Startup Archives - Done For You https://doneforyou.com/category/startup/ Done For You Sales & Marketing Thu, 27 Mar 2025 21:05:53 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 https://doneforyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/dfy-podcast-cover-150x150.jpg Startup Archives - Done For You https://doneforyou.com/category/startup/ 32 32 126347446 Top AI Business Plan Generators That Are Revolutionizing Startup Planning https://doneforyou.com/top-ai-business-plan-generators/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=top-ai-business-plan-generators Thu, 27 Mar 2025 21:05:50 +0000 https://doneforyou.com/?p=19498 Top AI Tools for Effortless Business Planning | Artificial Intelligence for Business Planning Leveraging AI business plan generators is no longer optional—it’s essential. These tools can drastically improve the accuracy, efficiency, and strategic insight of your business plans. This article will explore how AI can simplify data analysis, enhance financial forecasting, and streamline strategic planning. […]

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Top AI Tools for Effortless Business Planning | Artificial Intelligence for Business Planning

Leveraging AI business plan generators is no longer optional—it’s essential. These tools can drastically improve the accuracy, efficiency, and strategic insight of your business plans. This article will explore how AI can simplify data analysis, enhance financial forecasting, and streamline strategic planning. Expect practical examples and top AI tools to help you revolutionize your business planning process.

Key Takeaways

  • AI tools revolutionize business planning by automating data analysis, improving financial forecasting, and streamlining strategic planning, enabling quicker and more accurate decision-making.
  • Top AI-powered business plan generators, such as Upmetrics AI, PrometAI, and Plannit.ai, provide tailored solutions to efficiently create comprehensive business plans for entrepreneurs.
  • Customization capabilities in AI tools allow businesses to personalize plans with market insights and realistic financial projections, enhancing their appeal to investors and ensuring alignment with business strategies.

The Role of AI in Business Planning

An illustration depicting the role of artificial intelligence in business planning.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping business planning by enabling quicker decision-making and enhancing accuracy in strategies. The days of sifting through endless data and struggling to create comprehensive business plans are over. AI tools now automate data analysis, enhance financial forecasting, and streamline strategic planning, making the complex business planning process more manageable.

AI business plan generators have emerged as invaluable resources, transforming how businesses approach planning. These tools, integrating advanced algorithms and comprehensive market data, provide a new level of precision and efficiency in business planning software.

AI is transforming data analysis, financial forecasting, and strategic planning.

Automating Data Analysis

AI automates the daunting task of data gathering, market analysis, and writing, revolutionizing how businesses plan. These tools can rapidly process extensive datasets to extract valuable insights, significantly enhancing the market research process. Imagine the hours saved and the accuracy gained when AI takes over these tasks, allowing entrepreneurs to focus on what they do best – innovating and growing their businesses.

Automating various tasks, AI business plan generators save significant time and enhance plan quality with accurate market insights. This level of automation represents a significant leap forward in the planning process, transforming it from a time-consuming chore into a streamlined, efficient operation.

Enhancing Financial Forecasting

Financial forecasting is crucial for making informed business decisions and long-term planning. AI improves financial forecasting precision by analyzing historical data patterns to predict future financial trends. This methodology involves using AI algorithms to process vast amounts of historical financial data, identifying patterns and trends that might be missed by human analysts.

Enhanced precision in financial forecasting allows businesses to allocate resources effectively and mitigate risks. Leveraging AI allows businesses to create well-structured plans with accurate financial projections, appealing to investors and financial institutions.

Streamlining Strategic Planning

AI assists in strategic business planning by modeling various scenarios, helping businesses prepare for potential risks and opportunities. For instance, PrometAI has helped various startups transform their business ideas into actionable plans, illustrating the effectiveness of AI in strategic planning.

Integrating advanced AI with comprehensive market data enhances business planning, ensuring strategic decisions are based on accurate information. This strategic advantage is invaluable in today’s competitive business environment, enabling companies to stay ahead of the curve.

Top AI-Powered Business Plan Generators

A visual representation of top AI-powered business plan generators.

AI business plan generators utilize natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to produce tailored written content, making the drafting process faster and easier. These generators are designed to assist users in creating comprehensive business plans that include components such as an executive summary, market analysis, and financial projections.

Here are three top AI-powered business plan generators: Upmetrics AI, PrometAI, and Plannit.ai. Each of these tools offers unique features that can help streamline the complex business planning process, making it easier for entrepreneurs to create detailed and professional business plans.

Upmetrics AI

Upmetrics AI is an AI business plan generator designed to streamline the business planning process. With the capability to generate a complete business plan in under 10 minutes, it is a time-efficient solution for entrepreneurs. One of its standout features includes robust financial forecasting capabilities, allowing users to plan their finances effectively.

At a starting price of $7 per month, Upmetrics AI is accessible for startups and small businesses, making it an attractive option for those looking to create professional business plans without breaking the bank.

PrometAI

PrometAI is an AI-driven business planning and financial analysis tool designed to help users create comprehensive, expertly crafted business plans. It simplifies the business planning process by breaking it down into manageable sections with input prompts and examples. The tool combines a polished, visually appealing presentation style with accurate financial projections, ensuring that the final product is both professional and precise.

Offering a comprehensive collection of free business plan templates tailored to startups, PrometAI provides all the necessary resources. Its collaborative editing and investor-centric insights make it a valuable resource for anyone looking to create an effective business plan.

Plannit.ai

Plannit.ai is designed to outline and manage business ideas using the latest AI technology. It is perfect for medium and small businesses, helping them create tailored business plans efficiently. Plannit.ai provides a step-by-step process that guides users through the business planning journey with a series of well-structured questions.

Users have complete control over their documents and can download them in editable formats such as DOCX or PDF, ensuring flexibility and ease of use. Additionally, Plannit.ai features an AI business consultant that offers real-time feedback, enhancing user interaction and collaboration.

Customizing Your Business Plan with AI Tools

An image illustrating the customization of business plans using AI tools.

AI tools can personalize business plans based on specific prompts, making them more relevant to individual business needs. While AI-generated plans provide a solid foundation, customization is key to ensuring that the plan aligns perfectly with your business goals and strategies.

We’ll discuss personalizing templates, incorporating market analysis, and adjusting financial projections to create a standout detailed business plan.

Personalizing Templates

AI business plan generators frequently begin with templates. These templates serve as a foundational starting point for the plans. Look for robust customization options that allow you to tailor plans to specific business models. Effective AI business plan generators enable users to modify templates to fit their unique business strategies, ensuring that the final product is a true reflection of their business vision.

Personalizing templates not only helps in creating a unique business plan but also ensures that all aspects of the business are accurately represented. This customization is crucial for attracting potential investors and stakeholders.

Incorporating Market Analysis

AI tools can provide insights into market trends and consumer behaviors, aiding in a more informed market analysis. A comprehensive market analysis should outline customer demographics, competitive landscape, and market forecasts. Integrating these insights derived from AI into your business plan leads to more strategic decision-making.

A well-structured market analysis can significantly enhance the credibility of your business plan, making it more appealing to potential investors and stakeholders. It serves as the backbone of your business strategy, providing a clear understanding of the target market and competitive environment.

Adjusting Financial Projections

Users should input basic information about their business into AI generators to create financial forecasts. A well-rounded financial plan should include revenue forecasts, projected expenses, break-even analysis, funding needs, and potential funding sources. Adjusting these financial projections to reflect realistic and achievable goals is crucial for the success of your financial planning business plan.

AI tools provide the flexibility to modify financial details, ensuring that your financial projections are accurate and aligned with your business strategy. This precision is vital for securing funding and building investor confidence. An ai tool can enhance this process further.

Real-Time Collaboration and AI Integration

An illustration of real-time collaboration enhanced by AI integration.

Collaborative tools allow teams to work simultaneously, enhancing overall productivity. Real-time collaboration features in AI tools are essential as they facilitate teamwork and drive productivity. Instant communication during collaborative sessions helps align team members and accelerates decision-making.

Effective collaboration tools can integrate with existing workflows, reducing the time spent switching between applications. These collaborative features not only improve productivity but also enhance decision-making and transparency among team members.

Ensuring Security and Privacy in AI Business Planning

Regular audits and strict data retention policies can minimize the risks associated with AI data breaches. Businesses leveraging AI must adhere to strict data protection regulations to avoid legal repercussions. Integrating privacy considerations from the initial design phase of AI systems is crucial for data protection.

Educating employees on ethical AI use is essential to uphold data protection standards within organizations. Implementing measures such as data anonymization and aggregation can help protect individual identities in AI data sets.

Ensuring security and privacy is paramount for maintaining trust and integrity in AI business planning.

Case Studies: Success Stories Using AI for Business Planning

A collage of success stories using AI for business planning.

General Electric uses AI-driven predictive maintenance to foresee equipment failures, thus preventing costly downtimes in manufacturing. Amazon leverages AI for optimizing inventory levels and personalizing shopping experiences based on user behavior. Hilton Hotels has integrated AI through ‘Connie’, a robot concierge that enhances guest services with personalized recommendations.

Sahihi Seeds, an agricultural company in South Sudan, utilized AI-powered business planning to enhance their growth strategy while saving time and reducing costs. These examples demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of AI in transforming business planning across various industries.

How to Choose the Right AI Business Plan Generator

Crucial factors to consider when choosing an AI business plan generator include features, cost, and user reviews. Identify essential functionalities such as writing help and visual templates when selecting an AI business plan generator. Ensure the price of the AI business plan generator aligns with the features necessary for your needs.

Pick a user-friendly tool that is easy to navigate, especially for individuals with basic writing skills. Check platforms like Capterra and Trustpilot for genuine user reviews and feedback on the AI business plan generators. These steps will help you select a tool that meets your specific business planning needs.

Summary

The transformative role of AI in business planning is undeniable. From automating data analysis to enhancing financial forecasting and streamlining strategic planning, AI tools offer a new level of precision and efficiency. Top AI-powered business plan generators like Upmetrics AI, PrometAI, and Plannit.ai provide invaluable resources for creating comprehensive business plans.

By customizing AI-generated plans, incorporating market analysis, and adjusting financial projections, businesses can create well-structured, professional plans that align with their goals. With real-time collaboration features and a focus on security and privacy, AI tools are set to revolutionize business planning. Embrace the future of business planning with AI and watch your business idea soar.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the benefits of using AI in business planning?

Utilizing AI in business planning significantly boosts accuracy and efficiency by automating data analysis and enhancing financial forecasting. This ultimately leads to more informed strategic decisions.

How do AI business plan generators work?

AI business plan generators leverage natural language processing algorithms to create customized written content, significantly streamlining the drafting process. This technology allows users to efficiently produce comprehensive business plans tailored to their specific needs.

What should I look for in an AI business plan generator?

When choosing an AI business plan generator, prioritize essential features, affordability, user testimonials, and functionalities such as writing assistance and visual templates. This will ensure you select a tool that meets your specific needs effectively.

How can I ensure the security and privacy of my data when using AI tools?

To ensure the security and privacy of your data when using AI tools, implement regular audits and establish strict data retention policies. Additionally, integrate privacy considerations from the initial design phase.

Can AI business plan generators be customized to fit my specific business needs?

Yes, AI business plan generators can be customized to fit your specific business needs, allowing you to tailor the plan to align with your unique business strategy.

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The Unexpected Ways Businesses Are Using AI Chatbots https://doneforyou.com/the-unexpected-ways-businesses-are-using-ai-chatbots/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-unexpected-ways-businesses-are-using-ai-chatbots Wed, 12 Feb 2025 18:59:06 +0000 https://doneforyou.com/?p=19318 AI chatbots have moved beyond basic customer service—they’re now used in unexpected and innovative ways across industries. Business owners are leveraging chatbots to streamline workflows, boost creativity, and even handle tasks that were once thought to require a human touch. While most people think of chatbots as simple FAQ responders, their capabilities now extend to […]

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ai chatbots
AI chatbots have moved beyond basic customer service—they’re now used in unexpected and innovative ways across industries. Business owners are leveraging chatbots to streamline workflows, boost creativity, and even handle tasks that were once thought to require a human touch.

While most people think of chatbots as simple FAQ responders, their capabilities now extend to sales, marketing, content creation, project management, and beyond. In this article, we’ll explore some of the most unique and surprising ways AI chatbots are transforming business operations.

The Expanding Role of AI Chatbots in Business

AI chatbots are no longer just tools for customer interaction; they have evolved into essential business assistants that integrate seamlessly with various business operations. Companies are now leveraging chatbots in ways that go beyond simple automation, turning them into strategic assets.

Businesses are using AI chatbots to assist with advanced decision-making, processing large amounts of data to provide insights that would take humans hours to analyze. They are also breaking down communication barriers by enabling multilingual customer interactions, allowing companies to expand into new markets without hiring additional language support.

Another critical function is hyper-personalization, where AI chatbots analyze previous customer engagements and behaviors to deliver tailored recommendations, increasing satisfaction and loyalty. Additionally, AI chatbots are integrating with emerging technologies such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and voice recognition, enhancing user experiences in unique and dynamic ways.

With these advancements, AI chatbots have moved beyond simple scripted responses and are now playing an active role in business growth, strategic planning, and customer relationship management.

1. AI Chatbots for Sales Negotiation & Pricing Strategy

Sales and pricing strategies have traditionally required skilled human intervention. However, AI chatbots are now stepping in to optimize pricing decisions, improve negotiation processes, and close deals more efficiently. With real-time data analysis and machine learning capabilities, chatbots can adjust pricing dynamically, detect sales trends, and enhance the overall buyer experience.

Beyond just automating sales conversations, AI chatbots help businesses create tailored sales funnels based on customer behavior. By identifying patterns in past transactions, chatbots provide insights that allow businesses to craft more compelling offers. As a result, companies are seeing higher conversion rates and better customer satisfaction.

AI chatbots aren’t just lead generators—they’re also negotiators and pricing strategists. Businesses are using chatbots to:

  • Analyze customer buying patterns: track user behavior to determine when to offer discounts or incentives.
  • Negotiate pricing: Some advanced bots adjust pricing in real time based on supply, demand, and customer engagement.
  • Assist in B2B negotiations: handles preliminary price discussions and gather necessary details before human intervention.
  • Create urgency with dynamic offers: generate limited-time discounts to increase conversions.

For businesses with variable pricing models, AI bots help maximize profits without requiring manual oversight.

2. AI Chatbots for Legal & Compliance Assistance

Legal and compliance processes can be overwhelming for businesses, particularly small and mid-sized companies without dedicated legal teams. Navigating contracts, regulations, and risk management requires precision and constant updates to remain compliant with evolving laws. AI bots are stepping in to simplify these complexities, allowing business owners to focus on growth rather than legal hurdles.

By leveraging AI, companies can reduce human error in legal processes and ensure they remain compliant with industry-specific guidelines. AI bots provide instant access to legal insights, help generate critical business documents, and offer automated risk assessments to prevent costly compliance violations.

Small businesses often struggle with compliance and legal paperwork. AI chatbots are now being used to:

  • Draft and review contracts: analyze legal templates and highlight missing clauses.
  • Ensure regulatory compliance: alert business owners when policies need updates based on new laws.
  • Simplify employee agreements: generate tailored employment contracts and NDA agreements.
  • Manage risk assessments: AI evaluates business risks based on industry regulations and past legal precedents.

With chatbot-assisted legal tools, businesses can reduce costly legal mistakes and stay ahead of compliance requirements.

3. AI Chatbots for Mental Health & Employee Well-Being

Workplace stress is one of the biggest challenges affecting employee performance and retention. Long hours, high expectations, and demanding deadlines contribute to burnout, leading to disengagement and productivity loss. Business owners are increasingly looking for ways to support their employees’ well-being while maintaining efficiency, and AI chatbots are emerging as a powerful tool for workplace mental health.

AI-driven wellness bots provide employees with instant access to stress management techniques, confidential emotional support, and personalized wellness recommendations. By integrating mental health chatbots into the workplace, businesses can offer real-time support that helps employees manage stress, build resilience, and stay engaged without the stigma of seeking traditional therapy.

Employee burnout is real, and companies are turning to AI-driven wellness chatbots to support mental health and productivity. These bots can:

  • Provide stress management techniques: AI bots offer guided breathing exercises and mindfulness routines.
  • Monitor employee sentiment: analyze communication patterns to detect burnout risk.
  • Offer confidential check-ins: Employees can share concerns without fear of judgment.
  • Recommend wellness programs: AI suggests fitness, therapy, or relaxation options based on individual needs.

By integrating AI wellness bots, companies improve employee retention and create a healthier work environment.

