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The whole idea behind social proof is it's a mechanism that lets you borrow the credibility of a person or entity that is more established than you to grow. But what if you're a beginner and you don't have any? Now, I scaled two agencies to over 160k a month in combined revenue. I also spoke on stage with Alex Ramoszi and Sam Ovens and other business people, including a mention, though not by name, on the Diary of a CEO podcast just a couple months ago. — The winner of the Blast School Games. He got to like 300 something thousand a month. He started 16 months ago making videos about AI. What this means is I now have social proof and it lets me basically make money by being popular, which is insane. But I did not always. And so in this video, what I want to do is I want to show you more than a dozen very boots on the ground ways to get some yourself. Even if you're a total nobody, you've never made any money in business before. Here's how I'm planning on structuring this. I'm going to start by giving you guys an example of the social proof you would have if you employed this tactic. It's usually a cool sounding oneliner. Then I'm going to give you guys the actual tactic itself, including examples and demonstrations of how I have done this in the past. A lot of these tactics are going to be free. Some of them will cost you money, but then deliver a very disproportionate reward relative to the money put in. But obviously, something is free. I'm going to do my best to tell you, and that's what I'm starting with.

So, our first piece of social proof is going to be very big. If you do this, it will enable you to say things like, "Hey, I'm a Microsoft cloud partner. I actually work with Microsoft under their cloud partner designation. " Now, you can do this even if you are a total nobody. You've never earned a dollar in your life. You don't even know what the hell the word business means. What you do is you sign up to a partnership or creator program with the brands that are big in your target industry. I obviously used Microsoft earlier, but for example, a lot of you guys probably know about NAND, right? It's a no code platform. It's raised tens of millions of dollars. Obviously, very in demand right now. Well, did you know that you can just sign up to their website under the creator designation? And if you do this, they will literally give you a profile on an NAN. io hosted domain. So, I've done it and now I have pretty awesome NAN social proof. So, for instance, I can actually say, "Hey, I build templates for NADN under their creator program. They put me on their website along with a bunch of workflows and regular users download me all the time. Uh, my templates have been downloaded over 5,000 times. " What you end up with is something like this, which as you guys could see is on the nadn. io domain. And I mean, similar examples exist across the stack. I'll show you one for Notion later, but you know, this is pretty legit, right? If you have something like this that shows how many times your stuff has been downloaded, you know, one of my workflows has been downloaded over 7,000 times. I think you guys could see how this would buy you legitimacy. So, how do you actually go about and do it? You literally just type nadnillic. Let's not do that. Nad creator signup. Go down to verified nad automation workflows creators. At least as of the time of this recording. It'll probably somewhere else if uh you're watching this really far in the future. Then just scroll down to the bottom to where it says become a verified creator. Okay. So, if you click this join now badge, what are they going to ask for? Some very simple stuff. username, email address, maybe some examples of workflows you guys have done in the past. You use mine, use other people's, whatever it is. Hopefully, you guys are seeing you guys could put something together that looks very, very legitimate in a very short period of time. And if somebody is considering hiring you for some sort of no code automation service, right, that it makes you appear significantly more credible. It's going to significantly improve your conversion rate, your probability of any sort of sales engagement because you are now borrowing credibility from that brand over to yourself. You know, if you use the term Microsoft cloud partner, what you are doing is you are borrowing the credibility from Microsoft, which is obviously a very credible organization despite the fact that you don't have any. So, you can use hacks like this across the board. My recommendation is don't just do a specific platform like I just showed you how to do one, but um look to see all of the platforms in your target industry that would call you or make you more credible. Okay, our second

piece of social proof will let you say stuff like, I was featured in Bloomberg, which is obviously huge. So, how do you do that? Well, it is called a paid newswire. So, I actually used to own a PR agency that worked with some massive names. We're talking billion-dollar companies, uh, governments, literal space agencies. And a very common way that we bought credibility for people that came to us with absolutely nothing is we paid for a service called an EIN newswire, okay, to go and then blast a story, a press release basically across a bunch of media back channels on publications like Bloomberg, uh, and Yahoo News and Digital Journal and a couple of other ones. And in general, this process usually costs a few hundred. And at the end of it, you guys are going to get a list of major publications and logos that you guys can literally add to your website to say something like, "Hey, you know, we've been featured in Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, and so on and so forth. " So, let me give you guys a quick example. Um, this over here is 1 second copy. And I started this with very little social proof. It now has social proof, and it can stand on its own. But for a while there, um, these five logos were very important to us and very big portions of the reason why people thought we were credible. These are the direct result of a newswire. A newswire that I blasted out to Digital Journal, Bloomberg, Fox News Media, Yahoo Finance, and Associated Press. That cost me a grand total of $300. So in this case, you know, what we did is we basically took actual capital and then we tried to, you know, we basically exchanged it, currency converted it for some form of reputational capital. Uh, and it's very, very easy and very straightforward to do. Anybody here could do this on their own as well. There are variety of providers that do this sort of thing. Uh, what I personally did is I just went on Fiverr and I typed in newswire, press release, words like that until I found ones that, you know, had contacts and connections with logos that I was particularly interested in. You guys can probably find it way cheaper than 300 bucks. Uh, give it a go. The third piece

