Market Like A Nerd ™ with Amanda Goldman-Petri | Work Smarter Online Marketing Strategies For Business Owners And Entrepren

Time Stamped Show Notes 1:24 – Introduction. 6:00 – Nicole initially thought she couldn’t do affiliate income because she was a therapist and she had to deal with ethical guidelines about how you can’t sell stuff to your therapy clients or customers.  But all she had to do was take the first step and find an audience and she found an audience that wasn’t her therapy client and identified one of their problems. At that time, she was connected to many business owners and a couple of years ago she had taken a course that helps you with launching. 6:45 – She got an opportunity to be an affiliate for the course so she signed up for it but she was not sure if she would be able to take advantage of it. But she knew that all you need is an audience with a problem. 7:30 – Nicole says that we shouldn’t try to solve everything, we are not experts in all areas but we can definitely link them to the right resources if we see that something keeps coming up for them.  Nicole had an audience of peers who were struggling with launching so she had an audience and she knew their problem and the third step for her was to find a solution that solves the problem and she had the course.    10:53 – You just need to hook up your clients, your customers, your audience or even a different audience because you can be serving consumers as a health coach or a nutritionist, personal trainer, yoga instructor and have those alternate options for them that are helpful to them with struggles that they are currently having in life. 12:06 – When Nicole started out she didn’t really have a list she got an opportunity to sign up as an affiliate and she just shared the link to the webinar online and also she was always available to answer people’s questions about the program and build a relationship which was appreciated by people. 16:09 – Nicole says that one of the few mistakes that people make in affiliate marketing is that they throw random things at their list that makes no sense and you do want to treat it as your own launch and youth can make money this way without having a huge list for sure but a huge list can amplify your success in it so much better if you are choosing the right products or programs or services. 16:43 – You need to be honest in Affiliate marketing and tell people that the link is your affiliate link. 18:20 – One way of selling in affiliate marketing is educating people and letting them know about webinars and then directing them to the tools that are going to make it easier for them.    Resources Mentioned You can find Nicole online at NicoleLiloia.com and Nicole has a free gift for the listeners of this podcast which is cheat sheet with seven strategies that you can use to increase your affiliate income. For the free gift visit http://www.authenticaffiliateacademy.com/increaseaffiliateincome

Today we chat with Casey Zeman, Founder of EasyWebinar, who shares the secrets of an automated webinar funnel that earned 3k a day. Casey also shares how to create evergreen webinars, which software and resources to use, and how to do it all on a budget.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 1:38 – Introduction. 9:42 – Casey explains that an automated webinar is essentially a webinar that can stream in real time without you having to be there. So you take your perfect show and stream it out, it plays in real time, people come to it and they watch it, ask questions and you have offers that popup but you are actually sitting at home and maybe responding to people on phone. 10:29 – There are 7 thousand people that use Easy Webinar and most of these people are experts, authors, coaches and consultants. Casey’s system of the automated webinar allows you to see how much someone watches a webinar, you can see the actions performed during a webinar and that helps you gauge what people are doing. 11:48 – The software allows you to create one time events that are like live webinars but you are just not there or you can create evergreen webinars, events that can stream every single day at any point when someone comes to the page it’s going to show the next available time that they can be streamed in your attendee’s local time zone. As an admin you can also stream it out multiple times a day and you can also decide that when someone comes to the registration page to not let them register for a same day webinar they have to register for a future webinar but it’s still automated. 16:00 – Casey says that if you are going to do Facebook ads, and you want to know how to build and nurture effectively the right way and do a Facebook ad straight to a registration page, he has a lot of clients that do it and it works and the majority of them close the clients on the follow up and so even if they don’t consume the webinar, they have good enough campaigns where let’s say they come and register for a webinar that’s starting in real time and someone doesn’t watch it, then they will get a follow up reminding them that they registered but didn’t show up for the webinar and then a link to re-register for it is sent to them, which takes them to the registration page but now they sign up for a different time slot. 17:56 – His system integrates with most of the popular autoresponders and the ones that have a tagging system, you can trigger actions through easy webinar that will start campaigns in those platforms that are based on the actions performed during the webinar. 19:14 – Casey’s 3K a day funnel is slightly different, he has a four video series that he sends people through which is followed up by an automated webinar and then sales are closed on the automated webinar. And if they don’t buy from the four videos or the workshop, they are sent on to another automated webinar in the sequence that sends them into a course that teaches them about webinars. 21:19 – He has clients that are using his system for 3K a day where they are using it for a consulting funnel but there also people who are doing 20K a day where they start a low hanging fruit offer on an automated webinar and then sell a higher offer on a second automated webinar. 21:56 – If you can offer some sort of early freebie before you offer the webinar, that gets them excited and engaged to where they want to come into the webinar and then come into the workshop. 23:38 – Casey says that when you take them to the thank you page, there’s a link at the bottom of the thank you page saying this is the link that sends you into the webinar and the video has to be compelling enough on your thank you page to where you take up all the time before the webinar starts. When they are on the thank you page, they access the webinar through the link below and when they do they are automatically going to be getting a free gift when they show up to the webinar and so you don’t want to miss this and block out your calendar, show up, click that link to come on to the page that will take you to a countdown page prior to the event starting and when that countdown hits zero, that’s when the event starts and if they leave this page then there are emails going out to them and if they click on those emails, they will be able to come into this countdown page as well. 26:04 – One of the mistakes that Casey made earlier on is that he made an excellent 4-part video series and spent 25000 dollars on production but he realized that he didn’t need to spend that much on a four video series prior to bringing someone into a webinar because he probably could have done a blog article, a pdf, a simple video or even a Facebook live and saved himself a lot of money because people mostly buy from his webinar than they do off of his video series. 27:54 – According to Casey when you send people into an in time webinar, the problem with that is that a lot of people that use that way of doing it generally don’t sell off of those webinars because you are not building enough nurture ahead of time so selling off those webinars can be somewhat difficult. 29:16 – If you can narrow down the scope by creating more nurture, by the time they come to the webinar they already know you, they have already done their due diligence and now they are ready to come on through. 34:18 – An example of what Casey did before is that he had a webinar where he sent them to a thank you page and from the thank you page, he told them that the webinar was going to start and he told them that if they went to the countdown page, there is another video on the countdown page where they could hear stories of people who are having successful webinars. So he showed them case studies ahead of the webinar that sells the actual product.   Resources Mentioned: You can visit EasyWebinar.com if you want to learn more about the platform. Find Casey on Facebook @CaseySZeman. Casey has a free gift for the listeners of the podcast, it is a webinar mini course and you can find it at WebinarMiniCourse.com. This mini course has been voted as the best free webinar training online.

In this episode, Nafissa Shireen (Founder of Living Forward) shared how she went from a $1400 first year flop to multiple 6 figures with speaking. Nafissa also shares how to become a sought after speaker, create desirable talk titles, and prepare for your speaking gigs.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 1:13 – Introduction. 5:57 – Nafissa had come from a corporate background, she was used to making a lot of money but she didn’t know how to be an entrepreneur, how to sell, how to get clients and she didn’t know anybody because she worked out of the country for five years. So when Nafissa returned, she got online and did all kinds of things but she didn’t have a plan and so her first year was very tough. But her mentor told her to get out there and get speaking and she didn’t need much convincing for that because she was hitting the networking circuit every week and she doesn’t really network now she only hits those things if she is actually the speaker. Nafissa was going out one, two, three times a week she lived way out in the country and these were all downtown Vancouver and so she’d be driving so she thought she’d much rather be the speaker and then go out maybe once a month and get some clients and go home. 7:26 – She had savings from her corporate job but she didn’t want to exhaust her savings so she decided she will start speaking and what she noticed was that everybody was telling her to get speaking but nobody was telling her how to get speaking gigs so she would just approach event hosts and ask them if she could speak for them. She still didn’t have an ideal venue, ideal client and she didn’t know how to approach clients. 8:08 – The defining moment was when Nafissa went to a Mompreneur club at a daycare. These were business owners who were not really serious about business, it was just a hobby for them and she thought she will just try speaking there but even the Mompreneurs told her no. It is possible to make a lot of money in your first year but if it’s not happening, people shouldn’t beat themselves up because there’s so much evolution you have to go through because if you’ve had a different successful business, you have to take on a whole new identity that has nothing to with your actual business skills and so a whole lot of stuff comes up and it can be pretty scary. Nafissa finally got a speaking gig it was a person who she knew and requested the person for the gig. From the time Nafissa decided she would speak, it was a year until she actually got her first gig. 10:15 – Nafissa had the talk, it was a great audience and everything went really well but at that time her list consisted of just fifty people and in one talk she added fifty more people and thirty discovery sessions from it and a guy used that talk as a case study in her own business on why to speak and within a few months, she had sixteen thousand dollars in revenue from that. That felt great and Nafissa was convinced to continue on this path but she didn’t have any more gigs. 13:08 – Nafissa tried really hard to get speaking gigs and since she is a systems geek and she says that systems are predictable and repeatable so if it works once, you can repeat it and do it again and if there’s a piece that’s not working, you can pull it out. She created a system for getting booked and when she put all these steps in place, two three weeks later she had a completely full calendar. 15:25 – According to Nafissa, your first step is preparation, you’ve got to get your mind set into it and you’ve got to appreciate that you do have a gift, you have to be really confident and you’ve got to plan out and make decisions on how you want your speaking to go. Nafissa puts the same effort into a speaking tour as she does to an online launch. So you have to make decisions like how many times a month you want to be speaking, what is an ideal venue for you and whether you want to travel and she doesn’t recommend people start travelling right away to speak until they know their conversion rates because it can get expensive. And you have to make those decisions in advance because it decides how many times you are going to speak, how you are going to reach out. So you need to be really clear on all of that so that you go into it with a purpose and strategy. 17:01 – The next step is time consuming. When Nafissa took two weeks to put a bit of work into it, it totally changed her business so you must take the time it takes to do the prep work. Nafissa says that proper planning makes execution automatic. 18:17 – The next step which is also the most important one is making yourself desirable and a lot of entrepreneurs overlook that step you need to make yourself irresistible to event hosts. First of all, you need to brand yourself as a speaker because if someone’s going to put you on their stage, they need to know that you can fill the room and hold it. 20:58 – Nafissa teaches people that they have to be very clear about their talk titles and they should not reach out with a vague idea or a really abstract title that has to be explained because we are all taught to have an ideal client and in your talk you are speaking to that client but your event host has more than your ideal client in the room and they want to fill the room. So your talk has to make sense for them to put you on there and everyone has to get value hence you should take that step to be very well prepared so that they are impressed. 22:00 – Nafissa says that you should do all your research and find places to speak and look at not just what the event is and who goes there but also why they go there. Even if the content of the talk is the same at different venues, just tweak how you position it and tweak your title a little bit. 23:35 – Unless you are hiring a PR firm that can open doors for you don’t get your assistant to try to market your talk. Reaching out and marketing should be done by you. 24:35 – You should be really, really organized because there are so many details and if you know what all those details are then you can delegate that to someone else. But when you are reaching out, remember that you should not make it about you but about the event host. 26:14 – You want to be thinking about having a successful talk and a successful talk starts the night before at home. So you should go to bed early, be relaxed and don’t drink the night before. Nafissa says that you should get up early in the morning and leave an hour before you are supposed to leave. 28:22 – Whether you are working online or you are working in person, it is very important to have that long term focus that everything you are doing is stacking and building. 29:45 – Turn yourself into a sought after speaker. Get out there and self-promote yourself, put pictures of yourself up speaking, share the event host’s pictures because that gives them more exposure and they like that.   Resources Mentioned: The listeners of the podcast can find Nafissa online at NafissaShireen.com. Nafissa has a great gift for the listeners of this podcast and it is about how to do talk titles. You can get the gift at MarketLikeaNerd.com/talktitles and if you get that gift and like what you see, you can reply to that and say send me the webinar and Nafissa will send a webinar that goes into detail about talk titles.

Today we chat with personal branding strategist Shadé Adu who shares how she made her first $1000 with livestreaming. Shadé also shares which livestreaming platforms to master, how to be seen as an expert, and what to talk about when you go live.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:46 – Introduction. 7:50 – Shadé loves live streaming and it is a gateway to opportunity for so many people because all you need is a mobile device and 80% of Americans own a mobile device and this is an opportunity for you to meet people, grow your audience and make money. When Shadé started out, she knew that she loved branding and she could put things together but Shadé wasn’t making money, that’s when someone suggested Periscope and when she got on to Periscope she fell in love with it. 8:32 – The great thing about being an early adopter of a platform is that you are shaping the platform and people who are experts on other platforms are amateurish just like you. Shadé realized that she was not an early adopter of other platforms and so she thought this was an opportunity for her to be on the ground floor of something that was going to be powerful and in July 2015 she fell in love with Periscope and she knew that it was going to be impactful in her business and her life. 9:13 – Shadé says you should be this powerhouse brand builder on live streaming and she tells people not to just use Periscope but diversify and use Snapchat instastories, Facebook Live and use other live streaming platforms because it’s going to be extremely powerful for your business because we want to build powerhouse brands and businesses. Many people have a fear of public speaking and when you go into it you need to plan. Shadé is actually an introvert but Live streaming is just her thing. 10:55 – Shadé’s number one tip is to plan even if you are an introvert or an extrovert, whatever you do in your business, you need to map it out and you need to have a game plan. Every time Shadé goes on live streaming, she knows exactly what she is going to say before she says it. You should go into live streaming expecting to win, expecting to be profitable and successful. 12:00 – Tip number two is to think of live streaming as an opportunity for speaking engagements, clients, JV partnerships, podcasts, interviews etc. because you never know who is watching you or who is going to watch the replay. 13:50 – According to Shadé, social media is the wealthy women’s movement and she is highly committed to helping women entrepreneurs be successful and she is very adamant about supporting women because of the disparities between how much money men and women make. 16:04 – Shadé made her first $1000 within her first 30 days and the only reason it took her 30 days is because she didn’t ask for the sale until the 29th or 30th day. As soon as she realized that Periscope is the platform that she wanted to be engaged in, she showed up consistently everyday live streaming consistently for those 30 days and she encourages people who are just starting out to be consistent because people want to see you show up. After that, you have to provide value and be content driven and people are not looking for too much information but the best information and a process that streamlines our success. 17:05 – We are looking to be an expert. Shadé decided she wanted to be an expert in branding so she talked about branding everyday. She uses the word branding continuously because she wants people to see her as a branding expert and she looks for opportunities for her to speak about branding. 19:01 – It’s okay for you to talk about one particular topic and if someone asks you about something you don’t know, you can refer them to someone who is an expert on that topic and this gives you an opportunity to connect with people who are extremely smart and genius in something else. So you need to be an expert, create consistent content, provide value and show up for your audience. 22:10 – There are a lot of people who have multiple companies and they are building mega brands, you can do that too but not necessarily at the same time so Shadé says that you must focus on one thing first. 24:07 – Once you figure out a system that works for you, rinse and repeat it. Shadé loves live streaming and she could do it every day but she does it weekly because she can have some time to relax. Once you have these systems in place and once you start building a fan base and audience for which you are providing value, you can give yourself some wiggle room to not go as hard. Shadé has got to a point now where she is thinking how can she work smarter by going on live stream just once a week and still monetize it.   Resources Mentioned: Visit FreeGiftFromShade.com and you can download Shadé’s free gift which is ‘Sixteen ways to build your brand in addition to live streaming.

In this episode, Jennifer Dunham (aka The Happiness Architect) shares with us how to go from burnout to enjoying the process of making profits. Jennifer also shares how to start and end your day with happiness, the keys to creating good habits that stick, and how to improve your creativity and productivity.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:36 – Introduction. 5:41 – Jennifer was hit by a drunk driver, went through a divorce and had cancer all in the same summer and she calls that her crappy summer. But she did not completely change her life after that. Jennifer is a workaholic and she was working all the time and got married again and one day she and her husband were having a conversation about when they are going to retire in  the future, they were sitting outside their house and the dogs next door were barking and that irritated her husband and they would have frequent arguments so she thought was on the path to another divorce and so she went inside and said to her husband we’ve got to make a change and they decided that night to move because they always wanted to live away from the suburbs and seven days later they bought a house they absolutely loved and within thirty days they moved and few weeks after that her friends and family noticed that she looked much happier. 7:22 – Jennifer tells people she learned more about happiness and how to elevate her happiness on a daily basis from drinking coffee with her chickens than she did from that bad crappy summer.  Jennifer’s five steps have to do with the tiny power and leveraging the tiny power of what Jennifer calls happiness habits to really rekindle and rewire those neuro pathways in your brain, they exist but we just all get so busy in our day to day life that it takes three times as many positive experiences to outweigh the negative things in our brain and as human beings we are flight or fight so those are very stressful anxious things and we easily let that go in to our brains but the positive stuff takes work and so she tells people learning to be happier and infusing that into your business takes practice and a conscious effort. 9:41 – Jennifer tells people to start their day happy and end their day happy.  She does a lot of habit training about how to create habits that stick for your personality and this is a technique that works for most people, it’s called habit stacking. Habit stacking involves people stacking a new habit next to a habit they already have because it’s easier to make a routine that way. For example, when you brush your teeth in the morning or you are getting dressed you should insert the habit of starting your day happy. 12:10 – If you choose something to start happy likewise end your day with appreciation because you can probably appreciate something about the day even if it’s the blue sky.  Starting your day happy takes 30 seconds and ending your day happy takes another 30 seconds. 14:02 – Her next tip is to embrace silence. While she is driving, Jennifer doesn’t turn the radio on and enjoys the sights and the sounds around her. Also you could go for a walk without your phone or leave it your pocket. 16:22 – Jennifer’s next tip is to make contact. Nowadays you see people they are walking and texting at the same time. So you should make a conscious effort to make eye contact and it could even be with strangers. 18:05 – The next tip involves reframing negative self-talk. So at breakfast you can think if there was anything leading up to breakfast that started to weigh on your shoulder, start writing it down and after a week when you start figuring out what those negative patterns are and then reframe it into positive language. For example, Jennifer used to say ‘my time is so limited’ so she started to tell herself ‘my time is precious’ and when she says it like that it makes it so that she is more accepting of how she is choosing to spend her time. 19:30 – All five of these exercises are meant to elevate you because you become more mindful and more present but by doing these five exercises when you elevate your personal happiness, many studies show that you become healthier and it also improves your relationships and you are more productive and more focused. 20:08 – When you can elevate your focus, your productivity, your creativity, eventually what you are ultimately raising is your success. Everybody wants to be successful and make more money but sometimes they forget to go back and look at that foundation and it takes only five minutes a day to elevate your happiness.   Resources Mentioned: You can find Jennifer Dunham at HappinessMatters.com Jennifer is also having a summit called ‘Dodge the Dark Side of Success’ where 22 top influencers are going to throw light on how to enjoy the moment on the messy path to making millions.  You can register to join the telesummit at SuccessDarkSide.com

Today we chat with Sarah Kaler, Soul Powered Business Consultant, who shares with us how to cultivate the 7 Figure CEO Mindset. Sarah also shares how to get results through the help of others, maximize your resources and relationships, and hire the right people to scale your business.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 1:33 – Introduction. 9:19 – Sarah is glad that she is talking about mindset versus specific strategies because mindset is so much of what actually gets you to where you want to be when you are scaling. So when we look at the leap of seven figures and beyond, we need to start thinking about a few key things. Sarah starts with talking about getting results through others and there is a mindset shift where you go from I am the lead driver here, I create results to I create results through others and it sounds obvious when you break it down that simply but the reality of how that looks in your day to day when you are the leader of your business because you get so attached as a founder and a visionary to how things get done, what gets done and that is very natural and yet the mindset of I need to start to shift into getting results through others leading a team and yes you are still going to have your role and your responsibilities but that’s a really key shift and you are not going to break through that barrier of seven figures without that. 11:52 – One of the biggest fears that comes up in the service provider world is that they think my clients come for me and what are they going to think or are they going to get the same quality of results from someone on my team. 12:51 – According to Sarah, the reality is that in order to be scalable, and to have a scalable model you have to start getting results through others at a certain point. It is really important that service providers understand that in order to scale your business you have to have at its core a model that is scalable and that requires other people. The bottom line is that it is about others and you have to have that mindset or you are going to be a block in terms of your growth. You will be blocking yourself from being able to grow at a level that you ultimately want. 15:04 – Sarah says that as a CEO, you have to shift your mindset into not just being the doer but being in the awareness and having the mindset that your job is really about resources and relationships. So it’s not just I am going to execute and implement and create content or deliver my services but I need to be aware of what does my business need in terms of relationships and resources. 17:44 – According to Sarah, part of the hiring process is that you are going to go into what Sarah calls a team design phase. So you need to decide who do I need, what do I need them for and when do I need them because all of that isn’t going to happen simultaneously. One of the biggest fears people have when they are scaling and growing is that they can’t afford so many people at the same time but the reality is you will get a return on investment. So you are in a relationship with the resources and the people that are interacting in your business so that you are always seeing an ROI versus just having people be transactional. 19:21 – A lot of people don’t yet have that skill or know how or experience on how to hire well. 21:17 – According to Sarah the mistakes that entrepreneurs are making that everyone can avoid so easily is saying everyone is hiring a VA and that’s what I need too and that’s not how you want to approach your team and your position as a CEO because again it’s about mindset and what is your responsibility, you need to come back to the belief and the awareness that you as a CEO have a vision and it’s your responsibility to fulfill on that vision and to have the awareness of what resources you need, you need to be in a mindset of proactively creating that vision so that you can step into it before you even need to fulfill on it. Because just like goal setting principles, we know if we write down the goal and we create the vision, we are more likely to do it. 23:33 – Sarah’s team has had many iterations and currently it consists of 12 members and the team is growing rapidly and Sarah doesn’t know yet if there will be many more people in her team or few people’s roles will shift and change because sometimes it’s not necessarily about quantity of people but it’s about making sure that you have the right people whose strengths are really contributing in the right way to your overall mission and vision and moving you forward in the business. As long as you are moving in that direction ultimately and you have the right roles and those roles can potentially evolve over time and you don’t have to continue to hire more people. Sarah’s team ranges from people who do content development, marketing and sales, operations, COO. The team consists of internal employees as well as contractors. 27:11 – According to Sarah, people usually zoom off into hiring but before you do that you should think about the mindset of hiring. It’s important to not just talk about the zone of genius but to think about functions in your business. You need to decide what area of the business do you really truly need the most support in and what does that look like. It’s really important to think like that and not just rush off to the hiring process because you want to start to build out your business in areas that you are really supported functionally and then you can interview people to find out if they are truly strengthened by the activities of that function. 30:18 – You need to prioritize because some functions realistically need to come before others on your growth trajectory and sometimes that emotional charge can get in the way of seeing that.   Resources Mentioned: Sarah has a gift for the listeners of this podcast it’s the "Hiring Your Dream Team Guide" which includes an interview guide and you can find it at SoulPowered.com/dreamteam. You can find Sarah and connect with her team on www.SoulPowered.com.

