Hey, guys. I wanna first thank you for tuning in to the show. It's, much appreciated. Because you guys are listening to this either on the podcast or tuning in to the the live stream or, past video, I wanna thank you by, giving you free fifteen minutes of my time to help you grow either your podcast, grow your business, monetize your podcast, anything like that that you need help with when it comes to podcasting, I wanna help you out. So just head over to my website, feelbetterinc.com. I'll gladly speak with you. I have a lot of time available. So you have fifteen minute slots.

Just choose one, and I will see you then. But enough about Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Invest in Yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. I am, of course, the podcast mogul Phil Better. And today, I am honored to have Travis Chappell, a host of a top 25 podcast, Build Your Network, interviewer of multitude high level guests and actually creator of an amazing website called Guess.io, that helps you connect high value guests with high value content creators. Travis, thank you so much for being here.

Bill, what's up, man? Thanks so much for having me.

Travis, I do need to let you know I'm a little nervous because you are one of my top 10 guests because I have been following your podcast for a while and your content. And I'm looking forward to you have a mastermind next week that I'm looking forward to being a part of. So thank you so much again.

Thank you, brother. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate that.

Travis, you, you you've told on your, your podcast over the time that you grew the podcast because you wanted to grow your network and connect with the become a better networker. And you you've kind of alluded to that you don't like the name word networker. You like connector. Why why don't you like the word networker?

It's kind of a buzzword. I I personally don't have a huge problem with it. It's just that a lot of other people have a problem with it, and sometimes it's difficult to, you know, change the perception of a particular word when it's been so ingrained in people to think about it in a negative connotation. So, you know, back in, like, eighties, nineties, this networking style, kinda culture, I think, put a put a bad impression on the word for a lot of people, in their minds. And so people think of networking as, like, kinda like dirty word, like, it's something that you shouldn't be doing, because it sounds spammy. And it it gives people the picture. I call them networking net, the guy that shows up to the networking events with the name tag and a thousand hot off the press business cards and, walks around, you know, just barfing out elevator pitches on anybody who will listen. And then before they can say anything, he leaves and goes to the next person and shoves another business card in their face and gives you an extra 12 business cards to pass out to your neighbors.

And it's just like, ugh. This person is so slimy and smarmy and gross that I just don't wanna network at all. And that's what ends up happening is you have these two groups of people where it's all the networking nerds, and then it's all the people that just, like, hate that so much that they just think networking's a scam and they shouldn't do it. And so, I try to, you know, kind of have a little bit of a middle ground there and, create my own category of people who are actually really good at, quote, unquote, networking, but, essentially, networking is just relationship building. And so that's kinda another reason why I try to stay away from it. It's just like, I don't want you to think about networking any different than you would think about building a relationship with a buddy at a bar. It's the same concept. It's just it's just happens to be building relationships with people that tend to have similar interests that you have, and you're doing it on purpose for the purpose of professional development and continuing to push yourself to be a better version of yourself.

So I, you know, I I but to me, the activity should still be the same. It's still about creating relationship. It's still about finding common ground. It's still about making memories, creating experiences, hanging out with people on purpose because you know that it's good for you long term, in in different things like that. So I I try to stay away from the word networking, but, mainly because mainly because it already has a negative stigma, and I don't want people to think about the two activities as being separate activities.

Okay. I like that. I I like that. I was listening to your the first episode that I could find on Spotify, episode 22 with Ivan Messer. And you did a contest to shout to get reviews on your podcast.

Yeah.