253 – Donna Cravotta’s Secrets to Building a Thriving Personal Brand

Karen Yankovich 0:00
You’re listening to the good girls get rich podcast episode 253.

Intro 0:06
Welcome to the good girls get rich podcast with your host, Karen Yankovich. This is where we embrace how good you are girl. Stop being the best kept secret in town, learn how to use simple LinkedIn and social media strategies and make the big bucks.

Karen Yankovich 0:21
Hello, hello, and welcome to the good girls get rich podcast. I’m your host, Karen Yankovich. And I am so excited for this show today. Donna Cravotta and I met a few years ago and we are talking all things networking and business building and speaking event and AI which I learned so much from her about AI and some of the things that she’s diving into. You are absolutely going to love Donna, check it out. I am so happy to have Donna Cravotta. With us today Donna provided is the CEO and founder of crevado Media Group. And the creator of the mixtape brand story reels be visible club, a group learning community and the real 50 over 50 Visibility Project featuring 50 plus women who are quietly making a difference. After years of creating marketing strategies and building customized online platforms. Dinosaur recurring themes, her clients had gaps in their own stories, they left out parts of their journey that got them to where they are today. And the gap created a disconnect in their work and in their marketing. So she flipped her own story spent a year learning how to redesign 40 years of experience to help entrepreneurs. And now our focus is on guiding clients as they pull together all the parts of their stories and mix tried and true strategies with new technology to be visible and connected with their perfect audiences. Donna, I am so happy to have this conversation. We get to talk for like two hours before I hit record here. And like we’re like, No, we’re just talking about all the seven favorite for the show.

Donna Cravotta 1:49
Oh my goodness, we could go on for days.

Karen Yankovich 1:51
Donna, do you remember where we first met?

Donna Cravotta 1:53
I do. I was speaking and you were the only person in the audience, right?

Karen Yankovich 1:57
Yeah, I was we were both speaking at this event. And there was I think six people, it was a big event. And there were six, like six, six attendees at the event. And thankfully, I mean, I knew of you and I think I don’t know how we knew of each other. But I was like, Oh my gosh, somebody that I because it was I think I either I stayed for your talk, or you stayed for my talk, because I think it was just like, oh, I can’t like one of us felt pity on the other one saying I can’t leave this person alone. I don’t remember which way it went. But it was and it was, but it was, you know, nothing else this you know, we got to know each other better. Right? So for those of you that are speakers out there, just know this is gonna happen to you someday. You know? Yeah, you’re gonna walk into a room and there could be two people in the audience. My gosh, so you’ve had quite a journey since then you’ve done well, I remember when we first met your focus. You had a heavy focus on PR at the time. I still do. Yeah. So tell me about that. Tell us a little bit about that.

Donna Cravotta 2:55
Well, I before I started my business in 2006, I worked for 27 years in law firms. And I was a project manager. And one of the things that I did was I helped create their marketing department. And I launched financial applications and marketing applications. I created their online training environment in 2003. Because they wanted me to take my son to Asia for a month and he was six months old. And I was like, yeah, that’s just not happening. So I was like, look, we’ve got a Citrix account, it’s $200 a month, let’s go virtual. And I did, I created this whole, like global trading environment there. But part of what I did was I managed the media kits and the mergers and acquisitions transactions for this large global law firm, and I managed the media kits of 250 partners. And I was kind of like the interface to the legal publications. But I didn’t realize I was doing PR because it was just work. And it was like, Oh, if nobody else could do it, let’s give it to Donna. And when I started my business I saw like it was a little after I started my business when social media came out. And I started to see how the pieces were coming together. I saw that there was a real connection between social media, SEO, content development and PR. And this was like 2009 2010, I started pulling these pieces together, and nobody was really doing it back then. And

Karen Yankovich 4:25
we still aren’t, we know it. But there’s very few people that are pulling it together.

Donna Cravotta 4:30
And it works. When you can pull, you’ve got to include all the parts you got that include all the parts of your story, you’ve got to include all of the parts of what you’re doing. Otherwise, there are these gaps. And those gaps are the things that create the disconnect, and that’s where things don’t work. And that’s when you go and you hire somebody for way more money than you could afford that you don’t really need and you start buying tools you don’t need and you start doing all the things you don’t need, because you’re looking for the answers externally. But when you put All of your parts together, you’re getting the answers from yourself. And like we’re all personal brands, we’re not Coca Cola. We’re not Federal Express, you know, we’re, we’re small, tiny little businesses, we need to operate as such. And what attracts people to us is who we are. And that’s what I help people do. And whether that comes out in their content, or that comes out in PR, or that comes out in their social media. When they become you know, more one with themselves, everything else becomes easier.