4. AI Chatbots for Internal Knowledge Management

Managing and accessing company knowledge efficiently can be a major challenge, especially as businesses grow. Employees often waste valuable time searching for critical information, navigating outdated filing systems, or waiting for responses from colleagues. These inefficiencies lead to lost productivity and frustration within teams.

AI chatbots are revolutionizing internal knowledge management by making company-wide information accessible in seconds. Instead of manually digging through databases or asking multiple people for answers, employees can simply query an AI-powered chatbot to retrieve policies, procedural documents, and training materials instantly.

Searching for company policies or training materials can be time-consuming. AI bots help streamline internal knowledge management by:

  • Instantly retrieving documents: Employees can ask chatbots for specific company policies, training manuals, or procedural guides.
  • Providing IT support: AI bots assist employees in troubleshooting technical issues before escalating to IT.
  • Training new hires: guide employees through onboarding, reducing HR workload.
  • Summarizing meetings and reports: AI bots generate concise action points from lengthy discussions.

For businesses with large teams or remote employees, AI chatbots serve as virtual knowledge assistants, ensuring quick and accurate information retrieval.

ai chatbots

5. AI Chatbots for Market Research & Competitive Analysis

Market research is a time-intensive process that requires businesses to gather, analyze, and interpret data to make informed decisions. Traditionally, this has involved manual data collection, survey distribution, and competitor analysis, all of which can be slow and resource-intensive. AI chatbots are now stepping in to automate these processes, providing businesses with real-time insights that were previously difficult to obtain.

With AI-powered automation, companies can track industry trends, monitor customer sentiment, and stay ahead of competitors without needing a dedicated research team. AI chatbots can sift through vast amounts of data from multiple sources, including social media, review sites, and industry reports, to deliver actionable insights in seconds.

Understanding your competitors is crucial, but market research can be overwhelming. AI chatbots help businesses:

  • Track competitor pricing & promotions: analyze public data to keep businesses informed.
  • Scan social media for trends: monitor social sentiment and emerging industry topics.
  • Conduct automated surveys: collect and analyze feedback from customers in real time.
  • Predict market shifts: AI bots analyze patterns in news and economic indicators to provide forecasts.

With AI chatbots, businesses can make data-driven decisions faster than ever.

6. AI Chatbots for Creative Content Development

Creativity and AI might seem like an unlikely pair, but AI chatbots are proving to be invaluable tools in the content creation process. Businesses are always looking for ways to generate engaging, high-quality content efficiently, and AI-powered chatbots are stepping in to assist. From brainstorming fresh ideas to refining messaging, these tools are becoming essential assets for content teams.

AI chatbots can analyze vast amounts of data to predict what type of content will resonate most with a target audience. They can generate ideas based on industry trends, repurpose existing content into different formats, and even provide stylistic recommendations to maintain brand consistency. This level of automation allows businesses to scale content creation without sacrificing quality or originality.

Chatbots aren’t just for automation—they’re also being used for content brainstorming and creative storytelling. Businesses leverage AI chatbots to:

  • Generate unique ad copy: AI creates marketing scripts tailored to different platforms.
  • Write product descriptions: AI bots generate persuasive descriptions based on brand voice.
  • Help brainstorm video ideas: suggest trending topics and hooks for engaging content.
  • Assist in branding & messaging: refine brand voice and tone for consistency.

For businesses looking to scale content marketing without hiring large teams, AI bots provide instant creative assistance.

7. AI Chatbots for Smart Inventory & Supply Chain Optimization

Inventory management and supply chain logistics are critical for any business dealing with physical products. A poorly optimized supply chain leads to overstocking, stockouts, and inefficiencies that can drain resources. Traditionally, businesses have relied on manual tracking and forecasting, which often results in costly errors. AI chatbots are now transforming inventory and supply chain operations by introducing real-time monitoring, predictive analytics, and automated supplier communications.

By integrating AI-driven chatbots into their logistics processes, businesses can improve demand forecasting, track shipments with greater accuracy, and automate order fulfillment. AI chatbots analyze historical sales data, market trends, and customer behaviors to recommend optimal inventory levels, reducing waste and improving efficiency.

Managing inventory and logistics efficiently is a power move for eCommerce and retail businesses. AI chatbots are helping to:

  • Predict demand & avoid stockouts: analyze sales patterns and recommend inventory adjustments.
  • Track shipments & delivery updates: AI bots provide customers with real-time tracking info.
  • Automate supplier communications: Businesses use bots to manage vendor relationships and reordering processes.
  • Detect fraud & supply chain risks: AI scans transaction history and logistics reports for anomalies.

By automating inventory and logistics, AI bots help businesses run leaner and more efficiently.

AI Chatbots vs. Traditional Automation Tools

As businesses explore automation solutions, they often debate whether AI chatbots or traditional automation tools are the better choice. While both serve valuable purposes, AI chatbots introduce a level of adaptability and learning that static automation tools cannot match. Unlike rule-based systems that rely on pre-defined workflows, AI chatbots continuously evolve based on user interactions, improving their efficiency over time.

Traditional automation tools excel at handling structured tasks, such as scheduling emails or processing invoices. However, AI chatbots go beyond by understanding natural language, analyzing customer sentiment, and providing dynamic responses in real-time. Businesses that require flexible, conversational automation will benefit significantly from AI-powered solutions.

Many businesses wonder whether they should use AI chatbots or stick with traditional automation tools. Here’s how they compare:

ai chatbots

Before diving into the differences, it’s important to recognize that both AI chatbots and traditional automation tools serve distinct purposes. Businesses leveraging automation need to assess whether they require structured, rule-based workflows or dynamic, interactive solutions that evolve with user interactions.

While traditional automation tools are great for structured workflows, AI chatbots provide adaptive, conversational automation that improves over time.

Expanding the Differences: When to Use AI Chatbots vs. Traditional Automation

While AI chatbots and traditional automation tools serve similar goals—enhancing efficiency and reducing manual workloads—their core functionalities differ significantly. Understanding when to use one over the other is key to maximizing business impact.

Traditional automation tools excel in structured, repetitive tasks such as email scheduling, invoicing, and simple workflows. These tools follow pre-defined rules and do not adapt beyond their programmed parameters. They are best suited for businesses that require predictable and controlled operations.

AI chatbots, on the other hand, bring intelligence and adaptability to automation. They handle customer interactions, personalize responses based on data, and continuously learn from user engagement. AI-powered automation is ideal for businesses that need real-time decision-making, dynamic customer engagement, and deeper data-driven insights.

For businesses looking to scale with automation, the best approach may not be choosing one over the other, but instead integrating AI bots alongside traditional automation to create a hybrid system that maximizes efficiency and personalization.

AI Chatbots

The Future of AI Chatbots in Business

AI chatbots are transforming the way businesses operate, extending beyond basic customer service to become integral parts of strategic decision-making. Their ability to learn, adapt, and integrate into various business functions makes them an invaluable asset for organizations looking to scale efficiently.

With advancements in natural language processing and machine learning, AI bots continue to refine their capabilities. Businesses leveraging these tools are seeing improvements in customer engagement, workflow automation, and overall productivity, positioning themselves ahead of competitors who rely solely on traditional methods.

The key to maximizing AI chatbot potential lies in combining automation with human insight. While bots streamline processes and handle repetitive tasks, human oversight ensures that complex interactions and relationship-building remain a priority.

As AI technology evolves, its role in business will only expand, making it essential for forward-thinking entrepreneurs to adopt and experiment with AI chatbot solutions. Companies that embrace this shift today will be better positioned to thrive in an increasingly automated future.

 

FAQ

1. What industries benefit the most from AI chatbots?

Industries like digital marketing, coaching and consulting, online education, and service-based businesses see huge efficiency boosts with AI chatbot integration.

2. Can AI chatbots replace human employees?

No—AI chatbots handle repetitive tasks, but human teams are still essential for complex decision-making, relationship-building, and emotional intelligence.

3. How difficult is it to implement an AI chatbot?

Most AI chatbot platforms offer no-code or low-code options, making them accessible even for non-technical business owners.

4. What’s the biggest advantage of AI chatbots?

Their ability to learn, adapt, and personalize interactions, making them far more dynamic than traditional automation tools.

AI Isn’t the Future—It’s the Present. Are You Using It to Your Advantage?

Most business owners are either wasting time on tasks AI could handle or missing out on powerful automation because they don’t know where to start. If you want to free up hours in your week, increase revenue, and scale without burnout, AI is the answer –> but only if you use it the right way.

Let’s talk. Book a free strategy call, and we’ll walk through how AI can be integrated into your business to make you more efficient, profitable, and unstoppable.

Schedule Your Free Call Now

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Business Idea Validation: Two Powerful Strategies to Test Your Next Big Idea https://doneforyou.com/business-idea-validation-strategies-to-test-your-big-idea/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=business-idea-validation-strategies-to-test-your-big-idea Wed, 22 Jan 2025 19:01:53 +0000 https://doneforyou.com/?p=18978 Launching a new business idea can feel like jumping into the deep end without knowing if the water is warm or freezing cold. That’s where business idea validation comes in. Before you invest time, energy, and money, validating your idea helps you gauge interest, refine your concept, and set yourself up for success. Validation is […]

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Business Idea Validation

Launching a new business idea can feel like jumping into the deep end without knowing if the water is warm or freezing cold. That’s where business idea validation comes in. Before you invest time, energy, and money, validating your idea helps you gauge interest, refine your concept, and set yourself up for success.

Validation is like a trial run for your idea, allowing you to collect real-world data instead of relying on guesswork. It bridges the gap between “What if this works?” and “Here’s proof it works.” By testing the waters early, you can avoid costly mistakes, identify areas for improvement, and build confidence in your vision.

In this article, we’ll explore two proven strategies—running targeted ads and building landing pages—that can help you validate your idea without wasting precious resources. Let’s break down how to use these methods to get real-world feedback on your next big idea.

What Is Business Idea Validation, and Why Does It Matter?

At its core, business idea validation is about testing the viability of your idea before committing fully. It’s the process of asking your potential audience, “Is this something you’d want?” through measurable actions, like signing up, clicking, or purchasing.

Think of it as a safety net. Instead of pouring thousands of dollars into an idea you think is great, validation lets you base your decisions on actual data. It can prevent costly mistakes, save time, and ensure that your efforts are focused on something people genuinely care about.

The benefits of validating your business idea include:

  • Avoiding Wasted Resources: Know if your idea is worth pursuing before you invest heavily.
  • Refining Your Concept: Use feedback to improve your product or service.
  • Building Confidence: Validation gives you data-driven assurance that you’re on the right track.

Now that we’ve established the “why,” let’s dive into the “how.”

business idea validation

1. Run Targeted Ads: Your Real-Time Feedback Machine

One of the fastest ways to validate your business idea is by running targeted ads. Platforms like Facebook, Google, and Instagram allow you to place your concept in front of specific audiences, giving you instant feedback on whether people are interested.

Here’s how it works:

  • Create a Hypothesis: Start with a clear idea of what you’re testing. For example, if you’re launching a new meal delivery service, your hypothesis might be: “Busy professionals will be interested in weekly meal plans with fresh ingredients.”
  • Craft Your Ad: Your ad should highlight the main benefit of your idea. For the meal delivery service, your ad might say, “Fresh, Healthy Meals Delivered Weekly—Save Time and Eat Better.” Pair it with an eye-catching image or video.
  • Track Engagement: Run the ad for a few days and measure clicks, sign-ups, or other actions. If people are engaging, you’re onto something. If not, it’s time to adjust.

Why This Works

Ads provide immediate feedback. They’re low-cost, quick to set up, and allow you to test multiple ideas at once. You’ll know within days (or even hours) if your audience resonates with your concept.

Jason’s Tip: Split-Test Like a Pro

Don’t just settle for one ad. Run A/B tests with different headlines, images, and calls-to-action (CTAs). Even small tweaks can lead to big differences in performance.

2. Build a Landing Page: A Focused Validation Tool

While ads get the conversation started, a landing page takes validation a step further. A landing page is a single, dedicated webpage where you showcase your idea, highlight its benefits, and invite visitors to take action.

Here’s the process:

  • Design Your Page: Keep it simple but engaging. Use a strong headline, a few compelling bullet points, and a clear CTA. For example, if you’re launching an online coaching program, your headline might be: “Take Control of Your Career—Join Our Coaching Program Today.”
  • Offer an Actionable CTA: Encourage visitors to sign up for early access, join a waitlist, or pre-order. The goal is to measure genuine interest.
  • Promote the Page: Drive traffic using social media, email marketing, or paid ads.

Why This Works

Actions speak louder than words. If people sign up, pre-pay, or engage with your landing page, you have concrete proof that your idea has potential.

Jason’s Tip: Add Social Proof

If you’ve run ads before creating the landing page, use that data as proof. Highlight the number of clicks, sign-ups, or positive comments in your copy. It builds trust and excitement.

 

Combine Ads and Landing Pages for

While running ads and building landing pages are powerful on their own, combining the two can supercharge your business idea validation process. Together, these tools create a seamless feedback loop that not only drives traffic but also provides deeper insights into your audience’s behavior and preferences.

Start by running a targeted ad campaign that directs potential customers to your landing page. Use the ad to present your idea in a compelling way, highlighting key benefits or solving a specific pain point. Once visitors land on your page, offer them a clear next step, whether it’s signing up for a waitlist, downloading a free resource, or answering a quick survey.

This approach does more than just validate your idea—it also builds an engaged audience. When people take action on your landing page, you’re essentially creating a pre-launch customer base. Plus, you can analyze the data to refine your messaging, identify high-converting demographics, and test which ad copy resonates most.

For example, if one ad consistently drives more clicks to your landing page but another leads to higher conversion rates, you’ll know exactly how to optimize your campaign. This iterative process ensures you’re not just validating your idea but also laying the groundwork for a successful launch.

Combining ads and landing pages isn’t just about validation—it’s about creating momentum. When done right, these tools work together to build interest, capture leads, and refine your strategy, all while minimizing risk and maximizing ROI.

Pitfalls to Watch for When Validating Business Ideas

When it comes to testing your business idea, small missteps can lead to inaccurate results or wasted resources. To get the most out of your validation process, it’s essential to avoid common mistakes that could skew your understanding of your audience’s true interest or demand.

One of the biggest mistakes is focusing on vanity metrics rather than actionable insights. It’s tempting to get caught up in clicks, likes, or impressions without digging deeper into conversions or meaningful engagement. These surface-level metrics may look good on paper but won’t give you the data you need to refine your idea or confirm its viability. Instead, focus on metrics that directly align with your goals, like sign-ups, purchases, or in-depth survey responses.

Another common pitfall is launching your validation tools prematurely. Rushing an ad campaign or landing page without fully crafting your message or ensuring the user experience flows smoothly can lead to unreliable results. Take the time to polish your copy, design, and targeting strategies before pushing anything live. A sloppy execution can hurt your brand’s credibility and make it difficult to discern if your idea needs improvement or if your presentation simply fell short.

Mistakes to Avoid:

  • Ignoring Negative Feedback: If your ad or landing page isn’t getting traction, don’t ignore the signs. Use it as an opportunity to refine your idea or pivot.
  • Overcomplicating Your Message: Keep your ad and landing page simple. Focus on the core benefit your idea provides.
  • Not Testing Enough: One ad or landing page isn’t enough. Run multiple tests with different angles to get a comprehensive picture.
  • Targeting the Wrong Audience: Make sure your ads and landing pages are reaching the right people. Use detailed audience targeting to avoid wasting time and money.

Business Idea Validation

Real-Life Examples of Business Idea Validation

One of the most exciting aspects of business idea validation is seeing it work in the real world. The methods might seem straightforward, but when applied correctly, they can transform a concept into a thriving enterprise. By running small-scale tests or showcasing a clear vision, entrepreneurs have turned ideas into multimillion-dollar ventures. These examples highlight the importance of testing and refining before going all in, proving that even the simplest validation efforts can yield powerful results.

A critical takeaway from these success stories is the accessibility of validation tools. You don’t need a massive budget or a fully built product to validate an idea. Instead, you just need creativity, strategic thinking, and the willingness to learn from your audience. Whether it’s a clever video, a targeted ad, or a prototype, the goal is the same: to find out whether your idea resonates with the people it’s designed for.

Real-Life Examples:

  • The Dropbox Story: Before building their full platform, Dropbox created a simple video explaining their idea. The overwhelming interest from viewers validated their concept and helped secure funding.
  • The Dollar Shave Club: The founders ran targeted ads to gauge interest in their subscription-based razor delivery service. The response was so strong that it launched a multi-million-dollar company.