Today we chat with David Pitts, Founder of Off Day Trainer, who shares how he got a 36% click through rate with text message marketing. David also shares his best tips on why text messages can lead to more sales, how to successfully collect phone numbers, and how to leverage those contacts.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 1:43 – Introduction. 4:19 – David says that first and foremost, you will have to get everybody’s phone number because text messaging is the number one form of communication that exists today and people are more likely to reply to a text than to answer your phone call. So you must collect cellphone numbers of everyone in your network whether they are your prospects or your clients and if you are speaking to your prospects, make sure that you follow up with every one of them within twenty four hours of acquiring that lead because studies show if you wait past 24 hour barrier then most likely you would have missed the opportunity to close the deal. 6:10 – According to David, 98% of text messages are read in 5 minutes or less so when you send somebody a text message, they are definitely going to see it and so it is important that we understand the power of this deliverability and craft your message to show the leads how much you care about them and how much you want to help them. 6:29 – Step # 1: Collect everyone’s phone number. 6:32 – Step # 2: Call your prospects and if you end up leaving a voicemail, text them and say that you left a voicemail and you would like to connect with them so that you can learn how to help them. 7:10 – To collect phone numbers, if you are talking to someone or if you get a referral simply ask them for their phone number. The second method is if you are running ads on social media or you have a website, you must place an opt in form to collect phone numbers 9:51 – So many people in most industries are so obsessed with lead generation and looking for new money and they lose sight of the solid client list that is willing to pay them forever if they deliver their services with their experience. So you must focus more on your current clients and deliver a world class experience by serving them and connecting on a personal level, this way your retention will improve and you will make more money through them. This builds your reputation and you get referrals. 12:25 – The first text message that you send could start with, ‘Thanks for your interest in my services, I would love to learn more about you’ and ask them how you could help. 13:51 – David puts a link in the text message asking the prospects to spend two minutes and submit a form that would help him identify their goals and how he could help them.  In this manner, you are finding a way to overcome objections before they present themselves so that you can get them excited about working with you because you are providing a solution to them. 15:39 – The next step is to schedule a phone call or an in-person meeting depending on the business model to allow you to position yourself as the expert and the solution to the problems and make the sale. 18:04 – One of the biggest value propositions of email marketing is the automation and the drip marketing that you could apply to prospects and if you just reapply that to a more effective form of communication, you are going to get better results. 19:29 – David says that if you put a link in the text message, the average click through rate on that text messaging link is 36% as compared to 4% in an email campaign. So people will click on your link if you craft the right message to get them excited about what’s on the other side of that link. 20:19 – According to David, people are hesitant to embrace this model and they feel that from a business standpoint, texting is personal. But David says that the only way this model is going to be invasive or seem annoying to the recipient of your messages is if you are only pitching your product and saying buy my stuff. Before trying to sell anything you must provide some value.  So when David sends a message to people and they want to receive that message, it’s a completely different perception.   Resources Mentioned: Business Growth Strategies – David Pitts's video which explains branding your business, marketing and engagement. For US listeners, to get access to the video by texting the word Podcast to 56955.  

Today we chat with Terry Dean, Marketing Coach, who shares with us how he went from delivering pizza to earning $96,250 with one email. Terry also shares why higher ticket offers are better, how to create scarcity to sell more, and why he's a fan of the long form sales page.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 1:38 – Introduction. 4:57 – Terry got started back in 1996 from delivering pizzas, he came online, bought his first PC and started selling online. He did a lot of experiments with email and found out that email was the secret for him making money online. 5:11 – When Terry started speaking at conferences, one of the things that they asked at the conferences was to do a challenge. And in one of the conferences they put up a challenge that in the conference Terry would show them that he would make at least ten thousand dollars with one email to the list during the conference. 5:40 – The very first time Terry took up the challenge, he made around eighteen thousand dollars and then he made thirty-three thousand dollars and so he kept doing these promos and he also goofed up one time when he misspelled his own link and so he had to then send the correct link for people to order. 6:37 – As they moved forward, Terry was just promising ten thousand dollars but he had amazing results on one particular email. When you actually do a money on demand promotion you really want to think about the big three pieces for the promo. And the big three pieces are: there needs to be some very big special. So there is something you are doing that’s totally unique that could be a big discount on one of your products, it could be a product you just launched right now or something you are offering and that time Terry was going to offer licensing to one of his products and he was only going to offer the licensing this weekend and that’s where he hit the ninety six thousand dollars. So it was an exciting special offer. 7:25 – Another tip by Terry is that the higher ticket promotion always has the higher ticket returns for you.    8:30 – The second big piece is that there has to be some kind of scarcity and the scarcity that works best is having both a deadline and a limited number of something and Terry’s best promos have had both in them. 10:04 – The third piece is often left out by a lot of people and third piece is the reason why you are making this special and the reason why needs to be extremely important. 12:12 – From the email copy, the people are going to the sales page. The emails that Terry sends are really short. In the email, he usually only mentions why this is special this weekend and then he gives a good reason why. If you go back to the ninety-six-thousand-dollar email, the first paragraph was about this is special and how he is giving a license to one of his products and a link to it saying click here now if want to this special.  And the rest of the email added up to about four more paragraphs the first paragraph described what he was offering, the second paragraph described the limited time for it and then there were about four paragraphs describing why he was making this special offer and the email is more about the reason why than it is about the offer itself.   13:26 – The sales page is where he actually makes the sale by telling them about all the the things they are gaining and that is consistent across all of his different sequences, he sends them to the page to make the sale. 13:34 – His emails are stories or they are a reason why and when he does the reason why it basically is a story or sometimes answering a question or two that came in or few of the bullet benefits. Rarely does Terry list the price in the email or make the full offer in the email. 14:38 – What sets up those big challenges, those big money on demand specials is all the emails you send in between and those emails simply say what they are and the big mistake that most people with email is they send way too much content. You can make a lot more money by sending a lot less content.  You need to be building a relationship which means you are sending out true authentic stories about who you are, what you’ve done, your clients and things like that. And that’s what you are consistently emailing out to your list. 16:03 – According to Terry, the reason that the high ticket offers produce best is because you are going to find that a buyer is a buyer and if you look through your buyer list especially of the high ticket offers if you’ve been in business for many years you are going to know the names of a lot of your high-ticket buyers because they’re consistently your buyers. 17:02 – Terry’s sales pages are almost always long form sales pages especially the ones that produce best for his emails and sometimes he also does a video on top of the sales page but when he sends an email to his own list, he does not do video only to his own list because he has a large number of sales that come in within five minutes and the buyers did not watch the video or read the whole sales page. Long from sales pages have always produced best results for Terry by the email promotions. 18:57 – The results increase as your mailing list increases but also as you get more and more buyers on your list. 20:06 – With all of his clients, Terry always tries to establish some type of front end item so there is one product and some type of signature offer that they have in the front end. The purpose of that is to use that front end product and a couple of upsells to pay for the traffic and the whole purpose of the first sale is to pay for the leads that are being generated.   Resources Mentioned: http://MyMarketingCoach.com/free -- Terry is giving away a free report which is a copy of one of his paid newsletters and it’s seven unique ways to create money making emails even if you are not a writer. It gives you a lot of secrets of telling different types of stories and it will give you sixty-four story shortcuts to help you come up with stories and a lot of other tips and subject lines to help you create more profits using email.  

Today we chat with networking expert Patty Farmer, who shares how she went from 10,000 connections to 10,000 dollars. Patty also shares her best tips on finding the best networking events to attend, following up with your connections, and how to have conversations that convert into cash.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 1:34 – Introduction. 5:03 – Patty had just moved to a new town where she did not know anybody so she organized a kitty party but then she thought that she is not B2B or B2C but she is in the people business, she is in a brand-new town and she doesn’t know anybody and so she identified that as an opportunity and she changed her thinking a little bit to have a shift. She made a decision to meet 100000 people and make $100000. 6:50 – According to Patty your goal has to scare you if it doesn’t scare you, it’s not big enough. 6:59 – The next tip is to make a plan and so she started doing research about where should she network and who are the right people to network with.  In today’s business environment, relationships are the currency but you need to network with the right people because you can waste a lot of time by networking with the wrong people and so you should ask better questions. 9:18 – Even in social media it’s not just about the numbers but the engagement. Patty has dealt with clients who had a list of 700 but hadn’t made multiple six figures. It’s all about how much engagement there is and the only difference between a contact and a contract is the relationship. 10:10 – You must know the movers and shakers in town and where should you hang out. You should do research and find out who are the influencers and how should you connect with them. 11:11 – Patty used Meetup, Eventbrite and Google to find the movers and shakers. She also used social media to find them.  According to her you should let the people you connect to, connect you. So after meeting people and having a conversation with them she would ask them where are the best places you find to network where you get the best results and could you tell me the next three people I should connect to and they would tell her who she should connect to and that led her to connect to the next three people and so on. 12:31 – When Patty is confirming an appointment she would confirm the time and place of the appointment and she would also ask them who are the top three people they would really love to meet and who are great strategic partners for them and if she knew those people she would bring them with her. 14:45 – Sometimes people ask what if you meet those people and you are not so impressed with them. But Patty had just said that she would go through her database and bring them with her if she had them but people don’t know whether you had them in your database or not so if you meet them and you are not sure that you want to bring them then don’t bring them along. 15:37 – Patty’s next tip is to serve first and she will ask them how can I best serve you. She not only wants to serve people but she wants to do it in the most strategic way she can. 16:37 – Patty comes from a serve not sell mentality first because she believes that if you lead with contribution, compensation will follow. 17:09 – Once you have made the connection it’s all about taking that conversation and turning it into cash.  Once she asks them and finds out who do they serve, the question that Patty asks them is ‘I know a lot of people and if I was going to tell them about you, what would you want me to tell them’ and that enables them to tell Patty what is the value they bring to the Marketplace. All this leads to a very strong conversation that tells her what the next step should be and it opens up the conversation for how they can collaborate, where is the synergy, is there something they can do together and is there a revenue producing activity they can do together and that’s really what she is looking for.   20:01 – Patty always has a conversation on the phone before she meets anybody in person and it is very short so she knows a lot of information in a brief amount of time. She tells the person you can ask me anything you want for ten minutes and then after ten minutes we go on the clock and so they either write her a check or otherwise they are done in ten minutes.       Resources Mentioned: Patty has a gift for the listeners of this podcast. It's the 6-Figure Biz Quiz and it will tell them everything they need about where they are excelling, where they need some help and how they can have massive growth this year and they can access the free gift at PattyFarmer.com

Business and Wealth Creation Coach Melissa Pharr joins us in this episode to share her 7-Figure Sales Secrets. She also shares how to establish a healthy dynamic with your clients up front, how to avoid fear tactics in your sales calls, and 5 ways to identify your best money-making tasks.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:33 – Introduction. 6:24 – Ninety percent of the women that Melissa talks to on the phone are terrified of being salesy. A lot of us have been taught in sales and one of the reasons we feel that way is because Melissa  has gone through sales trainings before where she almost felt like she was supposed to get on the phone and try to be someone’s friend to build that trust and make them feel comfortable at the beginning and establish rapport and not make it seem like a sales call and a lot of us feel that’s the best way to go about it but it’s really interesting because almost a hundred percent of those ninety percent of women who are worried about being bait and switchy approach calls that way and what they are really doing when they do that is setting themselves for a bait and switch because we are not being clear about the fact that this is a sales call and so when we make an offer at the end it comes as a surprise to the people we called. 7:39 – Melissa wants to set up a really powerful dynamic with her clients and when you are coaching your client they are not paying you to be their friend, they are paying you for coaching or consulting so Melissa starts her calls in a way that changes the whole game and let’s everybody relax. 7:59 – She says something like ‘Hey Amanda, I am really excited to talk to you today, I am understanding that you are interested in my one on one coaching package is that true?’ and usually the person on the other end will say ‘yeah that’s true’ and then Melissa will say ‘That’s good because our call today is about figuring out whether or not it’s a good fit for us to work together, Sound good?’ 9:48 – On her coaching calls, Melissa asks what do you want to get out of the call. By the time this call is over what’s our outcome because you want to position yourself as an expert. And some people might be asking what if they say no or if they say ‘I didn’t know this was a sales call’ and Melissa’s response to that would be ‘No problem but I do want  to let you know this call is really reserved for people who are very serious about starting to work with a coach now and so if you have any other questions about this program, what I am going to do is I am going to go ahead and direct you to the website and then you can contact our team when you are ready to have a conversation because you’d like to go ahead and begin coaching.’ 11:00 – if Melissa would have offered a free coaching call, then she would have marketed it and if that is happening to you a lot it’s probably that you are marketing for what you are actually offering is most likely not clear or your application beforehand if you have one may not be asking clear enough questions. 12:09 – She is always trying to get the most qualified leads because she’d rather be on the phone with the right person and have a genuine conversation even if it takes a little while than just calling unqualified leads and hoping for them to convert.     12:23 – When Melissa first started, she didn’t have the confidence, the systems or the know how to be able to find her ideal clients and she learned her skills over time and so for  beginners who are struggling to find  the  right people she says that there is nothing wrong booking a lot of calls especially if you are trying to perfect your sales technique but no matter what you are offering it is not cool to dress it up as anything that it’s not. You need to be clear as to what the call is about from the beginning. 14:07 – Right from the beginning give them an overview and tell them this is what the session is about and don’t forget to say ‘I’m understanding this is that true’ because some people have a hard time saying how they feel unless you give them that opportunity. 14:35 – Melissa says that you might be used to being on a sales call asking somebody what’s going on in their business and figuring out what their challenges are but as soon as you realize that this person is an ideal client based on your conversation you must not directly tell them about your package because even though you’ve realized this has the potential to be a great fit, you can’t make that decision for someone and when you try to do that in sales you get pushy and convincing. You should be asking questions that make it conscious to the potential client that this is a great fit as well so that they can be the person to make that decision and want to stick with it once they make it. 15:29 – After she gets through those questions and she is pretty clear and she takes sufficient time to learn about the person, then she asks two other questions one of them is asking how committed they are to the process and the other is asking how urgent the outcome they desire is while working with her. 18:09 – When you start asking questions like this the feeling and the dynamic gives them this feeling if I work with this woman, things have to change because I can feel myself changing right now. 20:22 – When Melissa was first figuring out sales, she accidentally used fear tactics as well. It can be scary to be an entrepreneur when you don’t have a lot of cash flowing and you are really hoping that person will say yes and it’s easy to default to some of these tactics because we’ve been taught so many things and there are many well-meaning people who may have the skills to be great at sales who go to those kinds of tactics because they haven’t realized the power of complete transparency and genuine caring for your potential client.  21:53 – Even though so many of us want help with sales, sales is one piece of getting that client and in today’s world especially as an online entrepreneur a lot of people feel overwhelmed about knowing what to do to get to that point when they are on the phone with somebody. 23:02 – There’s five things to focus on and if you know these five things it becomes very easy for you to identify whether or not what you are doing is a money-making task.  Number one is 85% of the game is about keeping your mind in the game.  Number two is building your online community and number three is nurturing that community because if you don’t have a community of people who want to partake in your services or your products and you don’t have a relationship with them then you are highly unlikely of building an incredible long lasting business that has longevity. Number four is you’ve got to start making an offer somewhere. Number five is to work on perfecting your sales.   Resources Mentioned: Melissa has a free gift for the listeners of this podcast. It's a five part training called ‘Book your first paying client’ and you can find this free five part training at MelissaPharr.com/BookYourFirstPayingClients-AGP

In this episode, Heather Havenwood, Founder of Sexy Boss™, shares how she got 200 hours of free publicity. Heather also shares how she promotes her media exposure, how she gets booked on shows, and how she leverages her interviews.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 1:32 – Introduction. 8:50 – In August of 2015 Heather got a call from her friend who asked her to be on his podcast where she had a great conversation with him and just a week or two later she got an email and $5000 coaching client and two years before that she had created a podcast called ‘The Sexy Boss Podcast’ and she had thought that for her podcasting was done because she had tried that and it failed. But now after appearing on her friend’s podcast, she decided to do appear on other people’s podcasts and she has been on two hundred hours of other people’s shows. 10:31 – Heather’s entire business has always been on Affiliate traffic but she had not realized then that podcasting was an affiliate traffic source and so when she realized that fact she started really going out there and pitching herself. 10:51 – When she started in this business it was the year 2001 and till the year 2017, she was travelling the whole country to get in front of approximately hundred people but now she doesn’t have to travel and still she has an audience of more than a hundred people. 11:38 – Heather loves to be on other people’s shows because she wants to give value, she wants to give content and her story and she doesn’t like to travel. 12:20 – The beauty of podcasting is that it is way more intimate and it’s a conversation and not just a pitch. 12:37 – In 2015 she did not have a list or media page, product or message.  13:47 – Heather was taught at a very young age by her mother that she should not invite herself to the party and she should go to the party only if she is invited but as an entrepreneur you learn that you should go out and fail or go out and put yourself out there. So you should allow yourself to invite yourself to the party. 15:19 – Heather wanted it to be easy for people to say yes or no to her quickly so for that she created media page and she asked people to visit that page as a host. The idea of a media page is really to give the host everything that they need to say yes or no to you quickly, easily and effortlessly. 17:00 – The point of podcasting is that it exposes you to so many amazing people and in turn you are getting free publicity also you get to add value to the listeners and share your story and case studies. 17:44 – If your media page is really good and it shares a story, people will bring you on and say I know you are successful at this and what I really want to hear is your story. 18:17 – Heather’s media page is very clear about what she is and what she is not because a confused mind never buys thus you have to make sure you are clear on what your message to market is and the message has to be succinct. 18:42 – You don’t need very expensive tools, Heather just had a Yeti microphone for her first hundred episodes. Heather is a huge proponent of all businesses to be on a podcast for at least 30 before they even think about starting their own show. 21:00 – She signed up with a company that helps you secure a place in podcasts and now Heather is in the process of hiring someone in her team to delegate that but when you start learning to pitch yourself, you learn a lot, people just hire a PR to do that for them. 22:12 – Heather’s bio on her media page is the third edition because she is evolving and also because she is knowing her niche better. She knows how to talk to them and she also knows what kind of shows she wants to be on so she can make sure that she is really reaching that particular audience. 23:41 – Heather has people who have no clue about her podcast or are not prepared and once she had a random person who messaged her via Facebook and said that he loved her podcast and wanted to be on it.  So before you make a pitch you have to be prepared and your pitch should say about what you are and what you do and you should explain why you are a fit and how you can add value. 24:25 – A few tips for getting booked are to be clear in your message and what are selling. Heather doesn’t put her dating book on the forefront because some people get turned off by that but she does put it on there because she knows that not everyone is going to have her on for the dating site. 24:50 – You’ve got to unravel your own stories about self-promotion and some people like to outsource that task because when you learn to sell yourself, you know how to train someone else you. 25:38 – You must create a time-tested template to reach out to all the PRs and Heather has a template and some of the things on that template are a media page, her video speaking to KXAN and two other podcasts that she featured on because if they want they can hear other people interviewing her. 27:02 – Heather was interviewing someone today and their bio was in the first person and to change it in the moment from the first person to the third person.       28:17 – Heather got a couple of clients because of the interviews because after hearing her story they like her. So she sends people to HeatherHavenwood.com and  asks them to click on work with Heather and then she gets on a phone call with them to have a conversation. She tells them that she is very passionate about coaching. She also does list building by giving three free audio chapters of her book Sexy Boss by asking them to opt in but she does this also because she wants them to get to know her. 31:45 – Heather is also in conversation with a lot of people to go on TV and she is also a contributor on Entrepreneur but she makes sure that this was done to such an extent that the credibility foundation has been created for her.   Resources Mentioned:  Heather is offering three free audio chapters of her book Sexy Boss and you can go to SexyBossInc.com and opt in or you can text the word Sexy to 72000. The texting option is available only from the USA. Also, you can go to iTunes.com and type in Heather’s name and you can see about two pages of other shows that Heather has been on. 