Karen Yankovich 5:31
Oh, my gosh, well, you’re speaking my language, because that’s really one of the reasons why I leaned into LinkedIn so hard, because I think that that’s where, you know, when I asked, Can I ask 100 people? Where did you get your biggest clients from? They tell me a referral. And like, okay, but you’re spending all your marketing time on Facebook? What are you doing about meeting the kinds of people that can give you more referrals? Right, and you get referrals when you personally, are worthy of them, and you look worthy of them, and you’ve taken the time to, to show up worthy of them. And just from a PR perspective, you know, we incorporate PR into everything we do in our LinkedIn programs, from a perspective of are you building relationships with the journalists that write about what you do, right? When we paid you know, when you when the days when you paid $20,000 a month for a PR firm? You’re paying for the Rolodex, right. So let’s turn right now I know how old I am, right. But, but here’s the here’s the deal. Like, I think what where that comes back to your brand is if you’re featured in podcasts, and newspapers and magazines and things like that, your SEO was growing, your Google juice is growing. And when people check you out before they’re ready to hire you, you check out, right. And that’s all stuff that is free, that you can be doing that you just strengthening your foundation. So I love that you’re talking about

Donna Cravotta 6:44
one thing that I always tell people is you’re either going to spend time or you’re going to spend money, it’s one or the other. So spend the time first. Because if you are going to hire an agency, spend the time to learn how to do this. Right, you hire the right agency. So you know the right questions to ask. So you know what you’re getting. But quite honestly, with PR, for companies like hours, it makes no sense to hire somebody to do exactly the relationships are what matter. And once you build the relationships, you really never pitch again. I mean, I’ve been invited in the last two weeks to speak to be on podcast to be an expert in a community. I didn’t pitch a thing ever. Because

Karen Yankovich 7:25
Oh my God, that’s beautiful. You guys listen to this, this is that magnetic marketing that I talked about that it can be magnetic, you don’t have to be out there cold calling? I mean, I’m not saying don’t, you know, certainly if there’s a reason to reach out to people that you know, you want to be on their podcast, or things like that, by all means there’s a way to do that, and a way to do that authentically. But the more you build these relinked relationships and strengthen them, the more your marketing becomes magnetic, and that is the beauty of being an online entrepreneur, right when your marketing is magnetic. Yeah,

Donna Cravotta 7:59
it just happens. And then you’re like, what happens with me a lot is I work with clients, and then they never tell me that, like the work we did together resulted in XYZ. Because what happens is when they start to implement these strategies, things just happen. And they don’t think back. Oh, well, that happened because I worked with Donna. So in the beginning, when I started to do this, I used to take this personally. But now I celebrate it because it means that they’ve built this so seamlessly into what they’re doing. Yeah, that it doesn’t have anything to do with me anymore. Yeah, I

Karen Yankovich 8:34
love that. I love that. And this isn’t not even the direction we thought this was this conversation was talking about a lot more to talk about. But this is such an important topic that I want to stay here for a minute. Because here’s what happens when you start doing these kinds of things. Right? When you’re interviewed on a podcast, you you know, when I when I’m interviewed on a podcast, typically people will say at the end, and we’ll do this for you at the end of this show. How can people find out more about you? And I say, Well, we’ve got this great quiz, check out LinkedIn quiz.com, you can find out how to get started with LinkedIn tells you a little bit about depending on your marketing style, how to get started, that builds my email list. And I’m not paying for Facebook ads to do that, right. So so these relationships they filter down into the traditional well maybe it’s not on if it’s traditional anymore, but the the more modern marketing things of building your email list, because you are building these relationships with the media and you’re getting your name and your content and your lead magnets in front of the front of the your audience without having to spend a ridiculous amount of money on ads.

Donna Cravotta 9:32
I don’t ever use Facebook, Facebook ads. I think the last time I had a bill from them was maybe five or six years ago and it was $600 for the year.

Karen Yankovich 9:43
I spent an ridiculous I’m not against using ADS but I’m not using Facebook ads anytime soon again because it just doesn’t

Donna Cravotta 9:49
know I’m not against it either. I don’t find that I need them. And like one of the things that happens with this whole online world. It gets this magical like equation to it. That is based in reality, and you know, you start to see what other people are doing. And other people may not be totally transparent with what it takes to do their multi six figure launch. Right, right. And it’s a lot of work and it’s expensive, and you need people and you need systems and you need processes and tools and all of these things. But do we really need that? Right to Know what actually need? So like, when I start to work with people, the first thing I ask them is, how many clients do you need? We’re not even starting till you figure that out? Because we’re gonna base it on what your goal is. Right? Right. Somebody else’s goal is, you know, and love than, and in most cases, they need 20 clients a year. Alright, so if we you need 20 clients a year, you need to get in front of 1000 people with those 1000 people. Right? Right. That’s right. So let’s spend, let’s spend our time figuring out who were those 1000 people? What is going to attract them? What do they need? What are they not? What do they need that they don’t know that they need? How can you provide that? And that’s it. And let’s start there. Beautiful. Instead of starting with, you know, we need to reach 10,000 people,

Karen Yankovich 11:11
right? So you have a snazzy new employee on your team, don’t

Donna Cravotta 11:14
you? I do. Her name is chatty.