These examples demonstrate that even a minimal effort to validate an idea can set the stage for something much bigger. Dropbox didn’t need a finished product to attract investors; they just needed to prove that people wanted the solution they were offering. Similarly, the Dollar Shave Club didn’t need a fully stocked warehouse to start—they simply confirmed that people would subscribe to the service if it existed.

Ultimately, these stories show the value of putting your idea in front of a real audience, even if it’s in its earliest stages. Whether your goal is funding, customer interest, or proof of demand, the insights gained from even a small validation effort can guide your next steps and increase your chances of success. Business idea validation isn’t just about testing—it’s about opening the door to opportunities that you might not have seen otherwise.

Wrapping It All Up

Validating your business idea isn’t just a step in the process—it’s the foundation for everything that comes next. By using strategies like targeted ads and landing pages, you can gain valuable insights, refine your concept, and move forward with confidence.

Remember, the goal isn’t perfection; it’s progress. Start small, test early, and let the feedback guide you. With the right approach, your business idea can go from a spark of inspiration to a thriving reality.

FAQs About Business Idea Validation

  1. How much should I spend on ads to validate my idea?
    Start small—$50 to $100 is often enough to get initial feedback. If you see promising results, you can scale up.
  2. What tools do I need to create a landing page?
    Platforms like Leadpages, ClickFunnels, or even WordPress make it easy to create landing pages without technical skills.
  3. How do I know if my idea is validated?
    Look for measurable actions like sign-ups, pre-orders, or purchases. High engagement is a strong indicator of interest.
  4. Can I validate multiple ideas at once?
    Absolutely. Use separate ads and landing pages for each idea to keep your results clear and actionable.
  5. What if my idea doesn’t get validated?
    Don’t be discouraged. Use the feedback to refine your idea, change your messaging, or pivot to a new concept.

The post Business Idea Validation: Two Powerful Strategies to Test Your Next Big Idea appeared first on Done For You.

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Why Hiring a Fractional CMO is Smart for Your Business https://doneforyou.com/why-hiring-a-fractional-cmo-is-smart-for-your-business/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-hiring-a-fractional-cmo-is-smart-for-your-business Wed, 15 Jan 2025 16:21:54 +0000 https://doneforyou.com/?p=18950 The rise of the Fractional CMO is transforming how businesses approach marketing leadership. As Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) adapt to evolving demands, many companies are choosing Fractional CMOs for flexible, expert-driven solutions. By providing strategic insights without the cost of a full-time hire, these professionals are helping businesses thrive in competitive markets. In this article, […]

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The rise of the Fractional CMO is transforming how businesses approach marketing leadership. As Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) adapt to evolving demands, many companies are choosing Fractional CMOs for flexible, expert-driven solutions. By providing strategic insights without the cost of a full-time hire, these professionals are helping businesses thrive in competitive markets.

In this article, we’ll explore the concept of a Fractional CMO, their growing importance, and how they’re shaping the future of marketing leadership. From their key responsibilities to the industries they impact, this article provides a comprehensive look at why they are in demand and how they can elevate your business.

The Role of a Part-Time Marketing Leader

A Fractional CMO is a seasoned marketing executive who works with companies on a part-time or contractual basis. Unlike traditional full-time CMOs, they bring their expertise to businesses that need strategic guidance without the overhead of a permanent hire.

Their responsibilities often include:

This flexible arrangement is ideal for startups, small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), or businesses undergoing transitions like rebranding or market expansion.

Why This Marketing Trend is Gaining Popularity

fractional cmo

The rise of this role coincides with shifting business needs and economic realities. As the quote suggests, the role of the CMO is far from diminishing—instead, it is evolving.

Key Drivers Behind the Trend:

  • Economic Efficiency: Businesses can access top-tier marketing talent without committing to a full-time salary and benefits package.
  • Specialized Expertise: They bring diverse experience from multiple industries, making them adept at solving complex challenges.
  • Adaptability: In an ever-changing digital landscape, these professionals can implement agile strategies tailored to current trends.
  • Focus on Results: Fractional CMOs are often results-driven, focusing on delivering measurable outcomes in a shorter time frame.

In addition to cost savings, companies find that the flexibility of this model allows them to scale their marketing efforts up or down based on specific needs. This agility is especially valuable in dynamic markets where businesses must respond quickly to consumer demands and competitive pressures. These professionals offer expertise on demand, ensuring businesses can adapt without overextending resources.

Moreover, the growing complexity of marketing—spanning digital channels, analytics, and evolving consumer behaviors—requires a level of expertise that many in-house teams may lack. Leveraging their insights helps companies maintain a competitive edge while fostering innovation and sustainable growth.

Benefits of Hiring a Fractional CMO

They offer significant advantages for businesses seeking growth and transformation. Here’s how they can make a difference:

  • Cost-Effective Leadership: Hiring one eliminates the high costs associated with full-time executives while providing access to the same level of expertise.
  • Strategic Focus: They excel at aligning marketing efforts with business objectives, ensuring every initiative drives growth.
  • Fresh Perspectives: With experience across industries, they bring innovative ideas and outside-the-box thinking to the table.
  • Scalability: Whether you’re launching a new product or entering a new market, their strategies can adapt to fit your needs.

Key Skills of an Effective Fractional CMO

fractional CMO

A successful professional in this role combines expertise in marketing strategy, data analytics, and leadership.

They excel at identifying opportunities for growth, streamlining marketing efforts, and implementing systems that align with a company’s goals. Emphasize adaptability, as they must quickly understand a company’s challenges and deliver impactful solutions in a shorter time frame.

Their ability to balance strategic vision with tactical execution makes them invaluable assets for businesses looking to achieve sustainable growth.

Additionally, they must have strong interpersonal and communication skills to foster collaboration across teams. This ensures that strategies are not only implemented effectively but also embraced by all stakeholders. Their knack for prioritizing high-impact initiatives while managing limited resources further highlights their strategic value.

Challenges Faced by Fractional CMOs

While the role offers flexibility and variety, it comes with its own set of challenges. One significant hurdle is quickly building credibility and trust with a company’s leadership and teams. Since their role is temporary, they must demonstrate value almost immediately to justify their engagement.

Another challenge is managing multiple clients simultaneously. They often juggle several projects at once, requiring excellent time management and prioritization skills. Balancing competing demands while maintaining high-quality deliverables can be daunting.

Navigating unfamiliar industries or markets is a regular occurrence for CMO’s . Diving into a new business landscape requires a steep learning curve, as they need to understand the nuances of a company’s audience, competitors, and industry trends quickly. Staying adaptable and resourceful is essential for overcoming these challenges.

They may also face resistance from internal teams. Employees accustomed to a full-time CMO may be hesitant to embrace a part-time leader. Overcoming this requires clear communication, demonstrating value, and fostering collaboration to build trust and engagement.

Is a Fractional CMO Right for Your Business?

Not every business needs a full-time CMO, but many can benefit from their expertise. Here’s how to determine if it’s the right choice for you:

  • Growth Phase: Are you scaling but unable to afford a full-time executive? This option offers the leadership you need without the long-term commitment.
  • Strategic Needs: Do you require expert guidance for a specific project or initiative? They can provide targeted solutions.
  • Budget Constraints: If hiring a full-time CMO is not financially feasible, this role delivers value at a fraction of the cost.

By evaluating these factors, you can decide if this model aligns with your business goals and needs.

How to Choose the Right Fractional CMO

Finding the ideal candidate requires a thoughtful approach to ensure they align with your business goals and culture. Start by identifying the specific marketing challenges you need help with. Are you looking to expand your brand’s reach, optimize your marketing funnel, or develop a comprehensive go-to-market strategy? Having clarity about your needs will help narrow your search to candidates with the most relevant expertise.

You must also consider the level of industry experience and adaptability the candidate brings. They must quickly understand your business environment, adapt to your company culture, and deliver results within the limited timeframe of their engagement. Look for someone with a proven track record in your industry who can provide innovative yet practical solutions to your unique challenges.

Key Factors to Consider:

  • Experience: Look for a professional with a proven track record in your industry.
  • Cultural Fit: Ensure they align with your company values and culture.
  • References: Check testimonials and case studies to gauge their effectiveness.
  • Clear Objectives: Define your goals upfront to ensure alignment and measurable results.

The Future of Fractional CMOs in Marketing

The role is expected to grow as businesses continue to seek flexible, cost-effective solutions to their marketing needs. With the increasing complexity of digital marketing, having access to an experienced professional who can quickly adapt and deliver results is invaluable.

These professionals will also play a pivotal role in shaping the future of marketing by bringing innovative strategies to the table. Their ability to leverage emerging technologies, such as AI and data analytics, positions them as leaders in creating impactful, forward-thinking campaigns.

As the demand grows, we can expect to see more businesses integrating fractional CMOs into their leadership teams. Their expertise will be instrumental in helping companies navigate the challenges of a competitive and rapidly evolving marketplace.

Key Trends Shaping the Future:

  • Increased Focus on Data-Driven Strategies: Relying heavily on analytics to make informed decisions and measure ROI.
  • Expansion into Niche Markets: Businesses in specialized industries will turn to fractional CMOs for tailored marketing solutions.
  • Adoption of AI and Automation: Leveraging technology to streamline operations and enhance marketing efforts will become a priority.
  • Collaboration with Remote Teams: As remote work continues to rise, they will excel at managing and integrating global teams effectively.

By embracing these trends, they will continue to provide immense value, ensuring businesses stay agile and competitive in a dynamic landscape.

Final Thoughts

The rise of Fractional CMOs highlights a shift in how businesses approach marketing leadership. By embracing this flexible and results-driven model, companies can access top-tier talent without the long-term commitment of a full-time role. Fractional CMOs are not just a trend—they’re a strategic asset for businesses looking to thrive in a competitive market.

Whether you’re a startup seeking to scale or an established company looking to refine your marketing strategy, they can provide the expertise and insights needed to achieve your goals. As the business landscape evolves, leveraging their skills could be the key to sustainable growth and long-term success.

FAQs About Fractional CMOs

  1. What is a Fractional CMO?
    A Fractional CMO is a marketing executive who provides strategic leadership to businesses on a part-time or project basis, offering expertise without the cost of a full-time role. 
  2. What types of businesses benefit from a Fractional CMO?
    Startups, SMEs, and companies undergoing transitions or launching new products often benefit from the expertise of a Fractional CMO. 
  3. How is a Fractional CMO different from a traditional CMO?
    While both roles provide strategic marketing leadership, a Fractional CMO works part-time or on a contractual basis, offering flexibility and cost savings. 
  4. How do I know if my business needs a Fractional CMO?
    If your business requires high-level marketing expertise but cannot afford a full-time executive, a Fractional CMO is an ideal solution. 
  5. What are the key benefits of hiring a Fractional CMO?
    Benefits include cost-effectiveness, strategic focus, access to diverse experience, and scalability. 
  6. Can a Fractional CMO help with digital marketing?
    Yes, many Fractional CMOs specialize in digital marketing strategies, including social media, SEO, content marketing, and paid advertising. 
  7. How do Fractional CMOs build trust quickly?
    They rely on clear communication, proven methodologies, and a results-oriented approach to establish credibility and rapport with teams and stakeholders. 
  8. How much does a Fractional CMO cost?
    Costs vary based on experience and scope of work but are typically a fraction of the salary of a full-time CMO. 
  9. Can a Fractional CMO work remotely?
    Yes, many Fractional CMOs offer remote services, making them a flexible option for businesses worldwide. 
  10. What should I look for when hiring a Fractional CMO?
    Look for experience, industry expertise, cultural fit, and a proven track record of delivering results.

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Remote Team Management: Navigating Post-Covid Workforce Culture with a Global Team https://doneforyou.com/remote-team-management/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=remote-team-management Mon, 16 Sep 2024 12:00:59 +0000 https://doneforyou.com/?p=18713 The Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed how we see and interact in the world. It’s especially affected how we work! It’s accelerated the shift toward remote and hybrid work models. For marketing agencies, this transformation presents both challenges and opportunities. Managing a global workforce in this new era requires a deep understanding of remote team […]

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The Covid-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed how we see and interact in the world. It’s especially affected how we work! It’s accelerated the shift toward remote and hybrid work models. For marketing agencies, this transformation presents both challenges and opportunities. Managing a global workforce in this new era requires a deep understanding of remote team dynamics, a commitment to flexibility, and the adoption of new tools and practices. This guide explores how agencies can efficiently manage and fulfill marketing services with a global team in a post-Covid world.

 

Embracing the “New Normal” of Remote Work

An Upwork study suggests that 22% of the American workforce will work remotely by 2025 and approximately 14% of employed Americans (aged 18 and over) work from home all of the time, according to Pew Research Center. While 41% of employees work remotely on a hybrid basis.

In 2021, 70 percent of those who worked from home during the pandemic report virtual meetings are less stressful, and 64 percent now prefer hybrid meetings according to a report by Owl Labs

The pandemic has shown that remote work is not just possible, but often preferable for many employees. As agencies adjust to this new reality, it’s important to embrace the cultural shifts that come with it. According to Census.gov, the average one-way commuting time among those who travel to a workplace increased by almost 1 minute from 25.6 minutes in 2021 to 26.4 minutes in 2022. While this isn’t the highest this statistic has ever been, it certainly shows a trend towards people living farther away from where they work. Remote/hybrid work has been the response to this cultural shift.

Cultural Change: Remote work has democratized the workplace, offering employees greater flexibility and autonomy. This shift requires agencies to adopt a results-oriented approach, where the focus is on outcomes rather than hours worked. This is a very complicated place to work from considering tracking hours (from either a billing standpoint or capacity management for production) is essential to how agencies still run. We aren’t saying to abandon the hourly model entirely. You simply have to be more flexible and trusting in how it’s managed and tracked. 

Tip: Implement policies that support flexible working hours and allow team members to choose their own schedules, as long as they meet deadlines and deliver results. In their book “REWORK,” Jason Fried and David Heinemeir Hansson (the founders of Basecamp), remind us that, “Working more doesn’t mean you care more or get more done. It just means you work more.” While this might sound reductionistic (or dumb), the fact is, productivity in our world (agencies) might be billed by the hour, but hours worked don’t equate to productivity. There has to be some nuance and context applied to the concept of working – be it time or other measures of performance. 

 

Enhancing Communication and Collaboration in a Remote Setting

With teams dispersed across the country (sometimes the world), effective communication and collaboration have become more critical than ever. The key is to create an environment where remote employees feel connected and engaged and not penalized for being in a different time zone. This can be managed by level-setting expectations and fostering a collaborative remote culture.

Asynchronous Communication: In a global team, synchronous communication isn’t always feasible. Asynchronous communication—where team members respond to messages and tasks at their own pace—has become the norm. There are certainly moments where the team needs to align at the same time – and this is possible either via a late-day/early morning weekly alignment meeting or flying team members in quarterly to connect in person as a sort of “cultural recalibration” session. But generally and in the day-to-day, you need to have a healthy communication cadence and – with that – a plan for escalation as needed.

Tip: Encourage the use of project management tools like Basecamp or Monday.com, which allow team members to collaborate on tasks without needing to be online simultaneously. Use Loom for video updates and tutorials that can be watched at any time. Also, have a hierarchy of communication” that goes something like this:

– Email: Respond within 24 business hours

– Slack: Respond within the next working hour

– Phone call/text: respond immediately (within reason)

Virtual Team Building: Building relationships within your remote team is essential to fostering collaboration. Virtual team-building activities (non-business critical topics for calls) can help bridge the gap and create a sense of community. Learn more about your team and schedule time to do so collectively. Everyone’s favorite topic is themselves. So schedule times to cover everyone’s favorite topic – this will grow loyalty and open communication that in other ways wouldn’t be possible.

Tip: Organize regular virtual meetups, such as coffee chats or online games, to help your team members connect on a personal level. Ask deeper questions to get to know your team and ensure everyone engages! You can even mail people swag or things to display on these calls. 

 

Leveraging Technology to Manage a Global Workforce

Technology is the lifeblood of remote team management. The right tools can streamline workflows, enhance productivity, and ensure that everyone stays aligned, no matter where they are. But the wrong tools will kill productivity, damage your brand, and even cost you clients!

Remote Work Tools: Equip your team with the best tools for remote work, including communication platforms, project management software, and cloud-based collaboration tools. Having SOPs and shared documents and clearly communicating how to work remotely will maximize productivity and set you apart from your competitors.

Tip: Using tools like Slack for communication, Notion for team documentation, Drive for shared folders, and Figma for collaborative design work will all help keep everyone on the same page remotely. Ensure that all tools are integrated, allowing for seamless workflows across different platforms. If integrations aren’t available, use tools like Zapier to help create those connections and automate as much of your processes as possible!

