No Fluff - Small Business Simplified

Dive into this insightful episode featuring business savant, Courtney Ken. Explore her secrets to navigating business through life's various stages, merging personal growth with professional success. Gain Courtney's unique perspective on tackling challenges and leveraging life's transitions. Ideal for entrepreneurs and professionals seeking growth in all aspects.

In this episode, we delve into the crucial factor that often hinders small business owners from successfully converting leads into clients. We explore the common mistakes made by many entrepreneurs and reveal the untapped potential of effective follow-up strategies. By emphasizing the importance of consistent and timely follow-up, we shed light on how it can significantly impact revenue generation. Discover actionable insights to streamline your sales process, make your clients' lives easier, and ultimately boost your business's growth. Don't miss out on this valuable advice to overcome the barriers preventing you from converting leads into loyal customers.

In this episode, we delve into the crucial topic of when to run ads ahead of your busy season. Whether your business experiences peak demand during the holidays, the end of the year, or the summer, timing your advertising campaigns strategically can make a significant difference. We explore the importance of starting ads well in advance, at least three months before the season begins, to allow for testing, optimization, and building a robust sales funnel. By understanding the right timing and implementing effective strategies, you can maximize the impact of your ads and achieve better results for your business.

By acting and reacting how your future self would act, you can help to become her faster.

You may have heard that Facebook and Instagram ads aren't worth your ad spend anymore. But is it true?

Sometimes we all have trouble getting started, these 5 procrastination buster techniques can help you get over the hump and tackle anything you need to do!

I think this is something that a lot of business owners don't do or even want to think about. The thing is, is if you are not actively asking your current clients, your past clients for referrals, you were really leaving money on the table, right? Because a lot of times if you set up some sort of referral program, even if that's just like, oh, for every referral that I get, I'll pay you $100, right?

Yup, all of that and more. We're really digging into it today, but if you're interested in learning about it even more, we dig even deeper in my course, Scale Your Service System. If you're a service-based business owner who is trying to scale your business to your first six figure year and beyond, this is definitely for you.

It's something that I think is important and very necessary for everyone to be applying to their lives, to their work, or to everything in general, especially solopreneurs. The Eisenhower matrix allows us to figure out what is important versus what is not. It helps us distinguish what's urgent and what's not. It makes us prioritize our to do list, accordingly. It's a matrix just like this. To set it up, you'd have your x axis and your y axis, right?

This course is really all about giving you all the tools that I learned and developed while I was building and scaling my service-based business, my marketing agency AND while I was working full time at my day job. We go into how to plan the vision of growing and scaling your business to make sure that you really create a business that you want and that you find valuable because so many people end up focusing so much on growing their business that once they hit their revenue goal, they're unhappy. They begin to look around and think, this business isn't lighting me up or giving me what I want from life.

I know a lot of people have been thinking about building creating digital products to sell you have print on demand storage, you have a lot of businesses that really rely on running ads, but then you also have a lot of business types who maybe you've been running your business for a few years now.

A lot of newer business owners or freelancers who are trying to grow and scale their businesses really struggle with this idea of positioning yourself as the expert and communicating your knowledge and your expertise.

Today we are going to be talking about how to build and grow and scale a service based business. Now, I'm actually working on creating a new course all about helping service based business owners grow and scale their businesses in a way that feels good to them without leading to burnout.

Welcome back! Today we are going to be talking about how to add passive income into your life. And I know this is a super popular and hot topic that a lot of you have probably been thinking about or wanting to do recently.

Welcome back! If anybody hasn't heard, we are towards the tail end of 2021. I had a baby in September of this year. And for me, being able to step back from my business during that time after I had my child was amazing.

I see people talking about this all the time online and in Facebook groups and I see so many people trying to help business owners make content creation easier by outsourcing it to agencies like Sam DiNicola Digital. We can create all the social media content, all of your email marketing content all those things for you because it can feel so overwhelming.

This is something we're seeing a lot of, especially in the last couple of years, as more and more people are starting businesses, starting side hustles and leaving their full time jobs and trying to really build a business and an income that is going to allow them to work from home work wherever they want to and have that freedom and flexibility.