Today we geek out with Rocky Callen, bestselling novelist, who successfully turned a profit from publishing books. Rocky shares her best tips on how to create a quality book, become a paid bestseller, and do it all with integrity.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:23 – Introduction. 06:45 – One thing that Rocky sees often with people who want to write a book and make it the centerpiece of their business is they think I am going to crank it out and I am going to slap it up online and that they are going to be a best-selling person but it doesn’t work that way, people underestimate the time and energy it requires to make a book that is meaningful, impactful and actually draws in your tribe. Your book is an extension of your business so want to give it that time, heart, energy that it requires so that means making sure that when you are looking at your book, you are taking your reader on a journey and that reader needs to be your ideal client and you want to make sure that there is emotion, information and everything in it that you bring to your clients in your sessions or in your retreats or however you serve them .  You want to bring your reader on that journey so want to make sure you edit the book including developmental editing which is when a person goes and looks at all the holes, the flow, consistency  and potency and tells you what you need to fix and then you go into line editing where you start to get to the nitty gritty of grammar and then you go into proofing which is the ultimate polish and this is the writing side.  09:08 – Find a quality designer for the cover of your book because your book is going to be on Amazon or on bookshelves and it needs to capture the attention of people scrolling by, it needs to stand up to the competition. If your book looks like it’s been half assed, it won’t sell and the tribe won’t come to you and the clients won’t come to you because instead of being this epic and phenomenal way of exalting your brand, it diminishes it. So one must invest in a cover that is an extension of your brand and that reflects the way the book makes a reader feel you should be consistent with your branding from your business all the way through your book and invest the time and energy to make sure that happens. 12:36 – Rocky says that when you write a book well, by the end whatever your core message or mission is they are going to turn to you for that because they’ve invested hours of their life at that point because they have been so entertained or so informed or so motivated or so inspired by you and they know you at an intimate and personal level for example when you think about marketing and you are writing Facebook posts or a blog post you might write 500 or a thousand words per post but when you are writing a  book you are looking at thirty thousand to seventy five thousand words and that’s a lot of information and a lot of  story so when someone comes to that end point with you and you’ve taken them on that journey effectively, they have no choice but to keep going with you and that’s where you have the impact. So you must put your all into the book writing process and the branding process and then market like a nerd. 14:10 – If you know what the book is in your heart and you have the title and you know what it is then you should publicize it on social media and say I am writing a book and share with them the behind the scenes of the writing process, people will get very intrigued by that and that is book marketing without feeling like marketing and you don’t need a huge budget for that. 15:55 – You can create a wait list for your book and give them some bonuses for joining the wait list but they also get to see the behind the scenes of the book and that becomes your warm list of buyers and that should be a separate list from your bigger list because these people are invested already in the book itself. 16:24 – When you are looking at marketing you want to make sure that when you focus your efforts, your promotion, your guest posts and your partnerships with other people to promote you, you want to focus your energy on the first 72 hours of release because what happens is that people do a post weekly but how Amazon calculates bestsellers is they want to see mass quantity downloaded in a specific period of time and you have the best chance of really nailing that in those first 72 hours because that’s when the excitement and the buzz can really go so really focus all your time and energy there so that you give yourself the best chance to climb those lists. Being on a list means that you are more visible and in the end, that’s all that you want to be visible. 18:43 – You’ll see this a lot with entrepreneurs,  people that buy the most for 72 hours a lot of times get amazing bonuses paired with the book purchase so if you buy the book and you send in the receipt to the list and you might get an eight week course or something like that. 19:55 – You must give readers many different ways to engage with you and your brand like contests, giveaways, Facebook lives, Facebook events because all these things amp up the energy. 20:33 – A lot of people think that the book is going to make you a lot of money but for entrepreneurs, the money isn’t actually in book sales but from upsells so what you must try to do is create something that is so perfectly paired with the book that when they finish your book they are like oh what’s next, I need something right now, I need to go deeper or I need to go further whatever it is, however your book is set up and it could be a downloadable program or something entry level and that’s when you pull them through your whole funnel. You want to make sure that there’s something that’s beautifully and perfectly tied with your book so that way they want to dive in and they are willing to go and spend the money so that they are leaning in closer and closer so that when your fifteen-thousand-dollar offer comes up they go for it without thinking twice and that’s where you really make your money. 27:32 – Rocky says that you must look at every twenty-four-hour period of time and within every hour try to get on a webcast and get people to start buying because the Amazon algorithm is recalculated every hour so the more you push every hour the better your chances. It really depends on your category because even within business depending on who you are competing with because if a big name in the business is launching, they are going to radically change the game in terms of who gets to compete with them versus when a big name isn’t launching. So when you are looking at your launch dates you should look at what other books are launching if there are five other huge names launching then that means that it is probably going to be thousands more for you to get even on the top one hundred list. If you are just looking at the top one hundred list but you are not looking at spot number one then a few thousand on your first seventy two hours is going to get you somewhere on the list in general but it depends on the category and how many people come through in each hour and who you are competing against but that’s a good way to aim for it and try to go for that. 29:19 – Rocky does not feel it is appropriate for you to allow people to download your book for free for the first seventy-two hours and she would not consider it to be a best seller. She considers it to be a best seller only if it is in the paid list and you are next to the big names.  But one thing that is possible and potentially helpful is if you do the seventy-two-hour free offer you get people to buy and leave reviews and then immediately after that that’s when you hit it hard with marketing. 31:00 – When you are looking at categories there are many subcategories but you must look at the ones that have the least number of books because that means less competition and see what that word is and use it as one of your keywords as that makes it more likely for you to be placed in that category. And another tip is when you are looking at the top one hundred in a specific list, in a specific category click on the number one and the number ten and at the bottom when you go to product descriptions it is going to say rank 233 which means they are selling thousands that day and if they are going to rank five thousand then they are selling maybe a hundred or less. So you must see the gap between number one and number ten and that gives you an idea in this category,  number one is ranked ten thousand but in this category, its best-selling rank number two of all of Amazon so you must look at those ranks and then use those keywords when you are uploading your book so that way you know you have a better chance of  getting squarely in front of your audience  and really maximizing your chance for success in terms of being a bestseller.   Resources Mentioned: Rocky is very active on the Facebook group TheBleedInkTribe and this group is for women who want to write their books and publish them. Rocky has designers, editors and some awesome people in there. RockyCallen.com/Bleed-Ink-Checklist -- You can get a free check list for going from book idea to book launch.

Get your notepad ready as Lauren Zink, creator of Tiny Happy Empire, shares a few of her super nerdy tips on how to create a sales page that captures your client's attention. Packed with ingenious tools to outline your next sales page launch and successfully attract more clients.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 1:32 – Introduction. 6:30 – Lauren tells the listeners of this podcast to make a note of the outline she is going to share and use it when they are writing their sales pages. 8:00 – Lauren has been a copywriter for three years and the stuff that she is going to teach is tested by Lauren and her clients.  Lauren actively looks at other people’s sales pages and looks at their framework and how they are laying things out and why they are doing what they are doing. Lauren uses this Framework in her business and other big names in the online business use it too. 8:56 – The first thing on any sales page should be the headline and you should spend a lot of time on your headline because if nobody stops to read your headline and you are unable to grab their attention in the first second with the headline it doesn’t matter if the rest of your copy is brilliant people will just leave that page and do something else. 9:42 – Lauren tells us about this amazing tool called Coschedule headline analyzer. It’s a headline tool you just need to put your headline in the tool and it will grade your headline and give you suggestions on how to improve your headline. 10:31 – The next thing you need to do is to speak to them about the industry that you work in so if you are selling a copywriting program, you would speak about how copywriting can increase the number of sales you make and why copywriting is important as an industry and that creates a need and desire to learn more about what you are selling. 12:01 – You need to paint a picture of where the prospects are now and what they want to change in their life and highlight their pain points and Lauren has an exercise for this called a day in their life exercise and to get this section up to speed you need to think about from the moment they wake up till the moment they go to sleep what does their life look like in relation to your problem. So you need to think about all the little specific details about the day that are going to show them how big of an issue is the problem for them. 14:32 – The next step is to take the day in their life exercise and do it the day after they take your program and what does their life look at that point and what do they really want. You have to get very specific with this and make it tangible for them and make it something that they can see in their life and experience. 16:23 – You have to make them realize that you know they tried achieving what they wanted but they were unsuccessful and that sets you up to talk about you and your solution and why it’s different and it also takes the blame off of them a little bit.  And then you remind them from that point of what they really want and also remind them that it is possible.  You need to put in some case studies and testimonials that show them that real people have gone through transformations.  18:27 – The next step is to introduce yourself, get human with them and share a little bit of your story and how you have been where they are and how you have gotten to the other side and what that looks like. This shows that you are not some person presenting a random solution to a problem but you are a person presenting a solution to a problem that you know works and you totally get their pain and you know what’s possible for them on the other side so that they can really feel that they trust you. 20:53 – From there we are going to share the things we’ve noticed that really work so you explain your process or your system. 23:56 – The next step is to share a few more testimonials and case studies about how you actually know that this system works for people. 25:19 – Then you need to introduce your product or service you tell them the name of your product or service and then put a mini tag line ‘it’s going to help you XYZ’ or ‘the fastest path to results. You have to be very direct with them, remind them, pull them through and think about how their brain is working. Then to prove it you have to share a few testimonials or case studies and then you put your call to action. 27:51 – And the final section is your paradigm so for example if you are doing a course you say what they are going to get and how it is different from other courses and then you put another call to action at the end. 28:43 – You can add a few more things to your sales page if you want to get a little more advanced like time sensitive bonuses because people need a sense of urgency to take action which will increase your sales. And for most of us it is about creating a change in the world by making somebody’s life better or the world better and leaving a positive legacy and if people are not buying your product or service they are not going to get to the point of the process where they experience the results and what is important is the transformation that happens for them.   Resources Mentioned: A free five-day copywriting course by Lauren where she teaches you to write with emotion and how to find the specific words that go on your sales page. It can be found at bit.ly/writesellconquer.  

Discover how to maximize your Instagram account with Nathan Chan, creator of Foundr Magazine, who snapped his way to 950k+ followers in just two years. Nathan also shares with us how to drive traffic to your website from Instagram, and how to keep your followers happy and engaged.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:35 – Introduction. 5:26 – Nathan says that for them it doesn’t matter how many followers they have, for them it matters how much traffic they can drive using Instagram. So Nathan’s first tip is to worry less about your followers and make sure that you have a great profile set up and obsess about the link in your bio for your Instagram account and that’s the main way you can drive traffic. The best way to utilize Instagram is to obsess about that link in the bio and do whatever you can to get people to click on the profile link in the bio because that truly drives traction. 6:24 – You can also get people to Swipe up with Instagram stories if you have a verified account. Nathan got their account verified recently which is very powerful in driving traffic. A tip for people who really want to utilize Instagram as a growth channel is it’s less about the followers and more about the clicks.    7:26 – For Nathan Instagram is an amazing platform which they have used to build a massive community and this has allowed to grow the reach of their brand and the reputation of their brand at a very fast pace. 8:13 – According to Nathan, if you really want to leverage social media to the fullest get clear on what your sales funnel is so that you can drive traffic to the right thing. 9:26 – Once you’ve got the foundation set up and you have decided to use Instagram as a traffic source and a way to build a reputation for your brand but the end goal is driving traffic, you have to focus on producing great content on a consistent basis and the content has to be relevant to the market that you serve and it has to be loved by the audience.      11:35 – Nathan and his team create great content and post it between 5 to 7 times a day. 12:23 – Nathan and his team have realized that the best kind of content is photos of their magazine, quotes and startup tips and facts. Their audience loves this kind of content.  But it depends on the audience and niche, you have to test what you audience likes. 14:19 – One of their rules is they treat their community like gold and if someone leaves a comment on any of the images, one of the team members will reply to the comment or answer any question. Because their account is verified and large, they have found a lot of success with growth on commenting on other big Instagram accounts. 17:27 – According to Nathan, once you’ve got a good foundation and mindset for the purpose of having an Instagram account and using it to build your business or your brand, the next step is to focus on other growth strategies and one of them is focusing on getting other big accounts to share your content.  You can either pay them to do this or find another mutually beneficial exchange in value.   Resources Mentioned: People can find out more about Nathan Chan by visiting the website Foundr.com. You can also download a free issue of the magazine by visiting the link FoundrMag.com/Branson.

Today we chat with Jill Stanton, co-founder of Screw The 9 to 5 online community. In this episode, Jill shares her personal and professional insights on how to cultivate your own online community, maintain a consistent retention rate, and make more money with membership programs.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:37 – Introduction. 05:17 – Tip # 1: Jill says that before throwing yourself all in and going all in on membership sites figure out if you actually want this business model for your business because having a membership site requires taking care of your members every month, watching retention, keeping an eye on your numbers and making sure you show up consistently.  07:22 – According to Jill, when you are just starting out, you don’t know what business model you should go with because no one is talking about that. There is a lot of stuff online where people are just trying to sell their stuff so they tell you that this is the only way you need to do it but we must realize that one business model might not be the right fit for someone and another business model might be suitable for you. 8:28 – Tip # 2: Make sure you have the attention that allows people to actually join and hear about you, build a list and try to get some attention around your brand and ask them if this is something that they want. Jill initially had one of digital products and people objected saying that they can’t afford the products so she asked them if they would rather have something low priced with a monthly fee and everyone said yes so Jill and her husband went all in on it.  If you have are planning on a membership site you must realize that everyone does not like recurring payments so do some research and make sure that your audience is aligned with that kind of offer before going ahead with a membership site. 10:01 – Tip # 3: You should build and engage the membership because people may come for the stuff but they’ll always stay for the connection and the community. Many people think that memberships is all about releasing new content every month but that doesn’t have to be how you structure your membership site.    11:10 – A huge thing that people need to realize if they are going to create a membership site is that you have to really get clear on the progression of your members i.e. where they are coming in at and where they want to get to, you need to be purposeful with your content and you must give them the necessary steps to accelerate their journey for them. 12:20 – You should get in the process of steadily and continuously growing because in order for a membership site to be profitable you need people in the community. Quite a few people do open and closed where the membership is only open for a week after that the door is closed and then they open the doors to the membership six months later.  Jill gives an analogy of the head of the octopus as your membership site and all the tentacles are the different pathways into someone joining the site. Jill has content rich, hyper specific sales funnels. Jill starts with a free blog post which has traffic driven to it  then the next step on that page is to opt in for a hyper relevant freebie and then they have a value driven one time offer this is where they make an offer to grab their course for a limited time at a discounted amount then from there you are invited to a webinar where they pitch Screw U and this is constantly running 24/7 so a new audience is constantly being built which every two weeks they run a webinar and get people into the membership. 18:11 – Jill says that if you want to roll with memberships, you have to be comfortable with the fact that a certain chunk of your members is going to leave each and every month. The number of members who leave each and every month is going to fluctuate from industry to industry and it’s around 20% in the online business space. This might sound like a lot but if you have a solid sales system, you can continue to replace those people. 20:26 – Jill is opening up a second tier two Screw U which will have more access to Jill’s team and a higher price point of $500 a month versus $69 a month and Jill feels it is something worth playing with and she feels it has a benefit of not just allowing your members to strive to hit the next level, but also to increase your own revenue. The beauty of membership sites is that it allows you the recurring model which is predictable so you can have an estimate of how much will make this month and based on your retention how much you will make the next month and that allows you to invest this much here and this much there.  So having that second tier offer that is a higher price point with a lower amount of people allows you to add the pushes of profit into your membership that allows you to scale even higher. 23:46 – Once you have a strong and consistent retention rate, it allows you to start to predict your revenues so that you can map out where you are going to invest and the people you are going to bring on but everyone doesn’t get retention right they think that they can just create a course or a new freebie or a piece of content each month and people will stay for that but it doesn’t always work out like that because people need to be seen, heard, acknowledged and you need to give them success paths.   Resources Mentioned: The five biggest retention strategies Josh and Jill have used to have a consistent 93% retention rate can be found at www.marketlikeanerd.com/retention.    