Cybersecurity: As remote work becomes the norm, cybersecurity is a growing concern. Protecting your agency’s data and your clients’ information is paramount. 2FA and limited access to certain documents not only help your agency remain compliant, but they’ll eliminate a lot of Rework as well – locking down an annual shared content calendar for example to only-owner editability will help protect your business as well as your and your client’s privacy.

Tip: Implement strong cybersecurity measures, such as VPNs, multi-factor authentication, and regular security training for your team. Use tools like LastPass for secure password management or lock certain folders or documents to keep information secure.

 

Navigating Time Zones and Cultural Differences

Managing a global team means navigating time zone differences and cultural diversity. Some of this was touched on above, but it certainly warrants it’s own consideration. While these differences can be challenging, they also offer unique opportunities for your agency. One such example is our agency is based in Pennsylvania (EST). The director of our Agency Accelerator product lives in Arkansas (CST) and our lead Ad Specialist is in Wisconsin (also CST). They both start their days an hour earlier than the rest of our agency – giving us a head start on reporting and baking in an extra hour of work across our workdays. Some companies have international teams that allow their company to work 24 hours a day!

Time Zone Management: Use time zone differences to your advantage by organizing work in shifts, ensuring that progress on projects continues around the clock. If you manage this well, schedule meetings at appropriate times and communicate expectations for productive hours then you can literally add hours to your day! Take this to a global scale and your team could work 24 hours in a day without anyone losing sleep. 

Tip: Use scheduling tools like Doodle or share calendars in Google Workspace to find the best meeting times for team members in different time zones. Create a shared calendar that displays everyone’s working hours and ask team members to block their “non-working” hours. This will display appropriately across time zones for the one scheduling any calls or virtual meetings.

Cultural Sensitivity: Understanding and respecting cultural differences is crucial for building a cohesive global team. This includes communication styles, work habits, and holidays. This is especially important for international agencies. Some communication styles or assumptions are made state-side that require thorough communication and unpacking for, say, an Indian development team. It’s not extra work to be thorough and speak appropriately to different cultures. In fact, it can enhance your productivity, positively impact your bottom line, and even help you be relatable to prospective clients who are navigating the same sort of challenges.

Tip: Provide cultural sensitivity training for your team and create a cultural calendar that includes holidays and important events from each team member’s country and have an open line of communication with your team that allows them to bring to you any and all questions or challenges they may have encountering cultural differences for the first time. 

 

Maintaining Productivity and Accountability in a Remote Environment

Here’s where most companies get it wrong. Truly, one of (if not THE) biggest challenges of remote work is maintaining productivity and ensuring accountability. Without the physical presence of an office, agencies must find new ways to keep their teams motivated and on track. We mentioned above the tracking of hours for client billing or capacity reporting is one way to manage this challenge, but there are other factors to consider in tracking productivity from remote associates. 

Several studies over the past few years show productivity while working remotely from home is better than working in an office setting. On average, those who work from home spend 10 minutes less a day being unproductive and work one more day a week. These same remote workers are up to 47% more productive than office workers according to a Stanford study.

Performance Tracking: Use data-driven methods to track performance and ensure that your team is meeting their goals. This includes setting clear KPIs and regularly reviewing progress.

Tip: Implement task management reports or performance management tools like ClickUp, 15Five, or BambooHR, which allow for continuous feedback and goal tracking.

Employee Well-being: In the discussion around productivity, it’s import to not neglect the fact that remote work can blur the lines between personal and professional life, leading to burnout. It’s important to prioritize your team’s well-being to maintain productivity in the long term.

Tip: Encourage regular breaks and time off. Use tools like Calm or Headspace to offer mindfulness and relaxation resources to your team.

 

Adapting to the Future of Work

The post-Covid workforce culture is still evolving, and agencies must remain agile and open to change. This means continuously assessing and adapting your remote work strategies to meet the needs of your team and clients and being flexible in fostering quality communication, delivering results for clients, and making your company a preferred working environment – even remote!

Continuous Learning: The remote work landscape is constantly changing, with new tools and best practices emerging regularly. Stay ahead of the curve by encouraging continuous learning and development and inviting ideas or feedback from your team around best practices or new software to consider making your remote work more productive and efficient.

Tip: Offer online courses and resources to help your team stay updated on the latest trends and technologies in remote work and marketing and encourage certification programs either via LinkedIn or Google Academy to help folks not only stay sharp in their roles, but report back on any adjustments in the market they may have gathered in their continuing education.

 

Conclusion: Thriving in a Remote Work Environment

Managing a global workforce in a post-Covid world requires more than just adapting to remote work—it requires embracing it. By focusing on communication, leveraging technology, respecting cultural differences, and maintaining a results-oriented approach, your agency can thrive in this new era of work.

As the future of work continues to evolve, agencies that master remote team management will be better positioned to deliver exceptional marketing services to clients around the world and open themselves to a global (instead of regionally locked) talent pool!

Read more about how to better your agency at doneforyou.com/category/agencies

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The Art of Selling Marketing Services to Warm Leads: A Step-by-Step Guide https://doneforyou.com/the-art-of-selling-marketing-services/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-art-of-selling-marketing-services Fri, 13 Sep 2024 12:35:13 +0000 https://doneforyou.com/?p=18711 For the first few years of my career, I wondered why “Sales” and “Marketing” were always in the same department. The personalities of the teams were strikingly different, the functions seemed to support each other, but they were more at war for budgets, and resources, and espoused completely different cultures more often than not. But […]

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For the first few years of my career, I wondered why “Sales” and “Marketing” were always in the same department. The personalities of the teams were strikingly different, the functions seemed to support each other, but they were more at war for budgets, and resources, and espoused completely different cultures more often than not. But looking at the teams holistically – in the context of scaling a company – they were truly a match made in heaven!

Similarly, selling marketing services is as much an art or a marriage as it is a certain automation or business development person. While the selling of your services needs to solve prospect’s problems, you also need to be “appropriately aggressive” in pursuing prospects – much like the tenacious, deal-making strategies outlined in Donald Trump’s famous book, *The Art of the Deal*. While his approach to business inspired a relentless focus on closing, the same spirit can be applied to converting warm leads into loyal clients. This guide will take you through the essential steps to mastering the art of the sale, ensuring you turn interest into commitment.

 

1. Understand Your Warm Leads Thoroughly

The first step to successfully selling your services is to know who you’re talking to – you need to understand your warm leads inside and out. These leads have already shown interest, so it’s crucial to understand their specific needs, challenges, and motivations. And more importantly, you need to know how your services speak to or solve their needs and challenges. 

Tip: Use your CRM and analytics tools to track lead behavior and interactions. Knowing what content they’ve engaged with and what questions they’ve asked will help you craft a more targeted pitch.

 

2. Tailor Your Pitch for Maximum Impact

Your pitch should be more than just a presentation of your services—it should be a solution to the specific problems your warm leads are facing. Focus on the outcomes they can expect from partnering with your agency. You can even retarget these leads with that same messaging – helping coax them down the funnel to conversion or prepping them to book a sales call by answering their questions in retargeting ads. 

Tip: Highlight case studies and success stories that align with the lead’s industry or challenges. Make your pitch about them, not just about what you offer.

3. Create a Compelling Call to Action

Prospects need a reason to act now. Creating a sense of urgency can help push them from consideration to decision. Whether it’s a limited-time offer, a free trial, or the promise of immediate results, your CTA should motivate action. One ecommerce brand I worked with simply added a “Satisfaction Guaranteed” badge at the bottom of every page. This action alone (not even parameters or disclaimers unpacking details of the guarantee itself) drove a 15% increase in conversion. Now, we were ready to stand by our guarantee if we ever had a disgruntled customer via refund or replacement, but it rarely came to that. The reassurance was enough to instill trust and confidence in our brand.

Tip: Use phrases like “limited availability” or “start seeing results within weeks” or “satisfaction guaranteed” to create urgency. Make it clear that delaying could mean missing out on significant benefits.

 

4. Address Objections Proactively

Prospects will certainly have objections—whether it’s the cost, timing, or doubts about the ROI. Address these concerns directly and with confidence, providing data or testimonials to ease their worries. Try to mitigate as much risk for the prospect before ever hopping on a sales call with them. Reassure them of the value of working with your agency compared to the risk of not doing so and the impact that will have to their business. 

Tip: Be prepared with a list of common objections and responses. For example, if cost is an issue, demonstrate the long-term value and ROI your services provide OR (if margin allows) show a discount for services in the proposal itself as an added value for this prospect. It shows you’re willing to have some “skin in the game” with the client because you believe so strongly that you will be able to help them. 

 

5. Close with Confidence

When you’ve addressed a majority (if not all) of the prospect’s concerns and they are ready to take the next step (onboarding to become a client), it’s time to close the deal. Confidence and reassurance are key elements here—guide your prospect smoothly through the final steps, making it easy for them to say yes – even reminding them of questions you’ve answered along the way.

Tip: Use closing techniques like the assumptive close (“When would you like to start?”) to encourage a decision. Ensure all final details are clear and straightforward. Then book the now-client’s onboarding session(s)!

 

6. Follow Up and Support a Long-Term Relationship

The sale doesn’t end with a signature. In fact, now the real work begins! Set up the client for a solid onboarding (defining the scope of work, developing their messaging and offers, and defining what success looks like in your partnership is essential for client retention)! On top of that, proactively following up with quick wins or reporting to ensure client satisfaction and continuing to nurture the relationship is crucial for long-term success. This approach not only secures future business but also opens the door for referrals.

Tip: Implement a healthy client mtg cadence and proactive follow-up schedule that includes checking in regularly, reporting on performance (if relevant), updates on the project, even providing additional value, and identifying new opportunities to assist your client.

 

Conclusion: Seal the Deal with Confidence

Selling marketing services to warm leads, converting them to prospects, and eventually onboarding them to become new clients requires a thoughtful, strategic, and confident approach. By understanding your leads (first), tailoring your pitch, addressing (prospect) objections, closing with authority and onboarding strategically, you can master the art of turning interest into long-term business relationships.

Are you ready to streamline your lead generation and sales process? Partner with Done For You and gain access to a steady flow of high-quality leads without the hassle. Become a partner today at DoneForYou.com/Partners!

The post The Art of Selling Marketing Services to Warm Leads: A Step-by-Step Guide appeared first on Done For You.

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Revolutionize Your Brand with an AI Business Name Generator https://doneforyou.com/revolutionize-your-brand-with-an-ai-business-name-generator/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=revolutionize-your-brand-with-an-ai-business-name-generator Wed, 25 Oct 2023 17:03:40 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=17987   Are you struggling to find the perfect name for your new business? Or are you looking to rebrand your existing business with a fresh and modern name? Look no further than an AI business name generator. What is an AI Business Name Generator? An AI business name generator is a tool that uses artificial […]

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Find Out How To AI-ify Your Business! Click Here >>

 

Are you struggling to find the perfect name for your new business? Or are you looking to rebrand your existing business with a fresh and modern name? Look no further than an AI business name generator.

What is an AI Business Name Generator?

An AI business name generator is a tool that uses artificial intelligence algorithms to generate unique and creative business names. These generators analyze various factors, such as industry, brand values, and target audience, to create a list of relevant and memorable characters.

5 Business Name Generators:

  1. Namelix
  2. Look
  3. BrandCrowd
  4. Renderforest
  5. Shopify

These name generators create unique and memorable business names based on your preferences and keywords. They are a great way to start the brainstorming process and come up with a name relevant to your business and easy to remember.

To use an AI business name generator, enter a few keywords relevant to your business. The generator will generate a list of potential business names or trade names. You can then browse the list and choose a name that you like.

Here are some tips for using a name generator:

  • Be specific with your keywords. The more specific you are, the better the generator will be able to understand your business and generate relevant names.
  • Try different combinations of keywords. This is a great way to come up with various names to choose from.
  • Don't be afraid to get creative. Name generators can generate some pretty unique and innovative names. Don't be scared to try something different.
  • Once you have a list of potential names, get feedback from others. Ask your friends, family, and colleagues what they think of the terms and which one they like the best.

Benefits of Using an AI Name Generator

  1. Saves Time and Effort: Creating a unique and catchy business name can be daunting. Business name generators can help save time and effort by listing potential words that match your brand values and industry.
  2. Increases Creativity: AI business name generators use complex algorithms to generate unique and creative names you may not have thought of.
  3. Improves Branding: A well-crafted business name can enhance your branding efforts and make your business stand out. AI business name generators can help you achieve this by providing unique, memorable, and relevant names to your brand values.

How to Use an AI Business Name Generator

  1. Choose a reliable AI name-generator tool that fits your industry and brand values.
  2. Enter relevant keywords or phrases that describe your business or brand values.
  3. Choose the type of business name you want, such as a creative or professional name.
  4. Generate a list of potential names and choose the one that best represents your brand.

Conclusion

An AI business name generator can be a game-changer for your branding efforts. Using a business name generator can save time and effort, increase creativity, and improve your branding efforts. So, why not see how a unique and memorable business name can revolutionize your brand?
Find Out How To AI-ify Your Business! Click Here >>

 

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5 Simple Tips to Start Your E-Commerce Business as a Beginner https://doneforyou.com/e-commerce-for-beginners-dropshipping-vs-importing-products/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=e-commerce-for-beginners-dropshipping-vs-importing-products Tue, 24 Oct 2023 23:05:08 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=18023 Today, we will delve into the world of e-commerce for beginners. If you’re starting in online retail, there are two main ways to get started: dropshipping and importing. Each method has its own complexities and profit margins, and in this article, we will explore both logistics. Dropshipping: A Beginner’s Friend Drop shipping is one of […]

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Find Out How To Sell More Online! Click Here >>

Today, we will delve into the world of e-commerce for beginners. If you're starting in online retail, there are two main ways to get started: dropshipping and importing. Each method has its own complexities and profit margins, and in this article, we will explore both logistics.

Dropshipping: A Beginner's Friend

Drop shipping is one of the easiest ways to start selling physical products online. With drop shipping, you don't need to import your products or negotiate with manufacturers. Instead, you act as the middleman, listing the products on your website and collecting payment from customers. Once an order is placed, the drop shipper takes care of shipping the product directly to the end user.

When I started my e-commerce journey, dropshipping was my go-to method. I set up an eBay store and started selling car parts with higher profit margins. It went well initially, but shipping rates started to rise, making it difficult to maintain profitability," shared Jason Drohn, an experienced e-commerce entrepreneur.

While dropshipping may not offer significant profit margins, it provides a low-risk entry point in e-commerce for beginners. Platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce offer plugins that make dropshipping seamless and immediate.

Importing: Taking Control of Your Supply Chain

The alternative to dropshipping is importing products directly. This method allows you to source products from various suppliers, including manufacturers in China. Alibaba.com is a popular platform for finding suppliers and manufacturers in China.

If you have an idea for a product you want to sell, Alibaba is a great place to start. You can search for products, view pricing, and even order samples to test the quality," explained Drohn.

By importing products, you have more control over profit margins and inventory. However, it requires more effort and investment upfront. It is crucial to prove the concept before importing large quantities of products.

E-Commerce For Beginners: Exploring Alibaba for Product Sourcing

Alibaba.com is a publicly traded company that acts as a search engine for physical products from Chinese manufacturers. It offers a wide range of products that can be imported directly. Let's look at how to use Alibaba for product sourcing.

We recently decided to start selling sling bags for our GSD product line. So, we began searching for sling bags on Alibaba," shared Drohn.

By searching for "sling bags for men," Alibaba displays various options with different price points and minimum order quantities. The per-piece cost and MOQ are essential factors to consider when sourcing products.

"We found sling bags that cost around $4 apiece. Some suppliers even offer samples for a higher price to discourage selling those samples. It's important to order samples to check the quality before committing to a minimum order quantity," advised Drohn.

Once you have selected potential products, the next step is to contact the supplier and arrange for samples to be sent. This allows you to assess the quality and make an informed decision before placing a larger order.

Dropshipping Plugins: Simplifying the Process

Various plugins are available for platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce to streamline the dropshipping process. These plugins allow you to import products directly into your store and start selling immediately.

"Our favorite dropshipping plugin is Zendrop, which offers over 50,000 products that can be imported into your store. It works seamlessly with both Shopify and WordPress," recommended Drohn.

Other popular dropshipping plugins include AliDropship, WooDropship, DropshipMe, and Dropify. Each plugin offers features and integrations, so finding the one that best suits your needs is essential.

"Dropshipping plugins provide a quick and easy way to get started in e-commerce. However, if you want ultimate customizability and control over your supply chain, importing your products is the way to go," emphasized Drohn.