Today we are going to be talking about getting support in your small business. What does that look like? How do you know when you need to do it? How can you make decisions around that? This is going to come at different times for different people in different businesses. I ran my business as a solopreneur for almost five years before making my first hire, and now we have usually about a team of five at any given time. There's no right, there's no wrong, you might have support come in for one off things projects, or you might look for ongoing support. And we're going to talk through how to figure out which of those you need how to know which of those you need. So the first thing that I want to hit on is identifying what you need help with.

Alright guys, today we are going to be talking about copywriting and SEO and I know this is something that intimidates a lot of people right a lot of business owners, a lot of marketers, SEO is kind of this black hole confusing thing that people don't understand. They know maybe you know it's, it means Search Engine Optimization maybe that it says something about how you're being found online and via Google but that's kind of it, and people don't know anything else about it.

Okay, today we are going to be talking about how to prioritize ROI, or return on investment in your business. And this is really key to be able to effectively run and grow your business right. If you're not prioritizing the strategies, the tasks, and the products or services or the revenue streams that have the biggest impact on your business that have the greatest return on investment for your business, you're not going to be able to effectively grow and run your business.

All right, welcome to another episode of No Fluff, Small Business aside. So what I want to talk about in today's episode is making the transition from day job, employee to self employed CEO, small business owner, right, and this is a transition that a lot of people struggle with for a few different reasons and they, the underlying thing on below all of that the thing under the thing of that is, you're in charge, there's no one else to blame.

Welcome we are back for another episode of No Fluff Small Business Simplified. And in this episode, we're going to be talking all about niching and your ideal customer. Niching is a super trendy term that you probably have heard before, if you've been in the online business space, if you've been spending time researching your how to build or start a business, you've probably heard of niching. Basically, what it means is getting really specific about who your ideal customer is, who you want to sell to your products or services, and tailoring your marketing content, your sales efforts, your lead generation to reach out specifically to those people. And there's definitely some big benefits that you will see from niching.

We are back with another episode of No Fluff - Small Business, Simplified, and today I want to talk through your funnels and how your funnels and your digital ads should really hook up to each other. A lot of people are wondering, should I run ads right now? What would that ad strategy look like? And so many people are wasting money because they're starting to run ads before they're really thinking through and getting clear on how they are setting up their funnel overall. Ads are just a piece of the puzzle when it comes to your funnel, and you're really going to not see the ROI that you're wanting and hoping to see from doing paid ads, if you are not thinking through the entire journey of your customers, that purchasing journey which we've talked about in some other episodes. So, when you are looking at starting to run ads, you're probably going to first ask yourself, well where do I run these ads? Should I run them on Facebook and Instagram? Should I run them on Google? Should I run them on YouTube or Tik Tok? The first thing question you want to ask yourself is, what am I selling these people and are they looking for this thing specifically? Do they know they want this thing, or is this something that I know will be valuable for them, but they might not actively be searching for it?

Okay, let's talk about what to do when business is slow. And for a lot of businesses, a lot of business owners, a lot of industries, you might have peaks and valleys right you might have busy seasons and slow seasons. And so I wanted to share some things that you can do during those slower seasons that are really going to set you up for success.

Let's talk about some social media tips and best practices and I wanted to hit on this because I know social media is so important for a lot of small businesses, but for a lot of them and a lot of business owners, you kind of don't know where to start, because there's so many different social media platforms you can be on, and then even within those social media platforms. There's so many things, you are supposed to be doing, and it's really hard to keep up, right.

So today, I want to talk about some of the top mindset refrains that I find are the most powerful and the most impactful for a lot of small business owners, and we're gonna go over five or six today. But these are really really impactful mindset reframes if you are you struggling with your mindset or maybe you don't even know but you're struggling with these things. As a business owner, so the first thing is really around frequency. And what I mean by that is we we know every time we're talking about one of our products or services right? If you're still creating all of your own content and you haven't outsource any of your content creation yet, you are very aware of how often you've talked about a product or service or launch or webinar or anything like that. It's really easy to get into a place of well, I don't want to annoy my audience, I don't want to annoy people. So I don't want to talk about this thing, too much, but the reality of social media is that we all follow and consume a lot of content every day. And a lot of content on social media. So a little bit of a kind of reframing mindset check here is, you feel like you've talked about this thing 1000 times and you're really worried people are just tired of hearing about it, right? But they probably have not heard of that thing at all. They have no idea what you're talking about, or they're actually just seeing or hearing or reading about your post about that product or service for the first time, and often that people typically need to read or hear or learn about something, multiple times before they actually remember it. So, even if they have seen it before, the likelihood that they've already seen it enough times to really remember that that's what you offer that that's what you're promoting is low.