Karen Yankovich 11:18
Chatty, tell us about chatty,

Donna Cravotta 11:20
Chatty’s pink. She has a pink brain with a tiara and a wand. Okay. So I started working with chatty.

Karen Yankovich 11:30
How’s your chatty is first of all having occluded all the way? Yes.

Donna Cravotta 11:34
Okay. So it’s, it’s it’s chat GPT or other AI tools because I use an assortment of them. But when chat GPT came out on November 30, I was ready to launch a cohort, the six week cohort of how to pitch things because my entrepreneur friends that train coaches and speakers and authors, were telling me that they have clients that don’t know how to pitch anything. And I was like, Well, I’ve been doing this since 1997. You know, I could, I could pitch in my sleep. And I put together a whole six week cohort thing to help people learn how to pitch. And then Chachi it was supposed to launch first week in December and November 30. The chat GPT came out. And I was like, well, it’s back to the drawing board because this is going to be irrelevant by Tuesday. And I spent the last.

Karen Yankovich 12:24
I’m glad you recognize that because I was like, Oh, this is the this is the thing that’s putting me over the edge. My brain can’t learn one more new thing. This is the first new thing I’m not going to learn well, so much for that because I absolutely love it now, but my first reaction was oh, hell no, I can’t take on one more. I can’t learn one more thing. But it has frickin exploded. That

Donna Cravotta 12:42
was my take on on tick tock tick tock, but but chatty PT what I saw instantly that it could minimize the amount of time that the tasks take. And the research takes on so many of the things that I teach people, and they lose focus, because they get overwhelmed by the tasks and the resources. And they don’t realize that the process of going through the process is the magical part. That’s the part where you really learn, that’s where the things come together. But they don’t want to do it, they want to outsource it to somebody else. And these are things you can outsource. So chat GPT and other AI tools kind of made this all more feasible and like easier to, you know, show them how you can get through this process. So what I did, I did not talk about it for a long time, because I didn’t want to be that person like I’ve done this for 20 years. Now, I’m an AI expert, I am not an AI expert, there are a handful, nobody,

Karen Yankovich 13:39
how can anybody be an AI expert in their area, because they’ve been

Donna Cravotta 13:43
working on this for 1020 years. That’s true. That’s trading today, you know, and those are the people from those are the people that I’m learning from. And I really feel that even whoever is using these tools, we have a responsibility to understand the way they work. Because this is not just a productivity tool, this can change, this will change and it’s already changing systems of our society, education, governments, health care, I have afib. And there’s a shopping cart now where you can put your hand on the handle of a shopping cart, and it checks your heart rate. Wow, know where it’s too. But it’s you know, you really need to be careful about what you’re sharing the tools that you’re using, because there are 1000s of tools coming out every week right? Now, you learn before you start giving a lot of information to a tool, learn what that tool is learn who created it learn, you know, what do they stand for? Because there’s a whole dark side to this and we don’t want to contribute to that accidentally, you know, so there’s a responsibility in using the tools.

Karen Yankovich 14:50
So tell us but how would we get started so when you when you’re when you’re saying okay, so I was ready to create this whole pitch workshop and I knew it was going to be outdated by Tuesday. Like, how would you use your new employee chatty to create pitches?

Donna Cravotta 15:05
Okay, well, let me let me just explain first when I brought chatty on board, I my

