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Hey! I see you! Have a question for me, you can privately text me here! (This Episode is a Re-Release)In this first season, I'm still discovering what FLR means and how it can reshape a partnership. My goal is to bring you a real-world view with relatable stories and insights as I navigate this new and exciting relationship dynamic.In this episode, I open up about my struggles with intimacy and connection in past relationships and how they affected my self-confidence. I also talk about a pivotal moment when I met someone who introduced me to alternative perspectives on relationships, which sparked my curiosity about FLR. This episode is personal, honest, and serves as a stepping stone in my exploration of female-led dynamics.Value to Listeners:Listeners interested in alternative relationship styles will find this episode relatable and insightful. Krystine's transparency about her journey, coupled with her exploration of FLR, offers valuable lessons on self-discovery, overcoming societal norms, and embracing new relationship possibilities. The episode is rich with relatable stories and key phrases that make it a helpful resource for those considering FLR or reflecting on their own relationship paths.Key Takeaways:Reflecting on the Past: Krystine shares her struggles with unsatisfying, traditional relationships and how they shaped her understanding of intimacy.A Turning Point: She describes meeting a partner who introduced her to alternative views on sex and relationships, sparking her curiosity about FLR.Self-Discovery: Krystine highlights the importance of personal growth and self-confidence in preparing for non-traditional dynamics.Exploring FLR: The episode hints at how FLR has begun to redefine her perspective on connection and trust in relationships.Humor and Honesty: Krystine uses humor and authenticity to share her journey, making the content accessible and engaging for listeners.Potential Listener Search Questions:"How do I start exploring female-led relationships?""What are the first steps to understanding FLR?""How can personal growth improve my relationship?""What are real-life examples of overcoming traditional relationship struggles?""How can humor and honesty help in discussing alternative relationships?"Support the show Want to support the podcast and be involved with the behind-the-scenes, including voting on episode topics, as well as tiptoe with me into this whole "coaching" thing. Also, my psuedo-autobiographical audio drama podcast "Control" will "re-debut" this spring as we drop the entire first season exclusively on Patreon! Find my Patreon HERE!
Send us a Text Message.If you've been wanting feel more connected to your intuition, this is the episode for you! Ever wondered if you could train your intuition just like a muscle? This episode of the Money and Miracles podcast is all about connecting with your inner guidance and living an aligned life. Spoiler alert: I was once a skeptic! But a year-long energy healing training helped me realize that everyone has intuitive abilities waiting to be unlocked.We explore the practical steps in this episode to nurture your intuition + a meditation practice that's become my go-to method for reconnecting with inner wisdom. Whether you're a newbie or looking to deepen your practice, this episode will give you invaluable insights and inspiration to achieve clarity and empowerment. Links mentioned: POP-UP Coaching: Schedule your session here (1 spot left!): https://calendly.com/emilyking/coaching-45 Make sure to subscribe & leave a review on the Money & Miracles podcast!
140 We all want a life full of what is most important to us, full of “Wealth” of the emotional, relational, and also financial, kind–or what my guest, Mark Yegge, a “wealth architect” and money manager, calls “balanced abundance”.In other words, we want the wealth of feeling good, feeling secure, feeling healthy, feeling connected, loved, and fulfilled in this life. There is solid research that proves this.Even Einstein, the most brilliant scientific mind of his time, was super clear about what actually makes humans feel most alive and abundant. (In this episode we share the most beautiful secret letter he wrote to his daughter—it will truly just melt your heart!!)Unfortunately, because of the culture we live in, it's easy to end up (almost by accident) over-focusing on things that don't actually lead us to that happiness and fulfillment. That lead, instead, to what I call Emotional Poverty. Mark and I have both seen all too many people lose track of what most matters to them by over-focusing on the pursuit of a successful career and financial abundance (or what we think is just financial security), while under-focusing on the things that actually bring them Emotional wealth and TRUE security.Since you're here, you have a pretty good sense that relationships are a prime way to the happiness and meaning you want in this life. But you're likely (even to just a small degree) to fall under the influence of cultural programming that, by no fault of our own, distracts you from being able to make your important relationships the truly fulfilling and life-giving ones you know they are meant to be. Luckily, it's not so hard to re-align with what matters most to you, which is HOW you will be able to bring more TRUE WEALTH, the kind that matters most to YOU, into your life, starting today. It can just take a bit of remembering –and intention.So listen to this fun, laughter-filled, not-to-be-missed conversation, where Mark and I dive straight into the heart of all of this. You'll come away with your heart energized and a surge of motivation to bring what most matters to YOU alive in your life, so you can feel genuinely happier and more fulfilled --and wealthy in all ways--as an HSP. SHOW NOTESFind Mark at www.lightcircle.org/yourgreatestyear or https://markyegge.com/Get your seat at Freedom From Hurt Week with Hannah here.Get More Free Support, Courses and Coaching HERE.
Join me and my psychic friend of the show Danielle @DsEnlightenedEdits, as we talk about The Language of the Universe and how its always speaking to You! Be sure to be there Live on Monday August 21st, 2023 at 7pm ET to ask your Questions Live (& maybe even get a mini Reading on air). If you'd like a Spiritual Reading of your own, &/or to explore Energy Healing and Consciousness Coaching with Danielle, you can find all that and more on her website http://www.DAMCLDesigns.com Danielle will also be having her live Empaths & Energy ® group reading event via Zoom, on Saturday August 26th, 2023 at 2:30 pm ET / 11:30am PT. For digital tickets, click : http://www.DAMCLDesigns.com/products/empathsandenergy
In this episode, Rejys and Tisha share our experiences attending Matthew McConaughey's The Art of Living livestream event, where we were able to connect with different speakers and explore various themes. Listen in as we discuss the powerful concept of 'finding the green lights' within our lives, realizing that a red light is only a temporary stopping point and not a place to stay stuck. McConaughey's book, Green Lights, has been a source of validation and motivation for us, and we admire his storytelling abilities.Tune in!Thanks for listening!Rejys Cowan is a spiritual life coach, yoga teacher, entrepreneur, and the host of Spiritual Sh*t You Need To Know Podcast.Join the Spiritual Shit Podcast Mastermind!Looking for a spiritual community, connection, and guidance?Find your tribe with us!Access bonus episodes, exclusive content, and our Discord Chat Group via our Patreon!Let's link up! I'm so excited to connect with you in this new space.Learn more here:https://patreon.com/spiritualshitpodcast********************************Let's connect!Send me a DM on Instagram @spiritualshitpodcast or @yogawithrejys or email me at theholisticsojourner@gmail.comLinks mentioned in this episode:Better Than I Can Imagine YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@slightlyunmeditatedpodcasthttps://youtu.be/SjkTVFN0bmc******************************Leave a Podcast Review!Ratings and reviews of the podcast are greatly appreciated and mean a lot to us as they help with getting the message out to those need it. Please rate, share, and Subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or your favorite app for the latest updates!XOXO,RejysSupport the show
Dr. Donna Marks joins me on the high road to talk about her new book, The Healing Moment. The moment when you begin to understand that healing begin with yourself. Donna says, "We are born with an inner light but instead of filling that light with love it too often gets dowsed with negativity." Donna shares her own story along with many others on the show. She is a licensed psychotherapist and addictions counselor in Pam Beach Florida. In 1989 she developed a chemical dependency training program at Palm Beach Community College, which has grown into a four -year degree and received the Florida Governor's counsel award. Her new book is called, " The Healing Moment." If you have questions she is open to emails. drdonnamarks@gmail.com
On this episode of EvolveHer Unpacked, SEEN Edition, Taylor Shine had the honor of interviewing Cleo Cowley, where they discussed the power of perseverance and how to turn tragedy into change.In 2013, her 15-year-old daughter, Hadiya Pendleton was murdered in Chicago, just days after performing at Barack Obama's inauguration.Cleo could have withdrawn. She could have let the overwhelm of her loss take over. Instead, she took this horrific experience and turned it into an opportunity to help other people.Cleo shares that it's okay to put yourself first, it's okay not to be at your best performance and lay low for a day (or more) to recharge - that way you can come out stronger on the other side. MORE ABOUT CLEO COWLEY: As a tenured leader at TransUnion, Cleo leverages her expertise in Big Data to consult with clients on how TransUnion solutions can help them grow their business. Additionally, Cleo is Vice President on the Board of TransUnion’s Africa Diaspora Alliance Networking Resource Group (ADAN), an advocate group on behalf of associates in the Black Community. ADAN is a resource that raises awareness, celebrates and recognizes the Black culture. ADAN fosters an environment where associates feel empowered and provide a safe space for associates to be their authentic self. Throughout TU Cleo is valued as a trusted partner that encourages Diversity and Inclusion. Outside of TU, Cleo is a Mother, Trusted Partner, Friend, Comedian, Soror (Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.), Activist and Small Business Owner. Follow Cleo on InstagramAbout your hosts:Alicia Driskill is the Founder & CEO EvolveHer, a community that unites the skills and resources of working women to create a more equitable future. Prior to launching EvolveHer, Alicia worked as VP of Global Partnerships at WME | IMG, one of the world’s most innovative companies. She also served as a Senior Executive at Live Nation and People.com. After a 17 yr career in entertainment & media working alongside the industry’s elite, Alicia decided to evolve her own career path and disrupt the Chicago market by opening EvolveHer, Chicago’s first creative workspace designed for women. Follow Alicia on Instagram and LinkedIn.Amanda Chin, Partner and Head of Growth of EvolveHer, is a sales leader and business development strategist with over a decade of experience scaling businesses and brands. She has partnered with global Fortune 500 brands in digital marketing strategy and business development working at technology companies including Amobee & Xandr.Support the show (http://evolveher.community)
En este episodio te platico mi experiencia lanzando y vendiendo mi Software como Servicio en el mercado. En 2015 decidí lanzarme al mundo del SaaS. En 2015 tenía un negocio donde publicaba aplicaciones móviles en la Apple App Store y en Google Play Store. Tenía la empresa una portafolio de más de 300 apps móviles y decidimos crear una herramienta de marketing para utilizar la herramienta en nuestras propias apps móviles. Entra a esta publicación en el blog para aprender sobre todo lo que hice en el mundo de las apps móviles: https://appcelerador.com/como-lleve-mi-app-al-top-10-en-la-apple-app-store-sin-saber-programar/ Tenía una app que se llamaba 1App 1 oferta de juegos y apps gratis cada día. Logramos recolectar más de 50,000 emails de usuarios que querían más ofertas en su bandeja de entrada. Tener esa audiencia tiene mucho valor y puedes monetizar esa audiencia. Lo más importante es que tu eres dueño de ese activo en tu negocio y nadie te puede censurar si tienes los correos electrónicos de tus usuarios. También lanze otro SaaS llamado Lead Layer Conecta que te permite captar emails en tus anuncios de Facebook y sincronizar esos nuevos prospectos en tu CRM o cuenta de Mailchimp. De esa manera podrías dar seguimiento automático por correo electrónico a tus prospectos o a los prospectos de tus clientes. Vamos a Platicar.
The key to surviving the quickly changing environment in social media is to pivot quickly. So how do you overcome and survive those changes? We give you 10 ideas to consider. 10 Strategies and Tactics to Master Social Media Build a community. If you have a strong community, you will notice when things are changing, when they are shifting to new platforms or trying different things and you can follow your audience. Things change and you have to go where your community is. Build an email list and keep in touch. Use social media to build your email list. An email list is yours, it’s not going away and it’s a good way to keep in touch with your audience directly. Email is still the best way to keep connected. Use new tools and tactics. Keep your eyes out for the tools that are being developed that connect people online, offline and through various social media platforms. Connectio.io connects Facebook advertising with your email list and targeted groups. Facebook and Google Location Beacons allow you to offer deals through the Facebook app when people are in your store. Retargeting Advertising has become a standard in advertising. Build redundancy into your plans. Don’t depend on API’s of the social media platforms and tools you use for your business. Social media is constantly changing and it’s best to be open to the changes and prepare for them so you can shift quickly. Shift your mindset. It’s normal to feel stressed out when things change, but there are shifts you can make ahead of those changes to help yourself out when they arise. Change is constant and you have to be able to adapt to keep up. Expect things to change and have a plan, like a crisis communication and business interruption plan. Learn to pivot instead of complaining about changes. Action takers turn these changes into opportunities. Don’t expect to do everything for free. All of the social media platforms expect to monetize. Be willing to go old school. Think about how you can connect with your community outside of social media. Some tactics for connecting with audiences have been left behind by some, but they still work. Websites are still a great marketing tool. It’s your real estate that you own and no one can take it away. Never give up your website. Run an audit and look for opportunities to freshen things up. Blogging is an amazing way to get people to your website. Blog posts live on and they aren’t going to go away. Email is and always will be important and a solid way to reach your audience. Forums are a great way to connect with your community, your audience and with people that are like-minded. Facebook groups are still a great way to connect, but there may be a time when advertising is needed to gain interest. Definitely build an email list of your group members. Tools, apps and links mentioned: The Growth Suite Social Media Examiner The Hive Model Madalyn is Blogging About Twitter Weekly Marketing Your Community with Email – Ep 17 How to Build a Targeted Email List To Build Your Community – Ep 45 Take Action What is your plan for shifting your focus with your social media strategy this year? Come talk with us about in the CTC Community.
Wilco de Kreij is #1 internet marketeer Bescheiden, introvert, ongelofelijk slim en bekend om zijn video's waarin hij heel snel Engels spreekt. Toch zijn er in Nederland nog heel veel mensen zijn die hem niet kennen. Wilco is de eigenaar van Upviral en Connectio, 2 software pakketten voor internet marketeers. Maar ik ben er zeker van dat elke ondernemer die zich een beetje internet marketeer mag noemen in Nederland en België hem kent. Ik volg al vanaf 2013 wat hij doet en in 2015 lanceerde hij Upviral en dat was vanaf het begin gelijk een mega succes! Wilco vertelt dat hij tienduizenden klanten over de hele wereld heeft (in meer dan 100 verschillende landen) die zijn software gebruiken! 10 succesfactoren va Wilco de Kreij: (leuker en leerzamer is natuurlijk om de podcast te luisteren) 1. Imperfect action beats perfect in action We praten over het feit dat ik zijn salespages er verschrikkelijk goed uit vind zien terwijl Wilco kijkt naar alles wat beter kan. Toch heeft ie ze gepubliceerd. We herkennen elkaar erin dat als we video's opnemen we het liefst alleen in de ruimte zijn. 2. Stap voor stap bouwen aan je team Hoe groter je team is des te meer brandjes er te blussen zijn. Wilco vertelt hoe hij leerde loslaten en vorig jaar voor het eerst in jaren echt een maand op vakantie was en dermate vrij was dat het zijn vrouw opviel. 3. Eén van de 5 dagen rust nemen en inspiratie opdoen. Het lukt hem nog niet altijd, maar een halve dag per week minimaal. 4. Risico's vermijden Wilco's team is langzaam gegroeid en heeft nooit geld hoeven lenen om zijn team te betalen. Dit maakt dat hij zijns inziens 'langzaam' groeit, maar hij kiest hier bewust voor. 5. Maak een product waarmee je iets oplost, start met je eigen 'itch' Als er iets is waar jezelf last van hebt (je mist bijvoorbeeld een functionaliteit in je software) dan kun je dat zelf ontwikkelen en gaan verkopen. 6. Partner up als je ergens niet goed in bent Met de lancering 2.0 versie van zijn eerste eigen plugin had Wilco groot succes omdat hij op zoek was gegaan naar een partner met een grote mailinglijst die de lancering deed. Ook met Upviral heeft Wilco gebruik gemaakt van een partners. 7. Creëer een HYPE Toen Upviral voor het eerst gelanceerd werd heeft Wilco alles uit de kast getrokken om het product in de markt te zetten. 8. Promoot alleen een product van een partner als je er achter staat Wilco heeft een aantal keren producten gepromoot als soort wederdienst maar is hier mee gestopt. 9. Verkoop je informatieproduct voordat je het gemaakt hebt Wilco heeft ook de ConnectIQ Academy waarin hij je leert om Facebook advertenties in te zetten voor je marketing. Honderden mensen kochten de academy en in de podcast vertelt Wilco hoe hij dit gepromoot heeft. 10. Versimpel je business Je hebt helemaal geen ingewikkelde automatisering nodig om je business te laten groeien. En verder praten we nog over producten creëren, challenges, slimme manieren om mensen te helpen implementeren, rekenmodellen voor verkopen buiten je bereik en nog veeeel meer... En niet te vergeten: Wilco deelt hoe hij zijn podcast internationaal op #1 kreeg. Luister voor alle details naar deze hele waardevolle expertpodcast!