Today let's talk about SEO for your business. SEO stands for search engine optimization and this is something that can be really scary for a lot of business owners, because it feels like this, just like what the hell is it, how do I do it, it's super complicated or it's like very like hard to know what is right to do what is wrong to do what should I be doing. So I wanted to do a little introduction into SEO for small businesses at Sandy Nicola digital the marketing agency we work with a lot of small and medium sized businesses on their SEO, and basically you know let's just start with what is SEO so SEO search engine optimization is anything that's coming up like if you Google something, all of those results that are coming up, that's search engine results, right, and then the O is optimization which is optimizing your site to help ensure that it is coming up in those search results. So I'm not talking about the results that come up in the first few slots after you Google stuff, you'll see next to those that says ad and those are Google ads right those are display ads, those are you know people are paying to come up in that first, second, you know, or third result. Anything below that, or if no one is running ads for that, you know, then no ads will come up, but anything else that's coming up, those are organically coming up in your search engine results, so that means basically Google looks at the entire internet right any page any website that has been submitted to their, to their to Google, and they do what's called crawling a website and they look at your whole website, and they decide based on what this user is searching for, they want to give in the search results, the all the sites all the content that is most likely to closely aligned with what that user is searching for, right, because Google wants their users to have a good experience a good user experience so they want to make sure if I'm googling best vegan recipes for the instapot Google wants to make sure I'm seeing content that's coming up that's related to vegan restaurant recipes for instapot right, they want to make sure I'm not getting results for meat based and subpar recipes right because that's not relevant to me and so I don't want as a user, I don't want to have to parse through irrelevant information. So Google will crawl through your website, and using all the information on your website and you know different things that we're going to talk about in a minute, they will decide okay what is this website about what's the content of this website about, and then that is how you come up in those search engine results.

Today, I want to talk about systems and processes automations and outsourcing in your business. And I think this is so important and something that a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners struggle with, as they really start to scale and grow their business, right? Especially if you're a service based business owner, you now have enough clients where you're bringing in that revenue, but you are spending all your time servicing those clients. So how do you continue to grow without duplicating yourself, right, like, I can't kill myself. So that means I need to be able to get more done in less time. So what gives, and a lot of business owners jumped to outsourcing right there, and they'll just go straight for the VA. But there's a lot of lower hanging fruit that you can make yourself have more time available through systems and processes and automation, that will actually be cheaper than outsourcing. So that you can rely on the outsourcing for the higher level work for work that really requires that person, right an actual person to be handling it. So when I talk about systems and processes, this is really making sure that you have standard operating procedures documented for your business, right. So every time you do something, you should have a document that outlines every step of doing that thing, right, and you can have a document that outlines step by step, or you can record a video and then transcribe that video.