Today we connect with Adam Urbanski, a zealous believer in free enterprise, entrepreneurship, and that only you determine the limits of your success. In this episode, we get a behind the scenes look at Adam's multi-million dollar business, the difference between marketing and selling, and how to package and sell big ticket offers.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:43 – Introduction. 9:05 – Adam says that you should first realize what is a big ticket high end offer and why you should sell big ticket high end offers and then you should have something really nice to sell that actually sells and people are willing to pay more money for, know how to actually sell it and finally have someone to sell it to.    10:19 – According to Adam, there is only one way to make money and that is to bridge the gap between the need and the solution. 10:56 – Selling is so vital and fundamental to every business and because of the upbringing and the socio-economic stigma around sales, most people don’t have high regard for selling and if you are able to overcome that stigma and learn selling a little bit better and sell to more clients from the same amount of leads you could even double your business. 12:05 – One of Adam’s mentors told him that if you keep selling inexpensive stuff you are going to be so busy serving low end customers, you’ll never have time to build your business. When people are selling inexpensive products, you will require a lot of volume and infrastructure to make any significant revenue and it will prevent you from focusing on your growth. 13:19 – Adam says that to sell a high end offer if you package some of your knowledge into a consulting or coaching program, all you need is you, a one page outline and then you can start having conversations with people but if you want to sell a $100 eBook, you’ve got to learn how to write this eBook, then you have to learn how to turn it into an eBook format, you’ve got to learn how to host it online etc. so there is so much of learning required and that makes people very busy. 14:28 – if you learn sales and if you charge more, you are going to be exponentially better off to start with because you don’t need any mechanics, you don’t need to learn a whole bunch of things, you just need to be present with people and attentive to what they need and how can you position your skills and knowledge as  a solution to their needs.    16:19 – Step # 1 is that you must have something to sell and a big lesson that Adam shares with all his clients is that, ‘sell first and create second.’ 16:42 – Adam did a video where he had piles of books and manuals  and then he asked his students would you rather have all of this stuff or would you rather have me walk you through 12 consecutive steps on how to grow your business, one step a month and later he invited people to a call and on the call he presented the same concept and from the call he invited them to a $6000 program and he only had a one page outline of what the 12 lessons would be, he didn’t have the contents or  the slides, because all he needed to have is an outline and after the teleseminar he told people it is a big decision and we are going to be playing it for a year so you can’t even join right now, I am going to send you a link tomorrow morning to join and the reason behind that was because he didn’t even have a sales page ready. 17:59 – Sixty-five people signed up for the program and he made more than $ 300000 and all he needed to have was a description of the program and an idea and not the program itself. So the big lesson for people here is to prepare a one page outline and what you should write in this outline is 3 to 6 things that are your magic bullets, how can you help people. 19:05 – Adam says that if someone comes to you and you have a conversation and you want to grow your business, pretty much in every case you can say if we just took whatever you do and created one automated sales funnel would that help, how much could that generate over a year, how much freedom could that give you and you can tell them that you can launch their automated funnel for 90 days 21:33 – If someone goes through a training program and one module is how to create your automated funnel and you spend an hour teaching it to them, they have got an idea but they really don’t have enough to implement it and that’s why most people don’t because it is so overwhelming so you should break it down into steps, like the landing page, the autoresponders, the copy, the offer, the freebie etc. so you should work through all of it putting it together so it plays out like a beautiful song on an autopilot for your business making you money. 22:43 – Everybody thinks I need a lead first but if you have a hundred leads today and you can’t sell to them you have wasted a hundred leads so understand why you are doing this, have something really cool to sell and Adam says that people fall in love with their ideas but nobody cares for your ideas they just care about solving their problems so make sure that you sell what sells. 23:27 – To be better at selling you should take a basic course on selling and read a few books on how to become better at persuasion and influencing. Adam says that we must change our mindset towards selling and he tells people two paradigm shifting ideas and the first one is that marketing equals educating and selling is consulting, it is advising people how to make a good decision and which problem to focus on solving. 25:16 – Selling is all about consulting, asking questions, helping people figure out what they need, getting clear on how you can help them and the mistake most people make is that they have an idea and they want to prescribe something but we must realize that prescribing medicines before diagnosis is malpractice and in coaching and consulting people don’t seem to figure that out. 26:26 – If you think through every single sales conversation, it pretty much has the same flow and so you must reverse engineer a sales conversation that you are a part of and write down your own script and some people are resistant to having scripts but we use scripts in even in our daily conversations with people. 27:26 – Listen a lot more, in a sixty-minute sales conversation if you speak for more than twenty minutes, you are talking way too much. 27:50 – One of the biggest reasons that people cannot close sales is that people don’t take the current problem as a viable alternative and because of this 9 out of 10 times people will choose to stay in the situation that they are right now even though it’s uncomfortable and painful and it’s not getting them where they want to be but  they will rather be where they are because it’s familiar than risk doing something different. 28:59 – The juxta positioning of price is certainly a sales technique but it’s like Kindergarten play and people can see right through it versus when you compare real life situations. There is a difference between return on investment versus cost of inaction. The return on investment is questionable but we can certainly identify cost of inaction. 31:02 – Getting leads is a huge issue for all entrepreneurs and there is no shortage of clients and leads but there is only a shortage of marketing know-how in action. If you want to sell something for higher prices, don’t change what you do as much as change who you do it for.   33:52 – There are people that teach you how to get clients now through paid advertising and when it comes to getting leads there are two schools of thought get clients now and get clients forever so get clients now is paid advertising and it can work beautifully even though it is a learning curve and the second one is content marketing and content marketing is get clients forever and Adam  still has leads that come to him because of articles that he wrote and published 15 years ago. 35:07 – Adam says that you must start paying attention to where are the people that you would love to bring on as clients hanging out and start paying attention to their conversations and simply approach them but keep those approaches platform congruent. 37:53 – Let’s say you want to earn a hundred thousand dollars as a coach you should identify something that people will be willing to pay twenty thousand dollars for and find a client every other month for the first ten months of the year and you can make hundred thousand dollars or identify something that people will be willing to pay ten thousand dollars for and then find one client a month. You can troll on Facebook. LinkedIn, Twitter and look for conversations that indicate someone that could be a prospect.    Resources Mentioned: www.TheMarketingMentors.com is where you can find Adam’s blueprint which is a behind the scenes look at Adam’s business. On the same website, Adam is also giving away a fast start guide – Seven ways to attract high end clients fast. You can also find Adam on www.Facebook.com/AdamUrbanski

Today's guest is JP Sears, creator of The Ultra Spiritual Comedy Series on YouTube. In this episode, we dive right into how JP goes from ultra authentic to ultra profitable by merging his emotional healing practice and his love of comedy, and most importantly, embracing his weird messiness.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 3:06 – Introduction.  8:17 – JP says that people are inherently very valuable and a lot of us get stuck in trying to earn our value and when we get stuck in it, it is like quick sand that can swallow us up and it can really hypnotize us into forgetting that we carry a lot of inherent value in us which is not what we earned but what we are and so the miracle of our own being holds priceless gifts not only for our inner fulfillment but for our businesses as well. We are the gift and if we can tap that resource of our authentic self-inside it does amazing things for our business in terms of adding value and attracting people. It is noteworthy that it is a renewable and sustainable resource and when we bring something real about ourselves into our business that gives our audience something to connect to.  So you must figure out who you are and bring some of that real weird messiness into your business. 10:44 – According to JP bridging out of normalcy for the sake of finding our weird self and walking the bridge of weirdness and nerdyness is beautiful, it leads us into some of our true self and there is no limit on expressing our true self. 11:18 – Part of building an audience is producing content that is shareable and creating content that gives people entertainment and awareness and inspires people makes the content very shareable. 12:44 – When we are expressing our authenticity via video, written word or a picture, if we can have one or more of these three pillars of share ability i.e. entertainment, inspiration and awareness it allows us to express our authenticity and that can really enhance our business. 14:36 – One of the most fundamental need that we all have is the need for connection and when we are being personable, we give people someone to connect to but when we are being professional, we are not giving people an opportunity for a personable connection. So if we can be ourselves enough it gives people something to connect to and if we can contribute in them in some way meeting their most fundamental need for connection they will be connected to us and that means they have become a member of our audience and they may convert to actual customers. 19:49 – According to JP, we do ourselves an injustice when we buy into the illusion of overnight successes because when you see someone being successful and haven’t noticed them before you assume that they were an overnight success because we fail to realize that the overnight success could have taken 15 years in the making. JP worked for 13 years as an emotional healing coach before he made his first comedy video and the content of his comedy videos rests on the foundation of what he has learned and experienced in those thirteen years 21:08 – JP doesn’t do much to grow his audience he doesn’t consider himself a strategy guy he considers himself as a creative person. Doing his best to be true to the creative spirit in himself has worked well for him in growing his audience. JP says we must give value by giving the best version of ourselves. 22:54 – A lot of people in the entrepreneur space get stuck in valuing strategies and not so much valuing giving value and strategies are valuable to the business owner but not really valuable to the people we are reaching but giving value in the long term helps us build our businesses. 25:50 – JP thinks that we get what we give and if we really give it allows us to receive a lot. 27:23 – Up until two months ago JP didn’t do much to monetize his audience but at a point in time he realized that he had a nice sized audience and he decided to genuinely monetize it and so he released a line of ultra-spiritual T shirts and apparel and he also has his book coming up which is a comedy based on his ultra-spiritual character. He is also doing some brand deals by integrating products into his videos, besides that JP is doing speaking and performing at events. 29:37 – A really powerful asset that helps a business grow is not needing to make money for a while and the first 13 years of his career JP principally earned his living through doing one on one emotional healing coaching sessions and then two years ago, when he started doing comedy videos, he didn’t need to monetize it because he was earning a nice living from his coaching practice which had reached the point where he didn’t need to get more clients. 32:11 – It is a great asset if we are fortunate enough to be in a position where we have got income coming in from another job so that we can develop our business and not need immediate income from it.   Resources Mentioned:  JP’s forthcoming comedy book is called "How To Be Ultra-Spiritual - Twelve and a Half Steps to Spiritual Superiority." The humor in the book is meant to deliver a deeper message of advocating people to identify and let go of that which served you but no longer serves you as well as courageously connecting deeper to your true self.  To check out this book visit www.marketlikeanerd.com/JP

Today we're having Michele PW onto the show, who is the leading expert on Love-Based Copywriting, an approach that challenges the typical fear-based, pushy energy of typical direct response copywriting. If you have learned from traditional sales and copywriting experts and still have this icky feeling inside of you, and really wish there was a better way to communicate to your ideal client without feeling gross in the process, Michele's approach is probably exactly what you need. It's copywriting that FEELS GOOD and gets RESULTS too!   Time Stamped Show Notes: 1:38 – Introduction 6:53 – Michele was in the coaching industry and many of her friends, associates and clients told her that they hated traditional direct response copywriting and they asked her if she could come up with things like conscious copywriting or attraction copywriting and they were very helpful by giving her names but she didn’t want to come with another name rather she wanted to reform the whole direct response copywriting industry not just come up with something other than that and then have people saying if you are a real businessperson you will use traditional direct response copy if you are just a hobbyist or you are not serious you can use attraction copywriting. 7:28 – In 2014 Michele’s friend came up with a book, love based marketing and that made her think about love based copy and she thought the opposite of that would be fear based copy and that’s when everything fell into place. So, to persuade people to take any action, you have to tap into their emotions and you can tap into fear based emotions or love based emotions and traditional direct response copy is tapping into fear but you don’t have to persuade people or buy your products or programs and just tap into fear, you can tap into love instead. 8:33 – So there are three ways to get started with love based copy the first one is to really get to know your ideal clients and Michele prefers ideal clients over niche markets because the more you understand people’s core beliefs and their attitudes the more you can really talk directly to them because if you could write copy like you would write to a friend that’s really the key.  10:10 – Michele says that you should engage and connect with your clients on a deep level because fear is really about pursuing and control but when you come from a space of love you are really educating people and giving them a choice and stepping back and allowing them to choose. 10:38 – Her second tip is that you must have a love based mindset. If you slip into fear and you go chasing or pursuing or shaming people, even though you might have the best intentions that’s where the trickiness comes in so as much as possible before you start a sales conversation or before you sit down to write copy you should get yourself in a love based mindset which could be done in many ways like doing meditation or grounding yourself. Michele has come out with a book called love based money and mindset which is about ways to shift your mindset from fear based to love based.  And that’s  the hardest  thing because once  you are there a lot of this other stuff  is easy, the problem is that most  of us are  controlled by fear we are taught in  our culture to run away from your fear and if you run away  from your fear based emotions they actually control you so that’s why the more you can get into a  love based mindset the easier all of this  marketing  is going to become. 13:16 – According to Michele the more you can surrender and relax, the easier it is all going to be and also you shouldn’t be attached to the outcome. 15:04 – When you indulge in fear based marketing you erode your brand over time because they may not trust you. 15:53 – Michele says that pain is a part of life and our ideal clients are in pain and if you don’t acknowledge that it is not very respectful and so you should speak respectfully about the pain but you must not agitate it because that turns it into suffering which is fear based. Pain is a part of life but it should not turn into suffering. 19:27 – Recap.   Resources Mentioned: MichelePW.com – Michele’s website. LoveBasedCopywritingBook.com/template is where you can find Michele’s love based copywriting template. You can also click here to purchase Michele’s book.

I am mildly obsessed with Facebook Groups, so in this episode you will learn some important Dos and Donts for how to engage and market in Facebook Groups!   Time Stamped Show Notes 00:52 – Introduction. 2:10 – When I first started encountering Facebook groups, I wasn’t looking for it to be a marketing strategy. I was coming out of a business relationship that wasn’t making me happy and I closed down my Virtual Assistant business with my business partner and when that happened I felt like I didn’t have any friends in the industry. 2:55 – After I closed down my Virtual Assistant business, I was feeling very alone and I was craving finding other like-minded entrepreneurs who I would genuinely love as not just fellow entrepreneurs but also as friends and Facebook groups was where I went to go do that. I was hanging out in Facebook groups to get to know people and to create my own community. I got completely obsessed with Facebook groups and I found that Facebook groups were also making me money. 3:49 – Within 30 days I booked myself sold with private coaching clients and that was by leveraging other people’s Facebook groups. 4:01 – When it comes to Facebook groups, other people’s Facebook groups are the easier place to start because other people have already taken the time to build the groups. So if you want to leverage your own group, you have to take the time and energy to grow it, to engage it and to make money from it and it’s about a ninety day process from conception to your first big launch to your group.  5:03 – There are five don’ts for leveraging other people’s Facebook groups.  5:25 – The first don’t is don’t join groups that are too big or too small because if the group is too big like there are 10000 people in there, it’s going to make it harder for you to stand out and you obviously want to be visible in this group and stand out. And if the group is too small, there aren’t enough people in there for you to leverage and also if people in the group are not participating a lot then you will not get enough reward for the effort that you are putting in. So if the group consists of less than 500 people, it’s probably not worth it. You should leverage at the most five groups where your ideal clients are hanging out and where the size of the group is neither too much or too less and the groups are engaging in real conversations. 7:44 – It also helps if you join groups that have members are your ideal clients but the group administrator is not a direct competitor and is someone who is complementary to your service.  9:49 – Don’t number two would be don’t be a lurker. So many people just join Facebook groups and they don’t post anything, or comment in the group and that will not help your business. You have to take some action in the group and be visible.  When you first join a group, you must introduce yourself to the members of the group and the host of the group via an introductory post. 11:48 – Don’t number three is don’t do drive by promos which essentially means you join a group, you post a promotional post and then you leave. This is not good etiquette and it makes you look spammy and sleazy. You should join a group with the intention of giving value and creating real relationships. 12:51 – Typically what I am doing in Facebook groups is after I introduce myself, for the next week or two I am only giving value. I am commenting on other people’s threads, I am answering people’s questions, I am participating in discussions in the group and supporting the members and the host of the group and after doing all of that, I start promoting and I always follow the rules of the group. 14:21 – The fourth don’t is don’t go for the sale. What I have found is that it is exponentially easier to post a paid offer in your Facebook group but it doesn’t have the right energy and it doesn’t work quite as well when you are doing it in someone else’s Facebook group. So what works more effectively is build your own Facebook group to make sales paid offers and leverage other people’s Facebook groups to post free offers. You can post free offers that move people to your mailing list and you can then promote to them later using your mailing list. 16:34 – The fifth don’t is don’t rely solely on Facebook groups for your business. This is a manual and short term strategy and it’s a way to build out your visibility while you are working on creating your own tribe and your own traffic. It’s great to leverage other people’s traffic and in the short term it is a much faster way of doing it but you want people to see you as the authority and you want to own your traffic, you want to have people in your own mailing list and Facebook groups who see you as the authority and are excited to buy from you.   Resources Mentioned: http://MarketLikeANerd.com/FBgroupswebinar is where you can access Amanda’s free webinar about the three-step process to monetize your own Facebook groups.

Today you're going to learn from best-selling author and success strategist Kate Butler who went from stay-at-home mom to super successful work-from-home mom. Kate reveals how to spot self-sabotage before it happens and how to transmute that energy into attracting something better.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 1:27 – Introduction. 8:14 – Kate started as a stay at home mom and then transitioned into a work from home mom, she was an entrepreneur but she wasn’t doing what she loved and so she began to search for what her calling was and she began to do a lot of work with her mentor and began to transform her life into something that she is proud of. She has a different way of living than she did three years ago and so she started to look back about what were some of those shifts that began to happen that took her out of a place of loneliness, depression and isolation and brought her to a place where she felt really, truly aligned with her authentic self and could show up in the world in the way that she was meant to. 9:15 – Kate started to look through these threads of sabotage that she was doing throughout her entire life and today she would like to share  them with the listeners of the podcast in the hope that it can help somebody out there listening that might be able to identify with some of these self-sabotages. 9:30 – The first sabotage that she felt she did most of her life was  that she would go through the  motions and simply not listen for the answers so she was  constantly looking for something new, constantly looking outside of herself for answers, constantly asking questions  and wanting to find  what her next step was or where her next clients were going to come from or what is it that she should be doing  with her life and she realized that she was asking these questions constantly but she was never actually allowing herself to receive the answer and then she began to get into a practice of meditation. 10:26 – Kate says that every day you should spend time still in a quiet place with your eyes closed and this will enable you to connect with your answers. She truly believes that everyone was born with everything that they’ll ever need for their lives and you cannot truly access that combination until you meditate and stop sabotaging yourself with all of these outside distractions.   12:16 – if there’s some area in your life that’s not working just look at what it is that you are choosing to think about throughout the day, what it is that you are talking about throughout the day and what it is that you are acting on throughout the day and it will give you an answer as to why that is showing up in your life because the universe does not question what we ask for it only matches it. 12:55 – Kate found that prior to her being aware of this sabotage, even when she was aligned and knew what she should be doing and felt very purposeful of her life, she would get up and get into her office, switch on her computer and start firing away whether she was getting on a phone call, answering emails or getting on social media. She was getting right into action and she would feel that she was so busy the whole day and she was absolutely exhausted and she realized that she was showing up for everyone else in their to do list and at the end of the day she would think what did I actually accomplish today that got me to my next level goal because she was showing up for everyone else and answering everyone else’s questions but she wasn’t carving out the time to move herself over towards her next level goal. So she started a practice of choosing three things that would get her closer to her next level goal and she would do those three things first and only after those three things were done would she move on to the to do list and begin showing up for other people. 15:30 – Kate’s mentor said that if you were to go into the redwood forest and choose the biggest tree in the forest and you went into the forest and took an axe and every day you went and took five whacks at that tree it doesn’t matter how big that tree is eventually one day the tree will fall. 16:30 – Kate  then talks about the emotional sabotage which is that we  may have goals and we may have written down the next level goals but we don’t feel connected to them and we don’t actually feel aligned with them and we don’t believe that they actually going  to materialize so we psyche  ourselves out of what really is possible in our lives because we don’t feel like we are either good enough for it, we don’t feel like we can actually do it or we don’t see the how of getting there. If you decide what you want to do and you believe that you can do it, the how is going to show up for you.  If we begin to open ourselves up to infinite possibilities, then a lot of times what happens is that it shows up better than we could have ever actually expected. 17:43 – The specific tool that Kate has for this self-sabotage to come to emotional success around your next level goal is to put yourself in a place of a future vision and Kate does this by writing out a future vision, some people do this by visualizing during their meditation time. Kate puts herself a long time ahead in the future and she spends time mapping out exactly what life looks when she has achieved whatever that goal is she also maps out who is with her, what are they saying, what does she see, what does she hear, how does she feel, how is she dressed and how has her life changed. So she tries to get into as many small details as possible and really putting herself into that future place because it will ignite that emotion in you and it will then allow you to believe that this is possible for your life and then all of those things are going to begin to show up in truer form.      22:50 – Kate says that when things happen, they happen so serendipitously that it is often better that it could have ever been anticipated in our visualization because we are just doing a visualization with the limited awareness that we have at that time. 25:23 – Recap.     Resources Mentioned: KateButlerCoaching.com is Kate’s website and on her website you can find an ignite your life starter kit. The ignite your life starter kit contains a very specific tool that outlines exactly how to write a future vision. Kate is also offering to create a bestseller book and then use your book as a platform to create more success and multiple streams of income in your business. For special pricing and special information on this visit: KateButlerCoaching.com/bestseller.