Customization and Local Sourcing

While importing products from China is a common practice, there are other options for customization and local sourcing. For example, some labs and providers can create custom blends for you if you want to sell supplements or energy drinks.

"Finding reputable suppliers is crucial when sourcing products locally. One effective method is to ask existing e-commerce entrepreneurs in the same niche for their vendor recommendations," suggested Drohn.

By leveraging the knowledge and experience of others in the industry, you can find reliable suppliers and ensure the quality of your products.

Conclusion: Proving the Concept and Looking Ahead

When starting in e-commerce for beginners, it's essential to prove the concept before investing heavily in inventory or importing products. Dropshipping offers a low-risk entry point, allowing you to test the market and identify profitable products.

"Dropshipping is a great way to get started quickly, but importing your products gives you more control and potential for higher profit margins," concluded Drohn.

As the e-commerce industry evolves, beginners have more opportunities than ever to enter the market. Entrepreneurs can find the method that best suits their goals and resources by exploring dropshipping and importing.

Whether you choose to be the middleman with dropshipping or take control of your supply chain through importing, the key is to start small, prove the concept, and adapt as you grow. With the right strategies and tools, e-commerce beginners can carve out their space in the digital marketplace.

Find Out How To Sell More Online! Click Here >>

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Expanding Your Business By Using Website Analytics https://doneforyou.com/how-to-expand-your-business-by-using-website-analytics/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-to-expand-your-business-by-using-website-analytics Thu, 22 Oct 2020 14:00:30 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=11976 What we’re going to talk about right now is customer analytics, basically, understanding to expand your business. There’s this whole weird thing about data science at the moment. Data science is one of the hottest jobs. An introductory level data science position pays $130 to $150,000, or so. There are all kinds of analytics programs […]

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What we’re going to talk about right now is customer analytics, basically, understanding to expand your business. There’s this whole weird thing about data science at the moment. Data science is one of the hottest jobs. An introductory level data science position pays $130 to $150,000, or so. There are all kinds of analytics programs out there. You have Google Analytics, you have Brothers, all kinds of different places that you can get data. There are some more expensive ones like Heap and KISSmetrics. There’s a lot of funnel comparison tools. There are a visual website optimizer and some of the split testing tools. There is just an incredible amount of software around the analytics space.

Analytics Programs

But at the end of the day, somebody needs to interpret and understand those analytics for them to make a difference and expand your business, which has always been the hard part because software, it’s getting smarter, but software can’t show you where the bottleneck is, and then, also, recommend action to remove that bottleneck without a person. Do you know what I mean? You need somebody who understands data and understands marketing on a fundamental level to be able to interpret what is happening on a website, in a sales funnel, on a sales page, and then, moves through… Help implement and execute change on those, based on those things. Here’s the fundamental piece. So, I’m going to give you some tips here.

Tip #1. Here’s the fundamental piece of the customer analytics journey and understanding the buyer cycle, is well two pieces.

Three Steps To The Buyer’s Journey

So, in the buyer cycle itself, there’s really three steps. Three steps to the buyer’s journey.

1. Research Phase
The first is a research phase, so they think they’re interested in something. They think they need a solution. And what they’re doing is they’re trying to go out and quantify what that solution needs to be. They’re putting together different products, they’re putting together different businesses who offer that product, and they’re starting to assemble a mind map of how they’re going to solve their problem in their head.

2. Knowing The Problem and Solution
Stage two is the person who knows that they have this problem, they know of the solution they want, and they’re refining their solution… They’re refining their features. They’re basically refining their decision so that they know that they’re making an informed business decision or an informed buying decision, I should say.

3. Buying Phase
Then, you have your third level, which, that person, I mean, they’re going to buy. They’ve decided. And they’re really, sometimes, just narrowing it down between a couple of companies or they have their wallet out sitting between them and their keyboard. They are ready to buy something right now.

So, when you’re looking at your customer analytics, you want to put that cycle, you want to put that paradigm, if you will, in play. You want to understand why your customers, why your prospects are doing what they’re doing as it relates to that buyer’s journey to expand your business. So, maybe, they are just researching. Maybe they are looking for… Maybe you’ve made it down into the last round, and they are, literally, ready to put their credit card in your order form.

Sales Funnels

Tip #2 is whenever you’re looking at sales funnels… A sales funnel itself, let’s say you have 10,000 people who are coming to a website, and they are all going off in different paths. Sales funnel vernacular, people will speak of sales funnel, but they don’t really know what a sales funnel is. It’s like PPC. I had a client once, he was like, “Well…” We were talking about PPC campaigns back in the early Google days. And he was like, “I don’t understand when I get charged. When am I supposed to pay for this advertising? Am I paying per impression?” I said, “No.” And he’s like, “Well, when am I getting charged?” And I’m like, “You pay per click.” And he was like, “Well, I don’t get it.” I was like, “Pay per click. Pay per click. PPC. Pay per click.” And he was like, “Oh my God.”

In his mind, it was such a stupid question because the pay-per-click was what this advertising was. It didn’t also describe how he got charged. Do you know what I mean? And so, sales funnels… It’s funny because now, I’ll talk to a client, and they’re like, “Yeah, I have a sales funnel.” I’m like, “No, you have a landing page.” Literally, you have a landing page and that leads to a confirmation page, but it’s not a sales funnel. You’re not actually asking for a sale at any part in this, so it can’t be a sales funnel. That’s lead gen, maybe. But the sales funnel itself, you have your front end.

Automated Webinar

Let’s say, an automated webinar, for instance. Your automated webinar, it gets a hundred people. A hundred people who sign up for a webinar. Well, when somebody signs up for the webinar, then there’s always a very noticeable drop-off when they… For attendance. So, roughly, if it’s an automated webinar that starts every 15 minutes, then your attendance is going to be usually between 50% and 55%. So, 50% and 55% of the people who sign up are going to end up attending the webinar, which is awesome.

Now, if it’s life, it’s usually 30%. So, you’re getting a bump just by doing automated and just by scheduling it pretty quickly after they sign up. Then, immediately, you lose 50% ish of people. So, half of the people are not signing up for the webinar. Then, about half of them will watch through the webinar until your pitch. So, now, we’re down to about 25, 27 people who stay to the pitch itself. If the webinar is good and if your pitch is to sign up for a sales call, then your conversion on that, the sales call, is going to be about 25%. 20%, 25% of people are going to sign up for that call to action.

Automated webinar

If it’s an order form, then it really depends on the price. Is it an expensive product? Is it a cheap product? That really dictates what the conversion is going to end up being. But anything that you can do to influence those bottlenecks. So, if you can increase the registration on the webinar from 35% to 40%, then you’re putting more people on the webinar. If you can get more people to attend the webinar after they sign up, then you are putting more people, obviously, on the webinar, and you have more people able to buy. If you shorten up the webinar and get more people seeing the call to action, then it could, potentially, increase the number of people signing up for your sales call or hitting the order form.

So, there are a lot of variables in a custom analytics situation and end up… Just a small little marginal increase or a marginal difference will tremendously help the overall conversion of this particular sales funnel. Then, when you look at it from a very macro level, all of these analytics pieces, basically, assemble into this thing, which is the success and revenue and to expand your business. So, it really just depends on how deep you want to get into the woods. There’s the infinite breadth, as far as how many different types of analytics you can get. It’s absolutely crazy. No matter what product you’re in, no matter how big your company is, you can get as granular or as macro as you’d like.

For Questions and Guide

So, if you want us to take a look at some of your numbers and put a story around them, basically, figure out what’s going on, where are your bottlenecks, from a paid traffic standpoint, from a sales funnel standpoint, whatever, we will gladly take a look and help you expand your business. Just go ahead, go to consultingsession.com, fill out the short little form, and then, book a call with my team. We’re going to dive and expand your business, and we’re going to put together an action plan on what you need from a sales funnel standpoint and from a marketing, standpoint to grow and scale your business. So, if you like this video, share it, please. Subscribe to the channel, like the video.

Get This Sales Funnel Custom Built >> Click Here!

 

 

 

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Finding The Right Keywords For Your Website https://doneforyou.com/how-to-find-which-keywords-your-website-is-ranking-for-for-free/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-to-find-which-keywords-your-website-is-ranking-for-for-free Fri, 09 Oct 2020 14:00:11 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=11900 Today’s GSDdaily is episode 150. And it is our weekly Five Minute Guide Livecast if you will. Running a bit late today, I ended up getting kind of jammed up on a lot of different stuff. But mostly good, so it’s beneficial. So today we’re going to talk about getting ranked or not getting ranked. […]

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Today’s GSDdaily is episode 150. And it is our weekly Five Minute Guide Livecast if you will. Running a bit late today, I ended up getting kind of jammed up on a lot of different stuff. But mostly good, so it’s beneficial.

Google Ranking

So today we’re going to talk about getting ranked or not getting ranked. But basically figuring out where your website is already ranking in Google. And this is important because, I mean, Google is going to pick your website up for all kinds of keyword phrases to see keywords for ranking. So it is going to search and crawl your website and learn what your website and what your business and what you’re doing online, basically. So it will come to their own conclusions. So as internet marketers, what we need to do is we need to influence those keyword phrases and check keywords for ranking that it’s picking to rank you for. Because in influencing those keyword phrases, then you can generate more free traffic, you’re able to hit the first page of Google, you’re able to take up mind share in your customers, your prospect’s mind. All kinds of things you’re going to be able to do because you know where your keyword phrases are ranking.

Google Search Console

Google Webmaster

So the first step is basically signing up for a free tool, it’s Google search console. And you can go to it by … let me just grab it on the screen here. You can look at the search console by going to google.com/webmasters. I think it’s just going to log me right into my account, there it is. So Google Webmasters. When you set up the search console, it’s going to link your domain, there’s a couple of ways to verify your domain. But basically, you just need to verify that you own the domain. And then what it does is it’s going to wait a couple of days usually and it’s going to go into its databases and pull all of the keyword phrases that you’re ranked for. And then arrange them so you know where they are on the page. And it’s not all like, I’m going to show you Done For You, but the doneforyou.com is ranked for like 8,000 or 9,000 keyword phrases, it’s going to show us the top thousand.

So we’re going to go into Google Search Console now. And remember, this is a five-minute guide, so we need to zip through it pretty quickly today. But you’re welcome to dive in, you’re welcome to go to consultantsession.com and fill out the strategy session form. And we can walk through some of this stuff with you too. So what we’re seeing here is basically all of our web traffic, all the web searches for the last three months. So here you can see, this is doneforyou.com is the domain we’re rocking with. And we have a little over 7,000 total clicks, we have 482,000 impressions, we have an average click-through rate of 1.5% across all of the keyword phrases, and our average position is 44.5. And you can see that it kind of goes up and down, we have our clicks, impressions, CTR, all that stuff is here.

But if we scroll down through, we can arrange these by the number of clicks. So as you can imagine, most of our traffic comes from Done For You, by Done For You services, Done For You agency, Done For You affiliate marketing system, Done For You lead magnets we’re on spot 1.2. On Done For You services, Done For You, Done For You marketing agency we’re spot 1.1, Done For You service, 1.2. So that means it’s primarily the first spot, but sometimes it bounces to the second.

What I like to do is I like to sort my impressions so I can see where all of our big, big impression keyword phrases are to see keywords for ranking. Like what are we almost ranked for? And the first one is a business consultant, so business consultants get 11,000 impressions every single month. Marketing automation agency gets 9,000 impressions, called action phrases, 3,000 impressions. What is a flash sale? 3,500 impressions. What this lets me do is say, “Okay, we can start creating content around business consultants, and then we can start to swallow up a whole lot more than two clicks.” And as you can see, we’re spot 74. Spot 74, I mean, we’re on the seventh, eighth page of Google so nobody ever, ever, ever, ever makes it all the way there. But it lets us know that we could get there rather quickly.

So if I just click Google consultant and then go to the page, it’s going to show us the page that is ranking and let us see the keywords for ranking. So here you can see that this page, seven skills to become a business consultant, is ranking spot number 74 in Google, in the Google search results. So what I should be doing is optimizing this article to try to get it to page three, page two, page one. Or running a paid ad campaign, a paid traffic campaign directly to this business consultant page and then picking up clients that way. So if Google is ranking me organically, chances are if I run Google ads and run Google ads directly here, then I’m going to end up having pretty cheap click costs because my page is highly relevant to business consultants. And Google already told me this, organically. So it’s just another like an end-run around some things you can do.

For Questions and Guide

And that’s about it, we’re past our five-minute guide deadline. So have a fantastic weekend, if there’s anything that we can do, just go to consultantsession.com. Fill out the little form, we’ll jump on an action plan call with you.

Get This Sales Funnel Custom Built >> Click Here!

 

 

 

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The Ultimate Guide To Creating Kickass Webinars https://doneforyou.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-creating-kickass-webinars-that-convert/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-ultimate-guide-to-creating-kickass-webinars-that-convert Mon, 10 Aug 2020 14:00:57 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=11577 Welcome to today’s episode of GSDdaily. This is Episode 106, and I think this is the latest I’ve ever started because I had no idea what I was going to talk about this week. What I settled on is basically how to sell high-ticket stuff. We’ve talked about selling high-ticket products and services before. We […]

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Welcome to today’s episode of GSDdaily. This is Episode 106, and I think this is the latest I’ve ever started because I had no idea what I was going to talk about this week. What I settled on is basically how to sell high-ticket stuff. We’ve talked about selling high-ticket products and services before. We devoted an entire week to selling high-ticket stuff, whether it was through Zoom, through strategy sessions on the phone, we walked through funnels on how to do it.

Today what we’re going to do is I’m going to show you, and this was prompted by something. I had an idea a couple of weeks ago to create this PDF, this playbook, if you will, of some of our best strategies as it relates to something, as it relates to a particular way to sell something online, coupled with a to-do list, like checkboxes, coupled with a journal, so that you could go through and you could check off the pieces of the sales funnel that you already had, the pieces that you need, you can leave yourself notes.

It was just an idea until somebody on my team just absolutely crushed it, knocked that out of the water. Kristen, thank you for that but crushed it. What I figured we could do this week was I could give you the PDF and we could go through it together. It’s about 52 pages long or something. Here, let me pull it up on the screen and show it to you.

Automated Webinar PLaybook

This is the PDF. It’s called The Automated Webinar Playbook, and a comprehensive guide to creating kickass webinars that convert, so 56 pages long. We have a table of contents, and then of course we get into just a little bit of stuff from me. Then we go into an introduction to sales funnels, and then we get into this idea of what a legendary funnel is.

The legendary funnel, we call them L1 funnels, but it is our absolute most popular sales funnel, because when you’re selling something that is high-ticket, above a thousand dollars, and it’s also highly complex, there’s only one way to sell it. That is by getting on a sales call or getting on a Zoom call or doing some sort of an event, an event-based close, especially when you’re looking at 25 or $50,000 masterminds or multi-month consulting deals or term contracts that they’re $50,000 for the next six months or whatever.

Some of that stuff, you just can’t sell it through an order form. Especially right now, people are craving connection, so getting on a Zoom call or getting on creating kickass webinars, getting even on a phone call, and working through some of that stuff, is how those sales happen.

Here, let me give you a link so you can download this thing on your own. It is from doneforyou.com/legendary. I’m just going to drop the link in the chat or the comments here. You should see it over in the comments. There’s Melvin. How are you, Melvin? Melvin said, “Yes. Awesome.” Cool. There we go. Then we’re just going to get in here. If you want to follow along with me, we’re on Page 6.

I plan on just going through and walking through these and showing some interesting software tools or to-do items, or talking through this guide. It is very self-explanatory obviously, but I just figured it’d be a cool way to bring it back home and give you something actionable to do, so that if you’re trying to sell coaching or consulting or trying to create a digital product that you’re going to sell for a thousand dollars, $2,000, $3,000, then this would be a very worthwhile way of going through and making sure you checked all the boxes on what you needed to sell that thing.

The sales process for a hi-priced item requires high-touch.

First of all, if you want to sell a higher-priced item, like $5,000 coaching or a $10,000 event, the sales process is high-touch. It’s something that I remember a couple of years ago. It had to be four or five years ago. There was a team member who was coming to the house here, and we were working on some stuff. The way he was introduced to me as I was this guy who sold a bunch of stuff online, so that’s what he thought. Then once he started, once he was working for a little while with us, he was like, “You are literally on the phone all day.” Like, yeah.

I mean, at the time, it was like when you’re selling something that is high-touch, you’re on the phone all the time. Anything client-related, anything people-related – consulting, coaching, it is a very high-touch game. To sell those things, it’s going to be high-touch. It’s not a physical product. It’s not something that you can sell through a Shopify store.