Karen Yankovich 15:11
chat my chat up to his name is Gary and

Donna Cravotta 15:16
Chatty and Gary have a have a Yeah. I did an onboarding process for her, Oh, just as I would for an employee, because, you know, I’m asking chatty to do things for me that I would ask an employee or a contractor to do for me. And you know, one of the first things I learned how to do is how do I customize these tools? So they they feel like me, they sound like me. And a couple of things that I did well, now it’s easier because like in chat, GBT, there’s a new if you have the paid version, which, if you’re going to use it, spend the 20 bucks. Yeah, I agree, I have the paper out. Don’t even bother with the free, right, the free is faster. But it’s not as accurate. And you can add things to the paid version that you can add to the free version. And one of the things that you can do in the paid version is it has a customization option. So you can go in there and tell it who you are, what you do. And it will take that into account every time. It works with you. And now I learned this morning that there’s a new update for the paid version, where it’s going to take the prompts that you put in there, and it’s going to make them better. And it’s going to put that information in the in what they in the output, like in the section before the output. And what you can do there as you can go back and look at its thought process. Wow, wait, it’s prompting, and then use that. Use that in the future. But now just to get back to how I onboarded chatti is I went through everything I’m doing in my business. And I mean, like when I started my business, I was a VA. And I would give my clients a spreadsheet of like a piece of paper to fill out four columns. This is the task. This makes sense for me to do I want to continue doing it. I don’t know how to do this. And I never want to know how I hate doing this. And I never want to do it again. So those last two columns are the things that chatty can be tasked with, but who each one. And okay, so what information does this robot that has hallucinations needs to know. So we can get the most accurate information out of it. And like just like when you would bring a person on board to work with you, you can’t just hand over your work and say do this, I don’t want to do this anymore, you have to bring them on board and show them the way your business works and what you want them to do, why they’re doing it, and give them this background. So it makes sense to them. Otherwise, the delegation is not successful. So you have to do a version of that with the with AI tools as well, to be able to share this, so they’ll give you back the best information possible. When you’re prompting, and that’s when you’re asking it for specific information, you want to keep a couple of things in mind unless you’re on Bing, or Bard. The information it’s pulling from is a data source that ended in September 2021. So if you’re asking it for hashtags, or keywords, or a list of current events, or anything that’s news related, it’s only going to pull from old information. And if you ask it for information that it cannot easily get for you. It’s trying to please you. So it’s going to make things up. And those are called hallucinations.

Karen Yankovich 18:39
That’s so interesting, it’s an interesting way to look at it, because it will remind you of that, yeah, remind you of that. And it’s important to know this as a content creator, I haven’t actually used it yet to create unique content, like I’ve used it to do like a lot of post production on my podcast, right? So it takes the podcast, you know, transcription and it does all the things. So I’m not too worried about hallucinations there because I’m sending it the transcript, you know, however, just this week, for the first time, I uploaded the transcript, and I have to upload it in parts and it’s got all that down pat. And then I’m like, okay, create some show notes. And the show notes had nothing to do with the transcript. I was like, What the heck, I thought maybe I uploaded the wrong transcript. Like I finally had to give it back to my assistant to go. I don’t know what’s going on here. But it was so so it’s interesting to me, because what started the conversation that started the conversation of I want to talk about this on my show was me on LinkedIn saying, What do I do about the fact that my chat GPT is getting better and better and better at understanding what I want, but yet I don’t want to be doing more and more of his work. I want to be able to outsource a lot more of this to my team. How does my team have their chat GPT get better and better and better at understanding my voice. You know, and I was I was like that was the universe kind of dumping that back on my lap going I don’t know but you better figure it out. You know, because it’s So I sent it back to my team and was like, and you know, they’re gonna be laughing when they hear this, but I was like, I don’t know what just happened. But I’m putting this back in your lap for a couple of weeks. And let’s see how let’s see how it goes. Hey there, Karen, I just want to jump in for a minute and remind you that I am here to support you with all of the things we’re talking about here today, and introducing you to beautiful people like Donna and more people in my network in your life with the work that we’re doing in our she’s linked up accelerator program. It is a 12 week program that helps you understand how to get more impact influence in income in your life, by creating a strong personal brand, so that you are connecting with people at the highest level, putting those amazing people on your calendar, and building your business to a quarter million half million million dollar multimillion dollar business in record time, I would love to tell you all about it. The first step is grabbing a spot on my calendar, Karen yankovich.com/call, get you to that calendar. And on those calls, we just spend a couple of minutes with you getting some clarity around what you’re looking to do, we’re always looking to provide value on those calls. And if we think it’s a fit that we think we can support you and help you, we’ll tell you what that looks like there’s a few options. And the only way to know it is to jump on a call with us. So if you want to know once and for all, what it looks like to step into a more powerful role in your life in your business. I want to see your name on the calendar

Donna Cravotta 21:30
can give a few suggestions if you’d like I would love that. They can add paragraph or two on say of of something that you’ve already got in your voice right? And say have it pick up this voice.

Karen Yankovich 21:43
So ChatGPT, btw does recognize my voice probably because I have 250 podcast episodes on Google going back five, six years, right. So you can say in Karen Yankovich His voice, which by the way is pretty creepy. Because sometimes when I type something and then say please put this in Karen Yankovich voice, it makes it sound more like me than when I typed it in the first