I love me some vacations and I’ve got a couple coming up here, so I wanted to talk about... how do you take vacations and still make sure that your business is going to be sustainable in the meantime while you are gone? How will your business operate and you not have to worry? How can you go away without being attached to your phone or email? It really comes down to having plans and operating procedures that dictate how your business is going to operate when a vacation is coming up and when it’s actually happening. Let's dive in!   Time Stamped Show Notes: 1:01 – I love to take vacations; people say that you should build a business that you don’t need to be away from or build a life that you don’t need a vacation from but I disagree with that because even if you have the most perfect life ever people still need a change of pace and scenery in their lives. I love taking vacations whether they are close by in Florida or overseas. 1:59 – I wanted to talk about how do you take vacations and still make sure that your business is going to be sustainable in the meantime while you are gone. It comes down to having plans and operating procedures that dictate how your business is going to operate when a vacation is coming up and when it’s happening. 2:35 – I have operating procedures and plans for everything in my business and it helps in my business. There are three core plans or operating procedures that come up when it comes to vacations and time off in your business. 3:12 – So the first plan or vacation SOP that you should have in your business to prepare you for vacations is a vacation money plan which is a plan for how you are going to still generate revenue even when you are on vacation.  Because for a lot of business owners their marketing is very manual and that means that when they are going on vacation if they are not doing the work they are not making money and you don’t want that to happen you want your business to be still making money while you are gone. 3:54 – A vacation money plan could come down to a couple of things, this could come down to you down to you doing a pre-vacation launch so if your vacation is going to come up at the end of December so you can do a launch in November that will support you even in December. The other option is to design your business around recurring income where when signs up for a program with you there is a certain number of monthly commitments that they must pay so even if you are gone they’ve already committed to keep paying each month.  The other option is automated income so even if you are away you still make sales because the process of making the sales is automated. So, for example you have Facebook ads running and they are going to a Webinar and people are buying from the Webinar you don’t have to do a sales call people just buy off the Webinar. 6:39 – The second plan is a client fulfilment plan for while you are on vacation because you want your clients to be sustained while you are on vacation, you don’t want to go on vacation and make your clients unhappy because you are not there and they are not supported and so you need to have a written list of things that you must do to prepare your clients for you being away. How are you going to continue fulfilling services while you are gone or just warn your clients in advance that you will not be fulfilling services while you are gone. 7:20 – You need to have a plan for how your clients are going to be happy while you are on vacation. I use a project management software called Zoho so I would go into Zoho and open up a checklist that’s prepopulated it’s like a task list that I populate anytime I go on vacation and the first thing would be to put an email in my holiday campaign so that it notifies my clients that I am going to be away at this time so  I have Infusionsoft, I have a holiday reminder campaign where it emails out all of my clients every time I am going to be away and another step would be to update the company calendar, so I have a calendar on my website for my clients where it lists out all of the days I am going to be gone for the entire year and another step would be to send out the updated company calendar to all of the clients. 8:31 – Another step would be to inform the team that I am going to be away. And are you going to be fulfilling services while you are gone and how are you going to be doing that is your team going to be doing it and how can you prepare your team for it while you are gone or you are not going to be fulfilling services and how can you ensure that your clients know that and they have everything taken care of while you are gone. 8:59 – The third type of plan that you want to have for vacation is a team operations plan so how is your business going to operate while you are gone like for example when inquiries come in, when submits something to a support ticket, when someone emails you asking to be  featured on  your podcast or when someone emails you and asks if you can be on their podcast or who is going to manage your Facebook groups while you are gone and so these are some of the things that you have to plan out in advance. So, what are the different key areas of your business probably administrative, team, legal, customer service, content etc. list out all the categories of your business and then define how those things need to be handled while you are away by your team. 11:06 – Recap.   Resources Mentioned:  

Today you're going to learn from my fellow marketing nerd Dan Henry who makes bank while wearing batman underwear. Dan is going to walk us step by step through his case study of how he generated 6 figures using webinars and Facebook advertising.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 1:59 – Introduction. 7:32 – Dan did a lot of entrepreneurial things before teaching online marketing. He owned nightclubs he had blogs that made five figures but the blogs were not about how to make money online and people kept asking him if he could teach them internet marketing and so created this course on how to run Facebook ads as an agency. Dan looked at some podcasts on blogs on how to start online courses and he felt they were useless because the underlying theme was on how to market yourself as an expert when you are not one which he felt was insane. 9:37 – Dan started a small coaching program where he taught Facebook ads and he only taught it to 7 people initially because he  wanted  to make sure that he could get results so he worked privately with  these people, he got them results, figured out what  they were struggling with and ensured that they got results and he used  these results to launch a second time  as a regular course and this time he made $15000 and he observed how people did with that and even these people got results so he tweaked  his curriculum and redid a few lessons and figured it out and then he came up with the final version and he gave away a cheat  sheet  seven proven steps to creating, running and profiting from Facebook ads and he built his list up which was not very big but there were only quality people on his list. 10:52 – Then Dan announced a webinar about how he made $10000 in his first month running Facebook ads for clients and how you can too even if you don’t have  any  results to  show first  and one of the things that Dan taught in his webinar was that you can approach businesses and do a trial run and you can impress them by getting them sales you’ve got the client and they will gladly agree because you are willing to do a trial run  for free and because he taught  his students to run Facebook ads they were getting a lot of clients and within thirty minutes of the webinar they were up to $28000 and it reached $45000 before the end of the night and he kept the cart open for several days and he did another  webinar 5 days later and almost doubled it and at the end of the month he sent out another email saying you have one more chance to before the price goes to $19.97 to $9.97 and again he made $14000 on the last day and in the month he made over $100000 launching that course. 14:44 – Dan built his community very quickly he gave away a cheat sheet it was right there on the front of his website danhenry.org and the cheat sheet says join my free strategy group on Facebook it’s called Superhero Entrepreneurs and everyone who downloaded this cheat sheet he encouraged them to go the group and at the same time he ran retargeting ads that said hey, don’t forget to join the group. 15:24 – Dan doesn’t send out a lot of emails he engages more with people in his group and it’s more personal. 16:38 – Dan promoted the webinar a week before he did it and he promoted it in the group, in the retargeting ads and he did some cold traffic as well which converted fine and his total ad spend was only $509 and made over $150000. 18:14 – In his webinar Dan showed people how to get Facebook ad clients on the webinar, he said do this thing and you’ll have people interested in you running Facebook ads and several people did exactly as he told while on the webinar and got people interested in signing up with them even before the webinar was over and so everybody felt it’s not hard to get clients I can get clients. Dan got results for people even before he asked them for money. 19:30 – In his group Dan has a student success Database every time you do something awesome you can submit to this database and it helps Dan keep things in track. Dan gives the example of a chiropractor who enrolled for his course and by spending 90 dollars got 12 new patients.  21:05 – The thing about Facebook ads is that they are not hard if you know what you are doing and they are not hard to learn. For doing SEO, Copywriting, Sales funnels you should be an expert and you should be with Facebook ads too but there are clients out there that are extremely easy to get results for like doctors, lawyers, restaurants, bars, car dealers, if you follow the way that Dan teaches you to do it. 23:38 – There are bad clients and Dan tries to teach his students  to avoid them because he has students  that take on launches, webinars, coaching clients and these people have done Facebook ads before but the people that are brand new they need to stick to the easy ROI clients because if you take on a business coach as a client you have to trust that they are good at what they do and if they are not you are going to look bad no matter what however if you get a new patient for a chiropractor you don’t have to convince them to go to one.  25:58 – After the webinar ended Dan kept the cart open and said that for the people that are in a different time zone he would do a webinar at a different  time on a particular day and everybody signed up for that, he ran some more traffic  to that and he did the webinar on that day he  got to the end  of the webinar and only one or two people bought but after an hour after the webinar ended there were a lot of sales so Dan sent an email saying that the cart is going to close  on Friday and everybody bought at the last minute then he kept the cart closed for a week and a half and then he sent an email saying I am opening  the cart up for the next six hours so if you missed out you can get in for six hours because of that 14 people signed up.   Resources Mentioned: DanHenry.org contains a cheat sheet called seven proven steps to creating, running and profiting from Facebook ads. There is also a cheat sheet funnel, there are also training videos, and funny videos once you are on Dan’s list. 

Today I want to talk to you is not just what a Mastermind really is, but what it really SHOULD BE! This includes lessons from joining $11-$30K/yr Masterminds, what has worked, what hasn't worked.. The Good, The Bad, The Ugly! After you listen to this episode, you'll know what to look for in a mastermind that you join OR how to run one successfully yourself.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 1:05 – Masterminds are such a big buzzword right now and everyone wants to call their Facebook group, their virtual group program, their live programs masterminds. It used to be a lot different but it’s a buzzword and so people drop that Mastermind name down a lot so I want to talk to you about today is not just what a Mastermind really is but what it really should be because I have participated in many masterminds I have invested a lot in my coaching I have paid a lot of coaches from $6000 to $30000 and there are some things  that I have seen that are not so good and other things that I really liked so I want to talk about what I hate about masterminds and what I recommend they look like so if you are trying to create your own mastermind you know how to craft it in  the best way for yourself and for your clients and if you are planning on joining a mastermind you know what to look out for. 2:36 – I have  joined a few different masterminds, the very first coaching program that I ever joined was a live mastermind which was a yearlong program with a mixture of one on one but it was mostly group where we met for live two or three day retreats once every quarter and there was a Facebook group in between and a few coaching calls and that program was quite good for me as a  new business owner and there were a few things  in it that I wasn’t too crazy about like the hot seats at the live events because I only had thirty minutes to focus on my own business because I got one 30 minute hot seat and then the entire rest of the time it was listening to other people’s businesses because it was hot seats the entire time. 3:34 – Another master mind that I joined was $30000 dollars a year and it was terrible, you got to go to three retreats for the entire year and during the retreats it was completely networking and there was no coaching, it was super hard to schedule calls with them and it was so bad that they literally asked their members what they could do to make the mastermind better and that was a total money suck. 3:58 – So based on those experiences with masterminds here’s my take, I will first talk about what I hate about masterminds and then I’ll talk about how I recommend shifting it to make your mastermind awesome. 4:14 – The first thing that I noticed about masterminds is they are often just designed to make money for the host and so there is not that much thought that goes into how the mastermind is going to actually move the mastermind members forward because the mastermind is mainly just a way for the host to make money they take on a lot of people into the mastermind and there are some masterminds where there is no cap on the number of people enrolled in the mastermind and that impacts how much access you get and what level of accessibility you get to the coach of the mastermind. 5:11 – The other thing that I’ve noticed is that there is a mix of different types of clients in it because again it is mainly for sales and money for the host and the problem is that if you are an established business owner and you are with other people who are new business owners you are not going to get what you need out of the mastermind and you will have to keep answering questions that are for newer business owners or the if you are a new business owner and the others are established business owners they will be so many steps ahead of you that you will find it hard to catch up and get what you need out of the mastermind.  So, since there is a mixture of different types of clients it is difficult for you to get the focus that you need. 6:56 – The other thing that I’ve noticed is that it’s often a lot of networking where you go and you talk to people, you meet people it’s about the other people in the room and people say a mastermind is supposed to be where you meet really big minds and learn from each other and teach each other, so the value is not from the coaching it’s from what you learn from the people in the room. So if the value is not coming from the host but from the people in the room then why am I paying the host and not the other people in the room. 7:38 – There’s only so far that networking can get you unless you are selling to the other people in the room but if I am paying the host of the mastermind $30000 a year I should be getting some coaching and some strategy from that host rather than just networking. Most masterminds are networking there is no coaching and there is no real intentional strategy or curriculum around how they are taking you from point A to point B. 9:00 – Here’s what I prefer masterminds look like, first and foremost I recommend that the mastermind should be designed to create results for the client so when you are designing your mastermind ask yourselves what needs to be included so that your clients can go from point A to point B. A mastermind should have a coaching with an intentional strategy to get your clients results it’s not just about access and phone calls it’s about creating a specific desired outcome and those outcomes should be geared towards a specific type of client. 11:01 – I actually have a mastermind it’s called marketing nerds mastermind which is a yearlong mastermind and when you join that mastermind I put you into one of two categories you are either in operation cash flow or operation automation so you are either in the new business owners tier or the established business owners tier and that way each person who comes in goes into the category of entrepreneurs that are going to be working on the same things as them if they are a new business owner they are working with other new business owners in the mastermind, if they are an established business owner they are working with other established business owners and each level has a specific desired outcome. 12:11 – Operation cash flow is about getting cash flow for your business if you are new in business that’s the main thing that as a business owner you are working towards like getting a list, getting reliable income every month so that you know your business is going to be surviving long term and that’s what new business owners are worried about. 12:39 – If you are an established business owner the desired outcome there is setting your business up to make automated, sustainable, scalable so if you come into operation automation you probably already have a list, you probably already have cash flow in place but you are working too  hard to make it happen and there is too much manual effort going on, you are trying to scale up to bigger income levels without working yourself to the ground and that’s where leveraged offers, automated marketing, automated fulfillment, delegating, systems come into play and so those are the types of things that you are going to be working on in there to create that desired outcome. 13:23 – So you have these two levels and each one has a curriculum that creates that desired outcome.  The first thing that you work on in both the levels is cash injection campaign that’s designed to tap into the resources and opportunities that you already have available to you in your business to make you back your money right away. I had someone join my mastermind a couple of weeks ago and within three days made all her money back and another person who joined made all her money back within three days because the idea with cash injection campaigns is to inject cash into your business as quickly as possible with as little effort as possible. 14:21 – If you are a new business owner in operation cash flow one of the best ways to create consistent cash flow is to have a mailing list that you can consistently tap into to create that cash  flow so that you have a list to fall back on when you are doing launces or sales so that you can get that consistent cash flow so you build your list first and then I teach you how to monetize it so you build a list and then you do a launch or sale to monetize the actual list. 14:57 – If you are in operation automation one of the very first things that we are going to be doing is evaluating where your business is at right now and where  the holes are in terms of sustainability so I am finding that a lot of established business owners don’t have very leveraged offers, they don’t have systems, their packages aren’t setting themselves up to scale that they don’t have systems or offers aren’t leveraged so we are going to be looking at where those holes are and then where we can install automation into your business. 15:53 – The mastermind is a yearlong and broken down into quarters and there are quarterly plans that are taught at each of the live retreats and when people come to the retreat they are being taught a curriculum, they are being trained and each training has a specific desired outcome for the quarter to get you towards that first desired outcome for whatever tier you are in for the business. So, each retreat has a specific desired outcome that you are going to be learning and implementing live together in that retreat. 17:43 – In the retreat you learn the curriculum and you implement it live and there is also time for things like hot seats and networking. 18:41 – So we’ve got marketing nerds mastermind,  a yearlong mastermind broken into two different tiers that way you have a specific type of client working towards a specific type of goal and everything is working on the same thing you don’t have a mixture of different type of clients and each group has a specific outcome that they are working on and the retreats are intentionally crafted to get people to create those desired outcomes, they are actually taught a curriculum live, they implement it live in the retreat and you also have opportunities for networking and fun on the third day of the retreat. 19:35 – To  boost the results of my clients in this mastermind what I have done is before people come to the live retreats there are  two virtual retreats that happen beforehand and the idea here is  to get people into action as possible and I don’t want anything holding them back and I’ve noticed that there are all these things that hold them back from taking action in their business and it often has to do with clarity, they don’t have clarity around  their niche, their positioning, their overall business model they don’t even know what the vision of their business model is, things like packaging and pricing and these are basic things that you have to know about your business and a  lot of times people figure these things out over time but because they are figuring it out over time each little step that they take they are hesitant or it takes them a little bit longer because they don’t have clarity upfront. So the first virtual retreat is purely about clarity and the things that you can get out of the way right up front and never have to worry about. 21:02 – The second virtual is about cash injection and the other thing they learn in that second retreat is the overview of the intentional strategy they are learning for the entire year. So this is one thing that I highly recommend for coaches that if you have a  system that you are walking your clients through ,if you have an intentional strategy that you are walking your clients through that’s awesome it’s even better if your client understands it, if they know what they are working towards because then you are on the same page they know what the goals are, what the desired outcomes are and you are setting up expectations for them and this will catapult them into taking clear action. So I like to give people an overview of my strategy that way when I actually dive into the specifics of my strategy they know why I am doing it. 22:44 – After the virtual retreats you start going into live retreats and going through the curriculum and the quarterly plans and in between the retreats I also like to give people support because there is only so much the people can implement live in the retreat and you don’t want to leave people hanging. I’ve seen a lot of masterminds where you get them in a Facebook group but the coach  does not respond very promptly to the queries and I am a big proponent of no matter how much someone pays me you are going to get me being accessible and responsive and genuinely caring about you as a client  and to honor that and to support my clients in between those retreats I give them access to a Facebook group but I also give them access to me on the phone using an App called voxer because it is hard to explain everything via Facebook groups and this elevates  the experience for the client when they can hear you 25:13 – The very last component that I have in my mastermind that I recommend as well for your masterminds or for masterminds that you are looking at would be what I call a nerd  herd which is essentially a group of experts who I have brought together who are experts in areas which I am not an expert in for example in terms of coaching people on their mindset that’s not my brilliance and so I have a millionaire mindset coach who is in the mastermind who has a net worth of over a million dollars and is absolutely phenomenal at identifying million dollar money blocks in my clients and healing them really quickly so I actually pay her money to do a millionaire mindset breakthrough session with every single member of the mastermind and I foot the bill for that because I know how important it is and I have many such experts in various fields who are all in the mastermind who are amazing at the things that they do and have worked with millionaires or are millionaires themselves and can support you in those areas that maybe I don’t excel at and so I think that is really important for masterminds if you are not phenomenal at something then find someone who is and collaborate with them.   Resources Mentioned: If you are interested in joining the marketing nerds mastermind email me at amanda@marketlikeanerd.com and I will personally respond to your email and we can set up a time to talk about the mastermind to see if it’s a fit for you.   

This ones for my VAs and done-for-you service providers in the house! Here are 5 HACKS that catapulted my done for you business to $150K in 4 months at the age of 23!   Time Stamped Show Notes 00:52 – Introduction. 1:40 – Within four months of starting my first Virtual Assistant business, I had actually already generated my first $10,000 dollar a month at the age of 22. I became well known as a go to Virtual Assistant for coaches. I was approached by a very high profile coach in the Glazer Kennedy Insider Circle family and she and I ended up joining forces to create a second powerhouse Virtual Assistant business that was jointly owned by the both of us and within four months we had booked over $150000 in our business and I was twenty-three at that time. 2:45 – I was fortunate enough to have been surrounded by such high profile coaches and very successful entrepreneurs and so to me six figures seemed very normal and I realized that for a lot of Virtual Assistants the idea of making six figures in four months is very, very crazy so I started coaching Virtual Assistants and what I noticed is that most virtual assistants don’t do the strategies that they see coaches doing because they think that’s only what coaches do and virtual assistants don’t do that. 3:46 – The strategies that I used in my Virtual Assistant business were seen as bold and weird by other Virtual Assistants but using those strategies I was able to get to 10K in 4 months at 22  and 150K in 4 months at 23 and I’ve had countless Virtual Assistant clients who have doubled their income, quadrupled their clientele, hit their 10K months and have been able to create sustainable, systematized, scalable VA businesses because of the things that they have learnt working with  me. 4:25 – Today I am going to walk you through 5 strategies that I leveraged to grow my VA business. They might seem weird to you but they are proven strategies that I highly recommend for any Virtual Assistant who is bold enough to do them. 4:45 – Growth Hack #1: The first one is to list build. Most Virtual Assistants don’t keep lists, I haven’t come across many of them who have mailing lists and most Virtual Assistants think this is only for coaches. If you want to scale your Virtual Assistant business and make more money than you ever thought possible then having a list you can leverage to put offers in front of is very, very important no matter the niche, no matter the industry. 5:24 – Me and my business partner hosted tele summits and giveaways of our own and also participated in other people’s tele summits and giveaways as well. We ran a tele summit with 24 high profile millionaires and marketing influencers and we built our list by 3000 plus names within two weeks. So we had a list of 3000 people who we were able to tap into and monetize for Virtual Assistant services. 8:01 – You should host tele summits and giveaways and participate in them so that you will be able to generate a targeted list of prospects who are interested in Virtual Assistant services who you can either promote your services to now or continue the relationship with them through newsletters and promote your services to them later when they are ready. 8:24 – Growth Hack #2: The second growth hack is we kicked off the launch of our business with sponsorships at live events where some expert runs a live event and you attend as a paid sponsor. You get a booth and you might get some speaking time on stage and you get to put some ads in the marketing collateral for the event. There were 100 people who attended the event and we got 50 people on our mailing list and these were targeted people who were interested in Virtual Assistant services. We got people to schedule with us live then and there or we would follow up after the event was over through business cards that we collected with a raffle at the event and then we would follow up with them via email or via phone after the event to schedule a discovery session with them. 10:40 – We had a raffle at the booth where people could come over to our booth and put their business card in a little cup and if they put their business card in they were entered into a raffle to win ten hours or Virtual Assistant services and that meant that if they put their business card in that cup they were obviously interested in Virtual Assistant services so they were targeted people who gave us permission to contact them. 12:19 –  Growth Hack #3: The third thing that we did was we ran our own live event and my business partner pitched a coaching package and bundled in Virtual Assistant work with the coaching package which is a very effective to sell. So her company was able to get buyers and our company was also able to get buyers. 13:56 – Growth Hack #4: The fourth growth hack that allowed me to book over 150K in four months is we leveraged Facebook Advertising and sales funnels for our business. For the tele summits, the giveaways and the live event we were using Facebook ads but then we also had some other funnels that we would dedicate to sending Facebook ad traffic to for example, there were a couple of video sales letters or webinars that we created that would lead into phone calls and we would send people from Facebook ads into those video sales letters or those phone calls. There was a landing page that we created for discovery calls so we had one discovery call page just for virtual assistant services and then we had another discovery call page specifically for our website services and we would send Facebook ad traffic to it. 15:05 – A lot of Virtual Assistants will fear this because the cost per lead is a bit higher obviously, it is going to cost more to get someone to schedule a phone call than it is to get them to opt in for some type of free pdf but if someone really needs a website and they schedule a call to talk to you about a website, they are a very, very high potential prospect. 15:56 – Growth hack #5: Growth hack number 5 has to do with sales conversations and phone conversations. Most Virtual Assistants do one of two things they either do the phone call and then follow up via email to give a proposal or contract or they do the phone call and they are too afraid to ask for the sale so it ends up having to go to follow up via email.  I started trialing ways to get a yes on the phone, money on the phone and then following up for the contract later on and the first thing that I did was I stopped doing proposals I don’t do proposals in my Virtual Assistant business, I do contracts and I get the money first, I do the contract second so that was  the first change that I made to my sales. Later I started trialing what we called the save your damn  seat deposit because our business was called the best damn biz team and so we would get these prospects on the phone, walk them through our packages and then get them to say yes on the phone and pay $197 to save their seat and we reasoned with them that our business gets full very quickly and we have only a certain number  or slots that we allow for clients and then we have to hire new team members to support more clients and if you want to be in on our next client start date, you need to save your spot right now. 18:59 – Recap.   Resources Mentioned: The free Facebook group – Market Like A Nerd (Official Group).  Join this group at http://marketlikeanerd.com/invite. Amanda is in this group daily and you can post any questions and Amanda will personally respond to them.

