I do is I just throw a one minute chunk of a YouTube video and then I explain what I do in that video. Mm-hmm. But typically what works best, I think are written posts with a few images and just very readable meaning, like bullet points, spaces between, and it should sound like a human, if it sounds like AI, people are gonna get turned off immediately.

So I don't use AI to write any of my posts at all. Okay. and then, there's some other really nitty gritty things like, don't put a link in the post or LinkedIn won't push it or have people comment on it as much as you can and it gets pushed more. I believe there is some, a degree of truth to those sort of tips and tricks and hacks.

But ultimately I think what wins is people thinking and feeling like you're human and being transparent. Even if that means Hey, I failed here, but this is what I learned. I think that content goes a lot farther and of course builds more trust because there's just, there's a lot of people out there that are pushing narratives that may not be completely true.

Right. So authenticity is just over everything.

Bill Ross: And do you suggest everything revolves around their business and their, and their concepts in their business? Or should they be more personable as well?

Nate Herkelman: I think a mix of both. Mm-hmm. I guess it depends on are you trying to grow a company account or are you trying to grow your personal account?

But I think either way, people value people and community is everything. And that's why I am very bullish on community. That's why Alex Ram Moey is very bullish on community, especially with this AI wave. Is, that's a very future-proof thing, connecting with people. I think that's the whole 7 11 4 too, is people just feel like they make connections and click with certain people.

Right. so yeah, I think it also, I always try to tend to work backwards a little bit and think about, a big umbrella of people that I'm trying to reach. But ultimately you can't. You can't, resonate with everyone. So you, you do have to sort of think about, if, if I was this person and I had three pain points, all of my content should revolve around those three pain points.

Bill Ross: Gotcha. So you would use your business and your concept and your customer avatar to talk about those things essentially in the content that you put out there. would you use AI to help generate ideas that you're looking for, to, to produce content or, or, How would you go about that? And, and that'll be sort of the last question I have for you.

Nate Herkelman: Yeah. I think that there's, there's absolutely no problem with using AI for idea generation. building some automations to help me do things quicker. I'm just obviously a strong believer in handwriting everything. but I mean, I use AI to scrape through my LinkedIn comments, my YouTube comments, stuff in my community, and then just over time, week after week, give me insights of

Here's some things that people want, here's some things that people didn't like that you did, and just have a running list and be able to see trends of what resonates and what doesn't. Because you're gonna put out some stuff that doesn't hit, but when you find something that does hit you'll, you'll double down and just keep going there.

And I think, I've heard people call it the, the, Accordion. That's the right instrument, right? The one that goes right.

Bill Ross: Yep.

Nate Herkelman: Like you go wide, you do a bunch of things wide, and then you find something that works and then you just go in on it, So Perfect. That's another, another mindset shift there is not everything will hit.

Bill Ross: Okay. So consistency and, you know, keep at it and then go through the analytics, find what actually is resonating with your audience, and like you said, double down on it.

Nate Herkelman: Absolutely perfect. Yep.

Bill Ross: Well, I appreciate the advice. that's a quick segment on some actions You should take right away.

And Nate, I appreciate the time. I do have one final question for you, even though I said I only have one more. And that is if people want to get in touch with you, if they wanna know more about you and specifically what you do, how can they reach you?

Nate Herkelman: I'll keep it simple. I would just go to my YouTube channel, Nate Herc, and from there there's a couple different links on my videos that you'll see whether you're looking to, download some free templates, join a community or work with our AI business.

You can find all that there. So Nate Herc on YouTube is probably the easiest way.

Bill Ross: Okay, perfect. Well, listen, I appreciate the time and we'll catch up with you around sometime soon. All right. Awesome.

Nate Herkelman: Thanks so much, Bill.