Productive Insights Podcast — Actionable Business Growth Ideas — with Ash Roy
How To Build a Self-Sustaining Business Using Marketing Automation - With Carl Taylor Since 2010, Carl Taylor has been teaching the world how to stop dreaming and start achieving. After spending over $100,000 on his personal success and business education while under the age of 24, Carl transformed his life. Starting his first business at age 15, Carl has gone on to start, buy and sell businesses in varying industries from Gift Baskets to Marketing. He continues to run businesses and Mentor entrepreneurs, young and old, helping them grow their businesses. Red Means Go! his first book was written in only 5 days and went to #1 New & Noteworthy Business Audiobooks in less than 4 weeks of release. Carl is a highly regarded and engaging speaker who is regularly asked to speak at events across Australia and the United States on topics of Entrepreneurship, Online Marketing, and Personal Growth. Links Mentioned: Click here to download the podcast shownotes www.ProductiveInsights.com/automation automationagency.com www.PremiumProductivity.com www.CallAshRoy.com www.Youtube.com/ProductiveInsights Related Episodes: 163. [Case Study Part 1 of 2] Recurring Income Membership Site: How Julie MacDonald — Founder of The Awesome Au Pair — Launched Her Recurring Income Business 164. [Case Study Part 2 of 2] Recurring Income Membership Site: How Julie MacDonald — Founder of The Awesome Au Pair — Launched Her Recurring Income Business 140. Andre Chaperon — Email Marketing Genius And Creator of AutoResponder Madness 161. How To Turbocharge Your Facebook Marketing With The Connectio Suite of Products – With Wilco De Kreij (Founder of Connectio) 153. Is Artificial Intelligence Going To Destroy Humanity? Find Out In This Conversation With Matthew Michaelwicz 117. How to Create An Empathy Map Key Points and Insights: 2:11 - Why marketing automation is critical to building a profitable business 4:02 - Andre Chaperon explains how he uses automation sequences in Episode 140 5:17 - The key building blocks that go into creating powerful marketing automation 8:40 - "Don't let the tail wag the dog" - Ash Roy 9:57 - Is artificial Intelligence going to destroy humanity 14:00 - The mission of the Automation Agency and where it's headed in the future 19:49 - Key challenges people face when getting started with marketing automation and how to overcome them 21:44 - Important points to consider when automating your marketing 23:12 - How to manage the "how" successfully 24:59 - The hierarchy "What", "who" and "how" 25:46 - Action Steps you can take 32:46 - How to get in touch with Carl Taylor 33:49 - Carl Taylor's tips to make your business more environmentally friendly
Productive Insights Podcast — Actionable Business Growth Ideas — with Ash Roy
How To Turbocharge Your Facebook Marketing Using The Connectio Suite - With Wilco De Kreij (Founder of Connectio) Are you looking to turbo-charge you Facebook advertising? If so you've come to right place.
Productive Insights Podcast — Actionable Business Growth Ideas — with Ash Roy
How To Turbocharge Your Facebook Marketing Using The Connectio Suite - With Wilco De Kreij (Founder of Connectio) Are you looking to turbo-charge you Facebook advertising? If so you've come to right place. Wilco De Kreij shares his secrets around how to use the connectio suite products to create highly targeted Facebook ads. Links Mentioned: www.productiveinsights.com/connectio Click here to download the podcast shownotes www.connectio.io www.upviral.com YouTube Video link of this episode Related Episodes: 152. “Work Less Make More” — James Schramko Reveals Key Insights From His New Book 021. Facebook Advertising with Keith Kranc and Ralph Burns (Part 2) 129. PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising – A Holistic Approach with Ilana Wechsler – Part 1 Key Points and Insights: The connectio suite explained and how it benefits business owners How to grow your business using retargeting and the connectio suite
Wilco is a full-time online marketing “whiz kid” who started at the age of 16, when he started selling sunglasses online. Over the next decade and then some, Wilco has developed several online marketing applications and WordPress plugins. This humble man is the founder of UpViral and Connectio, two powerful viral marketing applications. He spearheads a diverse, talented team of programmers, developers, designers and online marketing professionals to ensure that UpViral and Connectio continues to grow as top-shelf applications. On today’s episode, Wilco will be telling us with us how to grow your email list exponentially. He will also discuss the intensity of Ad campaigns and how to effectively use and maintain them. And of course, he will be pleased to walk us through the functions and benefits of UpViral and Connectio.
Well today's episode is a little different than normal... Today, I'm actually the guest on my own podcast. Lindsey Anderson (One Click Lindsey) from Trafficandleads.com interviewed me not too long ago. Being the selfish human I am, I wanted to publish this for you here as well. You'll hear about my story, my journey to entrepreneurship and my philosophy on Facebook advertising and copywriting. I hope you enjoy it! P.S. - The next couple guests are absolutely insane... First up is Wilco de Kreij - Founder of Upviral and Connectio. If you have any desire to start and scale a software company from anywhere in the world and meet ALL of your financial desires by your mid thirties, this is an episode you cannot miss. Next is Perry Marshall. If you don't know Perry, unforgivable. - Dan Kennedy. He's basically the Godfather of Adwords and is one of the best living copywriters in existence. Bar none. He's also one of the only, if not THE only person to successfully bridge the gap between Darwin and Creationist theories. Yes, things get deep... There's a lot to look forward to ladies and gentlemen...
In episode #30, Wilco talks how you can 10X your marketing and growth without some clever hack. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:53: I want to dive into how you can 10X your marketing or 10X your growth without some clever hack. 00:59: Something that's going to keep them working today, tomorrow, next year and over the next ten years as well. 03:13: The way I look at it, in order to 10X your marketing is really just to get yourself out of it. 03:27: You need to find a way to tap into a certain traffic source, which doesn't take you too much time. 03:37: In 2018, I want to publish more and better content for our audience and for our customers. 05:09: The three steps are to systemize something, automate it and delegate it. 05:25: The first thing when I think of content marketing, I need to make it more concrete. 07:07: What I recommend you to do in various of your tasks is that you really try to break down what exact steps you're doing. 08:10: Because as sexy as delegating is, automating is always better. 08:12: If you can automate it, it's cheaper, it's more reliable, it's always good. 10:36: At the end of the day, what's even more important is that you understand common business practices. Transcription: Hey, what's up. It's me, Wilco de Kreij here back with you again in the very first podcast episode of 2018. We're actually already two weeks into the year, so it's been a while since I recorded the last episode, and I would say with good reason. I feel that over the last couple of episodes, I always start out like, oh it's been a while, so I should probably be more consistent with my podcast, which is actually kind of what this episode is about as well. So in this podcast, I want to dive into how you can ten X your marketing or ten X your growth without some clever hack. We're not going to talk about some clunky hack that may only work today or this week or this month, but something that's going to keep them working today, tomorrow, next year and over the next ten years as well. And I think that's really important if you grow a business. If you're running your business, you don't want to rely on things that are just working for a little while, you want to focus on things that keep on working day in, day out, for a long period of time, because that is how you reach true momentum in your business, and that's how you truly reach your goals. It's actually been an exciting time for me. It's 2018 like I said, I'm having very big plans for this year for both UpViral and for Connectio. I couldn't be more excited. And on a personal level, it's going well as well. In a couple days from now, I actually get the keys for my new dream home, which is pretty fantastic. I'm really excited about it. We've been looking forward to this moment, me and my wife, for a long time, so it's good. But let's not bore you with my personal stuff. So how do we actually ten X your marketing without clever hacks? Well I'll tell you. Basically there are so many things you can do in business or in marketing that you know will get you results. You can do, for example, content marketing. You see all these kind of people who are bragging about content marketing and it's the best thing ever. And then others, they're focusing on paid ads, on Facebook ads, or YouTube ads, and it's the best thing ever for them. And others, they're focusing on the affiliate model. They're having affiliates promoting their product and they say it's the best thing ever. No matter what state at your business you're currently at, you'll have to admit that a lot of these things, they work, but the problem is, you need to put in the work to make them work. It's not like you're going to give it a try on content marketing, publish a couple of blog posts, and all of a sudden, you are at the top of everyone's mind, you're getting leads in, you're getting customers. It's not that simple, and it doesn't matter which channel you're using, every channel or every traffic source will have its challenges and basically you'll have to learn about it to see how it works. The way I look at it, in order to ten X your marketing is really just to get yourself out of it and it may seem simpler than it is. What I mean with get yourself out of it is that you need to find a way to tap into a certain traffic source, which doesn't take you too much time. I'll give you an example. Currently, I am rethinking my content marketing strategy. So I want to, in 2018, publish more and better content for our audience and for our customers as a way to basically create momentum and drive more traffic, reach new audiences. So it's a marketing tool. Now there's multiple things I could do. Let's say I'm like, cool, I'm going to do content marketing so I'm going to create videos, I'm going to create blog posts, I'm going to do a lot of social media posting, I'm going to do a Facebook and LinkedIn, maybe not Twitter, that's not as big as it used to be, but I'm going to do all these things. Let's say if I would do all these things, it would take me a ton of time. Like seriously a lot. There's a direct correlation. I only have X amount of days in the week or in the day, and if I start doing all these things myself, then obviously it's not going to work out. I would not be able to keep working, growing, I would not be able to work on new features or come up with new tools for connecting or whatever. Even though I want to create that content machine, that content marketing machine, there's no way I can do it all myself. The easy way to think is like, all right, just hire someone to do it. I've been at that spot as well where I start outsourcing and then I figured all right, I'm just going to find someone who can already do it, and that's it. Easy Peasy, they will do it, and I don't have to do anything. Unfortunately, that's not how it works. What I learned is actually I need to implement a three step process if you want to get it done right, and that's how I currently do it. The three steps are to systemize something, automate it and delegate it. I'll just keep on talking about the content marketing plan that I'm currently working on. Like I said, systemize, automate and delegate. The first thing when I think of content marketing, I need to make it more concrete. I need to know exactly what parts I'm going to do. Let's say if we're writing a blog post, you could say, well we're going to write a blog post. No, that's not enough. I'm actually dialing in, and I'm thinking about the process, like how do we make sure to go from nothing to a fully published blog post that is promoted at various places. Now if we break it down in small steps, and this is what I call systemizing it, the very first step is idea creation. We need to come up with the idea, what we're going to write about. And then research, like are we going to use some articles, what's going to be in there. And then usually we go for like a bullet point section where there basically is a synopsis of what the blog post is going to be about, then the blog post will actually be written, then there will be editing as well to make sure it's all good, images will be added. There's a checklist of things that basically checks if everything is in order, like are the subtitles in order, like any kind of things that we need to check before being published, then we publish it, and then we go into promotion. And of course promotion in turn is like a certain systemized way. Perhaps we want to say all right, we want to post it on Facebook three times over the next three weeks, and we want to post it on LinkedIn, and we want to rewrite the article to post on LinkedIn, or maybe we want to create a video out of it as well, and we want to publish that on YouTube. There's certain steps involved. What I'm trying to say is instead of just going at something, instead of just seeing how it goes and every single time you're sort of reinventing the wheel, what I recommend you to do in various of your tasks is that you really try to break down what exact steps you're doing. Because once you know what exact steps you're taking, then you're able to see the full process, and then you create something that can be repeated. If something can be repeated, it can be repeated by someone else as well. It's really important to basically create whatever you're working on. Whatever marketing channel you're working, whatever it is you're working on, try to break it down in small steps and see if there's a one pattern that every single time you're doing that task, all these steps have to be taken. Because once you ... Sometimes it can take a little practice, but once you're able to identify it, and once you're able to create all these small steps, then it already becomes easier to start outsourcing it later on. But before I start outsourcing, right after I sort of systemize it and I actually have in my mind or on paper, what exact steps need to be taken, then I go to the automate section and I ask myself what can be automated. Because as sexy as delegating is, automating is always better. If you can automate it, it's cheaper, it's more reliable, it's always good. Often times, there are parts in that list of tasks that can be automated. For example, with content marketing, I could automate, set up, set an automation that once something is published and work for us, it would immediately be added into a buffer so that automatically there will be something going out to some social media networks for example. There's always things you could automate or I could automate on Trello, if a certain Trello or management system where we basically, a project management system in our business that we use to maintain tasks and see who's doing what, et cetera, so I could automate it. If a certain blog post is done, it's published, then automatically it will add a to do to the person who's doing our promotion to make sure that they know exactly what this article needs to be promoted to here, here, here and here. That's also a part of the automation. I ask myself which part can be automated. And only after that, I look at it and like which part can be delegated. Because obviously there's things that you may need to do, and there's other things that perhaps you could easily delegate. If you look at the whole picture, if you look at, all right I want to outsource, for example my content marketing, or I want to outsource for example Facebook ads, or I want to outsource like this whole big thing. It's going to be really hard to find the right person who's doing it in a way that you want him to do. It's really hard. However, once you start breaking it up, you start to systemizing whatever you're working on, then all of a sudden, it's suddenly a lot easier, because there's usually smaller tasks that require a specific skill. Maybe you as the entrepreneur, you have like 1,000 hats and you know all these skills, you have all these skills and you know how to learn it, but someone else may be really good at copywriting, but they may not be good at designing, for example, just as an example. Then you know, all right, I need to find someone who can write a good copy and also someone who is able to create good images, for example. That's really it. We can all thing about all these sexy tricks and hacks and whatever could rank us number one on Google or get us more social reach on Facebook or whatever, and all these things, it's true, it matters, and I like to experiment with new things as well, I do that a lot, actually, however at the end of the day, what's even more important is that you understand common business practices and one of them is definitely this three step process to whatever you're doing. Systemize, automate and delegate. It's incredibly, incredibly important and once you're a master at that, everything becomes so much easier because you can take on so, so much more ideas and work and projects, et cetera, et cetera because you create a system for it first, you automate part of it, you delegate the rest and you are there only at the beginning part. We'll talk about our content marketing. What my idea is, in a nutshell, is really like I prefer to create videos. I'm not a very good writer, so my idea is, and we're going to see how this works out. My idea is I'm going to create a lot of video content, and then I create various processes to turn that video content into various articles for different places. I'll have someone to create, to turn that video into a blog post, to that what I'm saying on camera will be used on text as well. Then if it's relevant, we may be able to create an infographic from it. Also just with a clear process, a step by step plan. Not all of these things will be ready right away, but my goal is throughout this year, I'm going to build a repeatable process and basically a content marketing machine where I can just put in my input, share my ideas and thoughts and knowledge, and then my team will be able to either automate and delegate, to make sure we produce all this content on all kinds of places online. That's it for all of you who don't have enough time in the day. Systemize, automate and delegate. It's incredibly effective. If you're not a master at it, become a master at it, because it's going to change your life and your business. That's it for now, and I will see you all in the next episode.