I know that so many business owners are not doing market research, then they're creating products and services that tank that do not sell, and they wonder why you have to do market research. I don't care that you think your product or service is a great idea. I don't care that you think it's going to be so helpful and people are going to love it. I don't care. You have to be doing market research because literally just taking a little bit of time to do market research, when you're building a new business, when you're creating a new product, service or package is going to pay dividends in the future. Doing market research is going to enable you to answer questions like: What should I charge? What should the price point for this be? Do people want this thing? How should I talk about this thing that's going to help it to sell? How do I talk about the value of this thing? Who wants this thing? Where can I connect with the people that would buy this thing? Those are just a couple of questions that you can answer with market research, but they're huge, they're the only questions that matter. But so many people don't actually do market research - you might think you're doing market research but you're really not. HOW TO START YOUR MARKET RESEARCH So there's a couple of components to market research that are going to be the most impactful for you. The first and easiest thing is going to be doing a competitive analysis. This means looking up people who are offering similar products and services. Check out their website, how are they talking about the thing that they're selling, who does it seem like they're targeting, what are their price points. I aim to look at 3-5 of these (preferably five) because this is really easy thing to do. Make sure when you're doing this competitive analysis, you're looking at people who are delivering a product or service at a similar level as you. What I mean by that is if you are a social media manager and you've really just started out - don't do a competitive analysis based on an agency that's been around for 10 years and who's extremely experienced at it, because that's not your direct competitor. Yes, they're offering something that's similar, but they're not your direct competitor because I guarantee that person, or that business, is commanding a higher price point than you're going to be able to command. That's not a bad thing. it's just the truth. So when you're doing a competitive analysis, you can look at those people because that's something to reach for and something to work towards. But your direct competitors are going to be people who are delivering a similar product or service at a similar level as you and who are offering that product or service to a similar target audience. So these are all things to keep in mind. Once you do your competitive analysis, now it's time to talk to real people. And I know this is the step that a lot of people skip because you don't want to talk to a real person or you don't know how to get on the phone with a real person. But getting on some phone calls, is going to pay dividends in the future. It's going to be so so impactful for your business, because you get so much value from those conversations! When I'm doing market research, what I like to do is I like to try and get on calls with two different types of people: My target customer. My competitors. Okay, so let's talk about the second one really quick - competitors or peers in your space. So, if you can get on a call with someone who is offering a similar product or service as you at a similar price point to what you're thinking about, maybe you can get on a call with a couple of those people. You can also get on calls with people who are or businesses who are offering a similar product and service to you, but it might be at a higher level, a higher service level offering. So it might be someone who started their business and has been offering that thing for 10 years already, but you can still get on a call with them because everybody started somewhere, and they can give you a lot of help and information around that.. They might even give you some advice around that. But we really want to communicate to those people that we really value their time and we really value their feedback. And that's the key here is really showing that value in that appreciation. So how do we do that? Again, some of you some people out there are not going to be willing to do this for you, they're not going to be willing to help you. And that's okay. We want to look for the people who are willing to help, who are willing to give us that value. And we want to offer something for them that really shows them I value your time. First of all, you're going to make these calls 15-20 minutes max! Any longer than that is just not acceptable. It's not valuing their time, they're doing this for you. They don't need to do this for you. It's a favor. Second, what I typically do is I offer to buy them a coffee so I'll either send them like a $10 Digital Starbucks gift card or maybe a $10 amazon gift card. This just is an extra indication of like, “Wow, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.”. Next, your target customer calls. Okay, so you want to identify who's a target customer. Ask them to get on those calls, you can either give them that digital gift card for a coffee or you can even offer them something for free. So if you're a social media manager, you might offer them a free social media audit in exchange for this call, or a few templates that they can use - something that they would find valuable, something that they would get value out of getting for free, and this is not just something you're giving out anyone for free you can offer them your lead magnet that anybody can go to your website and get for free, there's something that needs to be a value there. If you don't have that thing if you're not sure what that thing could be, offer that gift card - easy, not a big deal. There's going to be some people that are like “No I can't do it.” That's okay, you will find people who will be willing to do it. This part is key - you will not pitch them at the end of these calls. Because they are getting on these calls purely as “this is market research I want to ask you some questions.” If you then pitch them at the end of this call, you are totally breaking their trust. They did not come onto this call to be sold to. You will sometimes end the market research call and someone will want to work with you or will ask how they can work with you. I really recommend saying like, yes, 100%, we can do that. Let's schedule a discovery call specifically where we can talk about that. When you get on these calls, make sure you prepare questions ahead of time as well. Again this is indicating to them that you really value your their time. So, you are preparing questions around what are their problems, what are the problems they're looking for solutions on, how would your product or service benefit them. Use this time to really dig into what are their needs, what's the problem, how can you solve that problem via your product or service, how can you help them, how can you make their life easier? Ask them about pricing and you could say so for this type of package, what would you be willing to pay for this type of package? Ask if you can either record the call or take very very diligent notes as well, because you really want to pay attention to the words that they're using and how they're describing these things, because you can then go and use that in your content and you can get really great content ideas, because it's coming straight from the horse's mouth. If you go through this market research process and you do all these things, you are going to have so much information that you are able to use to make so many decisions. And, information backed decisions, you're not just pulling your pricing out of the air, you're not just pulling your packages out of the air, you've actually talked to people, you've actually figured out what they needed, and you're able to provide that no more, no less. And you're able to use their words and solve their problems as they've identified them. So this has huge impacts for your business but it's something that a lot of people don't do. They're not having this wealth of information because they're not doing that market research. If you are struggling to figure out how to do these things and you really just want someone to be able to hold your hand and walk you through how to do these things or you've done some market research but you're really struggling to understand what all that information is telling you, you probably want to book a digital strategy intensive! This is a 90 minute call where we deep dive into answering all of your questions and you get a really specific actionable plan after that call so that you can move forward and know exactly what you need to do to proceed.