All that is on the other end of the spectrum, which is its low-price, low-touch. Low-price, low-complexity. It’s very easy to understand and it’s a volume play. Whereas the high-touch, high-complexity is not a volume play. It’s something that you have to invest time in the relationship and time in the people and time in the service and the result. Then for that, that’s how you make your money.

Automated Webinar Funnel

creating kickass webinars

What an automated webinar funnel does is it lets you, A, generate the lead quickly. Somebody interested in the thing that you do is going to opt-in for a presentation. They’re going to opt-in for a webinar or whatever. They’re going to opt-in for a presentation on a Zoom call or whatever.

What it does is it allows you to capture their attention, if even for a minute. You’re able to teach them, you’re able to give them some aha moments. Furthermore, you’re able to just capture lightning in a bottle. Maybe give them a transformation of some sort, even to a small degree, make them see something a little, little, tiny bit different, which is going to anchor you in their mind. Then when they go to decide to buy the thing or service, they will think of you and come back and buy.

Strategy Session / Consultative Call

Of that, there is a small percentage of people who are going to take action immediately, meaning if you put a hundred people on creating kickass webinars, there might be six people or seven people who will sign up for a sales call. It shouldn’t be positioned as a sales call, of course. There are lots of ways you can term it. In this guide, we talk about positioning it as a strategy session or a consultative call. The strategy session is the format. It’s the most widely accepted format. Then on that strategy session, you figure out if you’re a good fit if they’re a good fit for you, and you figure out if you’re a good fit for them, and so on.

The biggest thing when building these things is just walk through this idea of the quickest path to cash. It’s something that I talk about a lot with a lot of clients, and as entrepreneurs, as business owners, there are so many different things we get our hands into. It is interesting because some of the most successful people that we are working with have four or five or six or 30 different businesses.

It is always interesting, because when you’re leading a company, this idea of focus is paramount, focusing on one thing. Really what a lot of these investors do is appoint somebody to focus on one thing for them. Then they have 30 people, 30 CEOs, who are focusing on that one thing. Just an interesting dynamic.

When you’re talking about the quickest path to cash, you have to be very narrow on the thing, the business, the model, the niche that you’re looking to generate the quickest path to cash in. Oftentimes it’s that thing that it’s half done, or it is that thing that is 75% complete or ready to launch, or the product is done and the sales material is not, or the inventory has been ordered and manufactured and the box graphics are just sitting on a shelf, whatever. Oftentimes it’s that, that last-push thing.

When you’re putting together your own high-ticket sales funnel, you want to be very cognizant of that. What do I have right now that I can move, I can go to market with really quickly? Or even for some of these high-price, high-complexity offers, what offer can I make that maybe isn’t even done and maybe doesn’t even have to be done right now? Is there a 12-week coaching program that I started maybe a year ago, and I can sell it for $3,000 and I have the first couple of modules done, and then I can just go live?

If the answer is yes, then as long as you are ahead of your members of your buyers, then you’re able to. You’re staying ahead of them. They don’t know. They don’t know that it’s not all done. The only way they would know if it’s all done is if you’ve given them the whole thing all at once and it was only half complete. If you step them out, like week one, week two, week three, week four, or month one, month two, month three, month four, as long as you stay ahead of them, then you’re pre-selling your curriculum. You’re pre-selling your course. The quickest path to cash sometimes doesn’t even have to be complete.

Let’s see. Then here, so if you’re following along, this is on Page 8 here. The quickest path to cash, we have a little journal entry that you can drop in. Whatever your quickest path to cash ideas are, you can just drop in here. The next thing is to teach you how to use strategy sessions to sell your high-ticket services, so your coaching, your consulting, therapy, and counseling, services, courses, masterminds, all that stuff.

Any high-ticket offer, you need to sell on the phone. A lot of people get weird about phone sales. I did early on, super, super weird about phone sales that I couldn’t bring myself to pitch. In fact, I couldn’t bring myself to say numbers over a phone and I don’t know why. It’s no different than ordering pizza really, but I just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t until I had been probably on sales calls for at least two or three months before I started getting into it.

Then I started loving it, because at the end of the day, a call, you’re starting at somewhere different, every call. The way this playbook shows you to set these things up, basically it’s an automated webinar that the call to action on the automated webinar is call signup. You use a piece of software like Calendly or Acuity Scheduling or whatever, and they book a call on your calendar.

In the middle is usually an application. Sometimes it’s tied in with the call schedule itself. How it works is somebody signs up after creating kickass webinars, they attend the webinar to learn in creating kickass webinars, then they hit the button. The button then sends them to an application, usually. In the application, we try to have between eight and ten questions. Things like first name, last name, email address, phone number, and then we usually try to have four or five questions that are related to your offer.

  1. If you’re selling a coaching program for, I don’t know, Fortune 5000 CEOs, let’s say, your questions might be how many employees does your company have?
  2. How much revenue did they do last year?
  3. What is your number one bottleneck right now?

Whereas if you are selling something different, like a high-end mastermind, your questions might be:

  1. How many employees does your company have?
  2. What do you think you’re going to get out of it?
  3. Why would you want to sign up for a high-ticket mastermind?
  4. What are you looking for specifically?
  5. What answers can we help you find that would help your business today, or whatever?

You just have to think about what your avatar is looking for. That bridge page, that application, when they sign up, when they apply, they come over, they get on the phone with you, and then everybody’s starting in a different spot. Locationally, they’re all over the world. Some of them are starting, startups or Fortune 5000 executives. There are all kinds of different variations in how they find you.

The goal is always to figure out if they’re a good fit for you and you’re a good fit for them. That’s always the goal of these consultative sales calls. It’s a little bit like chess as you go through the call. I’ve listened to lots and lots and lots of client recordings, both calls that are working well and sales processes and scripts and stuff that aren’t working well. It’s always like it’s the maneuvering. At the end of the day, it’s just about finding common ground and then helping, just figuring out if there’s a transformation in their life that you can help them make, or your company can help them make, or your service or your product or whatever.

It’s all about solving problems. We talk a lot about solving problems from an SEO standpoint or a Google search standpoint or a product standpoint. At the end of the day, selling something on the phone is about solving problems. If you can solve problems, then you’re going to be able to close at a pretty high rate. That’s where this whole legendary sales funnel comes in. We have a lot of clients who sell a lot of high-ticket stuff. What we do is leverage those strategy sessions to close the deal.

Creating kickass webinars: Timed or Just-in-time Webinar

Creating kickass webinars, it’s an event. It has been an event, let’s put it that way. There are always three ways you can set up these automated webinars. The first is you can set them up so that they’re timed, so you can start them at let’s say 9:00 at night, or start them at 11:00 AM or whatever, which has been fine.

The problem is we’ve gotten very, very webinar-blind when it comes to a timed event. We know that there’s going to be a replay. We know it’s probably not live in the first place. It’s probably an automated webinar. When it’s life, we’re usually not seeing the video. We’re usually not seeing a Facebook ad about it, that it’s going to start today. Do you know what I mean? We might see it if it’s out in the future. There are only a couple of people that can do time stuff way, way out because that’s just their brand. They’ve been doing it for 15 or 20 years.

The second way to do it is a just-in-time webinar. The just-in-time webinar registration is where the webinar starts in 15 minutes, or it starts at the top of the hour. Right now it is 10 28. A just-in-time webinar, the next one would probably be starting at 10:30. We would be waiting for two minutes to attend that webinar. At the top of the hour, we’d be waiting 32 minutes.

What that does is it helps. Somebody, they’re going to hit the page, they’re going to sign up. They’re going to be, “Oh shit, two minutes? I can wait for two minutes.” Then they’re just watching the countdown clock for two minutes, and then the webinar turns on, and then they watch the webinar. It’s a way to ensure that people are staying for the webinar, for the event.

What we found is that your timed webinars, when they’re way out in the future, are going to be like 30% attendance. Your just-in-time webinars are going to be like 55% attendance because they assume that a replay is going to be sent. Even if the webinar’s starting in two minutes, they’re like, “Fuck, it starts in two minutes. If they’re going to send a replay, I’m just going to … I opted in. I’m going to sign off and then I’ll just wait for the email,” which is fine.

Those worked pretty well until the COVID hit. Now, we are hurrying around. We’re hurrying up and we’re slowing down all at the same time. It’s the weirdest shit ever. Now it’s like we’re doing less, but we have more impatience. Weird. What we found works even better now is just literally doing and creating kickass webinars. You have a landing page, and the landing page gives away the webinar. It’s like, “Hey, sign up for the webinar, blah, blah, blah, it’s an on-demand webinar.” Then they opt-in, and then they immediately flip over into the on-demand webinar video that starts live.

Here’s the thing. You can count on the fact that 100% of people are going to hit that confirmation page. You’re going to have 100% attendance of that webinar. That’s good, right? Now, whether they want to watch in creating kickass webinars or not is a different story. Now you have your classical, your Netflix. You hook them in with something fucking scary or drama-inducing in the first minute and hope that they stick around for a little. With Netflix, it’s the first three episodes. If they can get somebody watching past the first three episodes, then they’ve hooked them for the entire season. They know that. It’s a well-documented thing.

For creating kickass webinars, it’s very much the same thing. If you can get them past the first couple of minutes, they’re going to stay. You’re going to have a nice, solid curve. If you’re looking at the analytics, it’s going to drop off and then it’s going to level out and just zip, right to the offer. Then once the offer hits, it’s going to fall. It’ll reduce by half. That’s the reality of how to schedule webinars. The thing is, you need to deliver valuable content immediately. When do you use an automated webinar? When you’re educating, when you’re bonding and when you’re engaging.

The architecture of the automated webinar, I think this is where we’re going to pick up tomorrow. I think we’re going to go through this tomorrow because then we get into the checklist of the different things that you need to pull this funnel off, and then we get into tips for maximizing. We’re going to talk about the architecture of the automated webinar tomorrow. We’re going to dip through all of this stuff, including some of the different traffic and the different things you need to have on hand and all of that.

Again, for those of you who have asked … where is the link? Melvin, this is your link. I just added it here. It’s doneforyou.com/legendary. I’m going to create a banner real quick. Let me see if I can just do this. Here we go. Maybe I can get this thing to scroll across the bottom. Let me see. Let me check this out. Does this work? There you go. Bam. Check that out. Look at that technology. It’s cool stuff. Doneforyou.com/legendary. You get access to that.

Tomorrow, we’re going to go into the architecture of this automated webinar and all the different pieces you’re going to need. You can go ahead and download this thing, though. Please go ahead and download it, read through it. We’re on Page 6. This is on Page 14 right now. We’ll go through and mark this all up tomorrow. We’ll probably only do another couple of pages tomorrow, and then we’ll complete it for the rest of the week. Doneforyou.com/legendary.

For Questions and Guide

If you’d like to talk about putting together a sales funnel or content marketing or pay-per-click or ad management or anything like that, go to doneforyou.com/start. If you just need more traffic or you need to optimize the conversions or creating kickass webinars, whatever, we’re happy to have the conversation and put an action plan together for that. Doneforyou.com/start. I will talk to you tomorrow. All right? Thanks. Bye.

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Software To Launch Membership Website https://doneforyou.com/choosing-the-right-software-for-your-membership-site/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=choosing-the-right-software-for-your-membership-site Thu, 06 Aug 2020 12:33:04 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=11480 Today we’re going to talk about the software that you’re going to use to run your membership site or choosing how to choose the right software to run your membership site. Last Monday we talked about membership sites and how you can charge for membership sites and you know how to build them and content […]

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Today we’re going to talk about the software that you’re going to use to run your membership site or choosing how to choose the right software to run your membership site.

Last Monday we talked about membership sites and how you can charge for membership sites and you know how to build them and content for them and all that other stuff. Yesterday, we talked about content. Today we’re going to talk a little bit about the tech part of it. The setup and just to bring it all home because up until this point, we have brainstormed content for your membership site. We’ve picked a niche or a market. We brainstormed some content if you remember inside that mind map.

Then yesterday we talked about creating that content and how there’s a couple of different modalities for content. There is your text-based stuff, you know, PDF downloads or blog posts. There is a video, and then you can pull the audio out of the video so that you have a video and an audio presentation. We also talked about some different ways that you can deliver content, whether it’s monthly, whether it’s a big block, whether it’s whatever. And we talked some about some pricing stuff too, like how to price, whether you sell monthly or annual, how to use that inside of an upsell sequence or whatever.

Software for Membership Site

membership website software
Today, we’re going to talk about the software to use. Now a membership site in and of itself is pretty simple. I mean, all it is is a collection of web pages that are protected, and the only way to get to those pages or those files is when you’re logged in.

I mean, almost every website has some sort of a protected membership login. It’s the same thing, you know? The difference is you in having a membership, you’re charging a subscription for access, or maybe you’re charging a gateway, an entry fee for access to your information. But the subscription part is the membership. The membership is just kind of the portal. You log into the membership, you get added into a membership dashboard and the dashboard is where you see your video courses or your audio courses or PDFs or whatever it ends up being. And you can have one course or two courses or four courses or a couple of memberships, or however, it is you decide to kind of split it up.

1. Moodle

There were a lot of different ways to build, functionally to protect that content. If you remember a couple of years ago, or earlier in the week, I talked about a decade ago, there was a course called, Teaching Cells that came out, and Teaching Cells was just incredible software for what it was … or it was a membership course on how to build membership courses, which is a little bit tongue in cheek, but they had some ground material. It was put out by a guy named Brian Clark who started Copyblogger. He went through and walked through this entire model of how to build this membership website software in a piece of software called Moodle. This is a CMS. Also protect it with a piece of software called aMember, which is very, very old now. I’m looking at their website. I don’t think they updated it.

This is how we used to build membership sites. We would take a piece of software like Moodle and Moodle looks like it’s been updated a little bit, but Moodle is what is known as a learning management software, LMS. The LMS software, there are very sophisticated forms of LMS software that are very, very, very expensive. They are what is powering all of these digital learning platforms. Every college is doing distance learning, especially right … I mean right now, and has a membership login and all that other stuff, they are using a form of an LMS, a learning management software. There’s a lot of very expensive software applications out there that they can run. There are corporate versions of Teachable and stuff that people use.

Moodle is a very simple free one. It’s an open-source piece. It’s open-source software that you can download. You can install it on your web server. You can configure it, use it, put your stuff in there. It puts everything behind a membership login. Now the part that controls the payment is usually different. Usually, you have Moodle, which is your software, your LMS software that controls how the content is delivered, that controls the video, that controls the login, all that stuff. And then what you do is you pair it with some sort of money software, like a collection gateway kind of membership site software.

2. aMember

The software called aMember was actually how I learned how to build membership sites. I built a Moodle site and then I wrapped it in aMember here, and aMember had the portal for putting your credit card information in and sending it to a merchant processor, all of that stuff. It was a very time-intensive process. There was a lot of handholding and things because by the time you have an LMS and then a payment software, payment gateways like an aMember tied to a Stripe or authorized.net, you have an email sending software, then you have a couple of other different random integrations and shit starts breaking real quick.

3. Wishlist Member

We found out quickly that this is not the right way to do it. It’s not an advantageous way of doing it. We started looking for other options and we found, the first kind of big membership software that was created for WordPress was this WishList member. I would say it’s probably the industry standard. Here, “Trusted by over 103 active membership sites.” So a lot of membership site software. It’s a lot of people using the software.

It’s very easy and integrates directly with WordPress.  You can have a WordPress site that powers 25% of the internet and add in this WishList Member plugin. Now all of a sudden you have a membership website software so it has members login; member login, pages, widgets, you know, functionality. You can protect any page, any category, any image that is on your site. So even if you want to retroactively protect some of your pages because they’re great content, you can do that with WishList Member. You can also show the first a hundred words of a blog post and then have a read more button. No, go … Go Erie is where I live, it’s the newspaper here. But if you look at any of these online newspaper places where you can only read three or four articles, this payment gateway or Paywall, is what it’s called.

But you read the first a hundred or 200 words, and then to read more, you have to become a subscriber for 99 cents a month or whatever. Then WishList Member has that functionality too. You can protect all your blog posts if they want to read them. There are lots of different things you can do with a membership plugin. A lot of different ways you can make money with that membership plugin. WishList Member is a great, great tool. We use it for a lot of client sites.

4. LearnDash

LearnDash is another one that we have since started using lately. They have some really interesting functionality for content licenses. They have some great dashboards and really … It’s a very pretty software whereas WishList Member is not. WishList Member is not a whole lot to look at. I mean, it’s nice and it’s functional and it works great, but LearnDash has some cool tools that tie in with a lot of other things.