Donna Cravotta 22:03
it’s looking to please you, right, and it’s looking to do the best job it possibly can with the parameters that it has. But you the trick is staying in between staying in the parameters of what it can do. Because when you ask it to do something that it can’t do, that’s when it goes and starts hallucinating. And when it hallucinates, it makes up things, and then it starts to believe it. So it really goes down that path. And another another thing that’s really valuable to know is it works best when you’re working on a subject matter that you really know. Because you’ll know right away, like like your own voice, you know, this is not true. Your podcast, you know, this is not true. But if you’re using this to get like, you know, like some kind of like evidence based data about something that you don’t really know about, you need to do, you know, allow the time for the extra research to make sure that what you’re sharing is accurate, because it has really good for getting External links, and finding things that validate what you’re talking about. But you also don’t want to validate it with something that’s untrue. Right? That’s gonna defeat the purpose altogether of what you’re trying to achieve. But like, as you’re bringing it on board, like thinking like go through task by task, what would you have it do for you? And what do you want that end result to be, and then build your prompts around that. And then you know, your team should also understand the way that it works. So they can like go this a step further than you I mean, it’s a process, just like when you hire an employee, you know that you’re gonna need to invest like a couple of months of working a little more with them, until they get on board and understand all of the ins and outs of your business. And this is no different. And even if your team has worked with you for a long time, you know, when you bring on another team member, you need to be the glue that holds them all together. Right? It’s the same, right? So think about the things like where could this be really useful? And no, also No, I mean, this is the thing that drives me nuts about the whole thing is people are using this as a catch all this is going to be the answer to everything. This is going to solve every problem I have. No, that’s never going to be the case. You don’t even want that to be the case. But how can it help you with the things that are repetitive, that you know, that maybe you need a brainstorming partner because we’re basically doing this alone or in a really small group and it’s hard, we do a lot of things. And you know, regardless of the size of our business, we’re still doing almost all the things a big company does, and we’re doing it ourselves. So like, you know, my head is like a spinning spreadsheet all the time. You know, to have somebody to say hey, what do you think about this that isn’t like at is really helpful. So

Karen Yankovich 24:58
I love that. I love that And I want more tips. The first time I used really use chat TPT, which really got me into it was I had, I was hiring somebody to do some marketing thing for me. And I got like a 50,000 page intake form. And I was like, Oh my God, who does your ideal client, listen to podcasts? What books do they read? And all those things, right? And I know the answers to these things, but I just couldn’t think of any of them. So I would literally go into chat GPT and I would describe my ideal client and say, What podcasts I listen to and now like, oh, right, you know, Brene Brown. Oh, right. This one like, it was like, it wasn’t like they were like, it wasn’t like it was giving me things that that it was inauthentic. It authentically jogged my brain. Yeah. And I was like, this is cool. It took me 1/10 of the amount of time to complete that form that it might have taken me without it. So that’s when I was like, Okay, this is cool. This is really cool. This is this is I need to do, I need to learn more about this. Right. So. So I just I still use it for things like that sometimes, you know, and, you know, and again, we right now we’re using it, I use it to jog my brain and post production by podcast primarily. Sometimes I do things like we like I didn’t use it to get some help with the quiz that I created recently, which was, again, took me 1/10 of the amount of time that it might have taken me otherwise, you still have to be part of that equation. Absolutely. Because there were things that I was like, No, that’s not right. No, that’s not right. I don’t like this. I don’t like that. And then I was pulling from this and pulling from that and pulling it together and saying that and one of the things that we did for the quiz, and those of you that haven’t taken the quiz yet sure the LinkedIn quiz.com. But one of the things that I did was I asked Chad GPT to because I have a like this right brain left brain thing going on, right? So I’m like, recommend a crystal that’s going to enhance the energy for this, this style type, you know, but then I had to go in and I know a lot about crystals, but I don’t know everything that I had to go in and Google the crystal to make sure that that information on that Crystal was actually accurate. You know what I mean? But it gave me some great ideas. And I’m like, Oh, my gosh, that’s a great crystal for this, right? So it was it was fun to be able to use to do those kinds of things. But for sure, I didn’t go in and modify it and make sure that it was it was what I wanted it to be right. In fact, there’s a couple things that I still want to add to the quiz funnel that I haven’t added yet, because I did not write yet. You know what I mean? I’m like, I need to take a break from this and come back to it. Because this is off. This is definitely not the right vibe that I want to share with this. So before we move on to there’s one other topic I want to talk about here today. Before we move on to that what else should we know about Chad TPT? And how are you serving people with this now?

Donna Cravotta 27:24
Okay, so I just want to swing back to the paid version of changes. Yep, there’s a couple of other things that it will do. One of the new things that it will do is it’s going to start giving you suggestions the way like when you Google something Google gives you hints. So they just launched this, like this week. So it’ll start trip trickling into people’s accounts. But as you start typing a prompt, it’s going to start giving you suggestions, so you could make your prompts better. And then you could also add plugins. So there are over 700 different plugins that you could add. So we could do other things like have it read a PDF, or have it read a link or have it read. What’s coming soon is having the ability to summarize a YouTube video. But there are also Yeah, like you can go to Claude II, which is part of anthropic, and on the free version, you can put in a YouTube link, and it will summarize the YouTube

Karen Yankovich 28:20
video. Awesome. We’ll put links to all this in the show notes. So