In episode #29, Wilco talks about the most important question that you can ask yourself, and that is, "What is your why?" Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:39: Why are you doing what you're doing? 00:51: What is your why, and why it is important? 02:40: You need to know your why for internal motivation. 02:55: Simon Sinek: 'How great leaders inspire action' 03:44: Start with the why. They start with, "We want to change the world." 04:40: if you don't know your why, it's really hard to really influence people. 04:50: If you know your true why, you can convince people to believe in that same thing as you do. 06:02: What I always loved doing most, is to do things in a way that make me feel smarter than someone else. 07:10: Do things as the top couple percent. 08:15: ConnectRetarget that allows you to only retarget those for example, who spend more than x time on your site or who scrolled to at least 50% of your page. 09:00: The real point of this podcast is that by knowing your why, you'll, it will be easier motivate yourself, it will be easier to motivate your team, and it will also be way easier to influence your potential customers. Transcription: Hey everyone, it's me, Wilco de Kreij, here, and today I want to talk about the most important question that you can ask yourself, and that is, "What is your why?" What I mean with that is like, why are you doing what you're doing, and that, "Ah to make money," or whatever. Making money, or getting more sales, or getting more customers, that's a result of the work that you do, but that's not you're true why. So today, I want to talk about what is your why, and why it is important, because for a long time, I thought that the only reason to knowing your why is important, is basically to find internal motivation. And obviously, that's partially true, that's definitely true, but it's, that only grabs, that's only a small part of why it is so important. That's why I want to talk, dive into this today. So, if I look back over the years as an online entrepreneur, there's definitely been up and downs. There's periods where I'm super focused, and I can just move mountains. There's so much stuff happening, I feel I'm in the zone, and everything's going exactly as I planned, yada, yada, yada. But then, at other periods, I sort of plateau. Business is going flat, or at least it feel like that. I'm not as motivated, and I'm really searching for that motivation. At these periods, knowing my why is incredibly important. I mean, when my business was smaller, I was able to get enough motivation out of, for example, monetary results. I was like, "If I can do x,y,z," in terms of revenue or profit, or whatever, that motivated me, because it was going to have a substantial impact on my life. If I would double the amount of money I would make, it would have a substantial difference on my life. Well today, monetary goals don't drive me anymore. It's like, maybe you can, or maybe you cannot relate, but at some point it's just like, that doesn't really matter. And at that point, the why becomes even more important, because if you don't know why you're doing what you're doing, how do you get out of bed in the morning? Just as an example. So, you need to know your why for internal motivation. But what I discovered is actually, that's just, the why is not just for your own motivation, but if you know your why, everything will move along. In fact, I just watched a presentation by Simon Sinek, it's actually on TED, TED.com, you probably know You would search for, 'How great leaders inspire action.' I repeat, 'How great leaders inspire action.' You'll find his presentation. I highly recommend it, it's awesome. What he basically, what that presentation is basically about is that, as a company, a lot people they ... basically he draws a circle on the board. In the middle he has why, and then how, and then what, on the outside. Most companies, they talk about the what first. Like, "This computer, it has all these features." How; "It's really well designed, it works well." And then maybe the why, why they do their thing. But they focus on the what first. Well, some companies, they start with the why. They start with, "We want to change the world." Like, for example, Apple, "We want to change the status quo. We want to change the world. We're doing that by redesigning modern computing," and how, with all the products that they have. If you watch that presentation, it's going to make a lot more sense compared to how I'm explaining it, but basically where it comes down to is that those that start with they with, that's, basically you need to start with the why if you want to truly impact. If you truly want to follow ... get a group of people to follow you, if you truly want to be a leader, whether it is as a company, whether it is as a politician, or whatever it is. You need to start with your why, and if you don't know your why, it's really hard to really influence people, because people don't, they are not influenced by just the specs. They're not influenced by the what, only influenced by the true why. Now, this may sound super vague, right now, I apologize for that. My point here is that, if you know your true why, you can convince people to believe in that same thing as you do. That goes for your customers, or potential customers, but also in your team. If everyone in your team is just focused on like, "Oh, let's do this, because we need to make it happen," they're just doing their job to get paid, basically. However, if they truly believe in what you believe in as well, if you explain them the why you are doing things, and they believe that as well, that's when they go all in. That's when they will, you're like, "Let's do this together." It's not just about the money. Obviously they need to make a living, but they do it because they believe in it. They believe in the why. They believe in the reasoning behind it. For a long time, I haven't personally been super clear on this. Actually started to formulate this more and more in the recent period, so probably still changing as we go along, but I'm more than happy to just, you know, let you know what I think my why is. Because if I truly look at myself, and even as a young kid, what I always loved doing most, is to do things in a way that make me feel smarter than someone else. Not like smarter, I don't want to, no, that's probably the wrong wat of saying it, right. I don't feel smarter, because ... I actually don't, but I want to do things that are smarter than other people. I want to do things that are more efficient. For example, even in high school, when all the people would, for example, study three weeks for a test, I would challenge myself to do in like, two days, max. Why? Because it gave me a kick to just do it in a more clever way than someone else did. Like in the exact same thing these days; other people might just throw something online hoping for people to share with their friends. I love it when I can use, for example, UpViral and have system or a trick, or a strategy in place, that makes sure I'm in the advantage, that I can actually do things better, or smarter, or more efficient than someone else. And right now, this, once again, may sound super vague. I'm still sort of exploring, but that's really, in the real core of me, I love being, doing things that are basically more efficient, and more effective than the average. Do things as the top couple percent, basically, just of things a little bit more clever. Like clever tricks, clever strategies, clever, just tiny tweaks that make all the difference. That's what I love doing most, and I noticed that's also what I love teaching most all this, as well. Instead of just following the crowd, and do the same thing as everyone else is doing, yada, yada, I love it when I can just share a little trick, and like something that other people just haven't seen it, and those who do, they immediately have a competitive advantage over their competitors. That's what I love doing. And that's really what is the basis of both UpViral and Connectio. I connect all the tools. I just do the things a little bit trickier, a little bit smarter, a little bit better than everyone else. I give you an example. So for example, if you're advertising on Facebook, a lot of people, they're just retargeting, and they're retargeting everyone who visited their site, right. So I came up with ConnectRetarget that allows you to only retarget those for example, who spend more than x time on your site. Or who scrolled to at least 50% of your page. I like all these kind of things. I just doing it smarter than everyone else, and we're getting such a big improvement of ROI, but for me, personally, it's not even about the ROI itself, it's really about doing things smarter, doing things in a more clever way compared to the others, and to compared to my competitors. So, that's really what drives me. That's what I love, and right now I'm really going through that process of finding my true why, and finding the right word for it, because obviously I'm not a native English speaker. So in Dutch it's easier for me to formulate, and over time, when I talk about people, when I talk about this with other people, it will start to formulate better, and that's actually also why I'm sharing it here on the podcast with all of you, so you can all ... I'm just trying to formulate my why. The real point of this podcast is that by knowing your why, you'll, it will be easier motivate yourself, it will be easier to motivate your team, and it will also be way easier to influence your potential customers. Because if they believe in your why, regardless of what the actual product of you does, that you deliver, but if they believe in your why, they are so much more inclined to become a customer compared to a competitive product that actually may do the exact same thing, may have, may look the same, may smell the same, maybe the exact same, but if they believe in your mission, if they believe in your why, they're going to take your product. They're going to buy your product, because they believe in your why, and by buying it, they are basically voting for that as well. So that's why it's so important. So once again, I would highly recommend you to look up the video called, 'How great leaders inspire action.' It's in TED.com, and it's presented by Simon Sinek. I'm not sure if I pronounce it right, but I just watched it this morning, and I absolutely love ... and actually just noticed that it got over 35 million views, so there's a good chance that you've already watched, that you've already seen it. So, if not, go check it out, and with that having said, I will talk to you all soon.
Adverteren op Facebook begint steeds meer terrein te winnen bij de kleinere ondernemer. We zien dat deze manier van adverteren goed werkt om leads te realiseren en dit dient als eerste startpunt om een schaalbare business neer te zetten. Aan de andere kant zien we dat op Facebook de concurrentie tussen adverteerders groter wordt. Daardoor wordt de click duurder en moeten we steeds slimmer gaan adverteren. Wilco de Kreij is flink wat jaren bezig om het leven van de ondernemer die aan online marketing doet, makkelijker te maken. Met zijn twee bedrijven Connectio en UpViral heeft hij internationaal een succesvolle online business opgezet. Wilco de Kreij begon al jong met het ontdekken van het internet en de eindeloze mogelijkheden. Op zijn 16e startte hij met het verkopen van zonnebrillen, die populaire zonnebrillen uit The Matrix. Wilco raakte geïnspireerd wat er in dat jaar (2003) allemaal al mogelijk was en vanaf dat moment is bij Wilco het ondernemers-gen ontstaan. Waar ik vooral met Wilco over sprak is hoe Wilco tot concepten komt, hoe hij ze valideert aan de markt en hoe hij dit opschaalt tot een bedrijf met een flink team aan mensen die overal ter wereld voor hem opereren. We spraken daarnaast over productivteit, focus, zelfontwikkeling en natuurlijk was de rode draad online marketing. Wilco deelt met jou wat wel en niet werkt in online marketing en is een professional waar veel ondernemers van kunnen leren! Beluister hier het interview.
In episode #25, Wilco talks about the most important of every sale which is what do you once someone becomes a customer of yours. Time Stamped Show Notes: �00:30: Today's episode is going be relevant for you and you specifically. 01:15: The most important aspect is actually, what do you once someone becomes a customer of yours. 01:48: You need to put in the work to get the customers in. 01:59: It's so much cheaper to get someone who's already a customer to buy another product of yours over and over again. 02:48: Now, the most important part is often to get your customers to consume your product. 04:10: The moment that they start consuming your course, the moment they actually go through your course, that's when things change. 04:51: He had a genius idea for this, in his course, he's basically adding incentives for people to go through it. 06:40: Connectio.io, it's a platform where we sell various tools for Facebook advertising. 06:43: ConnectLeads, it's a tool to collect Facebook lead ads and add them into your auto spinner. 06:45: Connect Audience which automatically synchronizes any of your email lists. 06:50: ConnectRetarget, you can run behavioral target audiences. 07:35: I bundled them all together, we call that ConnectSuite. 09:10: As I said, I'm in a software as a service, so we are depending on recurring revenue. 09:55: I'm actually thinking of creating a course which basically takes them by the hand, and then going through every step by step, how do you basically from zero to creating a profitable Facebook ad campaign. 11:35: On top of that, I'm currently setting up various email automations that basically will check that they consumed the content. 12:35: We know that once people actually go through and consume everything, they're going to be way more likely to actually stick around. 13:53: Don't just sell them the idea of that, make sure to actually go through after the sale. 14:09 If you even add more value to the product than you initially promise them, then they're going to be a loyal customer for life. 15:06: It's going to be a customer for life if you treat them well right and with respect.00:30: Today's episode is going be relevant for you and you specifically. 01:15: The most important aspect is actually, what do you once someone becomes a customer of yours. 01:48: You need to put in the work to get the customers in. 01:59: It's so much cheaper to get someone who's already a customer to buy another product of yours over and over again. 02:48: Now, the most important part is often to get your customers to consume your product. 04:10: The moment that they start consuming your course, the moment they actually go through your course, that's when things change. 04:51: He had a genius idea for this, in his course, he's basically adding incentives for people to go through it. 06:40: Connectio.io, it's a platform where we sell various tools for Facebook advertising. 06:43: ConnectLeads, it's a tool to collect Facebook lead ads and add them into your auto spinner. 06:45: Connect Audience which automatically synchronizes any of your email lists. 06:50: ConnectRetarget, you can run behavioral target audiences. 07:35: I bundled them all together, we call that ConnectSuite. 09:10: As I said, I'm in a software as a service, so we are depending on recurring revenue. 09:55: I'm actually thinking of creating a course which basically takes them by the hand, and then going through every step by step, how do you basically from zero to creating a profitable Facebook ad campaign. 11:35: On top of that, I'm currently setting up various email automations that basically will check that they consumed the content. 12:35: We know that once people actually go through and consume everything, they're going to be way more likely to actually stick around. 13:53: Don't just sell them the idea of that, make sure to actually go through after the sale. 14:09 If you even add more value to the product than you initially promise them, then they're going to be a loyal customer for life. 15:06: It's going to be a customer for life if you treat them well right and with respect. 00:30: Today's episode is going be relevant for you and you specifically. 01:15: The most important aspect is actually, what do you once someone becomes a customer of yours. 01:48: You need to put in the work to get the customers in. 01:59: It's so much cheaper to get someone who's already a customer to buy another product of yours over and over again. 02:48: Now, the most important part is often to get your customers to consume your product. 04:10: The moment that they start consuming your course, the moment they actually go through your course, that's when things change. 04:51: He had a genius idea for this, in his course, he's basically adding incentives for people to go through it. 06:40: Connectio.io, it's a platform where we sell various tools for Facebook advertising. 06:43: ConnectLeads, it's a tool to collect Facebook lead ads and add them into your auto spinner. 06:45: Connect Audience which automatically synchronizes any of your email lists. 06:50: ConnectRetarget, you can run behavioral target audiences. 07:35: I bundled them all together, we call that ConnectSuite. 09:10: As I said, I'm in a software as a service, so we are depending on recurring revenue. 09:55: I'm actually thinking of creating a course which basically takes them by the hand, and then going through every step by step, how do you basically from zero to creating a profitable Facebook ad campaign. 11:35: On top of that, I'm currently setting up various email automations that basically will check that they consumed the content. 12:35: We know that once people actually go through and consume everything, they're going to be way more likely to actually stick around. 13:53: Don't just sell them the idea of that, make sure to actually go through after the sale. 14:09 If you even add more value to the product than you initially promise them, then they're going to be a loyal customer for life. 15:06: It's going to be a customer for life if you treat them well right and with respect. Transcription: Hey hey. It's Wilco de Kreij here back for another episode. Today's episode is going be relevant for you and you specifically. The reason why I know that is because this is going to be very relevant for pretty much everyone who runs a business, everyone who's selling something, whether it's online or offline actually. It doesn't really matter. Today I'm going to talk about, what is essentially the most important aspect of every sale. Whenever you sell something to a customer, like I said, it doesn't matter whether it's online or offline, whether you're in B to B, B to C, or if you're running a set of servers like I do, or it really does not matter. The most important thing isn't what you do up to that point, isn't the kind of adds that you're running, isn't the kind of landing page you get, isn't the kind of emails that you're sending out. It isn't all that stuff. The most important aspect is actually, what do you once someone becomes a customer of yours. The thing is that a lot of people are like a lot of the times, really focused on getting new customers through the door. A lot of the time as a marketer, it's focused on that aspect, but the reason why we're focusing so much time on that is because it's hard to get customers to the door. Right? Obviously I love it. I'm a marketer. It's not like you just put one message online, and you'll get 1,000 customers. You need to put in the work. You need to put in the work to get the customers in. Here's the thing. Here's the thing. Once someone is a customer, it's so much cheaper, so much easier to get them to become repeat customers. It's so much cheaper to get someone who's already a customer to buy another product of yours over and over again, compared to going for someone new who's never heard of you before. This goes for every kind of market. Personally, I am as a service, which means that I'm very much focused on recurring. I'm charging a monthly or yearly. Obviously, I want them to actually start using our platforms. I want them to get results that they desire because once they get the results they desire using our platforms, they're never going to leave. Right? They're going to stick around. They're going to pay us monthly, month after month after month, year after year after year. That is our goal. That is our win win. They are getting the value that they want, and in return they're paying us a monthly fee. Right? Now, the most important part is often to get your customers to consume your product. Right? Let's take for example digital products, digital courses. There's a ton of people who sell digital courses but as you may know, most people who buy an online course, they don't go through the course. They don't. I'm going to assume that let's say you have an online course, and you create something of value. You create a course that I'm going to assume that you're proud of it, right? You created the course. You put all your heart and soul into it and you're proud of it, and you know that if someone is going through that course, it will help them. You know what else will happen once they go through that course? They will thank you for it. They will love you for it. They will respect you. They will see you as the authority. If someone just sees and ad on Facebook and they see your ad and maybe they go through your sales page, your webinar and then they purchase your course. They don't consume the product, they just made an impulse decision to purchase your product but there's a good chance that next week or so, they don't even know who you are, or a month later or so. You haven't really built a connection. You haven't really helped them. The moment that they start consuming your course, the moment they actually go through your course, that's when things change. Now, obviously you can think, I'm doing every thing I can to sell them. I'm going to get them excited and assuming that they're excited enough to purchase my course, then they're going to consume the thing as well. Well, that's where you're wrong. Even after they open their wallet, even after they took the credit card and made a purchase, then you sort of need to sell them again into going through your product. You need to do everything you can. I say a wile ago I was at a mastermind, and there was this guy. His name was Dean Harland. He had a genius idea for this. In his course, he's basically adding incentives for people to go through it. He basically he raised the price of the product a little but, but because of that, basically I'm just going to give you an example number. These are not real numbers. Let's say his original course was $50. What he would actually do is he would say, "Hey it's not 50. It's actually $60." Let's say it's 10 modules and then once people bought it, he