5. Ontraport

If we just want to cut right to the chase, we use Ontraport, which is a CRM, and it has a WordPress plugin, which will create your membership website software for you. It will protect all of your membership content and tie it to the customer record inside your CRM so that when somebody buys, it sends them their username and password, which is nice. It’s kind of a pain in the ass to set up originally but you know that when somebody buys something, they have their login. It isn’t up to them to go give their login and their password and all that other stuff.

Ontraport has worked well for that for more sophisticated membership website software or for more sophisticated … just protecting content in a more sophisticated way. if somebody buys, somebody sets up an email account with you and then they purchase maybe a month down the road, then they get their membership unlocked, Ontraport tracks how many times they’re logging in and all that other stuff. So really, really nice stuff. If you have a WordPress site, that’s how you would end up integrating it.

6. Kajabi

Now, if you want a more robust platform that isn’t WordPress based. Some people do, Kajabi is my favorite. Kajabi is a knowledge commerce platform. They very much, pride themselves in building robust membership website software that helps people learn. Content creators create, sell and help people, build the software and solutions that they want their members to go through. And brilliant software works well. It’s intuitive to use, they have pipelines and all kinds of other crazy stuff. They do email marketing and it’s just a very robust platform anymore. It’s great software.

7. Teachable

A competitor of Kajabi, somebody is like a Teachable. Teachable has also very nice software. If I had to pick one, I would pick Kajabi, just because they have a lot of marketing functionality and a lot of marketing tools like a Teachable, which is just kind of an off-the-shelf LMS uses. Kajabi is very much marketing heavy. Whereas Teachable is just very much course heavy, you know? So it just depends on how much marketing you think you’re going to need to do. And if you’re going to handle it doing something else.

If you have an email marketing platform, if you have a merchant processor, if you have like all of these things kind of in your business, Kajabi is probably the better way to go. Whereas Teachable, they have had some course creation stuff, and it’s nice to use, this drag and drop and all kinds of other stuff, but they both work well. So that is kind of how we ended up structuring how we end up building membership website software from a restriction standpoint.

Now let’s see. All right. Do you have any questions here?

What can you charge for membership?

membership charge
All right. We went through creating content yesterday. What can you charge for membership? We kind of covered this Monday, but we’re going to run through it again real quick. From a membership standpoint, anything below $10 is an easy membership. People are going to stay typically for years for anything on $10, in terms of membership. They’re great for qualifying buyers and then building a tribe of buyers and building a tribe of people who you can cultivate and nurture and stuff into some of your higher-end programs. It’s really where a lot of the low dollar membership website software come in. Anything between like $20 and a hundred, ends up being kind of that middle of the road membership that people are going to stay for between three and five months for as long as you give value. That becomes a profit center in your business.

When you’re at those levels, if you’re charging $67 a month for your membership, then you can also sell like a year-long, an annual version of that membership and give a lot of value. The annual version might give them three months free, but you collect the nine months. Whereas your normal membership is only five months. That’s what your normal churn is. You’re able to almost double your revenue by selling the annual version. And then you just let them know a little bit beforehand that their annual subscription is almost done. And then you rebuild them into the next month. Above a hundred dollars a month, you can do, but it usually needs to have live elements in it.

A live coaching call, group coaching, maybe a Facebook community, a Facebook group, something that is alive and more dynamic than just the kind of login and consumes material. That’s where those groups work well.

For Questions and Guide

I hope that answers the pricing question and software question. Do you have anything at all, anything at all, just go to DoneForYou.com/start and fill out a little application and book a call on our calendar and we will make sure to put together an action plan for you for your funnels, your traffic, your optimization, whatever. If you have any questions anywhere on the DFY site, there’s a little button in the lower right-hand corner. You can open up a chat and start talking with our team there, and I will talk to you soon, all right.

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How Competitor Research Guide You To Choose The Best Ad Campaign https://doneforyou.com/how-competitor-research-guide-you-to-choose-the-best-ad-campaign/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-competitor-research-guide-you-to-choose-the-best-ad-campaign Fri, 12 Jun 2020 14:00:11 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=11070       Video Transcript: Hey, what’s up. This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to today’s presentation This is GSD Daily number 65. And we’re going to talk about intelligence, gathering intelligence on your competitors. Spying on your competitors, ripping off their campaigns and their keyword phrases, and then using that data to help you generate […]

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Video Transcript:

Hey, what's up. This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to today's presentation This is GSD Daily number 65.

And we're going to talk about intelligence, gathering intelligence on your competitors. Spying on your competitors, ripping off their campaigns and their keyword phrases, and then using that data to help you generate more revenue online. Make more money, right? It's a little weird, I know... It's not weird, it's something we do every day. And you're better agencies, you're better providers, you're better... I mean, if you have somebody on your team who has this skill, you're going to be able to generate a lot more money a lot quicker, because you're using everybody else's data to find out what works and what doesn't. Today I'm going to walk you through a tool. SEMrush is the name of the software. It's a paid application obviously, you can't get anything quality for free.

For reason, this is high-grade stuff and what it provides in terms of analytics, and terms of competitor research and capability are... You could see everything your competitors are doing, everything that's working at least. We're going to go through that in a minute. For those of you... Let me shut my door there. For those of you who don't know who I am. My name is Jason Drohn, creator of a doneforyou.com and we specialize in three things, creating offers, building sales funnels, and then setting up marketing automation that works. And everything we do is about building a foundation for a business online, something that gives you sales on autopilot automatically. Today I had not a significant amount of... This is episode 65.

I have talked about a lot of different stuff as it relates to internet marketing, I'm starting to run out of stuff, that isn't a rehash of a previous thing. What we're going to be doing is we're going to start diving into some of the tools that I use, or that my team uses daily. We're going to talk about using things to execute some of the bigger things that we've talked about in previous episodes, like sales funnels and stuff. We have laid much groundwork already in the daily series, and talking about sales funnels, and talking about Facebook traffic, and talking about organic search rankings, and products, and offers, and all that other stuff that I'm going to start diving in deeper into specific things. And then those specific things we can roll up into the sales funnels, which is ultimately what we've already discussed, so I'm pretty excited about that. Next week, we're going to dig into organic traffic, so we have a lot of clients who are starting to explore organic traffic, starting to explore live streams, and SEO, and some of those things.

Next week we're going to talk about On-page SEO, finding keyword phrases, using keyword phrases, what we do to get rankings and all that stuff, and cover I think, a day. Today we're going to talk about spy tools if you will. The tool that we're going to discuss today is an application called SEMrush. SEMrush is a wicked awesome tool for SEO. And it works nice for SEO but more than that it gives you a lot of competitor data, a lot of competitor intel that you can use to spy on people who are advertising against you or people who are doing business in your same spaces. I'm just going to go through the tool. We're going to discuss the different areas of it and how we use it. Now, you probably are going to use it differently, or you might not, who knows. But the domain that we're tracking in here right now is done for you, I've been using SEMrush for years.

We have several options on the left-hand side, we've got domain analytics, keyword analytics, we've got projects, marketing insights, gap analysis, SEO content template, all kinds of internet stuff. Now, if we just scroll down this page a little bit, you're going to see that in terms of position tracking, we have visibility of 26.48%. And then we have some audits and some on-page checkers and stuff, but where this stuff comes into play. We're going to click into the domain analytics, so you can see some numbers. Now here this 38 is our authority score. We have an authority score of 38, our organic search traffic, we have 308 keywords, then we have 80, so these numbers are not right. If you look at our Google Analytics, we're getting about 300, 400 organic visitors a day.

Then can we scroll down here, and we see our traffic trend, so we can see that one. 2019, then up in March our traffic started trending up. Then we have our keyword rankings down below. You can see how many keyword phrases we have in the top three, so currently, if you follow this report. Now, this report is all... it's not like we're tying in Google webmasters, or Google Analytics, or anything like that. This keyword is generated on their side from their bots and crawlers. Here we have the top three, we have 13 keyword phrases in the top three. There's a lot more than that. We have 35 in the top 4 to 10, so a total of 722 keyword phrases that it found in the keyword results.

Now, if you look at our organic keywords here, you can see those 722 keywords, and we will see... Here, we're looking at organic competitor research, we are ranked in the first position for done for you, advanced lead generation systems, first position, DFY funnels, first position, free traffic Instagram, first position, DFI sales funnel, second position, so you can go through and see all of the keyword phrases that were ranked for. DFI funnels, Scriptly, webinar maker we're in the seventh spot. Done for your webinars, done for your webinar, so there are all kinds of stuff on the first page of Google, as everything above 10 is the first page of Google. CRO KPI done for your courses, that's interesting, we're up to the 12th spot there. We'll have to check that out. That's a pretty hot little keyword phrase. And that is really what we do.

Like we kind of troll through these keyword phrases and find where are our opportunities and if our opportunities, like let's say this done for your courses, it was in the 24th spot. Now it's in the 12th spot. We increased by 12. And the page that it is directing to is doneforyou.com. Well, knowing that it's like well, okay, we offer done for your course creation services. We create offers, so in knowing that it's like you know what, we're going to add something to the homepage for done for you courses linking off to our product to continue ranking for that keyword phrase, so I need to write that down while I'm still thinking about it. Marketing automation workflow, we're in the 27 spots. There are all kinds of keyword phrases here, so this gives you some insight into how your website is doing in the search engines.

But here's the thing, it's not all just that. We can go back out and let's get rid of this bubble here, and we're going to go back to overview, and we can see backlinks, we can see the advertising competitor research, but more than that, we can go into the competitors. Let's look down here, this competitive positioning map, and what you will see is all of the competitors that are, that are ranking for, and advertising for keyword phrases, just like us. We have DFI templates, Marketing Funnel Academy, we have clientsattraction.com has 19 keyword phrases and their traffic is 10. We have machines, we have ranktree.net, which has 156 keywords and 93. And then over here, we have doneforyou.com, which has 722 keywords and traffic of 308.

Needless to say, we're doing pretty well when it comes to our competition. And then we have a list of all of our organic competitors, so Marketing Funnel Academy, client attraction, RY machine, John McNeil has, it looks like three common keywords, a total of 214 keyword phrases, they have traffic of 71. And then we have 2 common keyword phrases, but 472 search rankings and 428 traffic. Let's see if there's anybody else down here. Digital matchbox, we have Rojo consultancy has 559 traffic... is 2300. The easy webinar is ranking for some of the common phrases that we are... They have 2, 618 keyword phrases. You can pinpoint all of your competitors here, from an organic standpoint. Now, if we go, we can go into advertising competitor research and we see the different positions, so traffic costs, we see the keyword phrases. The keyword phrases where we are ranking for. Then we can go into, let's see, we got position changes, and then competitors for advertising competitor research. These are competitors for our ads, so home business promo CFPRO, CFpro tools by ClickFunnels pro tools, they have some traffic going.

Iloveclickfunnels.com has a lot of traffic going. Let's look over at... we're just going to go into I Love Click Funnels, we're just going to see what they do. Their keyword phrase is ClickFunnels on average, their position number one. This is the URL of their landing page and is here, so we're going to go up and we're just going to look at this guy. This is their landing page. Hey Russell, if ClickFunnels is so darn good, why are you giving me two weeks for free? I don't have any idea what this is about, but it's maybe a video of some sort. And because I want you to make money before I make money. I'm so confident that when you see that... Anyway, whatever. That was an example of an ad. Now let's go back, we're going to go back and look at our competitors again. These are all paid, traffic competitors. We're going to go into FunnelHub here and look at... so FunnelHub is also advertising on the keyword phrase, click funnels, And they're just going right to a homepage.

Let's go look at that, so this is FunnelHub. It magnifies your authority, fixes leaky funnels, creates ownership of your traffic managers' perceptions, so this is Funnel hub, and apparently... Create my Funnel hub? Okay, cool. Now let's look at their ads. Funnel hub looked okay, right? I mean, so let's look at their ads, take control of free traffic start building your Funnel hub. Funnel hub helps you create a website to organize all of your funnels offers in one place, blah, blah, blah. Eh, is that? I mean, is that a solid ad? Maybe. Let's look at history and see how long it's been up. Well, this ad it's got 544, the traffic is 544. Click cost is 471, that's quite expensive for the keyword phrase, click funnels, like we're spending 70 cents for the keyword phrase, quick funnels. And it looks like this ad was in the maximum position in ad earned for a given keyword on a particular month, so 3, 1, and 3.

They're advertising pretty heavily right now for these two keyword phrases and then their pages are here, so now that is tied to some advertising competitor research. Then if we look at display advertising for Funnel hub, so the best tool for build sales funnels, okay. The best tool for build sales funnels, that's Funnel hub's display banner ad. That's unimpressive. But anyway, you get the idea, you get to kind of kick through, look and see what your competitors are doing. You get to dive into their stats, you get to look and see what keyword phrases they're ranking for. You get to see their ad copy. Everything about their campaign, you get to see through this one tool and you also get to track your competitor research, your keywords, your phrases.

You can do some keyword competitor research, putting together projects and stuff. They just created some sort of a content writing tool too. I don't know anything about it, but here's some global volume of Funnel hubs. There are lots of ways you can slice and dice the data. I mean, there's so much information in here that you can literally spend all day in here and just do nothing but competitor research, research your stuff, find different ways to exploit your data and rank better. But oftentimes whenever I start working with a client we're always looking for opportunities inside SEMrush for them, that we can go exploit for them. If you have any questions at all about signing or any questions at all about finding your competitor's information, building sales funnels, running traffic, all that stuff, then go to doneforyou.com/start. Sign up for an action plan call with my team and I. And then we'll put together a plan for you selling more stuff, creating offers, getting more traffic, setting up marketing automation.

And if there's anything we can do to help kind of talk through something on a future episode, go to doneforyou.com/GSD and done, and I will talk to you soon. All right. Thanks. Bye.

The post How Competitor Research Guide You To Choose The Best Ad Campaign appeared first on Done For You.

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Why Tracking The Right SaaS KPIs Will Help You Scale More Quickly https://doneforyou.com/early-stage-saas-startups-should-track-these-important-kpis/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=early-stage-saas-startups-should-track-these-important-kpis https://doneforyou.com/early-stage-saas-startups-should-track-these-important-kpis/#comments Thu, 04 Jun 2020 14:00:34 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=2825   SaaS KPIs are the most important to monitor when transitioning from a product idea to building an early-stage startup. Not only is it essential to track basic marketing metrics and the Key Process Indicators (KPIs), but you also need to ensure investor capital is protected! Founders who focus on product development and team building […]

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SaaS KPIs are the most important to monitor when transitioning from a product idea to building an early-stage startup. Not only is it essential to track basic marketing metrics and the Key Process Indicators (KPIs), but you also need to ensure investor capital is protected!

Founders who focus on product development and team building often neglect KPIs for early-stage startups.

Typically, an early-stage startup has created a minimum viable product and actively seeks seed funding to enter the growth stage. Failure to find investors will most probably mean the death of the startup. But to get access to funding, venture capitalists (VCs) or private investors will want to see complex data and analyses that show proven growth potential.

early-stage startups KPIs and funding

The analytics challenge in SaaS KPIs

At the same time, marketing analytics for an early-stage startup is a significant challenge. That is, firstly, because startups are not likely to have a budget for expensive analytics software. Secondly, and most importantly, a SaaS KPIs startup doesn't typically have a large customer base or a variety of advertising campaigns to compile a set of meaningful metrics. In other words, there's not enough data to track because the product is still in a beta or testing phase.

In the case of early-stage startups, SaaS KPIs, website analytics, and in-app analytics are of utmost importance and challenging to track simultaneously. Before discussing the best way to tackle this issue, let's briefly see what is essential to seed and early-stage startups.

Seed and early-stage investments

Early-stage SaaS KPIs or seed tech startups are typically exploring funding opportunities to invest in product development, infrastructure, customer acquisition strategies, and team building. Early-stage companies have few users testing a beta product while fine-tuning their product, working on their go-to-market plan, and devising an outbound strategy.

An early-stage startup usually focuses on customer acquisition and actively seeks customer feedback and its first outside investors through angel investors or VCs.

Usually, a startup won't be profitable until it expands its customer base. Some SaaS KPIs might hinge on trying to reach breakeven cash flow.

Why startup metrics matter

early-stage startups KPIsFirst and foremost, startups need to set goals, and metrics can be seen as business goals. Without pre-defined KPIs, setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-limited) goals and measuring progress would be impossible. KPIs are needed so that the management team can track progress and motivate the early-stage development team.