Donna Cravotta 28:24
yeah, so definitely, yeah, definitely get the paid version of chat GPT. The tool set that I’ve been using, currently is the chat GPT for anthropic Claude to perplexity, which is another great tool, I just use the free version of it, but it says great summaries, and it does other things in there that are really cool. And what, what perplexity will do is when you put information in there, it asks you for clarification, ooh, which is really nice. So and then the other tool that I’m using is a paid tool. It’s called writer.com. Okay, I love the company. I love the CEO, I love what they’re doing some, and they have like a whole onboarding process of, you know, how you write. So when you put the information in there, it’s like, curating content for you, based on the way that you write. And that would be really helpful with the team, because all of this stuff is built into the back end. And you could actually

Karen Yankovich 29:29
put so we could be working off of one account instead of each having our own. Yes, that’s nice. That’s because that’s kind of what I’m waiting for in chat GPT that I because what right now the issue is, if I have my team member, do all this post production stuff, and then I look at it and I want to make edits. I have to either do it manually. I can’t run it. I’d have to start from scratch on my own jet. I can’t go into his chat GPT and say, Now take this and do this. I can’t do that because, you know,

Donna Cravotta 29:55
a writer account would serve you well. And you could put snippets in there, so like you could put phrases that you say all the time, you could put, you know, different things that you want it to be pulling on a regular basis that are no. And it’s only $18 a month. I mean, we’re not talking. Right. And the company, I mean, just like, follow them on LinkedIn. They’re doing incredible work. I mean, I’m a writer.writer.writer.com. Yeah, I’m just blown away at the intelligence and the caring of some of the people that are like the rocket scientists in this field.

Karen Yankovich 30:32
Beautiful, beautiful. So you are doing AI roundtables, right? roundtables around. Yeah,

Donna Cravotta 30:38
a little bit about that. I did one of like, two weeks ago, because I was what I did was like created, after I realized that my little six week cohort was going to be extinct. I realized that we need to be able to do this in community. Because this work is going to change constantly. What worked yesterday isn’t going to work today, what works now isn’t going to work in an hour. Right? So but I also wanted to tie it to the work that I have done for decades now. And what I did was I created a community, it’s a learning community and an exploration community called Be visible dot club. And in there were going through, like connecting those gaps in your story, connecting with your audience, finding your audience creating content. There’s a whole like, PR masterclass that I’ve been giving for years that I updated, and, and how to use AI ethically and responsibly and creatively and practically. And so yeah, I’ve had that going for a couple of months with the core group, and now opening it up. And hopefully, I’m building my business family in there. And I’m really excited about it

Karen Yankovich 31:51
links, all of that shown,

Donna Cravotta 31:53
and the way that I’m marketing it, because it’s very different. There’s nothing else like it. I realized I couldn’t market it the way you’d market anything else. So I’m doing roundtables and they just open discussions.

Karen Yankovich 32:04
I love that I’ve done roundtables, and I really enjoy doing round tables.

Donna Cravotta 32:09
I mean, I think I totally forgot to market my thing with the conversation, but I’m doing another one with AI and PR. And I’m just going to do them like different topics and like how cool

Karen Yankovich 32:23
is together? Cool. Well, we’ll have links to all of that in the show notes. Speaking of your business family, you started a movement this year,

Donna Cravotta 32:31
I did

Karen Yankovich 32:33
tell us about that movement, because I freaking love it.

Donna Cravotta 32:37
You’re part of it.

Karen Yankovich 32:38
I know, I’m excited, I can’t wait.

Donna Cravotta 32:41
It’s called the real 50 of 50. And I woke up with an idea that it’s wonderful what Forbes does when they’re 50, over 50 and 30, over 30 and 30, over 50. And all of these lists. Anytime you can shine a light on women doing good work in the world, it’s important and should be celebrated. But they’re missing an entire segments of the population. And I sat down and in 15 minutes, I made a list of 50 women that I personally know that are over the age of 50 and doing really good work in the world. And I called it the real 50 over 50 which the hashtag was available the domain was available.

Karen Yankovich 33:23
Yeah, so the universe aligned to make this work. Not just that,

Donna Cravotta 33:27
that was a big indicator that nobody is having this conversation hate. My, my, you know, my second after I was like, Okay, this is an idea. I checked it with my friend. She said yes. Great idea. I started doing keyword research. The keyword research resulted in what not to do after 50 what not to eat, you’re slowly dying every day, how to date, how not to date, what to do with your hair, don’t wear that makeup anymore, you know? And I just like one, meaningful conversation happening here. And like of all the women I know, we would not talk about any of that. We just wouldn’t talk about any of that we would talk about 800 other things. It wouldn’t be any of that.

Karen Yankovich 34:08
Oh my gosh, that’s so that’s so true. That’s so true. I can’t imagine ever sitting around a table with my friends going, what are you wearing this week?