would say, "Alright cool. You know what? Every single time you finish a module, I'll give you a dollar. Every single time, I'll give you a dollar." Obviously, they'll be paid at the end, because they don't want to send over a dollar every single time, because of the hassle. Because of that, people got instant gratification. I'm not saying you need to pay people to go through your course. Definitely not. What he did is genius because it made people, even more excited not just to purchase the course, because often people just get excited to buy it because the idea of getting the results, but actually going through the course, that's another thing. He got people excited go through the course, to actually go and consume all the content and because of that, he immediately turned into the guy who helped him, and the actual authority, and the expert in his market. Because of that, it was no so much easier to then say, "I've got all these other kind of products," because now they already knew, this course was insanely good, especially for the kind of money I paid. The next kind of course is probably good as well. His uptake on his follow up courses, they went through the roof using this method. The reason why I'm bringing this up right here is actually because we're actually going through something in our business as well. As you probably know, or may or may not know actually, one of my businesses is called Connectio.io. It's a platform where we sell various tools for Facebook advertising. For example, we have ConnectLeads. It's a tool to collect Facebook lead ads and add them into your auto spinner. We have Connect Audience which automatically synchronizes any of your email lists. For example, if you're using Active Campaign, you can create a custom audience on Facebook saying everyone who opens a certain email or everyone who did not open. We have ConnectRetarget. You can run behavioral target audiences. You can actually read target people based on for example, if they scroll to a certain section on your page, or based on how many seconds or how many minutes they spend on your site, and all kinds of behavioral things. We got a bunch of Facebook tools and what I recently did as a test, is I bundled them all together. I sold them as a package all together. We call that ConnectSuite and based on that, they've got all these tools together. Here's the problem. Basically we said, here's ConnectSuite, and you get all these different tools. Then people log in and they saw all these different tools and they we didn't notice but as we started talking to our customers, they were sort of overwhelmed. They didn't know where to start. They didn't even, they were literally overwhelmed. They were literally like, alright, where do I start? Do I start with ConnectExplore, ConnectLeads, ConnectRetarget, ConnectAudience? What do I do first? We thought, this is an amazing value for Facebook advertising, and it is. We see that people who are already using Facebook ads, they immediately see the value because the get it. They get what all these tools do and they get the amount of value. They get what kind of impact it has on their results. We also get customers in, who are just starting out with Facebook ads, and they're sort of overwhelmed. Because of that, they're not actually going through everything and they want to be taken by the hand and show them what is what. Because of that, because people were not actually going through everything, because people were not really consuming it, the actual cancellation rate was way too high. As I said, I'm in a software as a service, so we are depending on recurring revenue. We need to decrease our turn out rate. We need to make sure that most people are going to want to stick with us. They don't want to cancel. If people are canceling because they don't even know what we do, then we have something to work on. I'll give you an example. Here's something we're currently working on to fix this. I still want to sell all of these products as a package because I think it's an amazing value and I know it's going to help a lot of Facebook advertisers, but because I don't want to overwhelm them, I'm actually thinking. This is right now just something that's in my mind. If you want a bit of a back story, you might actually see this later on in a webinar or somewhere in a special offer anything like that, when I'm testing it out. Here's the idea. Instead of basically selling ConnectSuite, I'm actually thinking of creating a course which basically takes them by the hand, and then going through every step by step, how do you basically from zero to creating a profitable Facebook ad campaign. Not just using our tools, but leveraging our tools but also leveraging all the regular things that are inside the Facebook ads, all the regular strategies and how do you write your ads and things like that. By doing that, we can actually if we sell that course to potential customers, and along with that, we actually say, "On top of that you'll actually get a trail to ConnectSuite." They'll still be able to use all these tools, but now instead of buying all the tools, and in their minds they should be getting value out of all of these tools, now they are actually purchasing that course. That course has a single entry point. They have a single entry point like this is what I should actually go through. Lesson one, module one, module two, module three, module four, module five, module six, et cetera, et cetera. Because of that, it's going to be easier for them to go through everything without being overwhelmed because it's going to be short videos one by one, and instead of confusing them with like five different options. Where do you get started. You get the point. My idea is that that's going to help a lot. On top of that, still I don't just want to assume that people are going to go through the content. On top of that, I'm currently setting up various email automations that basically will check. This is something more advanced. I'm not sure what other easy tools for this to create. I'm using ActiveCampaign so I'm a bit of a nerd. I would say so. Actually doing some checks and sending custom bags over to see if someone went through a module or not. Basically, what we're going to do is basically create a photo sequence that will depend based on what people have already been through. If they purchased but they haven't been through the course, they're going to get certain emails. If they already went through certain parts of the course, then they're going to get emails about the parts they have not yet been going through. We're not just going to say, go through the course. No. We're actually getting them excited. We're still kind of selling them on the idea. We're showing for example case studies and what people have done using that system, or we're sending out small triggers or curiosity gaps or anything we can do to try to get people excited about the next step they should take. We know that once people actually go through and consume everything, they're going to be way more likely to actually stick around. By the end of the course, they might just have a profitable Facebook ad campaign, which is awesome. They'll also be doing that, leveraging our tools inside of Connectio.io. Because of that, because they are not sort of dependent on it. Now they're used to it, they're not as likely to cancel because they already know if they will cancel on Connectio.io, then for example, their retargeting ads are not going to perform as well, because they don't have ConnectRetarget anymore. They will have to find another solution for their Facebook lead ads. They will have to manually create and update their custom audiences instead of ConnectAudience doing that automatically for them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. My point here is that whatever you are selling, whatever it is. It could be a service, could be B to B, could even be B to C, doesn't really matter. Make sure to get your customers to consume your product. Make sure to get them, whatever you're selling them on, whatever your product is solving for them, don't just sell them the idea of that. Make sure to actually go through after the sale. Make sure you follow them. Make sure you over deliver with even more value than you delivered upfront. If you make sure that they will go through your product, they will consume your product. If you even add more value to the product than you initially promise them, then they're going to be a loyal customer for life. The most important thing, what you can do, when every sale happens is what you do after the sale. I'm going to be completely honest here, I haven't done that in every part of my online career. Initially I just had a couple of email campaigns and when I started out, what I was basically doing is just pitching them in the next product, next product, next product. Even though short term that kind of works. It's okay to have an upsell, but initially I was thinking, I need to sell them more. Now, I know that it's even more important to get them to consume the product, to get them to build that connection and forge that connection and then, later when the time is right, then of course, yeah, you can make them another offer if that is relevant for them, if that actually helps them. That's fine. At that point, you already have established yourself as being a real relationship. You already have a good relationship with them. It's going to be a customer for life if you treat them well right and with respect. That's my tip for all of you today, to make sure that every single time you get a customer though the door, do whatever you can do to make them feel special, make them go through your content, make them consume your product, and just make sure you're doing whatever they want you to do and be awesome. With that having said, I'll see you all on the next episode. Talk to you soon.
Wilco is the founder of 2 software companies that he has built using Facebook ads. He details his strategies for video ads that convert on Facebook. How to create stories in your videos, how to split test and generate the greatest ROI from you ad. Show Notes When to running Facebook ads. The importance of testing and buying data of your Facebook ads. How emoticons will help your video ads convert. Other tips and strategies with video ads like storytelling and average time for video. Quotes: “You don’t have a real business unless you have traffic.” Links: FunnelHackerRadio.com FunnelHackerRadio.com/freetrial FunnelHackerRadio.com/dreamcar Connectio.io
The Business Method Podcast: High-Performance & Entrepreneurship
Today listeners, we have the founder of Upviral and ConnectIO, Wilco de Kreij on the show. Wilco is an entrepreneur that started dabbling in eCommerce as a teenager in the early 2000's selling sunglasses online. He continued his passion for building business online for sixteen years and is now the founder of two successful location-independent businesses. Wilco shares with us the process of building Upviral and Connect IO while making sure he was still able to travel when he wanted. We also chat about how the money is managed within his business to keep things simple and to keep focused on growth. Lastly, he shares what is essential when moving from a 6-figure business to a 7-figure business. 01:45: Utrecht, Netherlands 03:25: Who is Wilco de Kreij 08:10: Starting Upviral 13:18: ConnectIO 15:14: Spreading Your Team Amongst Two Different Businesses 16:06: The Biggest Difference Between 6-figure vs. 7-figure Entrepreneurs 17:07: Ways to Let Little Things Go as an Entrepreneur 18:31: When Disasters Happen While on Vacation/Holiday 24:14: How Wilco Manages the Flow of Money in His Businesses 28:11: What is Your Business's 100 Year Plan? Contact Info: Facebook Profile: https://www.facebook.com/wdekreij http://connectio.io/ http://upviral.com/ http://connectio.io/connectleads/ Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/entrepreneur-house-live-in/id1069958541?mt=2
In episode #24, Wilco shares his experiences on hanging out with guys who run 8 figure businesses. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:50: We went to the southern part of Italy. 01:12: I've got roughly 20 people on our team, we've got tens of thousands of customers. 02:00: Helped me to sort of zoom out and basically get my helicopter view of the business back. 02:19: Working in your business, versus, on your business. 02:55: I just need people who are ahead of me, people who have a business that's bigger than me, bigger than mine. 03:15: I need to see others achieve something, because then when I see other people achieve it, then I know I can do it as well. 04:08: Over time it became harder to find people that are ahead of me. 04:20: I've run into, for example, Russell Brunson's mastermind. 05:38: I also notice is that the more I hang out with people who are ahead of me, the more I sort of assume that whatever I know isn't that special. 06:20: The point is that, the more I hang out with people who are doing better than me, the more I think I don't have the right to talk about anything I know. 06:35: We opened a Facebook group for one of our businesses, for all the customers for Connectio.io 07:00: "You don't have to know everything to be an expert in a sort of niche, you just have to know more than your audience." 07:55: Last week I had a small get together with some local entrepreneurs here in the Netherlands. 08:20: I would highly recommend you to try to hang out with people who are ahead of you, because you can learn from them, you can prevent mistakes that they've already made. 09:15: Hang out with people who are ahead of you. 09:24: Never ever forget that you know more than you actually think you do. Transcription: Hey, hey, hey. It's me, Wilco de Kreij, and I am back for a new episode. I'm actually excited, a lot has happened since last time. I want to apologize in advance first, because I'm actually sick, but I didn't want to use that as an excuse not to record this episode. If I sound like a mess, if I sound terrible, I apologize. Anyway, so last week or the week before my wife and I we went away for a week, a holiday. We went to the southern part of Italy, which was awesome. Mainly because we went away for one week. Normally we take trips for three or four weeks at a time, so do a couple of one month trips every single year, but when you're away for three or four weeks, as you can imagine, it's not easy to be away for that long if you have an online business, right? I've got roughly 20 people on our team, we've got tens of thousands of customers, so it's literally impossible to be offline for three or four weeks. It's just not possible, right? What usually ends up happening is that I spend a lot of time working while I'm on holiday and this time around we just went away for one week. It's just so much easier. There's not a lot of things to prepare for that and you can just be pretty much offline for a week. I did some checking on my phone and I answered a couple of questions to my team, but most of the things were just, they could just say, "Well, if we're not able to handle it, we'll be back in just a few days." That's totally fine. People understand that, right? It's been a blast and it really helped me to sort of zoom out and basically get my helicopter view of the business back, so see where we're headed, where we currently stand, what's the longterm vision, and things like that. Because to be completely honest, sometimes it's not easy. I actually recorded another episode about this not too long ago actually where I talked about working in your business, versus, on your business. Sometimes I get trapped by work in my business and that's just not the most effective use of my time. I need to work on my business and sometimes you just need to step back for a little bit in order to realize that you've actually started working in your business without evening noticing it. Right now I got full clarity again. I'm really excited about it. One of the things I realized is that it's so incredibly important to hang out with people who are ahead of me, right? This might be different for everyone else, but I just need people who are ahead of me, people who have a business that's bigger than me, bigger than mine, people who are doing ... Who have a bigger team, who think ... Who I actually look up to and those are the kind of people that I need to hang out with, because if I don't I tend to ... It tends to result in a limiting belief, basically. I need to see others achieve something, because then when I see other people achieve it, then I know I can do it as well, right? When I started in the online marketing world, I mean, I was already running a business, but when I started doing in the online marketing world, I saw a lot of people who were quite a few steps ahead of me. I was able to learn a lot, I was able to be inspired by them, and think, "Wow, they're doing some amazing numbers and they're doing this and that." It was awesome, but to be completely honest, a lot of those people they sort of plateaued, right? They didn't really grow, they sort of ... They have minor ... They sort of grew their business but not to the amount of a level that I want to grow, so over time all those people that I used to look up to, now are ... There's nothing I can learn from them anymore. Over time ... I don't want to sound like a dick or anything like that, but over time it became harder to find people that are ahead of me, right? Fortunately, I've been lucky enough to run into various people. I've run into, for example, Russell Brunson's mastermind and that helped me to connect with a lot of people who are still quite a few steps ahead of me. Also, outside that space I've been able to find people who are doing eight or sometimes even nine figure businesses, which is insane, right? They're so many steps ahead of me and it's been awesome. It's been so great, because it really helped me to believe bigger things, basically. I know from my past experience, every single time I set a certain goal and I believe that it can be achieved, then it's easy, right? The hardest part for me personally is to start believing that something is possible, right? I mean, it's easy to believe that I've worked all these years and this year I for example, 10% growth. I mean, that's not hard. If I worked all these years to get to where I am today, and then being able to triple my business this year, I mean, that's something that is hard to believe. Then, in addition to that, next year triple it again. I mean, that is something that's insanely hard to believe. I need to see other people who've done the exact same thing or even bigger to actually say, "All right. If they can do it and frankly, they're not smarter than me. If they can do it, then I can do it as well," right? There is a downside. There's definitely a downside, because one thing I also notice is that the more I hang out with people who are ahead of me, the more I sort of assume that whatever I know isn't that special, right? I'll give you an example. For example, I haven't emailed ... I mean, you might be on our email list as well, but I haven't sent out that many emails to my email list, because quite frankly, I sort of feel like, "What do I know about what they're interested in? Everything I know, they know as well," right? I sort of forget that where I started out and where a lot of our audience is still at, right? Most of our audience they don't have, for example, a seven figure business, or they don't have 20 people on their team, or they don't have ... That's totally fine, that's not the point. The point is that, the more I hang out with people who are doing better than me, the more I think I don't have the right to talk about anything I know, right? Actually, yesterday, I'm not sure, you might have seen this or not. Yesterday we opened a Facebook group for one of our businesses, for all the customers for Connectio. For a long time I didn't do that because I literally thought, "What do I know? Why would I listen to me? I mean, I'm just this guy and I don't know that much," because I was always comparing myself to guys who were ahead of me, right? Last week I was actually reading, rereading the book of Russell Brunson and he said something in the line of like, "You don't have to know everything to be an expert in a sort of niche, you just have to know more than your audience." That's actually true. I mean, if you look at the movie, Catch Me If You Can, it's actually based on a true story. That guy, he was actually giving classes on a university, and he wasn't ... Nobody saw that he was just tricking the system. He was basically a student and he pretended to be the teacher. All he did was every single time, he just read the next chapter in advance. It was always just one chapter in advance, he was reading it. That's the classic example of like, he just knew more than the rest of them. That's really the downside, that you might believe or might think that you don't know as much as you actually do. Actually, last week I had a small get together with some local entrepreneurs here in the Netherlands and as I was talking, I'm like, "Wow, so much stuff that I think is logic and so much stuff that I think actually makes sense and everybody knows it. All of them, they don't have a clue." That's totally fine, right? Once again, I'm not judging them or anything like that, but my here is that even if ... I would highly recommend you to try to hang out with people who are ahead of you, because you can learn from them, you can prevent mistakes that they've already made. At the same time, never ever forget where you came from. Never ever forget that you know more than you actually think you do, right? I mean, it's just so easy to just think that everything that you do and everything that you learn it's common sense. Because for you, it is common sense. Because for you, it is actually easy. For you, all these things do come naturally. That doesn't mean that for other people that comes naturally as well and that other people know what you know, right? Even I ... I just have to continuously remind myself and I'm still feeling sort of awkward about teaching all this, because sometimes I just feel like, "Why would they listen to me?" It's only after I actually get people to say, "Ah yeah, I had no clue," and then I'm like, "Huh? I thought it was obvious," right? Then I sort of start talking more. Yeah, that's also one of my limiting beliefs I assume. Anyway, I just wanted to share that. For all of you who want to grow your business, do two things. Make sure, first of all, to hang out with people who are ahead of you. That's been my biggest lesson over the last year or so. It's helped me to grow my business a ton. Secondly, never ever forget where you came from. Never ever forget that you know more than you actually think you do and you're more valuable than you think you are. With that said, I will talk to you all soon.
