Interview with Ron Nash, “How to find your dream job, even in a recession”

If you have dreams of writing your own book, then be inspired by this interview with Ron Nash, author of “How to find your dream job, even in a recession”. No one is stopping Ron from getting his message out there! He uses all the tools of Publishing 2.0 and more to promote his book and help people with their careers. Ron is also a master career strategist at The Nash Group and his website is www.thefriendzone.tv.

Here is an edited excerpt from the interview, with the full audio and PDF transcript at the end of the post.

Tell us a little about yourself, and about your new book.

Well, my book is called, “How to Find Your Dream Job; Even in a Recession,” and the impetus of the book—the reason why I wrote it was—I’ve been working as a headhunter for the last fifteen years and for those who are not familiar with the term headhunter, I interact with companies like Microsoft or Cardinal Health or any company, and I find talent for them. I had the impression that I wanted to really help more people as the economy started changing and the best way I figured to do that was to write a book. So, hence, I wrote a book.

What was your process in writing the book, given that you weren’t a trained author?

I have a belief system, and fortunately, thanks to my parents—where I grew up realizing that we have lots of resources, and that we can pretty much do anything we imagine.

And so, when the impression came to do a book, the first thought in my brain was Okay, how am I going to do this book, because there was some internal pressure that I had given myself and I needed to do the book fairly quickly.

I had to be resourceful, which is what I am, and I set out to do the book. So I outlined the book first, based on what I thought I was going to write about. That was the first thing. And I didn’t worry too much about titles at that point in time.

The second thing I did was I realized that—I’m a very fast typist, however, I think faster than I type and so—typing would have been too slow. So I actually did some research and found some software by a company called Dragons Naturally Speaking that converts your speech to text. It types for you. That’s how I got the big pieces of the book done.

So how are you publishing the book?

The world we’re living in right now is very interesting. There’s a lot of new models. I know a guy named Mark Victor Hansen, and he did the whole “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series, and he’s published over 135 books.

Mark and a lot of people have gone over to a new model, which is a self-publishing model utilizing software and the internet, and that’s one of the popular things that’s showing up now. And it gives the writers and authors more control, as well as the ability to make more money.

There is a company called http://www.lulu.com that won awards with their software and their publishing ability. It’s a self-publishing space where they have all the resources you could ever need to publish a book. I use Lulu, which is where I’m going to be releasing my book, and I will be in Barnes & Noble, Amazon—I’ll be in over 80 countries by the end of November through the Lulu process.

You also have a successful business. Is your book aimed at promoting your business, or is it a venture all of its own?

It’s certainly aimed at promoting my business, and it’s also the curriculum for a new business model that I’ve created. It’s funny—I think books have a way of communicating with you. I don’t want to get too esoteric there, but books have their own life. They pretty much have their own purpose.

So as I started getting more into it, I started understanding what the book was about. I saw a new business model that wasn’t too far from what I’ve been doing, built it up, and so as a result of that, the book is now a large piece in the curriculum to my new business model.

Do you recommend that business people write a book in their area of expertise?

Absolutely. There’s a really good book out. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it called, “The 4-Hour Workweek.” So one of the things that’s said in the book, and I’ve heard this before but I absolutely stand on it is, if you’re in business, number one, you can Google any topic, and you’ll come up with millions of pages or at least hundreds of thousands of pages of people doing the same thing.

And in order to be revered as expert or a subject matter expert, writing a physical book gives you a certain amount of credibility that you cannot get just by saying you’re an expert. A book gives you a certain amount of credibility and it speaks on its own.

Let’s talk a bit about your website. You’ve got a great media kit on your website. For people who might not know about that, what goes into a media kit and why do you need one?

The media kit is there to anticipate interviews. So, one of the first, important pieces to have is information supporting what it is that you’re writing about, for instance, a press release. In my particular business, writing about the economy is a fairly easy thing to do, especially with a number of layoffs and downsizing and rightsizing and everything they’re calling it. So, a press release is extremely important in order to substantiate what you’re doing. It gives meaning to what your media kit has—the press release.

And then number two, a bio. A bio on the author, bio on who you are and just a little bit of—so that the person interviewing you can have a flavor in terms of who they’re going to interact with.

Number three, a photo and preferably a professional photo, a few—goes along with it. Sometimes people use it to print, or for various reasons.