Donna Cravotta 34:20
So I started reaching out to people and I filled it up. I mean, we had our first interview in March of 2023. This is now August 2023. We’ve had 18 interviews. We’ve got interviews booked all the way through to May 1 2024 weekly interviews every Wednesday at noon Eastern time. They’re live on LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube. The majority of the activity happens on LinkedIn. And so far we’ve got a collective reach of over 600,000 people.

Karen Yankovich 34:55
Oh yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it was so funny because I saw it. And I’m like, this is really cool. I should let you know how I get busy. And I’m like, I gotta check this out. It’s on my to do list probably stayed. And if I look back, it’s probably still in my inbox somewhere that I saved because I was gonna read that email that I never got back to. And then finally I reached out, I’m like, no, no, I need to be a part of this. And you were like, cool guy. It’s great. Here’s the link. And I was like, when is my interview? Like, she’s got people lined up every I think it’s like January or something. October, I was in October, okay. All right. But I was like, wow, like, this isn’t. But I was so amazed by that. Because it’s so it’s so important. And I think it’s such a important part of this conversation is, these are women that are making a difference in the world. These are women that are step and this is where the difference happens in the world, I believe. And, you know, one of the things that I get interviewed for a podcast recently, and it was so funny that they were stuck on this, because they were a lot younger than me. And they were stuck on this thing about why I believe you should just tell people how old you are on LinkedIn. I’m like, well, cuz if the minute you say, You’re younger than you say, you are somebody’s gonna post your 40th high school reunion picture somewhere, and they’re gonna,

Donna Cravotta 36:05
like, it is gonna lie about it. And the

Karen Yankovich 36:08
reality is like, and like you come to this, if you come to this, owning your owning every decade, and like remembering how much experience you have, and, and what you bring to the table, every one not that you’re not not that I’m dissing the 30 year olds out there, because I was a 30 year old and I hustle that 30. Right. But, but it’s different. It’s different now. And, and it’s not better or worse. It’s just different. And it’s okay, that it’s different. And I love that you are helping women step into and owning that, which is a big part of the conversation that I have. Maybe that needs to be a whole topic on the show. But it’s a big conversation that I have about, like people who care and if somebody’s not going to hire you, because they know how old you are. They’re not the right client for you. Well,

Donna Cravotta 36:50
again, we go back to I need 20 clients next trait.

Karen Yankovich 36:53
Right? Exactly. And you know what I can I gotta tell you something done. And when I’m speaking at events in person, I get that question probably more from men than I get from women. Which is interesting. Should I put my age on here? Should I put when I worked at McDonald’s and you know, 1975, or whatever? Like, I mean, I, it’s more men, I worry about that than women, which I, which I love, first of all, but And you’re right, how many clients do you need, we can find them? That’s, that’s such an important piece. You know, I can’t use that same theory. When people say my clients aren’t on LinkedIn, I’m like, Well, you need 20. You think we can’t find 20 of your clients on LinkedIn, but I think we can. And you don’t have to go to places all the time. You know, this is important process.

Donna Cravotta 37:35
This is the other thing that I have been saying, for years, listening is the most overlooked social media strategy, because people don’t listen. And you need to learn how to listen with your eyes with your ears, you need to feel it in your gut, in your heart and your brain. And that’s when you make good decisions.

Karen Yankovich 37:53
You know what? It’s so interesting. You’re saying that because one of the things I remember you saying that very first day we met was that, and you were saying I think you were talking about? Do you remember this Tylenol story, the Tylenol, you were saying that Tylenol listens on social media, and they look for people that use hashtag headache, and they jump into the conversations. And they send them samples or something like that. I don’t remember the exact details. But you were taught, but I remember that thinking that’s freaking brilliant. You know, like, instead of being out there trying to get people to stop to join the conversation, you started, jump into conversations people are already having, because you’re listening to those conversations, as opposed to trying to start like something new, like these conversations are already happening, just become a part of those conversations.

Donna Cravotta 38:39
I’ve had clients that don’t post ever, I don’t post that much. I don’t either. I go for fine. Where I started all this, the client that really helped helped me to pull all of this together. It was around 2010. She was a hand model. And she had a line of anti aging hand care products. And she was paying a PR firm $5,000 a month to get her into all the big print magazines, which they did. It did a phenomenal job. But they didn’t know social media. So they were trying to get me that PR agency was trying to get me to teach them social media for nothing while she was paying them 505,000 A month, I wasn’t getting paid 5000 What to do every night because and models do nothing. And I just I have to say to my client, I said, Well, you know, why don’t we flip that? Why don’t you fire the PR agency. And let’s let’s go all in with this. And that’s where I learned SEO. That’s where I pulled in my PR skills. And we started following the hashtag dry hands in three time zones at 11 o’clock at night. And I would follow the hashtags. I was one of the first 100 people that had a Hootsuite account, and I had all the streams set up and I’d lay in bed and I’d follow the streams and I’d send 20% off discounts for all luxurious am cream, and we sold with no budget at all. Over $100,000 worth of hand cream in eight months. Oh my gosh, this literally,