In episode #22, Wilco shares a chat he recently had with someone who asked him some of the right questions to basically get himself focused. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:28: I just bought myself a new toy. 00:50: It's actually a whiteboard with a year planner on it. 01:11: I just need it to be something more visual where I plan out all the projects so I could see exactly. 02:27: As an entrepreneur, it's not always easy to stay focused on the right things. 02:37: Would your business be around in 300 years from now? 03:00: What should happen in order for that business to be around in 100 years? 04:46: If you look at all the businesses that have been around for more than 100 years, none of them solely rely on its founder. 05:35: If you look at UpViral, a lot of the dashboard and interface and how certain features work, I've all created it myself. 07:39: Is it actually something longterm? 07:46: Connectio is 100% focused on Facebook ads and UpViral is 100% focused on getting people to share the message. 08:00: UpViral will be way, way, way much more longterm compared to Connectio 08:15: Connectio makes Facebook ads more effective. 08:50: I would say it's only a matter of time that Facebook will be not cool anymore. 09:34: With UpViral, it's not depending on any network at all. 10:20: I've also seen a lot of people who are creating things that are really just focused on a certain trick. 11:36: Everything I do since that time has been longterm and I can still use that in my business today. Transcription: Hey, it's Wilco de Kreij here and I just bought myself a new toy. I'm really excited about it, but I'm going to guess that once you hear what it actually is, you're like, "Huh. Boring." Yeah, it might actually be boring, but I'm actually geeking out and it's actually crazy that I never bought it earlier. It's not a tech toy or an iPad or anything like that, but it's actually a whiteboard with a year planner on it. I already have a whiteboard in my office. It just helps me to write things up and brainstorm a little bit, but I never really had a good year planner in the office. I always write it on checklist or a notes or in a. Basically, it's in my mind, right, but I just need it to be something more visual where I plan out all the projects so I could see exactly, right. All right, next month, we're doing this. This week, we're doing that. Then the month after, we're doing that because what I sometimes realize is that in our business, we're working on so many things at the same time and at some point, we launch something or we create something or finish a certain project or a deadline and then right after, I'm like, "Wait, a second, the next whatever should be happening next. It should've been done already, right. It should at least be halfway." Then, there's a bit of a delay because then I start on that project even though it should've started a month before and just get all the pieces and puzzles moving because obviously, a lot of the projects that we get out are depending on the various people, right. You'll need, for example, if we're launching a project, you'll need designers, video editors, copywriters, support training, developers, obviously, UX interface. There's so many things, so many pieces of the puzzle that are needed to get everything in motion. In other words, planning is a big part of running a business, right. Now with that, I recently had a chat with someone who asked me some of the right questions to basically get myself focused because as you might know, as an entrepreneur, it's not always easy to stay focused on the right things and he asked me a really good question. He asked me, "Would your business be around in 300 years from now?" I'm like, Three hundred years? No way. That's way too far ahead, right." Then he was like, "All right, would your business be around 100 years from now?" I'm like, "A hundred years? The internet might not even exist at that point, right. A hundred years is way, way, way too far off." Then he asked me like, "All right, what should happen in order for that business to be around in 100 years?" It's funny because I never really looked at it like that. I try to plan ahead, but 100 years, that's a long time, right. That's an insanely long time. I'm only 30 years old myself so that's like more than three times as my age, right, which is insane, but even though I wasn't able to answer that question because to be honest, I don't know yet at least what I should be doing to create something that would last an eternity or at least last 100 years and would still be around, right. Because I was thinking about that question, it did help me to basically make my own planning more longterm, right, because I'm not sure about you, but I usually have a hard time to really see the future in five years from now. I can see it for the next month, three months from now, six months from now as well and maybe even a year, but that's about as long as it goes, right. I sort of know where the business and everything should be going like multiple years from now, but there's a difference between knowing and knowing, right. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but I sort of know it, but I don't feel it. I don't really know it, right. When I was thinking about, all right, what should I do to make sure my business is around 100 years, then I suddenly started to realize that I should be focusing on completely different things, right. If you look at all the businesses that have been around for more than 100 years, none of them solely rely on its founder, right. As soon as a business is just relying on the founder, in this case on myself, that's not a good longterm strategy because quite frankly, I don't think I'm going to survive 100 years, right. Now if you look at the five-year perspective, you would say you can easily rely on just the founder because I'm hoping I'm going to be alive in five years still, right. Let's count on that. At the same time because I was thinking about that 100-year plan, I was like wait a second, why should it always rely on me? It doesn't mean I would always be involved, but I didn't realize that in order to really grow and really to go to the next level, I need to hand off certain things that I'm not the best at, right. I'll give you an example. If you look at UpViral, a lot of the dashboard and interface and how certain features work, I've all created it myself, right. I didn't code it. I didn't develop the actual technical part, but I did put it all on paper. Basically, I drew it all out and I decided how should things work and how should things not work, right. If you look at the grand scheme of things, if you look at certain massive SaaS companies, massive software as a service companies, the level of detail and the level of ... Basically, the speed of development is just so much faster than ... There's always room for improvement, right. That made me realize, wait a second. Now I'm currently doing all of that, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the best at this. There are people out there, a lot actually that this is what they do. They design the interface. They decide on what should be in there, what not. There's people who are way better at that and see all the logic and can focus on that full time while I should actually divide all my time to all different kind of things, right, not just a product, but also the marketing and affiliates and managing the team. There's a lot of things that I need to do. Long story short, by asking myself the question like what should we do in order to still be around in 100 years, even though that might be a silly question for many businesses these days, like many businesses if you're focusing online, it might not be as relevant, but it does change your way of thinking if you're really thinking about it this way and it will make you realize things that maybe you should just hand things off. Another thing that's really important right away, and I cannot stress this enough and this is actually something that might be relevant, it's actually relevant for everyone who's starting a business as well as those who are already running a business, and that is also to really think about whatever your thing is, is it actually something longterm? I'll give you an example. As you probably know, I have two businesses, UpViral and Connectio. Connectiois 100% focused on Facebook ads and UpViral is 100% focused on getting people to share the message, right. If I'm going to be completely honest, UpViral will be way, way, way much more longterm compared to Connectio. Now does that mean I'm going to quit Connect IO? No, definitely not. That's completely opposite of what I'm trying to say. The point is that Connect IO is 100% depending on Facebook ads. It makes Facebook ads more effective. In other words, as soon as advertisers stop using Facebook, then Connect IO will not be of much use. In other words, if Facebook for some reason will magically disappear or, for example, the same thing will happen as what happened with MySpace, for example ... At some point, MySpace was the place to be, right. Look at it right now. I don't know anyone who's using MySpace. Twitter was huge. Twitter is still big, but not what it was before, right. I would say it's only a matter of time that Facebook will be not cool anymore, right. Because it's a social thing, it doesn't last forever. Just like every local restaurant, it's cool for a while and then all the non-cool people go there and all the cool people go somewhere else. With Facebook, I expect the exact same thing to happen, which means that once people start to move over to another platform, advertisers are going to shift towards the new platform as well and then, connectio will not be as useful as it currently is. That's not going to happen overnight. It's not going to happen in the next two years, but if you look at it, for example, 10 years ahead, then I'm pretty sure that Facebook will not be around, at least not in the current form, right. That's my take on it. However, with UpViral, it's not depending on any network at all, right. It doesn't matter if people are using Facebook, doesn't matter if people are using Twitter, doesn't matter if people are using Yip, Yap, Yung which doesn't even exist, right. It doesn't matter which social network or which interaction they use between people because it's based on an invite link basis. People can share it wherever and people will always be talking to other people. People will always be in contact with other people because it's all based on word of mouth, right. For that reason, I see UpViral as something way more longterm because it's not depending on anything that is temporary. It's not depending on anything that could just cease to exist from one day or another or one year to another. These are two examples. I've also seen a lot of people who are creating things that are really just focused on a certain trick or a certain hack or something that is currently working or something that is, for example, not really according to the rules of a certain platform, right. They're having some cool tricks on Facebook or on Twitter or whatever and they created products around it. You just know before even starting a project like that, you just know that whatever that thing is, it's not going to be around for like six months, right. That's super, super, super short term. If you have something like that, then please stop, please, you should stop. You want to make sure even though 100 years is way too long for most people even for myself, but at least you want to aim yourself at least like a three-year plan, a four-year plan. Even though plans will change and even though yes, I know it's going to be hard to create a plan that far ahead, I even still struggle with that sometimes because there's so many opportunities and so much stuff and there's so much that could happen, but at least you want to be clear on what could happen and what you are planning to happen in those couple of years because that way, you can actually start focusing on things right now. Just yesterday, I was working on some funnels and I actually realized that I was actually using a lot of my work from 2015, right. I was using certain sales pages, certain copy because everything I do since that time has been longterm and I can still use that in my business today. Because of that, everything grows much faster because I don't have to start over every six months or every year or so. The takeaway for today is to whatever you are doing, stop for a second and ask yourself a question what should you do to make sure that my business is going to be around for another 100 years, even though that might seem crazy, but focus on that and then, you will realize that at least you should have something that will be around for five years. Anyway, I hope this helps and I will talk to you all soon.