of social proof is going to let you say stuff like, I'm Google certified, or I was certified by HubSpot. And this is pretty straightforward. These big companies like Google and HubSpot and Microsoft usually have certification flows. A lot of these certification programs are also completely free. They don't cost you a scent. What you do is you take one or more of these certifications, you become certified in whatever the platform is, and then you can just say stuff like, "Hey, I'm now Google certified. " Uh, and in doing so, you will transfer some of the credibility of Google over to you. Example, HubSpot inbound marketing certification. You just go to academy. hubspot. com/courses/inbound. Free certification course right over here. Might take you a couple hours. And at the end of it, you will have a nice sexy looking badge that you can both add to your website, add to any profile you want. In this case, this is my Upwork profile, which is just under $500,000 in earnings. Uh, you guys could add this anywhere. And, you know, adding it is one thing, but actually being able to say stuff like, "Hey, I am Google certified or HubSpot certified is really the main thing. You just want to have leverage in sales conversations. You want to be able to drop stuff like that

in general. " The fourth piece of social proof is going to let you say stuff like, "I was published in popular mechanics for my thoughts on aging. " Now, journalists often need professionals in a subject to use as quotes to make their articles sound more credible. And there are actually services out there that journalists will connect with that allow them to, you know, get quotes very easily from people like that. And I have a couple here that I'm going to talk about. One is quoted. Another one is Haro. So the whole idea is if you have any sort of bootstrap social proof using any of the four methods that we talked about, if you've gotten some certifications now, or if you're like an NN creator or a Microsoft cloud partner and you know something about what a journalist is asking for, you can sign up to any of these platforms and literally just scroll top to bottom through the latest issues or requests. If you have any skill or knowledge in that subject, you just leave a brief quote. You know, a journalist will ask you, "So, what are your thoughts on this? I'm looking for experts that know about X, Y, and Z. " You just say, "Oh, you know, I believe X, Y, and Z. " And a surprising amount of the time, assuming your quote is good. 3 to four weeks later, you will literally find your name in an article somewhere, which will allow you to have crazy social proof that you probably never thought was ever going to be possible. So, this is an article that I was published in on a very, very big publication called Popular Mechanics. And as you can see, you know, I literally have my first name, first and last name as like the first two words of this piece. We scroll down a little bit. Uh you can't see this because you have to pay money for the publication. But then this is me in some park somewhere. They actually sent out a photographer uh for me. Now, the specific platforms that I'm talking about here, one is called Quoted. Uh this is pretty big. Essentially, the way that it works is it's just like a big database where every day somebody will go top to bottom and just say like, "Hey, you know, I'm looking for an expert that knows uh I don't know, knows about logging. you know, if you know about logging, just leave me a quote that answers these questions. Um, and then there's also uh another platform out there called Haro or help a reporter out, which is just massive. And um, this is something actually one of the very first systems that I built on YouTube where basically you enter your email address and then several times a day you receive emails from journalists saying stuff like, "Hey, is anybody here an expert on X, Y, and Z subject? " Now, the actual emails itself look something like this. So, you'll have an index where they say, "Hey, I'm looking for a dentist or orthodontist. Uh, do doctors work for love or for money? Um, hey, I'm looking for people to help me prepare loan applications. Looking for financial planners, I'm looking for quotes from college or student staff about their mental health. " Obviously, it depends. And you know, the what I like about them is they break things down into niches. So, if you just like stay with your ear on the ground or maybe if you build some sort of automated system that watches this, then uh when something comes in that you know fits your specifications, it's very easy for you just to like jump in, drop a quick quote, and then a few weeks later get published in a major mainstream media publication. The fifth