HONESTY TIME: I used to charge $297 per month to my private coaching clients! Crazy, I know! Now I charge $20,000 for a year of coaching with me.. I’ve come such a long way when it comes to charging my worth, doing it confidently, still successfully selling, AND still getting my clients a return on their investments! So, if you are looking to raise your prices too, but are experiencing anxiety or fears around it... In this episode, I want to share with you 3 things that you can do to get over that anxiety about charging high ticket for your offers!     Time Stamped Show Notes: 0:55 – I kid you not, I used to charge $297 per month to my private clients and now, it’s $10,000 for a VIP day with me or $20,000 for a year long mastermind. I’ve come a long way when it comes to charging my worth, doing it confidently, and still successfully selling and getting client results despite the raised prices. 1:33 – So if you’re looking to raise your prices too, but are a little anxious about it here are 3 things you can do. 1:47 – Get Permission: Now it’s great when you can give yourself permission to charge more, that’s ideal, but the truth is for some entrepreneurs they’re just scared to do that and need someone else to believe in them and give them permission. That’s how it was for me at first. When I originally wanted to raise my prices, I hired a mentor who believed in high ticket offers and he gave me the permission I needed that I couldn’t give to myself just yet. So if you’re afraid of charging higher prices, I’d encourage you go find a coach who’s not. 2:43 – Get Validated: When you want to raise your fees, all you have to do is validate them. Beyond saying you are worth that amount, prove it. Now there’s a lot of ways to do this but my personal favorites are social proof, authority branding and content, personal success stories that show you’ve made it, and testimonials and case studies. 3:28 – Get Results: The best way to validate your fees, and make you and your clients comfortable with how much you’re charging is to simply get results for your clients. So when I wanted to raise my fees, I became FIERCE about getting really specific measurable results for my clients. I got strategic about my approach, honed my coaching skilled, got clear on who specifically I can help, and suddenly I had clients. 6:30 – Recap.   Resources Mentioned:  www.marketlikeanerd.com/masterclass register for free for the market like a nerd millionaire masterclass series where 37 geeky millionaires and marketing influencers are sharing their secrets for scaling past the glorified 6 figures and daring to dream bigger.  

This week Networking Expert Tor Refsland, who is also one of our experts on the Millionaire Masterclass Series (http://marketlikeanerd.com/masterclass) is joining us to share: How You Can Become An Authority & Charge Premium Prices, Even Though You Just Started Out Today.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 2:19 – Introduction. 7:30 – Tor says that it is extremely important that people should know that you are the real deal but for this to work you need to be good at what you do because if you are not it’s going to be bad for your brand, bad for the people that you serve and everyone who is affiliated with you and run your company into the ground. 8:22 – Tor gives the example of Tony Robbins’s website because he is world class and he is huge at what he does and if you go to his website he will most likely have two things the first thing is the icons of where he has been featured at and that gives instant credibility and he will also have testimonials from other influencers and those two things are instant social proof and if people don’t know who Tony Robbins is but they know any of the big newspapers or magazines that he has been featured on or they know the name of the influencer that has given him a testimonial then they will think if they influencer says he is cool then he is probably the real deal.  9:29 – So if you remove Tony Robbins from the equation and put yourself in there it will kind of be the same first impression that it gets if you have the same things so these are some of the mental triggers that will instantly increase your credibility and boost your authority. 12:12 – Tor picked one social media platform where he would get the biggest traction and it was Twitter and so gained 1000 followers in 18 days and 2000 followers in 38 days and it was a targeted audience and all done organically and he shared the amount of Twitter followers on his website and that gave his instant credibility. 13:29 – The next  step would be to position your authority by using something Tor calls crash test dummy technique which is basically doing crazy experiments yourself and just reporting it so when Tor was repositioning his brand after building an email list of 3000 people organically and being featured on over 100 blogs and winning a few awards but the influencers and the people that knew him perceived him as a success online but they felt he was a fraud so he decided to reposition himself in three days and it turned out to be how to network with influencers online and he needed to test it so he  got  testimonials from a lot of influencers but he also needed to show them that I can teach you this skill but you can use this skill to make more money in your business so he made himself into a human guinea pig and he was reaching out to people he did not know online and trying to get new clients and he got people paying him from $500 to $1500  a month and he got his coaching business from $0 to $3000 per month in less than three months by just working few hours here and there so you need to be the kind of spearhead and you need to experiment and be willing to fail and be ready to push the limits and do stuff that other people don’t want to do. 17:06 – The thing about turning yourself into a human guinea pig and getting results is something that people love because it’s the real deal if you can crack the code on how to get one client you can duplicate that process and get one hundred clients and that’s the beauty of cracking the code and optimizing and then you can just scale it. 18:36 – The third step is that you actually need to build genuine relationships with influencers if you want to multiply your profits but you also need to understand why it’s important because when you build a genuine relationship you are able to provide value and create a win-win situation and kind of build a friendship down the road and it will help you to get testimonials, to be able to promote your product to their email list and it can also lead into joint ventures like co creating a product or starting a business together and the opportunities are endless if you think big scale. 19:55 – Tor says that whatever problem you have in your business, networking with the right influencers can solve it. 22:03 – To create genuine relationships with influencers the first step is finding a way  to connect with them in a very genuine way so you want to stand out from the rest and you want to deliver value and Tor has an awesome gift for the audience it’s a course on how to network with influencers online and it’s free for the audience it’s called how to blog outreach like a boss and you can find it at http://timemanagementchef.com/amanda and this will teach people on how to make the first connection and it will then teach you to scale the relationship by not thinking of  the influencer as an influencer and try to be just relaxed and be yourself and find a way to provide value without being star struck.    Resources Mentioned: Tor is giving away a few free strategy courses and he normally charges $500 per session and he is giving them away for free and it will  be basically  be all about creating a strategy in helping people position themselves as the go to person in the industry and attract premium clients and if that’s something you want to do you can send an email at tor@timemanagementchef.com and in the subject write "Amanda sent me." How to blog outreach like a boss is a gift for the audience of this podcast and it teaches you how to network with influencers online you can find it at http://timemanagementchef.com/amanda.

Are you growing your business or SCALING it? Those are two very different things, and yet most business owners and coaches don't seem to know the difference. In this episode, I'm going to clarify EXACTLY what they are and which one you should focus on right now. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:52 – Are you trying to grow your business, or scale it? They’re two very different things. Let me clear it up in this episode. 1:03 – I see so many business and marketing coaches talking about growth but very few talking about scaling. And honestly I think this is why so many business owners get burnt out, capped at an income ceiling, hustling 24/7. 1:27 – If you really want to make big income with less effort, you need to focus on both: Growth and Scaling. 1:38 – First, let’s talk about: growth! Growth is about increasing specific end goals and numbers. For example, growing your revenue, growing the size of your company and team, and growing your LIST…Growth is about the outcomes. 2:06 - Now, let’s look at: scaling! Scaling is about increasing your growth numbers while decreasing output… In other words, it’s about how can you still grow those numbers, but do it while decreasing the time you and your team members are investing to make it happen. To do that, you need to take a close look at how you’re producing those outcomes. What your expenses look like, what your systems look like. Scaling about the process. 2:59 – In business, while you want to focus on how to create those Outcomes and hit those numbers, you also want to think about the Process it takes to get there and how you can make it as efficient and enjoyable as possible. Focus on both Growth and Scaling and you’ll have yourself a Profitable and happy business. 3:24 – Hey let me introduce you to 37 millionaires who have grown and scaled their businesses and are ready to teach you to do the same... Resources mentioned: www.marketlikeanerd.com/masterclass visit this link to join these free masterclasses hosted by me where 37 millionaires and marketing influencers will share their secrets for scaling past the glorified six figures and daring to dream bigger.

Branding Expert Minling Chuang, who also happens to the the "Challenge Expert" in the Market Like A Nerd Millionaire Masterclass Series (http://marketlikeanerd.com/masterclass), is joining us today to share with us her 3 best tips for Branding Like A Boss, so that you have a brand that is memorable, known by name, and establishes you as an authority! Time Stamped Show Notes 2:15 – Introduction. 7:20 – Tip # 1: Everybody thinks that brandings are the logos, the colors and the website so Minling’s first point is that branding is so much more than that, branding is the entire experience that you create because a brand doesn’t live with you, a brand lives in other people’s heads and it’s their perception of you.  So you want to create a really strong perception so when they see you they’ll think of the words that you want to be associated with. 10:52 – Tip # 2: The one thing that you need to get right to build your business and your brand is your message. A lot of people get their message wrong because they are not specific enough, they don’t solve a particular problem and if your message doesn’t connect, even if you have the most beautiful website and the most beautiful graphics no one is going to buy because no one is going to care and so you want to think about it from your customer or client’s perspective and think about it from their shoes. You’ve got to look at what makes you uniquely different, what are your strengths, what are you good at, what can you share that’s not being shared that’s out there already and leverage that. 13:36 – Minling says that you have to have a stand because it’s not just having a message, it’s having a stand for something, it’s having a strong belief in something. This is your point of view and the people that love your point of view will come to you and you are not supposed to serve what they want you are always supposed to find people that want what you have or what you are teaching. 15:58 – Tip # 3: The third tip is about your brand experience because it’s one thing to have a message but you have to be consistent throughout and what a lot of people do is they have a message but they are not consistent. You want to make sure that whatever you are saying for your brand, you are always associating or doing things that reach those words that you want to be associated with. So you’ve got to think about all your touch points how you talk to people, how you interact, how you write your copy, how you do your photos as well and once you have the strategy and message in place then you have to think about the greater experience and a lot of people can also create a theme and that brings in consistency. 18:48 – You have to hit people with the same message over and over again because people are not necessarily going to get it the first time because when they hear it. 19:10 – Think of your consumer’s mind as real estate you are trying to stake a claim in their brain. It’s a blank canvas and people are trying to get room and if your message is not clear they will be very confused because they don’t know where to compartmentalize you in your brain and so you’ve got to think about how you are showing up and what your experience is so that you can stake a stronger claim in people’s brains.   Resources mentioned: Resources mentioned: www.brandfameschool.com to find out more about Minling. Free gift ‘It brand guide to unbland your brand’ at brandfameschool.com/it-guide.  

As your business grows its visibility, authority, and income...you will experience more Haters than ever before. At first it may come as a shock and it won't feel good, but in this episode I'm going to share with you my 3 tips for how to Handle the haters, so that you can at least shorten the shock period and know what to do when it happens.   Time Stamped Show Notes 00:08 – As I’ve been scaling up my income, visibility, and authority… I’m continuing to experience more haters than ever before. Seriously, one second, everything was peaceful and then the next second, after I started doing FB ads, and interviews, and getting PR...all of a sudden there were people saying mean stuff on my posts, sending me hate mail, being jerks. 1:03 – At first when it happened, because I’m a good, sensitive person, yeah it bothered me. And it’ll probably shock you at first too, but hopefully these 3 tips will shorten up the shock period and prepare you for exactly what to do. 1:26 – Tip # 1: So first: Anticipate It. Look, people say “You know you’ve made it when you have your first hater” and it’s true. So just know it will happen, that way when it does, it doesn’t sting so bad. 2:00 – Tip # 2: Embrace It. When you start getting haters, know it means you are on your way to greatness. You are being more visible. You are being envied. You are triggering people because people are seeing in you the things they wish they had for themselves. So when you get haters, get excited because you’ve made it. 2:35 – Tip # 3: Address It. Now you could just delete their emails and posts, pretend it didn’t happen, hope other people didn’t see them or you could do something very unexpected and actually respond to your haters with kindness. My favorite thing to do is to craft professionally, peacefully worded responses to these people. Partially because I think it makes me look good. Partially because I’m passive aggressive and I think it’ll make them feel like crap to see that they were so mean to a nice person. But also partially because it’s an opportunity to make an impact, because those haters are probably the ones who need the love the most. It’s your chance to show them kindness. 4:53 – Recap.   Resources mentioned: Market like a nerd mega masterclass series where  37 geeky millionaires and marketing influencers are sharing their secrets for scaling past the glorified six figures and daring to dream bigger. Register for free at: www.marketlikeanerd.com/masterclass.

True wealth is about unlimited wealth, the feeling of freedom, and the feeling of joy that comes from money. There are many business owners who talk about making money online, but when you look closer, they do not have "TRUE WEALTH". Sarah is an expert at identifying your money blocks keeping you from millions at more, so that you can do MORE than just earn money...you can truly create unlimited wealth.   Time Stamped Show Notes 1:45 – Introduction. 5:33 – Sarah works with people who have already established a business, who have income coming in and who are paying more than their bills. According to Sarah true wealth really means a number of things unlimited income that there’s no psychological or physical block to asking for unlimited amount of income it also means creating a feeling of complete financial freedom where you are not worrying about your future. 6:49 – True wealth is really about unlimited wealth, the feeling of freedom, the feeling of joy that comes from the money is a deeper feeling because we are creating this money to feel happy. There are many people who are making a lot of money online and Sarah has talked to them and they don’t have a large college fund for their kids and they don’t have a large retirement and they should be working on that. 8:06 – Sarah says that you shouldn’t set an upper limit for your income and some people may perceive this as being greedy but she says that most people who are making a lot of money are very generous people so it’s a great thing for the universe too. 9:09 – The first block that Sarah finds in most of her clients that prevents them from making millions is a feeling of guilt and a feeling of not deserving and Sarah says that self-worth and net worth are related and a lot of people look like they’ve got a lot of self-worth they have the right car, the right outfits and they travel a lot and usually it’s about an inverse proportion the more humble people sometimes have the highest feelings of self-worth from within. We all must work on and be very honest about our feelings of deserving and sometimes that’s buried and people are not aware of it they feel deserving externally and they buy a lot of stuff but emotionally they don’t feel deserving. If we have an awareness of it then that’s something that you can build and your net worth will immediately increase.  11:00 – Sarah’s father was an alcoholic and her mother was codependent and there was a lot of low self-esteem and low self-worth and under earning in her family but she worked on that and everything shifted when she was around thirty and she worked on her emotional life and her spiritual life and so her income skyrocketed. All of this is related but she wasn’t consciously working on it but she started feeling better about herself and she started her own business and all this was directly correlated to her feelings of self-worth and self-esteem.  12:03 – One might feel that it is not cool or spiritual and you are over charging but when you dig deeper it is about the self-worth and the self-love. 12:17 – The second block is resentment of other people having money and it’s not necessarily always conscious so you can be making three or four hundred thousand dollars a year as an entrepreneur and be angry and resentful of these million dollar coaches and instead of thinking I can do it you are resentful of it. 15:52 – The third block is the fear of managing the money because if you have a lot of money it’s a big responsibility and people get worried about that because you have to learn about things like the stock market and real estate. You have to acclimate nobody summits Everest without going to base camp and staying there. So you have to be practical and really honest about that fear of handling it.   Resources mentioned: http://www.moneymagnets.net/quiz where you can find the quiz are you millionaire material Facebook group: Money Magnets Group

Business owners often work too hard on selling people their service. Reina's social glue method is about actually connecting with people and not forcing yourself down their throats, so that the sale just happens naturally and feels good for everyone. This takes away the dread of marketing and allows you to simply delight in being of service to people.   Time Stamped Show Notes 1:38 – Introduction. 5:23 – Reina feels that people work too hard on selling people their service but her social glue method is a long term marketing strategy which is about connecting with people and becoming a resource for people and not forcing yourself down somebody’s throat also it is taking the dread of marketing that she used to feel and turning it into a way of delighting people and being of service to them.   6:36 – Social glue method is a long term marketing method for people who are shy and can’t get a grasp on how to get people to see what they are working on and one of the ways to do that is to shift your mindset about what marketing might look like and it’s about how to connect one on one with people, work smarter not harder and go into depth with people. Reina says that you must connect face to face with people via Skype or a phone call and get to know people as humans. 7:19 – The result of going into a mindset of collaborative networking is that if you connect with one person they are going to connect you with somebody else. 8:59 – The people connections are the baseline of what we should be doing and this isn’t the only thing Reina does in her business for marketing but it’s the home that Reina found for herself because we do feel lonely in our own little offices and the outcomes of social groups isn’t necessarily to find more clients, it might be to find your tribe or to find other people who will buy services later down the road. 9:47 – According to Reina the mindset while going into these connections shouldn’t be to think how can I get a sale out of this person and when you become heart centered and people centered and keep your selfish needs aside you will have returns on your investment. 11:32 – Reina encourages people to get on the phone with people and says that once you get over the fear of doing phone calls it actually gets easier but if that doesn’t work for you or you never do it then find the modality that works for you. 12:07 – Reina says that people often ask her how to ask a person who is not even a friend on a coffee date and she advises them that they should think this person is just a person and I really just want to reach out to them and get to know them as a human being and how can I do that. 12:36 – When she first introduced herself to leaders in her industry she was very apprehensive because she thought they are probably too busy and they don’t want to connect with me but she emailed them and they chatted over Skype and they were amazing humans and so Reina advises that you should stop thinking of yourself as inferior than them. 13:16 – You should have some kind of an idea of where this conversation could go and you should be prepared with some questions to ask people. 14:10 – Reina finds that women are really bad at asking for support and so she always makes sure that they answer her when she asks for support because it is very important for women to learn how to articulate how others can support them. 15:42 – Reina says that you should just pour into other people before you ask for anything and the abundance mindset comes from being able to give other people your energy, your time and your craft and it’s not because she wants you to burnout but because when you pour into other people you actually get great energy back. 17:31 – A lot of how Reina built her list is through collaboration and it can be a really great list growth opportunity and Reina’s list building is not all automated and the part of it that is more heart centered that people forget about sometimes to talk about is collaboration and one of the ways she has done this is to do JB webinars with people who have a list and she has the content so she is able to share her stuff with their list and that way she is drawing a new crowd to them and they are drawing a new crowd to her and none of the JB webinars that Reina has done for list growth has been for selling anything. 20:35 – A couple of the things that Reina launched recently she hasn’t actually launched because she has had conversations with people and they are like oh I am buying that and then all the seats are gone. So she doesn’t have to spend the time or the money or the energy putting up a sales pitch because people are already buying it from her without her actually going out and promoting it with a big launch. 21:24 – Reina tells us to make sure that your mindset is on the long game and you are pouring into people.   22:24 – There are so many best practices in the online marketing world and so much of what Reina has learnt as an entrepreneur is that there is no actual right way of doing things and we just have to make it up as we go and figure out what works for us.   Resources mentioned: - www.Reinaandco.com/socialglue where you can find the free resource to download the social glue template and learn how to do a virtual coffee date. 