01:35 Sunglasses Spark, Shutdowns and Side Project Plug In Success 09:30 “Everything was a lesson in itself” Mindset 11:33 Painful First Lessons Hiring Developers 14:55 Finding a Big Partner to Launch a Product 19:42 User Interface Design 23:00 Big Lessons from Launches: Prepping, Timing and Backing Up Everything 31:15 Multi Projects, Launches and Teams 32:25 Upviral Story 36:30 Shooting to the Moon but also being Realistic 38:45 How to Value/Price your Product 42:00 Getting into a Recurring Business and Long Term Vision 44:20 Finding and Hiring Developers: Trial Projects 46:08 Hiring and Company Culture 47:50 “If you launch something you’re proud of, you’re launching too late” 48:50 Staying Motivated when Products don’t take off 51:05 Running a Software Company from Europe
In episode #20, Wilco shares what he's doing to get his day back and to prevent being overwhelmed. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:31: Just realized that a lot of the times that I'm recording an episode, actually, is because I'm feeling a certain way. 01:50: Last week, I went to the U.S., United States, for a mastermind together with Russell Brunson. 03:25: Do not let others control your to-do list. 03:33: Do not check your email. 04:40: Cut down your distractions. 06:38: You can also just disconnect or turn off your Wi-Fi. 06:55: I plan my hours day by day. 08:06: So every single time I start a new task, I write it down. 08:35: So I write down all these things and I'm asking myself like, "Is this something that I should be doing, or is this something that I could hand off to someone else?" 10:12: I want to be the voice and the sort of person of the business. 10:21: I'm flying out to Liverpool for a couple days of basically brainstorming with like-minded entrepreneurs. Transcription: Hey, hey. It's Wilco de Kreij here, back for yet another episode, and it's funny. I actually just realized that a lot of the times that I'm recording an episode, just like this one, actually, is because I'm feeling a certain way, and today, I am feeling overwhelmed, and I figured to just share that with all of you. Not just letting you know that I'm feeling overwhelmed, but letting you know that it's okay, and how I actually resolve it, because obviously, as an entrepreneur, I mean, a lot of you might recognize it as well, there's a lot of things coming at your plate, and there are so many things you can do, but just like anyone else, we only have 24 hours in a day. And for me, personally, I basically have one of two problems. Either my days are not long enough, I need more than 24 hours in a day, or my to-do list is too long. In any case, there's ways to resolve that, and I've figured to jump on this call or call, jump on this episode with all of you to share sort of what I'm doing to get my day back. Because like I said, right now, I don't know what I'm doing, but the day is passing by way too fast, and there's just no way I can get everything done that I want to get done or sort of need to get done in time. The reason why I'm currently more overwhelmed than usual is because last week, I went to the U.S., United States, for a mastermind together with Russell Brunson, and because of all the time difference and all of that, I was away for the first four days. The week's Monday through Thursday, which meant I only had one day, and then this week, because of Easter, we also celebrate that on Monday, and then tomorrow, which, I'm currently recording this on Thursday. I'm not sure when it goes live, but I'm recording this on a Thursday, and tomorrow morning, I'm flying out to Liverpool for another marketing event, so that means that this week, I only have three days, so that's four working days in two weeks' time, which, for me, is insanely ... I usually work a lot, I work a lot more. Let's just say I'm a bit of a workaholic, and also my team depends on that, right? My team depends on that. Right now, we're like 17 or 18 people, and a lot of the things, I'm still in control. I still want to be in control of what exact features we're building. I want to be in control of any exception that we have with one of our customers. There are so many things I want to be in control of, and right now, I just realized that there's just, it's just too much, right? It's just too much, and I think a lot of people can sort of relate with that, and even if you don't have a team, it doesn't really matter whether you have a team or not. Just as an entrepreneur in general, there's just so much stuff that needs to be done, and at times, it can be overwhelming, I think. So what I wanted to do on this call is, or in this episode, is to sort of go through the things that I'm doing to prevent being overwhelmed, even though today, I am feeling overwhelmed, but what I usually do to prevent being overwhelmed, right? So there's a couple things I do on a daily, day-to-day basis, or at least I try to do on a day-to-day basis, and one of ... First one is to do not let others control your to-do list. So the easiest way to fix that is to, when you wake up in the morning, is do not, I repeat, do not check your email. A lot of the times, an email is basically someone else's to-do list, right? So people are going to ask, "Hey, do this. Hey, do that," so if you start your day by checking your email, you're by definition starting off with someone else's to-do list, right? So what I recommend you to do is, do not check it until, for example, I don't know, afternoon, or whatever works for you. I try to check my email only twice a day. I do not always succeed, and the periods where I check my email more often are directly the times that I'm less productive, less efficient, because I'm just being distracted by my emails. Right? All of a ... Sometimes, I read my emails, but I don't really reply, and then later on the day, I read them again, because that's when I actually go into my email box, and I realize that I actually read a lot of the emails twice, just because of the fact that I read them first, didn't want to reply, and then do the same thing over. So that's super inefficient already, there, so first thing I highly recommend you do is, do not let someone else control your to-do list. Cut back on your email time. Just have like two, one or two set schedules, and also just, in general, cut down your distractions, so cut down Facebook. Cut down anything else that you find distracting, and I found a pretty useful tool. There's actually two tools that I use. I'm on a Mac. I'm not sure if there's something similar for Windows as well, but one of the tools is called Focus. I believe it is Hey Focus, like hey, like, "Hey." Heyfocus.com. It's a real cool tool where you can set basically a schedule in focus times, and during those times that you're focused, you cannot reach any of the distracting sites, so you can add a list of things like facebook.com, Gmail, maybe your statistics, or whatever like new sites, anything that is basically distracting and keeping you off-course, you can add this to your blacklist. And whenever you are scheduled, like whenever you're focused, all those sites will be automatically blocked, even if you restart your computer or do whatever. You literally cannot get access to those sites, right? So what I do is, I actually set up a schedule so in certain time blocks, no matter what I do, I just cannot access those sites, and that helps me a lot. Right? A second app that I use a lot is called Offline Time, and it really, all it does is basically make sure that I'm offline, like I cannot access my internet, so whenever I am writing or doing something that I don't really need internet for, I turn on that app. And when you do that, it's funny that as soon as I open that app when I'm sort of stuck on the task that I'm working on, I realize that I quickly check my stats or quickly want to check Facebook, quickly want to do this, I quickly want to do that. And when that app is on, you'll get a message like, "All right, you're currently offline. You cannot access it." I'm like, "Oh, yeah, sure, of course." Sometimes you even do it without noticing, so these kind of apps, they help me to basically prevent that I'm going through all kinds of distractions, so I use heyfocus.com as well as Offline Time. You can also just disconnect or turn off your Wi-Fi, just to make sure that ... It helps if you're offline, no one else can sort of reach you, and you are sort of in the zone, so cut down on your email, cut down on your distractions. What else I do is, I plan my hours day by day, so instead of just saying, "Hey, I'm going to do this, this, and this," I'm actually thinking like, "All right, how much time is every task going to cost me?" And I sort of plan it in like, "From 9 to 10 I'm doing this. From 10 to 11 I'm doing that," and that makes sure that when it's like a certain task is from 9 to 10, and it's 9:40 and I'm still not done, I'm like, "Oh, damn, I only have 20 minutes left. I need to rush instead of just spending countless, wasting hours on a certain task that should just cost me an hour, of course." Now, obviously, that's not always working as well as I make it sound right now, but that's usually the goal. And once again, I notice that every single time I do it like that, every single time I sort of set up my day on a day-per-day, hour-by-hour basis, and I plan my day, every task over the whole day in advance, and do that the evening before, it just helps me to be so much more productive. So those are just some things that I try to do on a day-to-day basis, but there's also some things that I do on a more irregular basis, so that would be, for example, right now, so right now I am feeling overwhelmed. There's not enough time for all the things that I wanted to do, so these are the times that I'm sort of just starting to realize, "All right, so what are all the things that I'm currently doing? What are all the things that I'm writing on?" So every single time I start a new task, I write it down. I write down, "All right, I'm answering support. I'm answering this," or, "I'm communicating with the designer how a certain feature should look," or, "I am doing research for a new feature for viral, for a new tool for Connectio," or whatever it is, right? So I write down all these things, and then at the end, like after a couple days or a week, I have like a list of things, of all the things that I'm spending my time on, and then one by one, I'm asking myself like, "Is this something that I should be doing, or is this something that I could hand off to someone else, or maybe I could even automate, especially if you don't have a team yet?" And a lot of the tasks that I'm doing, a lot of the tasks that I'm spending time on I realize that I should actually not be the one doing. Some things I want to keep in control, like deciding what features we're adding and things like that. I'm a bit of a control freak, so I think it will be best if I would still do that, but some things, I just do not need to do them. But I just, once time passes by, I sort of take these things on my to-do list, and I just do them, right? So it's only when I actually, I'm overwhelmed, as I am right now, that's when I start to realize like, "All right, do I really, really need to do these things?" And if I don't, I try to offload them to my team, which is going to be on my to-do list for next week, so now I've just written down all the things that I'm doing for this week. And then next week, I'm going to try to offload quite a few of those tasks, again, to my team, to basically win back my day. I'm going to also be more strict to myself in terms of the email and distractions and my day-to-day and hour-by-hour planning, which is going to be good. So next week, I'm hoping to have all my days back. I'm hoping to be in control of how I plan my days. I have not been in control this week, so it should be better next week. So that's pretty much it. I just wanted to share this with all of you real quick, because I know for a fact that a lot of entrepreneurs, they have similar challenges, I would say. So right now, I'm going to go offline. I've got a webinar to prepare for, which is one of the things that I still need to do myself. I want to be the voice and the sort of person of the business, right? So I want to be the one who is doing all the webinars and things like that, so I'm going to prepare for that, and then wrapping it up, and tomorrow morning, I'm flying out to Liverpool for a couple days of basically brainstorming with like-minded entrepreneurs, which helps me to keep myself sharp, and from the next week on, just a lot of good stuff coming. So, hope everyone has a great day, and I will talk to you all soon.
Regelmatig neemt Marc de Groot interviews af met andere online marketing experts, succesvolle ondernemers en andere mensen uit de e-commerce sector. Deze interviews zijn te beluisteren via de Online Marketing Podcast en in samenvatting na te lezen via dit blog. Vandaag gaat Marc in gesprek met Wilco de Kreij, de man achter producten als Connectio en UpViral. Mis geen enkel online marketing en ondernemers inzicht meer en volg de content van Marc ook hier: - Online marketing blog - Online Marketing video's - Webwinkel Marketing Platform
In episode #13 Wilco talks about the importance of consistency in your business. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:43: ConnectExplore, it's one of the new products that we just launched for Connectio.io 01:16: There is actually one thing that helped us a lot to get more affiliates on board for this one, to get a higher conversion on the sales page. 02:37: What I think helped this a lot over the last couple years is one thing and that is consistency. 04:06: It's a trap, right? You're always going after the next thing. 04:49: UpViral is our viral referral platform and Connectio.io is a suite of various Facebook ad tools. 04:54: The first tool that we created inside of Connectio.io was actually ConnectAudience. 05:56: The things they deliver are actually a great value for what you pay, right? 06:22: Over the years we've shown to our customers, our affiliates, to partners and people around us that this is what we do, and we're sticking to it. 07:07: The reason why they promote it is because they believe in what I do. 07:42: Just by doing the same thing consistently it's going to help you so much. 08:55: I'm a bit of a freak when it comes to customer support. 09:20: That helps me to understand them better, understand our customers better. 09:52: I've actually replied to over 1600 emails, which is insane. 10:22: The whole team is always striving to the best kind of rates of our support. 10:40: We want to make sure we make our people happy. 11:42: Keep on doing it, don't give up after a couple months, but just keep on doing it because only after a while are you going to get that tipping point where everything else becomes easier. Transcription: Hey there it's Wilco de Kreij here and while I'm recording this we just got out of a product launch for Connect Explorer. That basically means that right now I desperately, desperately need some sleep, but obviously that's not what we're going to talk about. If you've been following me then you probably saw some emails about it as well, ConnectExplorer, it's one of the new products that we just launched for Connectio, you can check it out at Connectio.io. What we did is we had a big product launch in which we had a special offer for the first couple of days and we then besides just sending it out to our own existing email list and through our own existing customers, we also invited a bunch of affiliates to promote it, so you know they can actually send it out to their audience as well so that we can actually get a lot of people at the same time all checking out this introduction offer and hopefully get access to it. Now there is actually one thing that helped us a lot that we've been doing over the last couple of years already actually which helped us a lot to get more affiliates on board for this one, to get a higher conversion on the sales page. To get more people to actually purchase, but also for example to get more people to actually take us up on our web sale, because after people got access to ConnectExplore we had an up sale offer so that you can actually get access to that as well. There is something we did over the last year, two years or so, maybe even longer but at least definitely the last two years that has helped those on all of these things and all together, like I'm not going to share any numbers, I'm not a big fan of that, but the launch went really, really well, above expectations, and I'm just super grateful for my team and all of the customers that actually got access to it, but also for all the affiliates who were kind enough to promote ConnectExplore to their audience. Just super happy, super grateful, and that's why I'm shooting this quick podcast for all of you while we just got out of the trenches. I'm obviously still super busy with the launch and all the work that's involved with it, but I just wanted to touch base with my podcast crew, which you are one if you are listening to this right now to sort of give you the backstory of this. What I think helped this a lot over the last couple years is one thing and that is consistency. Just consistency, consistently doing something that you believe in. I mean, I'm not sure about you but I'm subscribed to quite a few email lists from all kinds of marketers, and one of the things that I noticed is that a lot of people, they just jump from one thing to the next, right? For example this day they do some kind of product launch for a sort of product, and then I don't know, it's the best thing ever. Right? It's the best ever like, ever, ever, right? Then two months go by and then they promote something else and then that thing is actually the best thing ever, like ever, ever right? And maybe there's even a huge overlap. Then if you then go back to that first product, is it still being updated? Do you still have people working full time on that adding features and what not? No, because now the new thing is the new thing, right? That just does not make any sense to me. I mean, what ... at what point in time did we actually think that that was a good idea to just start over every single time. Now, granted I'm not going to lie, I've been there, right? I've had various product launches in the past where you know, I just did a launch and then six months later I had another product coming out, and that was sort of like the routine for a while. At some point, I saw the light, that's not going to work, it's a trap, right? You're always going after the next thing. There is no real world business that works that way, right? It's not like BMW is going to create a car and then after a year they're going to say, "You know what, we're going to get rid of all the cars, now we're just going after motorcycles," and then after a year like ... it doesn't work like that. You want to keep on adding. It's fine to add new products, to launch new products, but you should always ... it should be added on top of your whole whatever you're doing, instead of just replacing the old stuff, right? What we've been doing over the last two years or so is we've been focusing on two platforms and two platforms alone, which is UpViral and Connectio. Viral is our viral referral platform and Connectio is a suite of various Facebook ad tools. The first tool that we created inside of Connectio was actually Connect Audience. We haven't launched that to the public first, but we actually started building that in February 2015, so almost two years ago. We still ... We're updating it continuously, we have people on top of it. For example at UpViral, we started that even earlier actually. We have three developers working on it full time. Why? It's not that we want to launch something and then just forget about it. We want to keep on adding things on top of it, we want to keep on building. Now the thing is when you start out doing that, obviously I have a lot of, I don't want to call them competitors but other people in the marketplace who are also creating tools and software, right? Because they usually don't really ... a lot of ... like no offense but a lot of people they build something and they don't really continuously add features, continuously improve it or they don't really have good support or whatever, and because of that they are able to deliver things sometimes for a lower price than we do, right? The things they deliver are actually a great value for what you pay, right? Not going to lie about that, it’s a great offer, but for us in the beginning, it can sometimes be hard to sort of compete with that because someone who is brand new, they're going to see two products and yeah, well this one is price x and this one is price y, why would I pay more for this? From the outside they might even look sort of similar. Right? Over the years we've shown to our customers and to our affiliates and to partners and people around us that this is what we do, and we're sticking to it. It's not like, "Oh yeah, we're going to do this for a long time," and then six months later we're focusing on something else. No, we said this is what we're going to focus on, and six months later, a year later, we're still doing it, we're still, you know we're not changing, this is what we do and what our long term vision is. Just by doing that consistently it just gives so much trust to the people around you to the partners and to customers as well or potential customers. I mean we even saw, I was talking to various affiliates, they literally told me that the reason why they promote it is because they believe in what I do. So someone said actually that he has been following me for a while but initially he didn't want to promote my products to his audience because he wasn't sure whether we were going to be around. We have the long form sales pages, right? We have very long sales pages, so for some people that seems a bit off, it's like all the marketers are doing that, so it must be something that you know ... you must be like all the other marketers who are just going to continue and run off and do something else, right? It took them a while to realize that. Just by doing the same thing consistently it's going to help you so much. I think that goes for a lot of my customers as well, right? I see a lot of people, they just do one thing and if it doesn't work out, then they go to the next thing. They're going to try something else, but what I realized and it took quite a few years to realize it actually is that usually there is somewhere along the line there is a tipping point, at which point initially it's really hard to get something off the ground, right? There is a tipping point where everything suddenly becomes so much easier, but you're not going to get to the tipping point unless you stick to the same thing. You just got to grind, you just got to do the same thing over and over and make sure that you do it consistently. Only then you'll be able to get that tipping point and that's when everything becomes a lot easier. Just giving another example and it's actually one of the reasons why I'm so tired right now, because the truth is a launch like this, a lot of work goes into the preparations, right? All the sales pitch are done before hand, all the affiliates know what to do, all the videos are ready before hand, we have all the videos created for ... in the members area. Everything is all done beforehand, but the thing that kept me up the most is customer support because I'm a bit of a freak when it comes to customer support and normally I'm not in the customer support desk a lot, we have a team taking care of that, we trained them well, but always when we launch a new product, I sort of become this control freak who just wants to see what's happening inside of our support desk. The reason for that is actually because I want to see if there's any issues and I'll want to see how people are using the tools because that helps me to understand them better, understand our customers better and to makes sure we can create updates for it that are actually going to make sense. We actually already have quite a few updates listed just from the initial couple days because people are sending over some great results, if I wouldn't have been inside of the support desk myself, I might not have seen that. I mean my support staff might have summarized it for me, but there's always something that gets lost in translation, so over the last seven or eight days or so, I've actually replied to over 1600 emails, which is insane. That's just from the support desk by the way, that doesn't include my own inbox, my Facebook inbox, and doesn't include any of the chats I've had with affiliates and all of that. 1600 just from the support desk, back to our customers, that I personally did, not even the rest of my team. But that's just the reason why I want to make that clear, once again one of the things I think we've done consistently is we care about our customers, not just me but our whole team. I mean the whole team is always striving to the best kind of rates of our support, as we automatically keep track of how happy you are. If you send in a reply, and we send a reply back you can automatically vote how happy you are with the reply. We're always striving to basically get the highest score possible. We want to make sure we make our people happy. That's also something, if you just do that for a week or a couple weeks then people aren't really going to know this, right? If after a couple years people have been sending multiple messages in and every single time they're happy with the result or at least most of the times because obviously you can't always make everyone happy, right? Over time it's going to become clear, "All right, these guys, they actually have good support, right?" If you just do that for a week, or a couple weeks or a couple months, it's not going to have an immediate effect but once you do that long enough, once you do that consistently over a long period of time, at some point there is a tipping point where people are going to talk about it and say, "Wow these guys, they're actually really good. They have good support, go there." That just makes everything so much easier, right? That's really just the thing that I wanted to share with all of you, so whatever you're doing in your business, don't try to switch from one thing to another, but be consistent in what you do. Do something that you actually believe in and be consistent with it. Keep on doing it, don't give up after a couple months, but just keep on doing it because only after a while are you going to get that tipping point where everything else becomes easier and also it takes a while to sort of get a certain image into your customers or into your prospect's mind. If they're going to see that for a long period of time, over and over that you're actually sticky to what you do, then they know that it's true, you're not just saying that it's true, but they know that it's actually true. That's it for today, I hope this helps and I hope you all have an awesome day. Bye, bye, cheers!