piece of social proof lets you have verified check marks next to your name on social media platforms like Instagram and X. This isn't really much a hack as much as it's just buying a piece of verification. But the reason why it works is because some people out there still associate having a check mark, you know, blue check or whatever with literally being a celebrity because that is how these platforms, in case you didn't know, I used to manage their verifications. If you had like several hundred thousand followers, they would be like, "Hey, do you want to verify your identity? We'll give you a check mark. It'll make you stand out more. " So, what that means is nowadays you just buy it for $5 to $10. If you're running a social media profile, you significantly improve your click-through rate and your engagement rate, especially on DMs, simply by paying $5 to $10 per month per social media profile. This is my own social media profile right here, Nick Sarra. As you can see, I am pretty big. We have 340K followers now. But on that little blue check mark does a lot, especially when you're doing some sort of like outbound sales. Um, anecdotally, anytime I have anybody in my DMs that is not blue checked, probability of me clicking on them as opposed to me clicking on somebody with a blue check is like probably onetenth. So, do with that what you will. The sixth piece of social

proof lets you say stuff like, "Hey, I'm actually listed on notion's website. " So, in short, with the strategy, your goal, like our very first tip, was to get listed in the vendor directory for a service. So, in our case, at the beginning, it was in a creator directory. It's a little bit different. A vendor directory is somebody typically that provides solutions using this platform. And the way that these big SAS companies work is they are incentivized to not only like build the SAS but then create some sort of marketplace or network where very proficient providers of the service can be listed and exchange you know notion or whatever company gets a little bit of fee. So yeah, notion's a really good example of that. They have a hire a notion solutions partner page right over here. And as you can see if you just scroll down you literally have like real people that get to leverage the actual traffic of notion. so. It's obviously a massive SAS company. Uh, and then, you know, let's say you're looking for somebody that speaks Czech to help you with your notion stuff. You can actually just click on this and you can actually contact, you know, Dala over here. Hopefully, I'm not absolutely butchering your name, but you know, there's a place for a portfolio, a place for them to put videos, clients. It's basically like a mini Upwork or a mini Fiverr if you guys ever use that. And so, it's not just notion that has this. There's like 20 30 major SAS platforms at the top of my head that do. Um, just type in SAS plus solutions provider or SAS plus vendor list or something of that nature and you will find a big chunk of them. The

seventh piece of social proof is pretty crazy, but it will let you say I'm an Amazon bestseller. So, to make a long story short, what you do here is you write and then you self-publish a short, maybe 50 page book on Amazon. I've actually done this, and I'll show you that in a second. Then you get 30 or 40 people in the span of about maybe two or three hours to just purchase, download the book, and then rank it up based off whatever voting system Amazon makes available to you. The way that Amazon works is you basically have a bunch of different categories. And within these categories, it's actually a lot easier to become a bestseller in, you know, a specific category, especially a not very popular one, than you probably think. The reason why is because they break it down so granularly I suppose that the probability of you releasing in a day and then competing with other people that get more than like 10 or 20 or 30 downloads in an hour is very low and then the way that they do their rankings I think it resets every couple hours. So this is something that I published on my Facebook forever ago and u basically what I did and I used to go by a different surname just cuz I didn't think anybody could pronounce my name. That's a story for another time. Basically what I did is I created this short little uh book and it was like 30 or 40 pages and it was basically hey how to sell stuff you know how to sell products or services the right way and you know I can't really speak to the value of the content that is in this book fortunately this is a much younger and more naive me uh but I set it on Kindle self-publish it using their Kindle platform and then I set it for $3. 98 and then I just got like 10 or 15 of my friends to buy it in the span of an hour. Now the way that Amazon works is they evaluated you know the best seller status or whatever on you know an hour or by hour basis basically one or two hours and so for a brief two hours I was actually the number one bestseller from my understanding in the world or maybe just Canada I'm not entirely sure but I was the number one bestseller in marketing so like think about that obviously the degree to which you can claim something like this is pretty hacky because when you say I'm the number one bestseller in the world people are probably going to be like oh my god like atomic habits no way but that is pretty crazy social proof no and you can actually do it yourself for less than $30 cuz that's about how much money it cost me to do everything that I needed to do. Signed up for like a Canva Pro subscription, created myself a little, you know, book binding cover thing digitally. Very, very straightforward. The eighth piece of