I always say that if you want a sustainable and scalable business, you must do 3 things: Leverage, Automate, and Delegate. Well, today, we're focusing on Leverage & Delegation. Educating us on the topic we have here: Business Strategist Christine Gallagher! She's going to share with us her 3 top tips for building a team for ultimate leverage in your business. Listen in!   Time Stamped Show Notes 01:53 – Introduction. 6:12 – Some of the biggest mistakes that Christine made earlier and that others do now are being anxious and try to control everything in your business. Because she has a tech background she would rather do things herself thinking that she could do them faster and better. So one must give up that control and trust others. It’s true that the other person is not going to do it exactly like you but they are going to do it good enough that your business is going to be able to grow. 7:12 – Christine waited way too long to hire her first team member and when Christine hired her first VA, her income more than doubled in that year and she tells people all the time not to wait too long to add team members. 9:14 – Tip # 1: The big thing you need to think about are the red flags and there are many things that you can delegate in your business. People wonder what is the right time to delegate things in your business and when you notice that clients are not being cared for the way they should or things are not happening on time or things that need to be done on a particular time keep getting to the bottom of your to do list and you feel you just can’t get to it but you know that if you got to it you would move your business forward. 9:59 – There are also some things which you don’t know how to do but you are trying to do them. So Christine says that is not a very good idea as you are going to get frustrated and lose money so avoid doing things which you don’t know how to do. 10:24 – Also avoid doing stuff that you are not good if you find yourself in that situation you know it’s time to find some help and if you are doing things that are not directly related to bringing in revenue and you are getting bogged down by them you need to get help. 13:19 – Tip # 2: It is a big obstacle to figure out if it makes financial sense for you to bring on team members and so Christine says there is a formula for that you need to look at what your time is worth per hour to do your genius work and then think about all other the things you do in a day that are not your genius work and make a list of them and give a dollar value to the other things that you are doing and decide if you can outsource that other work to someone else for a much lesser amount. 16:05 – You need to put the time upfront to do the interviews and the research before hiring because if you don’t you are going to end up paying more in the long run. 19:06 – Tip # 3: There are tools out there that you can use on yourself and with your team to get crystal clear on who should be doing what. So the two tools that she uses and recommends to her clients as well are the Strengths Finder’s assessment they have a book that you can buy and they also have a test online which costs $20 and using this assessment you can find out what your strengths are and shows where you can put your genius work in place. You can use it to weed out people when you are interviewing them and although it is an expense that you pay for a person to take it but you are going to end up paying in the long run if don’t get clear. The other tool is the Kolbe A index which tells you how you are wired and helps you work with other team members. 22:13 – The Kolbe A index also helps you find out what your instinctive method of problem solving is for example in Kolbe there is a part of it that tells you whether you are a fact finder or a quick start and Christine is a fact finder and that isn’t always good when you are an entrepreneur and that tells her that she needs to have some quick starts around her who are going to take her away from that constant analysis and put it into motion. 23:23 – Christine always her second tier mastermind clients take the test because you can then see why they do something and why they don’t. 24:17 – The biggest way Christine uses to find employees is personal referrals and that is a really good place to start and there are a lot of online places you can use to hire people like Craigslist but a lot of people end up being really disappointed with who they employ or the number of people that are out there and they hit a dead end and it keeps them stuck so she says it is always better to go back to the people you trust and the people you like and see where do they find people or who do they know that might be looking for a position. There are sites like Upwork.com, Fiverr.com, Guru.com and Freelancer.com where you can hire people but Christine always prefers to go to people she knows first. 26:03 – For hiring people Christine first narrows down people for a position and then she makes them take the Strength Finders and the Kolbe and sometimes that’s the thing that decides no or yes in her hiring process. You should also thoroughly check their references by personally talking to people.  She asks situational questions to potential employees like what would you do if this happened because that’s a good way to judge how a person is going to respond in a given situation or scenario. 27:31 – You can also ask your potential employees to do a trial period and tell them how many hours you want them to work and what you want them to accomplish in that period of time and then you can talk at the end of that that can be a big life saver as well.  29:20 – The thing about leverage is not negotiable if you want to grow and without it you cannot grow to the next level but when they don’t do it their income gets capped, they’re totally exhausted, their overwhelmed and they think I am never going to get past this income level which is frustrating if you have big goals in life. Resources mentioned: The balanced entrepreneur Facebook group. Shesgotclients.com is Christine’s website where you can find out all the information including the social media links to connect with her. Shesgotclients.com/Surefire is the link for Five surefire strategies to escape the dollars for hours’ trap and it’s a free pdf guide with an accompanying audio which helps you find out how to leverage your time, your expertise and your offers to bring in more money and experience more freedom.

I'm going to make you famous! I mean, it’s no secret that I am pretty big freaking deal *brushes shoulders off* (just kidding... or am I?)... So if you want to be a big freaking deal in your industry too, then you have to be seen as an authority or expert in your niche. No matter your industry... if you want to have name recognition, to make an impact, and experience seamless sales too, you have to be seen as an authority or an expert in what you do!   Time Stamped Show Notes 00:52 – Introduction. 1:04 – If you want to be famous then you have to be seen as an authority in your niche. If you want to have name recognition make an impact and experience seamless sales too you have to be seen as an authority or an expert in what you do. 1:30 – Some people think that authority means getting thousands of likes on Facebook or hearts on Periscope but the truth is that it’s actually much simpler and a lot faster than that too. 1:42 – You require just three things to be seen as an expert or an authority in your niche. The first one is expert content. Your content allows for you to showcase your knowledge and your expertise to your followers in a way that’s really easy for them to consume. A lot of the biggest names in the industry are people who create a ton of content at least that’s the case in the online business and marketing world. You should ensure that you are creating consistent valuable high quality content. I create these podcasts and vlogs as a way to give value to my community so that they see me as an authority in my niche. 3:14 – The second thing required is influencer marketing. Another way to get people to trust you is to stay in the same circles as other influencers who they already trust. So just figure out who the big names are in your industry, follow them, become active members of their communities and ultimately find a way to collaborate with them because when you collaborate with other high profile influencers who your market trusts they are going to see that you have aligned yourself with them as a peer and by being a peer to those other influencers by proximity that makes you an influencer too. This could include them interviewing you or you interviewing them or writing guest blogs for them.  Just ensure that you are consistently aligning yourself as a peer to those influencers because the closer you are to them, the more circles you are in with those influencers the more you seem like an influencer yourself 4:44 – The third way is authority branding. If you take a look at the other influencers in your niche you will notice that they have invested in themselves, in their website, in their visual branding and the quality of their content. 5:03 – When I first launched this podcast, people in my Facebook group told me that you make me feel like my podcast is crap because yours is so good and when I launched my web TV show people went crazy for it because I invested in the quality of the content. 6:10 – It’s not enough to actually be an expert and trust that people will take your word for it you have to look like one too. So visit my website marketlikeanerd.com and use that as an example of an authority website. 6:47 –  Recap.   Resources mentioned: Marketlikeanerd.com – Visit my website to use it as an example of an authority website with authority content. 

In this episode, I'm geekin' out with fellow sales funnel lover Stephanie Nikolich, who grew a million dollar business while living life as a single mama! She's going to share how to unlock your passive profit potential and set up sales funnels that really work so that you can bring in sales and clients each and every day WITHOUT having to work so hard! [WARNING: It's going to get a bit nerdy in here!]   Time Stamped Show Notes 1:36 – Introduction. 5:41 – The biggest mistake that comes to Stephanie’s mind is not testing and just assuming that one time if you put a page up or if your ads up or you put your upsell up or you launch a program, that if it doesn’t go well the first time, then it didn’t work but that’s not necessarily the case and she actually loves it when things don’t work out, a person came to her and she was very disappointed because she had spent a lot of money and yet her opt in page was only converting at 4%  so she told the lady not to quit because the page is converting at 4%, Stephanie suggested some changes in the opt-in page and asked her to test the changes and after that there was a very significant increase in the page conversions. 6:47 – A lot of funnels will not perform the way you want them to, minor changes like changing an image can very significantly boost your conversions sometimes. 7:20 – Stephanie strives to educate entrepreneurs about what changes they can make to get better results when things are not going right, once you understand how each piece of a sales funnel is laid out, how each piece connects, how they all go together and create something that’s magnificent and beautiful, you can go back when something’s not converting the way you want it to, make a couple of little changes, shifts and get pages that are converting really well. 8:13 – The reason why Stephanie’s pages convert as well as they do is because they were tested and they didn’t necessarily convert very well right out of the gate, she made many changes, she knows what to change in order to get better results.    8:38 – She had a new copywriting team and the opt-in page was converting at six percent and she got it up to 47% by just making a few changes over a three-day period because they were driving traffic to it. When it’s cold traffic it’s probably going to convert differently than warm traffic. So you need to take all these things into consideration but you must not just give up when something doesn’t work because when things don’t work that is actually an opportunity. 9:58 – Tip # 1 is delegate to dominate so stop trying to do everything by yourself. Stephanie doesn’t set up her Facebook ads she only does the high-level strategy for them and she is very actively involved she knows enough about each piece of her sales funnel so that she can convey to others what her vision is and what she wants them to do. 10:31 – Stephanie analyzes her ads and makes sure that they are moving in the right direction. When you stick in your school of genius, you will grow more than you ever imagined possible. It is even possible to double your income month over month and this happens because she is doing what needs to be done and she is outsourcing a lot of her work, hiring the right people, interviewing people and taking time and being patient and as a result of that her business is blossoming. 11:31 – One of the best things that Stephanie did in her business was that she stopped trying to do all the things and began to focus on the areas in which she was an expert and when she did that her business began to grow out of control and that’s what happens when you have the right people to support you in your vision. 12:18 – Stephanie masters one funnel at a time, she has about 21 active sales funnels in her business and they are migrating everything over to click funnels, she has more than 70 pages in her funnels and a lot of them are multiple step sales funnels. 12:48 – All the funnels lead to the end goal which is bigger high end program so the end goal is all the same but the entry points are different. 13:18 – Stephanie does many Tripwire funnels because they work well. She did a live stream and she had 4000 people live, she mentioned a product and they came into her funnel. She has small micro offers because they generate a lot of revenue as they build trust with your audience. Sometimes people will come to you but they are not ready to spend $10000 right out of the gate, but if they have those offers available to them wherever they are you are on their vision board, you are on their bucket list, you are on their Christmas list and you are the one for them and they can’t stop thinking about you. A funnel is active all the time and leads are coming in but there are leads going through at all the different stages and three months in she may get a call that drops down to book with her and that person is ready to buy her high level program because she came in three months ago and bought the $27 product and she has  been nurtured and she has seen so it builds a lot of trust by offering them a micro offer that meets them where they are and then brings them through the funnel to higher price point products. 15:20 – The first digital product that Stephanie came out with was for $27 called the lucrative list builder and she has sold over a thousand units of the product and the product hasn’t even been out for 11 months yet. It took her just 4 hours to create this product and for that she earned $2700 of direct revenue and that product has also led to over $200000 of additional revenue because when people buy that product they come back to her and one of her clients came back to her three days later and jumped from a $27 product to a $10000 program. 16:55 – Stephanie served around 25 clients last year and by the end of this year she will have served over 3000 entrepreneurs through paid products and services. 17:36 – Tip # 2: The key is to unlock your passive profit potential; passive profits were attractive to her when she started her business because she was pregnant and her business was growing but it was all one on one support and she was working 12 to 16 hours a day and she was stressed out in the beginning stages of her pregnancy and she was very concerned because she wanted to be a fully present mom and spend time with her child and she realized she couldn’t do that by working one on one with people. She wanted the freedom to build sand castles on the beach with her baby and so she decided passive income was the way forward and she couldn’t continue to serve people one on one. 19:19 – Stephanie’s first digital product was born out of her own personal experience, she did this marketing campaign where she built her list 0 to 4000 names in 4 weeks and she was gearing up for the launch and the launch went terrible but she did build her list by 4000 names and that’s a pretty cool thing that a lot of people would want to know how she achieved and it wasn’t all paid marketing and she created a product around it the lucrative list builder, which has sold more than a thousand units in less than 11 months. Stephanie is very passionate about passive income and creating sales funnels because it has given her the freedom to do whatever she wants. 20:50 – Stephanie is a big advocate for working smarter not harder. She did a case study and she showed people the difference between her best month last year and her best month this year she worked for 241 hours last year to get $78883 and this year her income was $153129 working just about 41 hours. 22:38 – Tip # 3: Facebook ads are your friends and many entrepreneurs are scared of running ads on Facebook and Stephanie spent a lot of money on ads earlier on in her journey and didn’t make a lot of money back but once you really tap into your formula and your audience and you know your brand and you know your messaging and you know who your prospects are and who your clients are and how to connect with them and how to engage with them, Facebook ads are your friends. Typically, she puts in a dollar in Facebook ads and she makes $10. Using Facebook ads Stephanie has been able to reach clients in more than fifteen different countries. 25:52 – Time is your friend, everyone is in such a rush and Stephanie was going to go in a launch and they pushed back the date of the launch because she knew that if they spread it out a little bit they would get much better results. She needed the time to be putting up the ads and start testing them because all this takes time so instead of being in such a rush you should give yourself a little bit of time because if you do, you could actually multiply your results. 27:04 – Stephanie was not a very big fan of launches but she revealed some programs in an academy and  they really need a launch and so she talked herself into that and they were able to enroll 403 entrepreneurs into the legendary entrepreneur which they are structuring more like an academy and it worked really, really well. There are benefits to launching and there are benefits to evergreen but obviously you can reach the same types of goals overtime if you have an evergreen funnel in place but sometimes you want to do a launch because whatever you are selling wants a launch and you can get amplified results in a short amount of time but also those amplified results come from amplified budgets so you’ve got to have more members in your team, more money invested upfront and if that is not something that  you have access to then the evergreen model just getting that going and testing and tweaking and making sure your opt ins are converting and your upsells are converting will still bring you money or you could do both. Resources mentioned: Facebook group called Female Entrepreneurs Collaborate. www.stephanienickolich.com/sales-funnel-profit-producer contains a free gift which is the secrets to unlocking your sales funnel potential, it is a profit producing checklist

People make marketing way too freaking complicated. Truly all it comes down to is two steps. That's it! If you want to make money in ANY business - online or off - there are only two steps. And I'm going to reveal exactly what those steps are in this episode! Time Stamped Show Notes 00:52 – Introduction. 00:57 – A couple of weeks ago, I decided "Hey! I want some extra income" So in the course of just 7 day I generated $10,000 in extra revenue for my business AND I only spent $57 to make it happen. 1:14 – The truth is that making money is really easy, it just comes down to two steps. Here they are: 1:29 – Step # 1 is to create an offer, in order for someone to buy from you, you have to have something to buy. It sounds simple, but a lot of entrepreneurs focus so much on list building, giving value, or posting on social media, that they forget to just put an offer in front of people and ask for the sale. 1:54 – So if you're not making money, ask yourself am I making offers? The other problem I see is when entrepreneurs only have one offer and their audience has either already seen it, already bought it, or doesn't want it, so there's nothing else for them to buy. That's why last week when I wanted to make $10K in 7 days, I actually created a brand new offer that I knew my clients and community members had never seen before. 2:40 – Step # 2 is send traffic. Once you have the offer and a way for people to buy it (meaning an order form or a sales page), the only natural next step is to send traffic to that offer. Because no one knows it exists, no one is going to buy. So once you create an offer, promote it everywhere you can think possible without worrying about how salesy or annoying you're being. Send an email to your list, post in your Facebook group, in other people's Facebook groups, make a Facebook event, do a live stream, create a Facebook ad these are ways of sending traffic. 3:28 – Recap. Resources mentioned: www.marketlikeanerd.com – Where you can find the web TV video version of this podcast.        

This week we've welcomed Heartpreneur and Digital Marketing Expert Nathalie Lussier to share with us her secrets for creating a profitable business without the sleaze. Nathalie is a genius when it comes to leveraging tools and technology to create an out of this world user experience for your prospects and customers, so that they not only feel good while consuming your content, but become brand evangelists who share it with their friends and rave about you online!   Time Stamped Show Notes 00:59 – Introduction. 6:06 – Nathalie says that some of the common mistakes people make when they are ready to scale is that they create their first launch or their first course and it is not a huge success but maybe there’s something there that attracts attention or it hit the right point but maybe they didn’t have a big enough list yet to grow it. What Nathalie sees people do a lot is that they throw the whole thing out and they decide to do a second course or a second program instead of trying to reach more people with the same thing that you sold in the first place. So one must think that I did great with this so how can I improve it and reach more people this time maybe it’s getting more affiliates on board or improving the marketing around it a bit so that the next time you go out there it is even stronger.  7:08 – Nathalie says that when you want to scale you can’t do it all by yourself and she also struggled with it in the beginning because she had a team consisting of just one VA and herself and when she added more people they were able to grow much faster. 8:44 – According to Nathalie you need to find out is it a lack of people seeing your offer, is it lack of traffic, is it a lack of list building and thinking about those numbers will help you make the right decision so that you are focusing on the right stuff.  So don’t assume that people didn’t like your stuff they probably just didn’t know about it. 10:22 – Tip # 1: Creating free courses works very well and then you can focus your energy on marketing your free stuff and then people can go into your paid offers. So focus your creative energy on new ideas and stuff on bringing people in through your free courses. A free course is more powerful as compared to other free resources because you actually get people in your membership site, you also get their name and email, you get them to login and be a member and that member experience is one step above a subscriber or a website visitor and you can build a relationship with the members. 11:24 – Tip # 2: Once your visitors are inside your membership area you can show them your different courses or programs that you have and they can see what’s available. You don’t necessarily need to have a sales page with a buy now button but it is that curiosity and you are letting people self-select without being pushy. So when people opt in to your free course and start getting value and if they like the experience they are having with your free course then they are a lot more likely to say yes to a paid course. 12:23 – Nathalie likes to look at the stats on her website and she found that a lot of people visit her products page but they are not actually looking to buy but if they are in a member’s area already and if you are seeing the free course and then a couple of paid courses so they can’t escape it and if you do click through you can bring people to a sales page and give them some more information or promote special offers in the member’s area and you can give them some time sensitive reason to sign up for the  paid courses using a countdown timer or a special price instead of creating an evergreen offer to encourage  them to enroll. 14:33 – Nathalie uses AccessAlly which has one box which says unlock your free course and they see a greyed out icon or something that says I don’t have access yet and we humans have a psychological tendency to have access to everything and this way is not pushy if it’s not for them they are not going to sign up but if they are already in that direction then it’s a much easier and gentler way to get them to say yes. 17:11 – Nathalie learned a lot of these things through experiencing and practicing and trying different things in their membership site and you might not find these features of in other plugins because they tend to be built by mostly developers and not necessarily people who are in business as well. 18:28 – Tip # 3: As a course creator you must think about the user experience side of your courses and your programs. Nathalie has taken a lot of online courses and as a course creator she wants to make sure that people get the results that she is promising on her sales pages so she ensures that they do finish the course or are able to take action on the stuff that she is teaching. 19:18 - Nathalie gives the example of the thirty-day challenge where there are thirty videos over thirty days and that could be a bit overwhelming so they have put little checkboxes that people can check off as they are going through and if they wanted to come back to day 10 they can keep it unchecked so that they can come back and go through it again or take action on that and as they progress they’ll see how far they’ve come. There are also things like a video bookmark option so when people click that button it will start playing the video at the right spot. 22:00 – You can even go further with ProgressAlly so let’s say you want to have it as a certification or you just want to reward people after they go through your course you can actually have a quiz that checks people’s understanding of what they’ve gone through and then you can give them an auto generated pdf certificate. You can also follow up with people who haven’t completed something for a while so if they haven’t logged in or if they haven’t completed anything in say two or three weeks you can have your email system send them an email saying hey is everything alright you should probably log back in this is waiting for you and that can also increase people’s completion rate and they feel better at having used what they purchased. 24:37 – As the whole focus is on list building and scaling, people might think I created these free courses but how is that going to help me build my list but if you have really good content the people and people are  going through your free courses you can set up social sharing for them within your membership site and have people share your opt in page for your free course and Nathalie has noticed that about 20% of the people end up joining from social shares saying hey I am taking this free course come and join me. 28:11 – Your business doesn’t get built in a day all of us are extremely ambitious and we have great ideas but implementing them takes time and Nathalie says that your website is never done it is like the spiral staircase that you are going to keep improving upon and the same goes for your membership site and your courses you will probably have more great stuff to add to your courses or you might have new ideas for your membership site and the beauty of the internet is that you can change things over time and it’s not like a book where you publish it and you can never make changes.   Resources mentioned: 30daylistbuildingchallenge.com – Totally free to sign up and get more tips on list building. AmbitionAlly.com – To check out the different plugins and other stuff by Nathalie and her team.