This can be something that's really scary for new business owners or business owners who are trying to price new products or services. The bad news is that you're always going to have people telling you you're too expensive — No matter what your price point is you will always hear that. So you really can't let that feedback affect how you think about your prices. The key to pricing appropriately is really market research and mindset. I know in the online business space, it's very trendy to say “charge what you're worth”. But I actually really take issue with that, because your self worth shouldn't be tied to your business in any way! Your business is a business, your worth as a person, as a business owner is completely separate from what you're charging for your products and services. I also have an issue with that saying because as soon as you get more than one person telling you that your prices are too high, you're going to immediately believe them and think you need to lower your prices because you just pulled a number out of your a**, instead of actually figuring out and thinking about what is the market willing to pay for this price. What is my target customer willing to pay for this product or service? Unless you know that you will never have enough confidence in your pricing.

A lot of business owners aren't super clear on how people are discovering their business or how people are interacting with their business, up until the point of purchase and even after that point. Today I want to discuss how to develop your customer purchasing journey. It's going to allow you to start to formulate and build a proper sales funnel, that's going to bring people down the purchase journey, and it's going to grow the know like and trust factor for people who are coming into your orbit, getting to know you and your business, and eventually purchasing from you.

When you've identified what you need to outsource, you will know about how many hours per week or month that you need to outsource that project for, because you've already tracked that time. And you have documented the system around that project, so that you can make it easier. I know that hiring can be super scary and overwhelming for a lot of people, especially if you're already an extremely busy business owner. But this is the way you get support. This is the way that you build a business that allows you to build the life that you really want to be living right outside of your business.

This has been something that has been top of mind for a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs in the last year or so, because a lot of people's businesses have changed due to the pandemic. Maybe you are an in-person business that's now really gone mostly online, and you're really looking to try to add other streams of revenue within your business. If you're really looking to grow and bring in additional revenue with different products and different services, continue reading. So many of you are really leaving money on the table when it comes to revenue that you could potentially be bringing into your business, because you just haven't thought about it or you haven't made those things available to your customers to purchase. Here are some tips that you could implement to add more streams to your business.

A lot of this has to do with perfectionism and imposter syndrome. Those two things are usually what keep people from starting a business. They are what keep people stuck saying, “I'm not ready. I'm not ready. Oh, I'm just going to go and do this research over here first.” A lot of times, new entrepreneurs get stuck in this place of research or planning or preparing, and they never actually just pull the trigger and start promoting their business. But, what's kind of amazing is you start to realize that you can start a business, and you can provide whatever it is you're going to provide for your customers so much sooner than you think that you can.

There's not a formula for ads. There's a lot of questions that go into this, and that's totally okay. But the key thing that I really really stress to anyone who ever asked me about ads is you cannot advertise your way out of a shitty strategy. I think this is something that some people are surprised to hear me say, because we offer ad management in the agency. But the truth is, if you are running ads and you're putting budget behind ads, and everything else about your strategy, everything else about your purchase funnel is crap — those ads are not going to be as successful as they should be. They're not going to perform as they should for you. Ads are fantastic for people with group programs, memberships, courses, or digital products. We really look at how big is your existing audience and whether we can leverage your existing audience on social media or your existing customer base or your existing email list for our ads. Can we do that by retargeting those people or creating lookalike audiences based on those people? getting super clear on your goals for ads and your budget for ads is really important because if you don't have a super established audience, that doesn't mean you can't run ads, that doesn't mean they're not going to work for you, but it's going to take a little bit longer.

I know this can be a really scary topic to talk about which is why a lot of newer entrepreneurs might avoid it altogether! It's common to feel overwhelmed to look at your finances because you don't have a lot of experience in this or you don't have a bookkeeper or an accountant to help you. However, when you're starting to scale is — it's so important to get familiar with your numbers and to just play with your numbers when you're making goals!