social proof will let you say things like, "Hey, our company was at XYZ really big conference. " Now, there's no real magic here and you guys probably already know what I'm going to say, but if you want to use a strategy, all you have to do is you have to buy or rent a booth at a conference. Uh, my recommendation would be to get the cheapest booth possible based on whatever the hierarchy of booths are. They usually do square footage. And the only real important thing for you is to be able to say, "Hey, we were at XYZ conference alongside or right across from Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, like all these big businesses. " And the idea is you are basically borrowing or loaning the credibility of the conference and then being able to say in the same breath, you know, we were across from Microsoft or across from Nvidia or so on and so forth. So what do I mean by conference? This is an example of a conference that I went to actually. It was hosted in Vancouver uh just about a month and a half ago and I was lucky enough that they extended me like a free invite. presumably they do a certain number of media passes and when they see YouTube channels that are as big as mine, they're like, "Hey, you know, do you want to come in and record us a video about it? " They didn't actually ask me to record a video, so I just said, "Yeah, I'll come in. " And then I just didn't record the video. But very, very cool stuff. And um you know, there's a lot of money and whatnot there. And uh you know, I saw a lot of like small to mid-size startups there. I saw like a lot of ones that probably had less than a million dollars in funding, but because they were put in the exact same place room as, you know, Nvidia, Dell, Intel, like these really, really big guys who tend to just come to these conferences by default, uh, for a number of reasons, one of which being business write-offs, but also just to ensure brand awareness and stuff like that in the space. Um, they got a ton of credibility, and this is something that you guys can do, too. uh booths here I believe started at about $1,000 or so which probably seems out of reach for a lot of people here but it's definitely something to consider if you want to get into physical trades conferences and so on and so forth. The next piece of

social proof will let you say things like hey we were featured in XYZ big platform publication and basically uh this is different from what I talked about earlier with popular mechanics but you can pay a small fee to be featured in publications from newsletter providers like medium. So for instance when I was writing I would commonly go and get published on a medium publication called the startup. Medium is just a service where you could blog you know that had many hundreds of thousands of users and you know the actual reach was nowhere near as important as me just being able to say we've been published on the startup 5 million readers this that you know over and over again. The whole idea here is it's a big sounding publication so you get to leverage this in future sales conversations. you know situations like quoted and harrow and whatnot. an example. This is my Medium profile from way back in the day before most people knew who the heck I was. So, I had about 2,000 followers. This was not the thing that was important to me. Was important to me was the fact that I got published in platforms like Geek Culture. Um, you know, if I scroll down here, probably have a couple that are in the startup as well, unless they changed them. They might have changed them. Oh, yeah. The startup, right? What is beneficial or valuable about this? You could say, "Hey, I'm published in a publication that has direct distribution to 33,000 readers or in this case, you know, 856,000 followers, you know, under a million. " And so, you know, when you get published in five or 10 or 15 of these, as a writer, at least in my case, cuz that's how I started blogging. You know, it's a lot easier for me to go to another publication and say, "Hey, how's it going? I've already been published insert big name here, insert big name here. I'd like to be published here, too. What are your publishing terms? " Sometimes they take money. Sometimes they just take that credibility. Either case, a lot easier for you to make something happen. And

then that last piece of social proof just lets you say stuff like, "Hey, we're part of the NYU alumni association or our staff members went to NYU. " Now, it's not a massive piece of social proof, but basically a lot of people don't realize the colleges and the universities they go to does give them some sort of alumni association a lot of the time. And the way that it works is if you or somebody else in your team went to that university, it's either free or it's like a very small fee and then you become part of the association. The whole idea, and like there's really not that big of an idea here, but the whole idea is that you just get access to the alumni association logo. And a lot of the time, the alumni association logo looks really similar to, you know, the actual university logo. So, a quick example here, this is the NYU Alumni Association. If you guys have been to NYU uh not just this specific NY but literally any NYU university or uh you know if any staff member in your team or any I don't know team member contractor you consult with or whatever has you can join this alumni association that you could say members of our team have been trained at the best universities in the world or something then you can stick that little sticker on there. Um, so not a massive piece of social proof and you know a lot of the time anecdotally I find that like business and academia sort of butttheads and very good business owners look at academics and go like what the hell do you know and then academics look at business owners and go like what the hell do you know but it's a reasonable and for the most part free way to bridge that gap. All right, I

really hope you guys appreciated this relatively hacky but hopefully very pragmatic way to buy yourself more social proof regardless of situation and regardless of where you guys are in your career. You guys like this sort of stuff, definitely check out Maker School. It's my day-by-day accountability program that takes you from a total beginner to somebody that has signed a paying client for AI consulting services. We do all this for you in 90 days. And assuming that you spend all 90 days doing the steps and you don't achieve that result, I will actually pay you all of your money back. That's part of our full guarantee. This is a follow-up to my last video on different ways to build social proof if you're a complete beginner. And I also touch on a couple of very, very advanced tactics over there. So, if you guys want more, definitely check that out. Aside from that, thank you guys very much for watching. As per usual, if you haven't subscribed, do me a big solid and do so. Got a bunch more value coming at you pretty soon.