Karen Yankovich 40:05
this is like we could this is. Remember when I started this conversation that I said this, this is gonna be a long one. So. So that’s an entire another it’s an entire other conversation we could be having about listening because it is, it is so important. But it all kind of comes back down to for me all the things we talked about here today. ties back into authenticity, right authenticity and relationships, and and genuinely showing up as who you are, and having conversations with people, even if you but using all these tools to make your life a little bit easier, like looking for the hashtags looking for AI, right? No, you’re not saying at any point and then go sit on the beach while the while your money pours. There’s work we have to win lotto for that. Yeah, I love this.

Donna Cravotta 40:53
This is what I tell my clients to like, they don’t want to do a lot of this work. Because you know, it’s not sexy. It’s not the bright, shiny stuff. It’s the roll up your sleeves and get into the research. But when you do this, what you learn through the process of doing this is something that you can outsource to somebody else’s personal brand. Yes, you identify who are your people what they need. And because you have this whole, like wealth of knowledge, you get to figure out like how you can help them and it changes everything that you do. Because you’re not guessing anymore. This, this is where the answers come to you. And this is where the answers not only come to you, but merge with your knowledge. And it changes everything.

Karen Yankovich 41:38
That’s amazing. Well, I think we probably need to wrap this but you all need to be following Donna, we’ll put all the links in the show notes to how to do all of that definitely want to be connected to her on LinkedIn. So you don’t miss any of these 50 over 50 interviews. And I’m sure that you can go back and listen to a bunch of them. They’re still there, right? Yeah, they’re still there. They’re in YouTube as well, right. But I would recommend you watch them on LinkedIn, because then you can, then you can join the conversation not only with Diana, but with whoever her guests was that week, right. And this is how you start to build your own personal brand. And surround yourself with other people who you love to be surrounded with who you’re excited to be surrounded with, who you’re excited to see their name, you know, on your calendar, when you’ve when you make time to talk to them.

Donna Cravotta 42:18
This is where you’re gonna find your 20 people.

Karen Yankovich 42:21
This is where you’ll find your 20 people. Exactly. That’s exactly right. All right, everybody, I’m going to wrap this, Donna, thank you so much for being here. Definitely get on Donna’s go to her website, we’ll put it below where she’ll have a link to when the next roundtable is connected on LinkedIn, because all the details will be there as well. And I think there needs to be more in our future, Donna will have to figure it out at some other time.

All right. Thanks so much for being here. And thanks for listening, everybody. I am so grateful that I have people like Donna cavada. In my life, she is such a beautiful person. And hopefully you’ll do take advantage of connecting with her and really following the work that she’s doing. You know, this is what it’s all about, right? Building relationships with the kinds of people that you love hanging out with and building your business at the same time. Right. That’s what we do in our she’s linked up program, we create wealthy women of influence that hang out with other beautiful, incredible women. So if you want to know what that looks like, remember, all you gotta do is grab a complimentary call on our calendar at Karen yankovich.com/call. So if you listen before, or if you loved this conversation, you know, we love hearing from you. So make sure you’re following this show, on Apple podcasts or wherever you’re listening. And we love your reviews, you know, and of course, I’d love for you to share this episode on social media take a quick screenshot of this and tag me tagged on I use the hashtag good girls get rich. So we all can share your posts with our audiences. And we all get more visibility that way, right. That’s how we lift each other up. In the show notes. There’s a link for SpeakPipe where you can leave me an audio message. I love getting your audio messages, I respond to every one of them personally, and we get to have like a, it’s where I get to make this podcast a little less me talking at you and me talking with you. Right. So just go to Karen yankovich.com/ 253. And you’ll see all of the information for the show all the links we talked about today. And you’ll also see the link to speak pipe so that we can start that conversation. Remember that rising tide that lifts all boats, right, this is how we get started. So if you need to know what your first step is, you’re not really ready to get on the call with us. We have another option for you. We’ve if you have not yet taken our assessment, the What’s your marketing style assessment, you can just go to how how should I market.com and that will take you to the assessment. It’ll give you a sense of how you can get started on LinkedIn, and some of these other networking platforms that are out there so that you can start building your network full of these beautiful, amazing people. This was a really fun project for me because I got to incorporate lots of strategy. All the fun left brain stuff I did but I’ve also got some fun like right brain stuff in there too. We even get some morning visualizations, depending on what your style is. So it’s really fun but you gotta you gotta get it to be that right links in the show notes. I will see you back here next week with another episode.