And then number four, you want to have a set of questions prepared that the interviewer can use to choose from if they so choose. They need—television stations are extremely busy when they interview people, so they recommend that you give them pre-framed questions already so that they can choose from those questions. Many times they don’t have—they may not read your book in its entirety, but they may read just excerpts from your book, so they’ll want to have framed questions that pertain to the subject.

I see from your website you were on Fox TV and you say you’ve been on a couple of shows. How did you get on TV and how can authors pitch TV?

TV is always looking for things to report on, that’s number one. But many people don’t know that. And there are a number of resources that are out there.

I hired a media consultant, though. I came out of Hollywood, so I’ve been around film and television for a while, and I happen to know a media consultant and hired an individual in order to book me on some shows, and that was my first exposure.

But then after that, the second set of interviews I’ve done happened by virtue of me talking about my book and talking about being on TV. It’s amazing. When you put it out to the universe, things happen.

What are some ways that authors can promote their books using Web 2.0, social networking and other online methods?

We live in a different day and age and we are extremely, extremely fortunate to be able to market through social networking. LinkedIn, for instance, I have over 12 million people—there’s over 26 million people on LinkedIn altogether. I’m linked three degrees away from about 12 million and growing.

And so, whenever I send out an email blast, it reaches quite a few people, and driving traffic from that way—there’s a way to do it. There’s an etiquette in reaching out to them vs. just saying, ‘Hey, buy my book.” Because that’s not what you do. But there’s a format doing it, which is why I recommend LinkedIn training, which is available on my website.

Facebook is another great application. Once again, there’s training for that. But there’s ways to use social networking in order to get the word out and to drive people to your website using one of the Web 2.0 applications.

So I am actually, as of tomorrow, I start my own first radio broadcast on their radio station called http://www.realcoachingradio.com , and I’m going to be interviewing people. It’s a social networking-based radio station that has—you know it’s webcam meets chat meets traditional radio, and it’s broadcast internationally, so it’s looking for authors to interview, like yourself…

But interestingly enough, there are a number of people in channels that are always looking for new stories because stories come and go. And so, it’s really about being resourceful and finding out where your sweet spot is. Where are the people looking for your kind of story.

You also are using YouTube, as well. Have you found these videos successful in driving traffic?

Absolutely. Without a doubt. It’s interesting because what ends up happening with a video is it ends up going out and doing work for you. So traditionally, there’s a number of different areas. When I look at marketing, which is one of the areas that YouTube and LinkedIn, etc., they all fall under the same category as marketing.

But when you release a video, it is its own entity. It’s almost like a satellite, launching a satellite. It has its own promotion—obviously, a link back to the website or advertisement advertising whatever it is that you’re marketing. I think that YouTube has been extremely great in giving me exposure.

One of the things I liked about your website was your Rule of 23. Can you tell us a bit about that and how that applied to people’s writing?

Certainly. I had the fortune, or misfortune, depending on how you look at it—my dad died at the age of 66, about four-and-a-half years ago. And there was an epiphany in my attempting to understand the circle of life—that was my first parent who had ever passed away.

And so, it was an opportunity for me to internalize it. It took me about a year to figure it out. And at that point, the difference in his passing and my age was 23 years, which hence, I call it the Rule of 23.

And that’s a very simple rule. At his age, had I known, in looking back at my life, a young man, that I had 23 years left on the planet, would I have done anything differently?

So I look at myself and I look forward going, If I knew that I had only 23 years left on the planet, how would I approach my life? And I pose that to everyone, every time I talk because it made me do a very deep self-analysis and I had to really look at death in a different way because I look at death as part of the fear spectrum. And many of us use the fear spectrum to hold us back in life.

And in the fear spectrum there are two places that fear is used. Fear is a healthy thing or it’s an unhealthy thing. It’s a wall inside of you that keeps you from going forward, or it’s a shark behind you that motivates you to go forward. It’s your choice in terms of how you choose to use it.

So the Rule of 23 that I give to people is, if you knew you only had 23 years left before you die, how would you approach life?

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You can download the full audio here with much more from Ron including the power of goals and more on social networking. MP3_Interview_Ron_Nash_041108

You can also download the transcript here. Right click and Save Target As. PDF_Transcript_Ron_Nash_Nov_2008