Today I want to talk about building a business as a multi-passionate entrepreneur — or as a multi-passionate person. This is something that a lot of people struggle with when they're first starting out, especially if you really enjoy doing a lot of different things, you love learning, you're really interested in a bunch of different things, and you can do a bunch of different things. But what do you offer to sell in your business?

This is something that comes up so often. Fear likes to rear its ugly head when we least expect it. Fear might show up in a few different ways. Maybe it's that you are avoiding doing something in your business because you're scared of the outcome, or you're scared how somebody's going to react. Or it might be, fear of taking the jump and doing something you haven't done before. Fear really is something that will crop up for you time and time and again. As a business owner, and no matter what income level you're at, no matter how long you've been in business, you're always going to have fear around doing certain things. Luckily, there are a few strategies you can employ to really put fear in its place, and not let it keep you from doing what you need and want to do in your business.

A lot of content online is talking about where to find potential clients and how to connect with them, but not a lot of people talk about the next step in the process, which is actually getting them to a yes, which is actually getting them to buy from you. Knowing how to get a client to say yes is what really sets people apart from those people that are bringing on new clients consistently and those people who are just really floundering, really struggling to get new clients to actually execute, pay that invoice, sign that contract and get started.

In this episode of the No Fluff - Small Business Simplified podcast we're talking about Letting Business Feel Easy. This is something that I think a lot of people struggle with. It manifests itself in different ways and it's really hard sometimes for us to get perspective on our own business. What's going to make your business feel easy, is making decisions that go back to that big picture why.

In this episode of the No Fluff - Small Business Simplified podcast we're talking about how to set SMART goals — simple, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time bound. I know a lot of us revisit goals at specific trigger points throughout the year, whether that's before a new month, or before a new quarter or before a new year. But, the reality is you can really be setting goals whenever you want to! The biggest thing is setting goals that are setting you up for success and that are going to be the most likely to achieve. That's where SMART goals come in

In this episode of the No Fluff - Small Business Simplified podcast we're talking about how to create a sustainable and realistic content marketing strategy that even a solopreneur could stick to. If you are starting a business, getting ready to start a business, or if you've already started a business — you probably have already heard plenty of times that content is king. Content is going to be such an important part of your overall marketing strategy and that can be really overwhelming for a lot of business owners, especially if you're a solopreneur and you're trying to handle your marketing on your own. The three methods I cover in this podcast will help you create content that lasts much longer and goes further so that you can work less while still reaching more eyes.

In this episode of the No Fluff - Small Business Simplified podcast we're talking using a task management system like ClickUp for your business. If you are starting your business, looking to grow your business, or you're starting to bring on team members — paper lists just aren't going to cut it anymore! However, when you're thinking about getting set up on a task management system, there's a couple of basic functionalities that you really need to make sure that it has in order for it to be effectively used in your business.

In this episode of the No Fluff - Small Business Simplified podcast we're talking about the questions you need to ask yourself before launching your business idea. Many of us have ideas for revenue streams and new businesses all the time! But that doesn't mean every idea will be successful and will make us feel supported. Before you start your business from that new idea, ask yourself these questions.

In this episode of the No Fluff - Small Business Simplified podcast I'm covering the most important things you NEED in order to grow your business this year. We all know 2020 was a weird year and whether you started a new business, pivoted your business, or saw massive growth, I know many of us are looking ahead and thinking about what we'd like to accomplish in 2021. Doing these things will set you up for success this year and for many years to come.

This episode is a replay from a guest appearance on the Tipsy Business Podcast with Carley Zuercher. I share the exact strategies I used to add over $100k in revenue to my business in less than 6 months…as a solopreneur! Oh, and did I mention I spent less than 5 hours per month doing lead generation? If you want to know how to use Facebook groups to start getting more clients and grow your revenue, you don't want to miss this episode.

Find out how to know if you're ready to start running ads in your business in this episode of the No Fluff - Small Business Simplified podcast.

Find out the 10 things you need to know to build a successful small business in this episode of No Fluff - Small Business Simplified.

Find out what you can expect from the No Fluff - Small Business Simplified podcast.