In episode #12, Wilco talks about how to get sane during a busy period in your business. You might be able to relate to such a busy period, right? Listen as Wilco provides you with great advice on how do you make sure you're not stressed out, at least to a minimum degree, while getting all your stuff done. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:52: We run two software companies, UpViral and Connectio.io 00:55: Suite of various Facebook tools, tools for Facebook advertisers to make their ads more profitable and more efficient. 01:10: ConnectLeads, ConnectAudience, ConnectRetarget. 01:12: Launch a new product: ConnectExplore 01:22: The downside is that whenever we launch a new product, there's so much work that goes into that. 01:53: When we launch a product, we usually do it with a lot of affiliates. 02: 39: I want to move and I want to move fast. 02:50: What we always do is we pick a date that we're going to launch it in advanced, usually like two months in advanced. 03:00: that's the date we are going to launch it, no exception, no excuses. 04:10: We have first Christmas day and second Christmas day in the Netherlands. 05:06: The thing is that I wanted to talk about today, how do you stay sane in a period like this? 05:59: First thing I do is I always have a clear, detailed list so I know exactly what I need to do. 06:58: I imagine the worst case scenario. 07:46 It's good to try and achieve as much as you can, but never forget that whatever you're trying to do it's not as important. 08:42: It's really important to take time off. 10:14: Focus on your end goal. 10:25: I also reward myself. 11:51: Record a podcast episode to talk about it. Transcription: Hey, hey, everyone. I hope you're all doing great and I also hope that you got to enjoy Christmas over the last couple days. Right now it's just a few days after Christmas, right before New Year's, and I'm sitting at my desk and I am super, super stressed out, actually. It's an incredibly busy time at the business right now and sometimes it just drives me crazy. I'll probably have to start at the beginning. As you probably know, we run two software companies. One is AdViral and the other one is Connectio, which is a suite of various Facebook tools. Basically, tools for Facebook advertisers to make their ads more profitable and more efficient. In that arrange of tools we have actually multiple tools, right, so we have right now connect leads, connect audience, and connect with targets, and we are about to launch a new product, which is pretty exciting I think. I'm actually really excited about it. It's called CONNECTExplorer. The down side is that whenever we launch a new product, there's so much work that goes into that. I mean, not just the product itself, but ... Well, also the product itself, actually. It's not just thinking about what it should do, it's not just designing it and the whole infrastructure and actually building it, like the actual development of it, but also things like testing and training the support team and creating training videos and all this good stuff. That's just the tool, right, and even outside of that there's so much stuff on the marketing side. When we launch a product, we usually do it with a lot of affiliates. We invite affiliates or other people who in turn can then promote our tools to their customers and to their audience and they will get a percentage of the commission. There's so much work involved with that. Not just the sales pages and the sales videos and the email sequences and all that kind of stuff, but also things like running ads to get affiliates on board and talking with affiliates on one on one and deciding on the pricing structure and the funnel and all this. There's just a thousand and one things that need to happen. Which is cool, right? It's good. That's part of our job and I like it. The thing is that whenever we launch a product, I'm not someone who's just going to work and see whenever it's done, blah blah blah. I want to move and I want to move fast. I want to take the best out of the year and I want to do as much as I can in order to move forward. For that reason, what we always do is we pick a date that we're going to launch it in advanced, usually like two months in advanced, and we say "All right, that's the date we are going to launch it. No exception. No excuses, that's the date. Unless someone dies, that is the date that we're going to launch it." In this case, we picked January 4th. We picked the date roughly, I think two months ago. From that point on, we know that's when it's all happening. Usually that works out pretty well, right? Usually over the last couple of products that we launched everything ... Basically, ahead of time everything was fully done. The reason why I like to do that because I don't like to have stress in my life, right? I'm trying to avoid stress at all times. In this case, we had some delays on the team, mainly on the marketing side, which means that everything was sort of pushed back. The result of that is that right now we have less than a week left and there's still various things that need to be happening on the marketing side, things like videos and finishing up the sales page and quite a bit of work all on the marketing side. I'm confident that we will finish it, but in order to get it to be done it's just a super stressful time at this moment. For example, right now ... Even on Christmas, we have two days of Christmas, right? We have first Christmas day and second Christmas day. That's just a thing here in the Netherlands. It's the way we do it. That's usually when we all go to families, just like you probably did. On the first Christmas day, we went to my wife's family and then on the second Christmas day we went to my own family. Usually we go there at eleven or so. During the morning I worked, and then the moment I go back home I worked, which is not something you want to do on Christmas day. That's the way it is right now. On all the other days I usually work right now from like eight am to around twelve pm with not much breaks in between. That's just because I want to get stuff done right now. It's not always as fun. Just so you know, these are not my typical working hours because that's obviously crazy, but what ends to happen needs to happen, right? The thing is that I wanted to talk about today, how do you stay sane in a period like this? You might be able to relate to such a busy period, right? You maybe had some deadlines in the past as well where you just need to get so much stuff done, or maybe you even earlier on ... For example, when I look back at university or at high school, I remember when I had exams or tests that I was always super stressed out because there was so much to learn and to do or whatever. You might be able to relate to that where you're just so, so busy that you're just stressed out and you're just generally stress out. Now, how do you fix that? How do you make sure you're not stressed out, at least to a minimum degree, while getting all your stuff done. There's a couple things that I do to stay as sane as I can, even in the busiest moments of the year. First thing I do is I always have a clear, detailed list so I know exactly what I need to do. For example, when we do a product launch, we actually have a full template of all the steps, all of the tiny, tiny steps that we need to do. We know when we're going to launch a product from A to Z, these are all the things we need to do and we can just check it off of our list. All right, that's done. That's done. That's done. By knowing exactly what you need to do, once you have it on a list, once you've written it down, you can just forget about it basically. You can remove it from your head because you have it on the list and you know if you just follow that list you're going to finish everything, right? That's the first thing I highly recommend you to do. Write everything down that needs to happen. I think one of the most important things for me, when I sometimes go crazy and I'm super stressed out and I'm not always as fun to be around with, I guess, what I do is I imagine the worst case scenario. What if everything goes South, and I mean everything. We're all trying so hard to have an impact in the world and to grow our business, but what's the worst case scenario? Even if the worst of the worst of the worst would happen, at the end of the day this is just, quote unquote, just a business. If everything fails, if a product launch doesn't go as planned, nobody's dying. Nobody's getting sick. It's not that bad. People around me, especially over the recent period, I had multiple people in my environment who sadly passed away way too early. That just makes you realize ... That just puts things in perspective. It's good to try and achieve as much as you can, but never forget that whatever you're trying to do it's not as important. The people around you, your wives, your family, your husband, your parents, everyone around you. That's what really matters. If you are sometimes stressed out and you're just generally stressed out, just think of the things that are really, really important and that sort of makes you realize that the things that we sometimes seem to worry about are not even that important. That's something that helps for me a lot, actually. I do that pretty much every day. Just make myself realize that it's not that important. The worst case scenario is still a pretty good deal if you look at it like that. Everyone's healthy and all of that. Also, it's really important for me, at least ... Everyone is different, of course, but for me it's really important to take time off. Even though it's super busy and, like I said, I made long days right now, but I always go for a walk, for example. Just clearing my mind and not doing anything with work. The moment I start working nonstop, all the time, I just know the next day I'm going to be less productive. You're still human. Maybe you are a robot, I don't know, but for me I cannot be productive all the time. You need to have time off. Instead of having that at random whenever my body says, "Well, stop," I'd rather just plan it in and I schedule it in beforehand. Every couple of hours or whatever I go for a walk, take a little bit of time off, and that really helps me to stay sane as well. While doing that, I usually also imagine that worst case scenario. "oh yeah, I'm trying my best, but don't forget this is just a business. It's not your life." That really helps me to stay sane as well. With that also, obviously, and really important at least for me once again, everyone is different, is exercise. Personally I love to play squash. It's a kind of tennis kind of thing. It's really energetic, I love it. That just helps me to clear my mind and to just be able to focus the next day again. I usually do that in the evenings. It helps me to focus the next day again on the business. For me, that's really part of my routine as well. One thing that really helps me stay sane as well, especially during such a busy period, is focus on your end goal. Right now, we're super busy for this launch, and I have my end goal. I know exactly what the end goal is going to be. With that, I also reward myself. For example, by the end of January my and my wife, we are actually going to Ecuador for a three week trip to Ecuador and the Galapagos islands. We're going to travel around because we just love to travel, we love to meet new people and love to explore new cultures and all that. We're going to Ecuador is South America for a couple weeks. That helps me now, as well. I'm like, "I'm just going to be super, super busy. That's fine because I know what the reward is going to be. In a couple weeks or in a month from now I'm going to fly off and I'm going to spend some quality time with my wife while traveling to an amazing country." That helps me a lot as well. Altogether, let's go through the list. How do I actually stay sane even if it's super, super, super busy? First of all, have a clear list of what needs to be done so you know exactly what needs to be done. Also, keep in mind what the worst case scenario is because often you're worrying about things that are not really worth worrying about. Also, make sure to take time off, exercise, and also focus on your end goal. If possible, reward yourself after you've put some really hard work in. That sort of is the pain that you're going through. That's how I do and also maybe I could even add another one which is record a podcast episode to talk about it, which I'm doing right now. Actually I'm recording this at the beginning of my day right before I dive into the action because I just wanted to get this off my chest. I actually feel that it's already helping, so that's good. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to go for a walk, clear my mind a bit, and then I'm going to dive into the action. With that having said, I hope you have an amazing day and I also hope that you have an awesome New Years Eve and an awesome start of the next year. All right, that's it. I will catch you all in 2017.
In Episode #10, Wilco answers the question that he got asked a lot, listen as he discuss what he’ll do if he has to start all over again from scratch and what kind of business will he start. Time Stamped Show Notes: 02:29: What would my wife start something online? 03:10: Formulated the business model for my wife if she will do this. 04:08: What would be my model, exactly? 04:04: Pick a market you know, that there is money to be spent. 04:32: People buy on emotions. 07:15: Look what other brands and people are doing. 07:25: connectio.io/blog/, Spy tools for Facebook Ads. 08:25: look in Alibaba/Aliexpress 09:50: Start driving Facebook Ads, see which ones works best. 10:10: I really suggest to go for just one product first, make as simple as possible. 10:59: Add a recurring element on the backend. 13:40: I would create my own brand. 15:52: Bulletproof coffee, they are not selling their product, what they sell is productivity. 16:22: One actual product at the front end, one recurring element on the backend, and one high ticket item. 16:52: Octopus funnel. Transcription: Hey, it’s me Wilco de Kreij here, back with you again. Today, I’m going to answer a question that I get asked a lot and I usually really, really don’t want to answer this question. The question is, “Hey, what would you do if you had to start all over from scratch again?” Or, “What kind of business should I start?” A lot of people ask me that and the reason why I think they ask me that is because at this point they don’t have a business yet and they want to sort of know the pathway from zero to hero. They sort of want to know, “Hey, what should I do in order to become successful online?” I think that’s just an impossible question to ask. It’s way, way too broad. It’s pretty much like if I were to ask someone, “Hey, how do I build a house?” There’s so many things you could mean with that. Do you mean on the planning side? Do you mean how to buy it? Do you mean what kind of stones to pick, the constructional side? What do you mean? How do I start a business is not really a question that can be answered. Right? Over the last weekend, something very interesting, and a lot of fun in the process as well, happened. Because like every Saturday morning, my wife and I we do our grocery shopping for the whole week. While doing that, we always take down a nice lunch for Saturday afternoon. Right? Same thing this weekend, so we sat down at noon for our Saturday lunch at home. We were talking, we started talking, and one of the things we sort of run into … Not really run into, but some of the things we talk about is that I’m an entrepreneur and I can work from wherever I want. It doesn’t really matter whether I’m here in the Netherlands or whether I’m traveling. I can work from pretty much wherever. She’s, more or less, the career type, so she has a job and she’s not an entrepreneur, she’s not a marketer, she doesn’t do anything online. She’s just like, she goes to her job and she comes back. There’s not really much room for traveling, except for when she has time off which is kind of limited every year obviously. We started talking and she’s like, “What if I would start something online?” Right? “What if I would have my own thing as well?” Right? She’s not really much of the online type. Like I said, she doesn’t know anything about marketing and at the same time she also doesn’t want to rely on just online stuff. She wants to actually, if she would start something, she would want to have a physical product for example, something like e-commerce. She wants to actually see the product. She doesn’t want just have a digital product like I do, for example, with software. What happened was we started this conversation at 12, at noon, and we didn’t get up from our table until 5:30, which is kind of crazy, we spent roughly five, five and a half hours on this conversation. We just kept talking and talking, and brainstorming on things we could do. Looking backwards, what I realized is we sort of formulated the business model that she would be able to start if she would do this. I’m not sure if she would, she’s really focused at her job, and there’s a lot of other stuff she wants to do as well like sports and friends and all of that. I’m not sure if she actually would, maybe, maybe not. We’ll see. Regardless of that, like what came out of this conversation is actually pretty interesting, I think, for you guys. For all of my audience that maybe is on the pathway to start something. I figured I’m just going to record an episode on basically what the model is that I think, that I definitely would start if I would be her. Personally I’m really much focused on the software side, and I love the digital products, but let’s say I want to start a more physical business with an online, obviously online based, but like an e-commerce or anything like that, what my model would be exactly. The first thing I would consider in picking a niche or picking a market would be to pick a market where you know there is money to be spent. It needs to be something that, for example, pretty much all B2B, business to business markets that would be the case, but there’s a lot of business to consumer markets as well. I mean if people are pregnant there’s a lot of money in that. People buy on emotions. People buy on things like that, and you can more easily charge something without people actually knowing what it is. Basically the market needs to be something that where people spend money on, and it should not be a commodity, because a commodity, that’s pretty much a race to the bottom. People know how much they spend, for example, on coffee. Obviously you can increase the value of that a bit by making it all healthy, or making up like you get all coffee from all parts of the world, but still there’s no way people are going to pay $80, for example, a bag of coffee beans. It should not be a commodity, it should be something where people are willing to spend money on. It should be something where people buy on emotions. That’s what I like, because when that happens, when people buy on emotions you can more easily create your own brand and then charge whatever you want, in a way. Obviously there’s a limit to that, but if you market it right you’re in more control of your pricing, and because of that you’re more in control of your margins as well. That’s really what I’m interested in. Without really solid margins it’s really hard to advertise. That margins are not even there just to make a profit, but the margins are there to be able to advertise on the line, and still make a profit. I see a lot of people struggle with that. In fact, my wife she actually did one project before, and that’s why I brought up the coffee example, because in the past she started a web-shop for a subscription-based coffee bean shop. The problem with that was that there was really, almost no margin. There was like a 10% margin, or something like that. The only way she could drive traffic into that web-shop was if she would be able to send free traffic. There’s obviously a lot of limit to that. Either it takes a lot of time, and even then it’s sort of limited. Going back to what I would do if I would have to start over all again, I would pick a market where people spend money, where people buy on emotion, and it’s not a commodity. That way you’re able to find something where you can put your own price tag on it, and go for a good margin on your product. What I would do next is inside that market is I would start looking, this would be a shop in the Netherlands. What I would do in this case. This goes also if you go for an English-spoken market, but I would basically look at what other products are doing, or what other people are doing. For example, if I see any Facebook ads inside that market, and there’s obviously some tools out there, we’ve covered some on our Connect IO blog, at ConnectIO/blog you’ll find some tools. If you look for spy tools or something like that you’ll find various sites where you can find basically tools where you can find existing Facebook ads to go through. If I could find any ads to similar products, and see if they have a lot of likes, or a lot of shares. If they get a lot of likes, for example, we did some research and we saw some ads that had like 20,000 likes on the actual post that I know for a fact that that person who is running that advertisement has been running it for awhile, and there’s no way that person would