Today we are going to be talking about what business model can make you millions! This is a really fun topic because a lot of you - my listeners! - are the ones who dreaming bigger... you don’t just want the six figure hustle! You want to make way more with way less work, and I am here to tell you that it’s 100% possible!   Time Stamped Show Notes 0:54 – Introduction. 1:28 – A lot of people think that it comes down to the model and there is a right way to grow your business and as long as you know the right model to do it you can do it because you can model off of it. 2:17 – I started going out and looking at the different businesses that are making millions of dollars in the industry and a lot of people came to mind so I decided to see what they are doing and what their business models are and go from there. 2:45 – Tip # 1 is first thing that I realized was that there were a lot of different business models. 4:52 – Tip # 2 is there’s no one size fits all solution I just went through all these business models and none of them really have the same setup so there’s no one size fits all solution but that is a good thing because it means that you can really grow a million-dollar business doing whatever you want. You have the freedom and the power to choose how you decide to grow your business. Decide what’s going to align with your interest, personality and lifestyle and build your business around that. 5:38 – Tip # 3 is to reframe the question the original question was which business model can make me millions and I would love for you to do is to reframe the question to what’s my dream business model because you can make millions doing whatever you want you might as well create your business model around your lifestyle, your interest and your personality. 7:07 – I looked at what these million-dollar business models were, who these people were and how they were making their millions and I picked and chose which ones I thought were fun for me.    7:43 – Some people would probably say that I’m crazy because I have a vlog and I have a podcast and that’s not a great way to build your business because you should have one type of content at a time and some people might think I am crazy for doing open closed door launches and automated funnels but I have seen that you can make money doing anything and there are tons and tons of different models so I am going to ignore what those people are saying and I am going to build my business the way that I want. 8:20 – Recap. Resources mentioned: Free Facebook group: The Balanced Entrepreneur join at marketlikeanerd.com/invite

After growing up an orphan, spending most of her childhood in severe poverty, bouncing around from multiple abusive foster homes where she was molested, beaten, verbally abused, locked in rooms that had no carpet or furniture and even forced to eat her own vomit....Ann Strout has created an aligned freedom business that she loves. She is a prime example of how no matter your circumstances, you CAN come out on top to create the business and life of your dreams. And in this episode, she's going to share with us her 3 best tips for making it happen.   Time Stamped Show Notes 1:26 – Introduction 6:13 – Ann says that to alignment for her means that she is able to have a business and a life that is total bliss all by her choice by her demand she creates both and in both areas she is giving a hundred percent a hundred percent of the time and doing what she loves a hundred percent of the time. So being in Alignment for Ann is being able to create that business that will support that lifestyle so that she can have the and life and she doesn’t have to make choices. 7:19 – Ann says that the growth never stops so you never master anything and you are completed there is always the next thing. The next step for Ann is tapping in to something even bigger than her, even more meaningful than what she does now with a higher level entrepreneur.  Ann and her team are working on something bigger but she is also taking some time for her and her family. 8:49 – Ann says that you do fall sick and it is part of the process and she embraces it and she is ready for new heights herself. 9:47 – On the point of being able to create the dream business regardless of your circumstances, Ann thinks it is important that we are really clear that what we see around us or what we are experiencing is something that we are creating and it doesn’t have to be the reality so you can change it, you can look outside your window and see whatever you want to see it doesn’t necessarily need to be what’s absolutely there and if you can shift your mind to believe that you can make anything happen. 11:02 – When she had her son Ann was on food stamps and welfare for more than two years and she lived in subsidized housing and when you looked out of the window you saw welfare, poverty and all kinds of terrible negative things but when Ann would look out she would see possibility and hope and she would think this can be different it doesn’t have to be this way. Ann says that it’s all what you believe and what you see. Some people just stay there and some people grow. 11:57 –  Tip # 1: The first mistake that Ann committed was thinking that she knew everything. The reason that that was a big mistake for her was because it didn’t leave open space for her to learn from anybody else and so she struggled for many years in the beginning of her business. Ann says coming into business instead of competing with your competitors collaborate with your competitors they will teach you everything you need to know.       14:02 – Ann says learn from your competitors be open to that. 14:26 – Tip # 2: The second biggest mistake she made was she pivoted from everything under the sun. So constantly pivoting from one thing to the next to the next really makes it hard for you to get in front of your ideal clients and it makes it hard for you to enjoy your business and so her biggest motto is one step at a time so whatever your genius is focus on that one thing you can grow and advance later there is no rush. 16:54 – Ann says that you have to master the one thing and you need active income, leveraged income and then passive and it goes in that order like you just have to do one thing at a time and you have to figure out what that one thing is and then once you master it and you know how to market it, sell it and make money with it then you can start to move on. If you want to be a coach, you need to figure out what is that one thing as a coach that you can help people with. 17:41 – Tip # 3: Get a coach or mentor for whatever it is you need help with right now today and then the same thing should be applied to teams, systems and things like that so don’t try to do this by yourself. 19:23 – Ann says there is no magic pill where you will get a coach and you won’t have to deal with challenges, you will but you will be able to get through it faster because the only way out of it is go through it and you don’t want to do that by yourself. 19:55 – You can’t delegate anything to anyone if you are in urgency mode. 20:34 – Tip # 4: Constantly recreating versus repurposing. Ann says that typically most of us launch every 30 to 90 days depending on our business size and Ann noticed when she had her previous business that she was constantly recreating content, recreating free offers, recreating checklists so Ann says that you have to build a habit of creating a Standard Operating Procedure for your business, a checklist for everything you do in your business especially stuff you are going to  delegate out or things that you are going to be doing on a repetitive basis. 23:26 – SOPs are not fun to do but you can do some and you can have your team do some and so when Ann’s team members create an SOP she proofs it. 24:37 – Ann says that a lot of people don’t like the word hustle but embrace it and get comfortable with being uncomfortable and embrace the hustle especially in the beginning especially when you are up leveling or you are going to do a launch you are going to hustle a little bit and there is no such thing as an overnight success. 25:19 – Tip # 5: Ann is a big geek on planning and it’s pretty much what she built her business on. You have to have a plan and Ann breaks down her plan into 30 days for her newer aspiring entrepreneurs and for the six figure and beyond she looks at 90 days and this helps to be able to get clarity. You need to have specific lined out goals financially or even otherwise. 28:46 – Entrepreneurs don’t know what actions to take and that causes them to not be able to focus. Ann has done many surveys and she has realized that people don’t know how to stay focused and don’t know what to focus on and that is because you don’t have a plan that you are excited about. If you don’t have a plan you have nothing to work toward. Ann says that there is no other way to do it you have to have a plan even if it’s only for thirty days. You’ve got to take a big vision and work backwards from that break it down into manageable, actionable, trackable pieces so that you can actually reach your goals. 30:34 – Have a thirty-day plan and the biggest tip with it is that you make sure that you are excited about it because if you are not, you are not going to do the work and you have to stick it out for the minimum of the thirty days so if you don’t get results in the first week don’t start beating yourself up and calling it quits, stay in the game for the thirty days and you will get results. 31:03 – Recap. Resources mentioned: The balanced entrepreneur Facebook group Four-part video training series which includes a worksheet at Ann’s website: www.annmstrout.com

How would you like to interview the biggest influencers and celebrities in your niche? To invite them to telesummits, events, and podcast appearances and have them say "YES"? Well, iIn this episode we’re going to be talking about how to do just that! In just one short year, I have participated in over 100 interviews... with millionaires, high profile influencers, and celebrities in my niche... and now it's time for you to do the same! Time Stamped Show Notes 00:52 – Introduction. 1:19 – I recommend if you haven’t done many interviews before that you start by interviewing other people and often you will see that you will naturally get people who want to interview you because they see that you are in the interview space. 2:13 – You might do a video interview for your Vlog with someone or an audio interview for your podcast or a lot of people also do tele summits where they interview 21 different experts over the course of two weeks or thirty days. I have done a bunch of tele summits. I have been fortunate enough to find some really high profile guests for those interview series.    3:25 – Some of the people I was able to secure for those tele summits don’t even accept interviews or don’t even do tele summits and I was able to get them to do the tele summit for me. 3:44 – I’ve got a few secrets that I am going to share with you today. 4:00 – Tip # 1: If you want to have a high profile influencer say yes you can interview me then you want to go into it with extreme confidence that you are worthy of them saying yes. If the expert doesn’t know who you are then they probably don’t know how new or established, you are either.  Don’t approach the situation with them out of fear you don’t want to appear as timid because the expert is going to look at you like this is charity work. Instead you want to be confident and own your value. When you believe in yourself and you talk like the expert you are, this is going to inspire them to believe the same. 5:23 – Craft your interview invitation email with the assumption that they will want to join with the belief that it’s going to benefit them to be aligned with you. I often craft my emails in a way that sells the benefits of me interviewing them and sells what I bring to the table.  I do interviews in a different way I always find some way to add a twist to it that’s how I position myself as an authority and as a peer to them. 6:13 – Tip # 2: Start off your invitation email by creating a personal connection. The first line or two of the email should show the expert that you already have some type of connection with them. The idea is to create the know, like and trust factor by establishing a preexisting connection. 8:56 – Some people idolize influencers in their industry but I look at them as people just like me so that I can talk to them in a very human way like I would talk to a peer and that’s how I recommend you approach the situation. 9:22 – Tip # 3: You need to play with the ego of the experts because just like everyone else experts also like to feel important. So make them feel important without downplaying yourself in the process.  My favorite phrases for this are “are you currently accepting interview requests?”, “I instantly thought of you because…” or “I’d love to share you with my community” 10:49 – Tip # 4:  Do name dropping do not be afraid to leverage someone else’s name. So if you know someone who has worked with them or you have a client who has bought their stuff say so.  If there’s other speakers on the summit that you are planning big or small just mention them because the more experts you mention or the more connections you make the more valuable this is perceived by the expert. 12:15 – Tip # 5: Respect the time of the speakers because they might be super busy or they might have a team who handles this stuff for them.  When you email them, have all of the details worked out including the dates the interview is going to air, the dates you need them to promote, what their requirements are and when you’ll have things ready for them.  Have some FAQs that the experts might have about the interviews and have the answers ready. 13:07 – I send medium sized emails which are organized and contain headlines which are bold and in caps. The emails also contain bullet points so that they are informational but perusable. The more information you can provide, the better it is going to be perceived by the person you are pitching to and the faster they are going to be able to make their decision. 14:24 – I sign off my emails by saying so from here I’d love if you just shoot me an email back and give me a quick and then there are bullet points with options so that they don’t have to think about a response, I’ve given them a prompt for the response. 15:04 – Recap.     Resources Mentioned: The Balanced Entrepreneur Facebook group at marketlikeanerd.com/invite

Being visible is the first step to being seen as an expert, and in this episode Visibility Coach and my very own Publicist Kristi Dosh is going to share with us her exact step by step process to become visible in your industry. Working with Kristi, I was able to secure over 30 podcast interviews in 30 days, become featured in Influencive as one of the Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30, and snag multiple high profile guest blog and feature article opportunities as well. Now it's you're turn to learn from her!   Time Stamped Show Notes   2:13 – Introduction. 7:03 – Tip # 1: Develop your niche. Know what it is, live it, breathe it, have an elevator speech for it and commit to it a 100%. 7:21 – Tip # 2: You’ve got to build a visibility strategy. Kristi’s tag line is “It doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do if no one knows you do it.” 7:35 -  Tip # 3: You need to implement that strategy and position yourself as an expert by getting in front of the right audiences and being in the right format for what you do. 8:59 – You’ve got to decide what is it that you want to be known for before you start to put stuff out in to the world. It is not sufficient just to be visible but it is good to get started and get over any fear you have. 10:22 – Kristi always starts with asking people their short term and long term goals so that she can develop a strategy and determine visibility techniques to be used.  Some people want to reach out to people in just one industry but Kristi works with people from a variety of industries but they all have one factor in common and that is they want to become more visible and establish themselves as experts. 11: 02 – People get worried that they are excluding people by niching down but in reality it is much easier to reach people that way and you can branch out a little down the road and people will automatically come to you if they really want to work with you even if you are outside of a particular niche. 12:25 – You should go where your audience is and you shouldn’t try to drive people somewhere else that will not work 13:01 – Once you have decided what your niche is and who you are trying to reach you have to figure out how to reach them. Some people love to write so they prefer doing guest blogs whereas some people dislike writing or are not confident of their writing skills so guest blogging might not be the right option for them. 14:03 – Sometimes appearing on TV can be helpful because it sometimes elevates you in people’s minds but you should have the right expectations because if you are not in front of the right audience or on the right show you are can’t expect overnight results. 14:26 – You need to develop the right strategy to reach your audience and asking people helps so if you have a Facebook group or a newsletter list you can ask them what kind of blogs do they read instead of trying to drive your audience to some new outlet, find out where they already are and get your stuff into that outlet. 15:58 – Kristi likes to set a schedule, she is an organized methodical type of person and she knows the order she wants to do things in to get her clients to achieve their goals. Some people want to do guest blogging and TV and radio and public speaking so things need to happen in a certain order so it gets easier for her to pitch so that more people can say yes. 16:57 – You need to first decide what your goal is so if someone’s goal is to build a platform to get a book deal from a traditional publisher so you have to do things in a certain order and over a certain timeframe before pitching to the publisher. Some people think that writing on some outlets and going on TV will help but depending on the goals those might not be the right steps to get to their goals so Kristi tells them that that isn’t going to work and she tells them what is going to work. And it is different for everybody some people need more clients and grow their business to a certain revenue level or some people want to sell more products and becoming known as an expert for that particular kind of product. 18:02 – There’s got to be a strategy in place you can’t just gain visibility and expect people to notice and hope that it leads you to your goal. 18:45 – Being visible is the first step in becoming an expert you’ve got to piece some things together and you need some tangible proof to show people that you are an expert. 19:47 – If you are not willing to call yourself an expert nobody else is going to either. Kristi called herself an expert and started saying she was a nationally recognized expert when she was focusing on the business of sports and radio hosts started introducing her as an expert on the business of college sports and she started getting mentions in papers and blogs that called her an expert. 22:00 – People wait far too long before they start calling themselves experts if your business is profitable and you have that well defined niche then you start identifying yourself as an expert. Once you start calling yourself an expert other people will also start calling you one. 22: 46 – We live in an age where there are a lot of different ways to establish yourself like blogging, podcasting, media appearances 23:28 – A professional looking website is the biggest hint that you are an expert. You need to make sure that everything is updated on your website it needs to have photos and details on how to contact you. If you want to write people should see articles on your blog or links to other blogs where you’ve been writing. 24:26 – What talent bookers are looking for is different from what clients might be looking for and so when Kristi starts working with somebody new she gives them suggestions to make small tweaks to their website for things that are important for talent bookers and to make it easy for them to find the things they are looking for. The as seen on banner on your website will ensure that talent bookers know that you’ve already been able to be visible in these big outlets. 27:42 – Ensure that a way to contact you is listed on your website. Some people do not have a way to contact them listed on their website. You need to have your email address or a contact form on your website. 29:42 – Kristi is getting ready to launch a course that is all about how to be your own publicist and one of the modules of that course is on public speaking so Kristi is giving all the listeners of this podcast is her guide on where to find these speaking engagements. It is her brainstorm list of places she has found speaking gigs so that you can get in front of people.   RESOURCES MENTIONED: The Balanced Entrepreneur Facebook Group Guidemybrand.com Guidemybrand on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook The visibility workshop – Free private Facebook group Guidemybrand.commarketlikeanerd – Kristi’s list of places where you can find speaking gigs.      

Today you'll discover 5 marketing hacks that will really accelerate your business momentum so that you can make money with your marketing with less effort. We're going to walk you through one time hack, one content hack, a marketing hack, a traffic hack, and a list building hack... all ways to accomplish your goals faster with less effort.   Time Stamped Show Notes: 1:20 – Introduction. 1:34 – Hack # 1 is a time hack. The tip here is to collect plug and play templates that you can use in your marketing. If you see a coach out there who is offering plug and play templates that you can buy or that you can download to use in your own marketing, then those are the types of things that want to snatch right up and use right away. 2:33 – I create these email templates and SOP templates that work for me and once I’ve proven that they work I include them in a lot of my programs. You should always be on the lookout for plug and play templates where they give you the template and you edit the text and make it your own and put it into your business. 3:16 – Hack # 2 is a content hack and this is to keep swipe files that you will save for using and leveraging later on. With swipe files typically you are not getting permission to use their stuff and so you can’t copy it but what you can do is you can model it so I use graphic swipe files, swipe files of newsletters, ideas, ads, landing pages, funnels and I take screenshots of these things. So if you see something that you really like or something that inspires you, take a picture of it or store it somewhere in a folder on your computer so that later on you can pool from your swipe file for ideas. 5:22 – Hack # 3 is marketing hack and this is to leverage other people’s marketing efforts. The only way to make money online is to send traffic to an offer. But the problem with a lot of entrepreneurs is that they don’t have enough traffic because they don’t have a list, they don’t have a Facebook group, they don’t have a social media following so if you don’t have it you can leverage other people’s traffic. You can do this by paying so you can leverage Facebook’s traffic, Twitter’s traffic or LinkedIn’s traffic and pay them to borrow their traffic. 6:27 – The other is you can collaborate with them in some way or do some type of swap where you say if you promote me now I’ll promote you later and leverage their traffic by doing some sort of bargain. You can come up with a way to work with them where it is mutually beneficial tele summit is a great example of this where you are collaborating with many other people and you are leveraging everyone else’s audiences to grow your own. When you leverage other people’s traffic it reduces the need for you to have traffic of your own. 7:14 – Hack # 4 is a traffic hack so this is to pay to swipe other people’s traffic. If you approach someone who has a big list in your community and you tell them that you’ve got an offer that I think your community would really like so can I pay you to put an ad in your newsletter, a lot of people will agree to do that. This is called a paid solo ad where they’ve got the list and the traffic and they are already sending out mailings and newsletters to their list and you pay them to put ad space for your offer into their next mailing. 8:20 – Hack # 5 is a list building hack. I am a big believer in creating mini lists and so I consider my Facebook group and my push crew subscribers a mini list. Push crew is a plugin you can put on your site so that you can send out push notifications to the people who subscribed to it. 9:17 – Another way to list build is to leverage retargeting. So you can put pixels on every page of your website and if people go to the page and don’t’ opt in or go to the page but they don’t buy or if they go to one page but don’t go to another page you can have a pixel on that page that will keep a record of their IP address or Facebook profile and you can market to them in other ways like Facebook advertising. 10:18 – Recap.  Resources mentioned: The Balanced Entrepreneur Facebook Group