keep on running that specific Facebook ad without making a profit. Now I know that that person is targeting that Facebook ad to a specific product while making a profit. I know, hey, that’s a good start. I would start inside that market, I would start looking for various products which are all really cheap to get. I would go for physical products that are roughly, if you check them out on Alibaba or Ali-express, which is one of the sites that you can buy stuff on in China, ideally stuff that you would be able to buy for between $3 and $5, $3 and $6. Something like that. Like really cheap, but these have to be things that people don’t really … It’s not a commodity, and you have your own, you put your own swing to it, and you can really solve a problem with that. That way you could … You think you’ll be able to charge, for example, $15 or $20 for that. You’ll be paying, for example, $5, and you’ll be charging $20. What I would do is i would try to find, roughly, let’s say three, four products of these. Like not more than that. Just three or four, that will be your best bet. That’s the first phase of what I would start. I would start advertising that. I would see which one of those products I would be able to make to get the best return on. It doesn’t even have to be profitable at this point, even if it’s just break even that would be perfect. Let’s say if I would be spending $5, and I would get $20 back, that would leave so like $15 for overhead cost plus advertising cost. I would start testing it all out, I would start driving, in my case mainly Facebook ads. All these three or four products, see which one works best, I would then cut off all the others that are not working, and I would just pick one of those products. Just super easy, because one of the things when first starting something like this is also your motivation. I know that for my wife, for example, she’s not someone who’s going to be super passionate, super motivated, who is going to be working for months and months and months before getting results. I really suggest to go for just one product first. Make it as simple as possible so that you’re going to stay motivated as well. You’re going to pick three or four products, see which one you can get work on, spend, for example, $100, $200 on ads on every one of those products, which might seem a lot, but that’s the amount of money that you need to put into this in order to fully test to see what happens. Pick the one that’s working best for you. That’s the one that you’re going to go for. Then you’re going to optimize. You’re going try to see maybe a couple different sales pages for example, different ads, and see if you can get to better. That will be your front-end product. Once you’ve got that running, right after what I would do is I would add a recurring element on the back-end, which means that after they purchase that first product, I would try to get them into a recurring subscription style business. That could be for example an online course, or an online membership, which would be my preference, because I’m all about online. If it’s all online then you’ll only have fixed cost to create it. For example, if it will be a membership with like videos and all of that, you would have to spend money on making those videos, maybe, but there’s no cost of actually sending the products out, which means there’s a lot of margin on that. This could even be a low-ticket, a really cheap recurring subscription. Could even be like $10, $20 a month, for example. Obviously it starts to add up, because that’s really what we want. We don’t want to just keep on selling, selling, selling in order to grow, but if you have a recurring element the every single month you’re going to get more people into that membership, and into that subscription style business, and that way it starts to grow. Even if your sales are flat. Even if your sales are the same every single month. I’d be doing that. I’d be adding a recurring element, and in case of my wife, like I said before she’s really into the physical products and she really likes doing that, so maybe for her it would be better to go for a subscription box. In a lot of niches and a lot of markets you have these boxes where every single month you send something their way. Well I just told you about the coffee business that she sort of started, which is like that web-shop, and I think she only had like seven or eight customers, like not a lot. That was for a subscription-based for coffee. The thing is, and that’s actually what raffled me. I think she had like a total of seven customers, which is not a lot, once again, but she started that roughly two and a half years ago. Two of their customers who started right from the start are still a customer, so every single month, they still receive coffee from my wife’s business, and they still every single month they pay for it. That’s the power of recurring. Like even two, two and a half years after they’re still a customer, that’s really why I would want to add a recurring element into that business. That would be my second phase. I wouldn’t start it off creating that recurring element right away, because initially I don’t even know whether this business works. I don’t even know whether that front-end product is going to [inaudible 00:13:06], but once I do know that, that’s when I right away, I start adding a recurring back-end offer. Now, one thing I would also do is instead of just shipping out products from China or whatever, that’s what I would initially do, right. I would initially just buy products from China. Keep it super low-key, keep it really easy to get started and don’t over complicate it. Right after I prove the concept, I would actually create my own brand. I would hire a designer, I would create my own brand name, I would create my own logo, and all of that. Every single product that I would sell would have that exact same branding. I would change the packaging, it could be the exact same product, but I would change the packaging so that it’s actually … It all adds up to the brand. Let’s take an example, if something is a brand you become exclusive. There’s nothing else that could offer that. I mean if you would sell, for example coffee beans, there’s a lot of other coffee beans. Let’s say, this is a silly example, you would have the brand Coolio Coffee, whatever. There’s no other place where you can buy Coolio Coffee. Obviously you’re not selling coffee, then you would be selling something like a new, exploring new tastes of the world. Whatever your hook is. Like, you’re not selling the actual product, you’re selling them an emotion. Of course coffee might not be the best example, but in most businesses you don’t really sell what product you’re actually selling. I don’t know if you guys know from Bulletproof Coffee, they’re not really selling their coffee. What they sell is productivity and high-performance. That’s what they really sell. It’s just delivered in the form of something else. That thing that you’re actually selling them, that emotion that you’re actually selling them to, that’s what you want to have in your brand all the way through. Going back to, so like wrapping it up. What I would do is I would, once again, I would pick a couple of products, front-line products, physical products, all low cost products like $3, $4, $5. Sell them for like roughly $20 or so. Start driving Facebook ads to them. See if any of those actually converge. Once it does and actually proves the concept, I would start creating a brand, I would also create a recurring element on the back-end, so right after someone purchases it I would actually say, “Hey, you know what, you’ve now joined this membership.” Get them into that recurring membership, and then the next phase would be to add a higher-ticket item. Something like, especially, once again, this is from my wife’s perspective. She wants to also work one-on-one with people. tHat’s what she likes to do. If that’s what you like to do that’s awesome. In that case I would ideally add also a higher-ticket item on the back-end for, for example, $5,000. Where people get to work with her, like workshops or whatever, the market she would be in. More or less a one-on-one or one-to-group kind of level. That would be a third product in the line. At this point it’s a pretty simple business. We would end up with one actual product on the front-end. We would have one recurring element on the back-end, and we would have one high-ticket item afterwards that as well. All of that is in the same brand, and obviously everything you do, if you start a blog, or if you do any outreach or anything like that. Everything adds up to that single brand. Once you got it running obviously you want to add multiple front-end products. I mean I sort of see that as an octopus funnel where all these kinds of products all lead into the same bucket that you have in the middle, which is that recurring element. That’s pretty much in simplified way what I would do if I had to start all over from scratch if I would not go for a fully digital business. Honestly I’m a geek. I love all this online stuff. I would probably go for something that’s 100% digital, because there’s just a lot more margin, and because of that it’s easier to advertise and scale up. If I would be like my wife, or maybe you’re the same as well, who just wants to have a physical product, who wants to see what they’re selling, who wants it to be actual real in the real world, then this is definitely what I would do. Perhaps maybe this is something that my wife actually is going to execute on. We’re going to see if she does. I’m obviously more than happy to help her out along the way. If we do that I’ll definitely report back on this podcast. If you are listening to this, let me know if this inspired you, or if this helped you. I’d really love to hear that. That having said, I think I’m going to stop recording now, and I’ll talk to you all soon.
On this episode Wilco shares how he actually didn't realize that he got scammed until after he paid out 25,000 US dollars, which is crazy, right? Time Stamped Show Notes:01:21 I decided that I wanted to have a coach or a mentor. 01:51 It had to be someone that is ten steps ahead of me. 02:20 founder of ClickFunnels 02:59 The cost of this group, of this inner circle of his, is $25,000 a year. 04:04 Russell Brunson is using Upviral. 05:48 I call his team, and I joined, and I wired the $25,000. 08:00 The funny thing is that it's actually joined Russell Brunson's inner circle because of that scammer. 08:51 As it turns out, those $25,000, it was easily worth the investment. 09:30 As an entrepreneur, don't look backwards. 09:41 Have a vision, and move forward. Transcription: Hey everyone, it's me, Wilco de Kreij here, and today I've got a crazy story to share with all of you. Recently I got scammed, and I actually didn't realize that I got scammed until after I paid out 25,000 US dollars, which is crazy, right? In order to dive into that story, I'll probably need to start at the very beginning for it to sort of make sense, sort of like know why I actually fell into this trap. You might think, "Well that's just a bit stupid." I just want to give you the full story. As you might know, as an entrepreneur, it sometimes can be a lonely journey, right? I mean, we have to make all these kind of decisions and we usually, we don't always have people to brainstorm with. We sort of need to have the vision and we need to set the strategy and the whole team, or your whole business depends on it, right? In my experience, it can be a lonely journey. For that reason, at some point, I think it was like last year or so, I decided that I wanted to have a coach or a mentor. In order for someone to be a coach or a mentor to me, I knew that that person needed to be at least ten steps ahead of me, right? If someone was at the similar level in terms of their business and what phase they're on, that wouldn't really inspire me. Or like if I would ask a certain opinion, like, "Hey, how would you do that?" If someone is at the same level as I am, I would probably be asking him like, "Why would I believe you, and why not just go for my own gut feeling?" It had to be someone that is ten steps ahead of me, so that if he or she would actually say, "I've done this, I tried this and this is the best way." Then I would actually believe them, that to be the best way, and I would actually take action on that instead of second guessing their opinion or their input, right? I've been searching a line, and I've been doing some research and all, and at some point I ran into this guy Russel Brunson. You might know him, he's one of the bigger online marketeers. He's the founder of ClickFunnels and I've been following him for a while. I've been reading his book, I've been listening to his podcasts, and all of that. I think about sixth months ago or so, I started to, I was sort of curious and I was thinking of joining his inner circle. He has like an inner circle, which is a group of people, group of one hundred entrepreneurs that he gives mentorship to, or coaches, or however you want to describe it. It gives you access to his mind, basically. You can actually ask him questions, one on one, and there's some brainstorming sessions in the US as well, so it's a good way to ask him questions and to leverage his knowledge, right? The cost of this group, of this inner circle of his, is $25,000 a year, which is quite a bit of money, right? The first time I started thinking about that, I've been thinking about it a lot, and for me, most of the money I spend in my business, I can sort of estimate what I'm getting back out of it. If I spend money on ads, I know what I'm getting out of it. If I spend money on development, if I build my team, a lot of the things are, I can sort of see what the return is. For this, I was actually paying out $25,000 just to get some input. Just to get some answers on questions. In my mind, it was not an easy decision to make. It was not like, "Oh, yeah. It's just $25,000, I'll just throw it at it." No. It's actually a lot of money. I just wasn't sure, basically. I had a call with his team, I thought about it, and at the end I decided not to go for it. I just let it be, and I figured I'll just do it on my own. A couple months later, a friend of mine, actually a couple friend's of mine, they texted me and they said, "Hey, Russell Brunson is using AdViral." He was talking about it, AdViral, which as you probably know, is my baby. It's my main business. He was talking about it on social media. He was saying, "Oh, yeah, it's great. We're getting all these kind of results." He was literally promoting AdViral on his Snapchat and all his other channels as well. I was like, "Oh, wow. Russell Brunson is using AdViral, how awesome is that?" I'm looking up to the guy. I think he's a superstar. I was getting all excited that he was using AdViral, which is, I think, pretty awesome. He was getting good results with it as well, right? A few days later, I actually got an email from him. At that point, I was freaking out. I was like, "Woah. Seriously? Russell Brunson is emailing me?" He emailed something in line of, "Hey dude, it's great software. Awesome. Keep up the good work." Something in that line, right? We emailed back and forth a little bit, and then he asked me whether I had a second account for AdViral. His team had their own account. He already purchased one account, and he said, "Hey, do you have a second account? In return, I'll give you one of my products." We made a swap, I also gave him access to our auto products connect for ConnectIO, our Facebook access products. I gave him those accounts, and he gave me an account, and because he was emailing with me, I was so excited I actually talked to my wife saying, "Oh, yeah. Russell Brunson is emailing me." I felt like this was super cool. I never had contact one on one with the guy. I've been following him, listening to him, to his podcasts, just the fact that he made time out of his busy day to reply to me was just, it was awesome. That's actually why I decided at that point, while I was emailing with him, I figured you know what? I'm just going to join the inner circle, right now, right here. I call his team, and I joined, and I wired the $25,000. You might think everything is good, right? Well as it turns out, in a way it is good, right? The inner circle, I love it. It's actually, seriously I love it. Recently, I sent a message to Russell, because now that I'm in the inner circle I can obviously contact him one on one. I sent a message to him, because I was checking the login that he sent me earlier in that email conversation. I was checking that login to see, I wanted to check out what it was. I never really had time to dive into it. At this point, I wanted to dive into it. I opened the new login that they sent me, I entered my email and password, and it didn't accept it, right? It didn't work. I sent a message to Russell saying, "Hey dude, the login that you sent me, it's not working. Could you please fix that, or let your team fix that because I'd love to check it out." He messaged me back, saying, "Dude, I never gave access that login." I'm like, "Wait a second. Yeah you did." I reminded him of the email conversation that we had and he said, "Well, no. I don't remember that. That was not me." We dig in deeper. As it turns out, those emails were not Russell Brunson. Let me explain to you what happened. Russell Brunson, he was using AdViral, and he shared that on social media. We dove in deeper. What apparently happened, someone else saw that, and they signed up for a domain name, which is similar to his ClickFunnels domain, and he imitated Russell Brunson by sending me an email. He took on a fake domain name, he used the name Russell Brunson, he emailed me saying, "Hey, could you please send me a login?" We emailed back and forth, and all this time I was thinking it was Russell Brunson, when in fact it was a scammer. It was someone who went through all that effort, signing up for a domain name and pretending to be Russell Brunson, sending me emails back and forth in the actual language as if it was Russell Brunson, right? Only with the goal of actually getting access to AdViral and ConnectIO. I get it, right? Who doesn't want to have access to those tools, but I mean, that's a lot of trouble, and also illegal by the way, but a lot of trouble to just get those tools. The funny thing is that it's actually because of that scammer, it's actually because of that scammer that was emailing me, I believed it was actually Russell Brunson that I joined the inner circle. Here's what happened, right. This guy, just last week we looked up his account, obviously, and realized he never actually used it. A couple months back there was this guy, a scammer, he went through all this trouble to sign up a domain name and to imitate someone he wasn't actually himself, to get that account, and now a few months later after going through all that trouble, he hasn't even used it. He's just putting a lot of effort and a lot of work in, and I'm guessing that he's still at the same spot as where he was a couple months ago. Now, on the other hand, I actually joined the inner circle because of these emails. Sure. As it turns out, those $25,000, it was easily worth the investment, because I'm already way ahead of that right now. I think that's the main idea I want to give you. It's a bit of a crazy story when me and Russell figure this out, that someone actually imitated him and I actually joined because of the scammer. We laughed so hard. Some people might say, "Doesn't that feel awkward that you actually joined because of the scammer?" That doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what made me to decide to actually move forward, I moved forward and that's the power that we have as an entrepreneur. As an entrepreneur, don't look backwards. Don't look at the decisions you made that did work out, that didn't work out, or try to find excuses for things. Have a vision, and move forward. If something happens, just take the best out of it. I think that's really what sets us apart from those that are just not, that don't have a vision, that are short sighted. These are the kinds of people that might be doing these kind of tricks, trying to scam someone and get a free account or whatever. That's just super short sighted. I think, I guess, the biggest takeaway that I wanted to share with all of you with this crazy story, is that just have a vision, go for it, and don't find excuses or don't blame all of us if something works or doesn't work out. Of course, yeah, I could have been pissed off that someone scammed me and that I paid out $25,000 to Russell. Just to make clear, the $25,000 obviously went to Russell. It's not like the scammer also tricked me into paying that to him, but I did pay out $25,000 because of those emails. If the scammer would not have emailed me, I would not have joined the inner circle. I'm actually thankful. Just in case he or she is actually listening, thanks for that. I appreciate it, because of your short shortsightedness, I'm actually way ahead from all of this. Yeah, thanks for that actually. That's it. I just wanted to share this quick story with all of you, I thought it was super funny but also like I said, please take the lesson out of it that just have a vision on long term, and do what you believe in, and you'll be all right. Everyone peace out, cheers.
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