Data also helps founders make intelligent, informed decisions about their new business. Even with a small customer base, they might be able to identify patterns, problem areas, and achievements and strategize on potential next steps.

Of course, tracking SaaS KPIs, website analytics, and marketing data is also essential when startups are talking with a VC or angel investor. Investors will typically want to see indicators of product validation. Specifically, they will require proof that the go-to-market strategy works and that the company has a solid monetization strategy.

The only thing that makes a great idea is the numbers. If a startup founder cannot get to the point where they acquire paying customers, the picture will die. As they say, a picture is only as good as its execution. So, an early-stage startup should be able to demonstrate specific growth and success metrics.

It's essential to understand why metrics matter. Without data and analysis, a founder won't know how far they have progressed and won't know when the startup is ready two scales or is in trouble.

Decisions are often made based on entrepreneur intuition, but nothing is more solid than metrics, especially when a third party will be involved as a funding source.

Marketing metrics and analytics for early-stage SaaS startups

Let's assume your startup follows the freemium model (I know - not a GREAT way to monetize in terms of SaaS KPIs).

Freemium is a pricing strategy by which a SaaS KPIs product has a basic free tier, and it also provides premium paid plans for users to access additional features.

In this case, a lead refers to a free signup, while a customer is anyone who converts to a paid plan.

It's worth to mention that there are three keys to success in SaaS:

  1. Acquiring Leads
  2. Converting Leads into Customers
  3. Monetizing Customers

Here are the most critical metrics KPIs for early-stage startups you need to track consistently.

List of top SaaS KPIs

Here's a list of the top KPIs for early-stage startups that we will discuss in this article.

KPIs for SaaS startupsA. Growth metrics

  • Monthly unique visitors
  • Monthly new leads
  • Customer acquisition rate
  • Churn rate
  • Average use per user per month

B. Conversion metrics

  • Visitor-to-lead rate
  • Lead-to-customer rate

C. Marketing and other basic KPIs

  • Cost per lead
  • Customer acquisition cost
  • Monthly revenue and monthly recurring revenue
  • The average revenue per account

D. Expenses

  • Monthly expenses
  • Cost of goods sold
  • Operating expenses

E. Other marketing metrics that matter

  • Traffic per channel and campaign
  • Customer lifetime value
  • Brand reach
  • Sales cycle

Free download: Excel Template with KPIs for early-stage startups - SaaS Metrics 2.0 Dashboard

Do you need a better web analytics tool that helps quantify traffic data and visualize complete sales funnels instantly? With Statly, a web tracking and analytics tool that is simple to set up, you can finally start to make sense of your marketing data.

A. Growth metrics to track for early-stage startups

Monthly unique visitors

Monthly unique visitors are an important one for SaaS KPIs. It's the number of different users visiting your website each month. If a single person visits the site multiple times within a given time, they will be considered one unique visitor. That is, of course, as long as they use the same browser for the visits and do not clear the browser cookies. Use this metric and the traffic source to know more about how effective your paid or SEO campaigns are. Monthly unique visitors are a good reflection of the size of the audience and are a good measure of your brand reach.

Use tools like Google Analytics to estimate monthly unique visitors.

Monthly new leads

This metric, called lead acquisition rate, shows how many new leads or free signups a SaaS KPIs company acquires monthly. It makes sense to track the information sources, whether through paid channels or word of mouth and SEO.

Not every SaaS KPIs business offers a free trial or a self-service option. Many established companies require you to schedule a demo with a sales rep before accessing the software. But, self-service user signup and activation is perhaps the best way to lower the cost of acquiring a customer and increase the lead acquisition rate for a small SaaS startup.

For self-service SaaS companies in their early stage, monthly signups are probably the most critical growth metric since they're still building up their user base. Sometimes, CEOs want to acquire as many leads as possible before finding an optimized formula to convert those people into paid users.

Google Analytics can help you calculate some SaaS KPIs, such as new leads and comparing data to the previous month.

Customer acquisition rate

Whether offering a free trial or a free pricing plan, your ultimate goal should be to convert free users into paying customers. It is a misconception that many trial users will eventually generate considerable revenues.

SaaS startups need to put a well-thought-out onboarding and lead nurturing plan into action if they want to be able to boast when in meetings with VCs.

Similar to the lead acquisition rate, the customer acquisition rate is the number of new revenue-generating users over some time, usually a month.

Your billing or accounting platform will help you find the number of new customers and the revenue they generate every month.

Churn rate

Churn measures a drop in the customer base of a SaaS startup. Churn is about how much the service has lost within a certain period, which might be longer than a month. It's one of the most meaningful indicators in forecasting business continuity. As a startup founder, you must know if customers want to stick with or abandon your product because they see no value.

So, keep a sharp eye on the customer churn rate and identify its reasons.

For most SaaS companies, 3% or lower churn is considered normal.

Now, in terms of revenue lost because of churn. As an early-stage startup focused on revenue growth, your goal should eventually be to earn more from new customers than lose from abandoning customers. In other words, you need to accomplish a negative revenue churn. Your biggest bet is to prevent paid users from unsubscribing while at the same time finding ways to retain existing customers, if not sell more to them.

You must use data from your accounting or billing and CRM software to calculate churn. Ideally, these platforms should be integrated so that you can cross-check and pull data from either place.

Churn Rate = ( Users at the beginning of Period - Users at the end of Period ) / Users at the beginning of Period

Average use per user per month

Average use per user per month is a KPI to measure the quality of your active users. This is an essential ratio if you want to know how long users spend working with your app. It is a qualitative number that reveals your app's importance to their daily life. It doesn't explicitly measure qualitative data, like passion and frequency of use, but it provides an excellent metric to highlight the relationship of the average user with your app.

If you hook customers to your SaaS KPIs product and get them to revisit it repeatedly, your app becomes a habit, and the users are more likely to continue using it and talk to their peers about it.

Use built-in app functionality to measure this critical metric for early-stage startups, and install Intercom if you want a more accurate portrayal of each user's journey and behavior.

B. Conversion KPIs for early-stage startups

Visitor-to-lead rate

In most cases and according to different marketers, the number of website visitors that become leads is deficient. And we're talking about the conversion rate of the total number of website visitors, not a particular landing page. On average, more than 95 percent of new visitors will leave your website without signing up for your app or subscribing to your newsletter. Instead, very effective landing pages coupled with targeted inbound traffic can give a conversion ratio of as high as 60%.

How to calculate the visitor-to-lead rate. Take your total number of people that converted to leads (subscribers to the free plan and email leads) for any given month, divide it by the total number of unique visitors, and multiply the result by 100. For example, 500 monthly charges with 10,000 website visitors would result in a 5% visitor-to-lead rate.

If you still feel something is wrong with your funnel, you may want to watch our three-part video course. In this free course, you will learn the three steps to finally fix your sales funnel and conversion rates to make more money from your current traffic. Click here for instant access.

Lead-to-customer rate

Every SaaS KPIs startup in its early stages wants to convert free or trial users into paid customers. This number describes how many leads convert into paying customers per month. In other words, it shows whether your sales process and lead nurturing methods work. The lead-to-customer rate is about how quickly you turn free subscribers into customers. Generating sales-ready leads is a challenge; this metric shows you how good you're at it.

The lead-to-customer rate is pretty straightforward to calculate. Take the number of newly acquired customers for any given month, divide it by the number of new leads, and multiply that by 100 to get your percentage. For example, 15 monthly customers when you score 500 new charges would result in a 3% lead-to-customer rate.

Use Google Analytics goals to track conversions and other paid tools that can come in handy, like Intercom.

C. Marketing and other basic KPIs for SaaS startups

Cost per lead

Cost per lead (CPL) is a number that shows you how much it costs your company to acquire a new user that is interested in your SaaS product. In other words, CPL is how much you need to spend on average to have a new lead subscribe to your newsletter or sign up for your free plan. Compared to the cost per click (CPC), CPL is more important as a KPI for decision-making. CPL measures the actual cost of a real business asset, a natural person who engages with your business and decides to come aboard your app.

How to calculate cost per lead. CPL is calculated by dividing total ad spend by the number of new information for a given time. While you can use the actual ad spend over the total number of leads, it is best practice to attribute lead generation to an ad. So, CPL should be calculated separately for each channel campaign.

CPL = Total Ad Spend / Total Attributed Leads

Customer acquisition cost

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) describes how much your SaaS startup costs to acquire a new paid customer.

Calculating CAC is somewhat more complicated. Divide your total marketing spend (including personnel) by the number of new users who purchased a plan within a period usually longer than a month. If you calculate CAC for a single month, you might not consider your sales cycle, which is typically longer than a month for a less-known SaaS product.

CAC = Total Cost of Sales & Marketing / Number of Deals Closed

For example, if you spent $80,000 over three months and added 400 new customers, your CAC would be $200.

Combined with customer lifetime value (CLV), this metric helps companies calculate ROI and prove their business model is viable.

Monthly revenue and monthly recurring revenue

Revenue for early-stage SaaS companies is necessary, but a recurring cash inflow is even more worth concentrating on. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is a simple but powerful metric that tracks the net value of renewals, new subscriptions, and up-sells minus churns every month.

If you want to calculate the new monthly recurring revenue, use this formula:

Net New MRR = New MRR + Expansion MRR – Churn MRR

MRR helps your early-stage SaaS KPIs startup predict its business future more accurately. Thus, MRR can gauge the value you bring for a funding round.

The average revenue per account

The average revenue per account (ARPA) measures the average revenue generated per user, typically monthly, where multiple pricing tiers exist. It represents the average revenue per customer since a customer should be signed up for a single account.

A simple way to calculate ARPA is to divide the total MRR you have at the end of a month and divide it by the number of active customers at that time, like so:

ARPA = MRR / Total Number of Customers

A good practice is measuring ARPA for new and existing customers separately to understand how your ARPA is evolving or if new customers behave differently compared to existing ones.

D. Expenses

Monthly expenses

When it comes to expenses, one of the most significant tasks from a SaaS startup's P& L perspective is the proper classification of costs. The two main categories of expenses are the costs of goods sold (COGS) and operating expenses. Both categories of expenses are essential for analytics, benchmarking, and investor analyses.

For example, revenue minus COGS gives you a gross profit margin. This is one of the most straightforward but powerful ratios investors consider when funding their early-stage SaaS startup.

From a managerial point of view, you need to keep an eye on COGS and operating expenses that are usually high in tech startups, like staff wages, technology expenses, and marketing costs.

Cost of goods sold

COGS is the direct costs attributable to the production and delivery of the product.

In the case of a SaaS company, COGS will include any of the following: developer wages; hosting; cloud and database fees; support personnel and customer care costs; third-party fees directly attributable to product creation and delivery; and customer onboarding costs.

Operating expenses

On the flip side, operating expenses are incurred by an organization through its day-to-day business operations. This category of costs would include other staff salaries, rent, advertising, legal & professional fees, etc.

Your accountant will be able to help you with the appropriate cost structure for your early-stage SaaS startup to comply with the law and, at the same time, be able to reach conclusions from a managerial perspective.

Free download: SaaS Financial Model - Simple Template For Early-Stage Startups

E. Other marketing metrics that matter

Traffic per channel and campaign

You already know the importance of consistent streams of traffic to your site. Unique visitors and traffic sources (per channel and campaign) are also important SaaS KPIs. They should already be visible in your Google Analytics account; however, diving deeper into your traffic analytics is essential as a SaaS startup.

Most SaaS websites have a way for users to log in. The log-in link is usually in the top navigation bar. As the number of users of your cloud-based software increases, you will get a lot of repeat visitors to your homepage. These users come back to find the log-in link. This can yield false traffic data.

An artificial increase in your overall traffic might be misinterpreted as business growth due to marketing campaigns. You need to tackle this issue with the help of a Google Analytics expert.

Customer lifetime value

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is one of the most critical SaaS KPIs! It's the average income each customer will generate for your business. It is wrong to associate the value of each user with a month's worth of the plan they purchased. Also, it's wrong to calculate the ROI of your marketing efforts based on a customer's first purchase. Instead, you need to take into account the sum of revenue you have on average from a customer's lifetime.

Here's how to calculate CLV.

CLV = ( 1 / Churn Rate ) x ARPA

First, calculate your customer lifetime rate by dividing the number 1 by your customer churn rate. For instance, if your monthly churn rate is 2%, your customer lifetime rate would be 1 / 0.02 = 50.

Then, it would be best to figure out your average revenue per user (ARPA) by dividing the total income by the total number of paid users. If your payment was $50,000, divide it by 100 customers, and your ARPA would be $50,000 / 100 = $500.

Finally, find the lifetime value of your customer by multiplying the customer's lifetime rate by ARPA. In this example, your SaaS company CLV would be $500 x 50 = $25,000.

This value translates into the expected revenue from a single customer for the lifetime of your relationship. It is what every user is worth. It is an essential piece of data you want to display to funding parties.

Brand reach

Turning to pure marketing ratios, brands, or market reach is crucial to a tech startup. In its simplest form, brand reach is the estimated size of the audience you reach through your marketing campaigns over some time, usually a month.

Market reach allows tech startups to determine whether the cost of a marketing campaign is worth the revenue that new customers could bring in.

To measure this metric, you would usually look at the total number of people who visited your site (monthly unique visitors), saw your Facebook or Google Ads, opened your email, and so on. Observe the number as it grows month after month to make sense of this SaaS metric over a more extended period.

Sales cycle

For most SaaS products, the sales cycle will depend on the type of product you're selling, the reputation of the product, and the price tag.

An early-stage startup usually struggles to create buzz around its name, making it easier for people to purchase.

Even if you have a long sales cycle, tracking how it changes over time is essential so you can continually improve. Either you have salespeople who pick up the phone or an automated sales sequence focusing on effective onboarding and nurturing the leads in your funnel to shorten the sales cycle.

And remember: Acquiring a new customer is 4-10 times harder than retaining an existing one. So keep building your relationships with newly acquired customers and improve your engagement KPIs.

How does your startup score against other SaaS companies?

Tracking analytics and data might make sense if you look at them as standalone numbers and rates. First, it's essential to look for trends over time, and second, you might want to benchmark against other SaaS and tech companies. If you're wondering what is the typical KPIs for a SaaS company, look at the following survey of over 400 private SaaS companies, which represents deep benchmarking data and insights on the growth and operations of private SaaS companies.

Survey part 1
Survey part 2

These benchmark metrics will help you see how you're doing and create a detailed business plan for your startup. Such a business plan can help you present your business in front of VCs for funding or just set business goals.

The importance of data-driven decisions for SaaS startups

To make an early-stage SaaS company successful, you can't just build a great product or change your software subscription model and assume that hordes of customers will come. You need a thoughtful marketing strategy and run marketing and sales campaigns to make people aware of your SaaS product and attract your target market.

The SaaS economic model is unique from almost any other. It relies on small amounts of recurring revenues to support growth. It would be best to track important metrics and KPIs from day one of your early-stage startups to make rational, data-driven decisions regarding your marketing, sales, and services operations.

Free download: SaaS Cohort Analysis Model - KPIs for early-stage startups

 

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Mastering SAAS KPIs for Business Growth

Hello there, I'm Jason Drohn, the brain behind doneforyou.com. Today, we are diving deep into the nitty-gritty of SAAS KPIs - the metrics that can propel your business into a new digital age. Through our expertise in creating offers, setting up sales funnels, and marketing automation, we aim to assist you in sculpting your business growth trajectory. So, let's unravel the intricacies of SAAS KPIs.

Understanding the Landscape of SAAS KPIs

SAAS KPIs, or Software as a Service Key Performance Indicators, are metrics cloud-hosted software companies use to gauge their business health and growth. Due to years of hefty venture capital investments, SAAS companies have developed mature business models, adopting a data-driven approach ahead of many other digital business sectors. Understanding and tracking your SAAS KPIs is crucial whether you're an early-stage or late-stage startup. Let's delve into why these metrics are critical for your business development.

Essential SAAS KPIs for Startups

In the early stages, startups often face the challenge of identifying the most vital KPIs. The focus often sways between subscriber growth and profitability, with a keen eye on metrics that signal promising returns in the future. Here are some fundamental SAAS KPIs to consider:

  • Monthly Unique Visitors: Track the number of new visitors to evaluate the reach of your business.
  • Lead Generation: Monitor the influx of new leads daily, as they hold potential for future revenue.
  • Customer Acquisition Rate and Churn Rate: Keep an eye on these metrics to understand your business's health and growth rate.

Monetizing Leads: A Closer Look

Turning leads into revenue is a gradual yet inevitable process. It might take a while, but with the right strategies, such as effective email sequences, you will see a significant uptick in your revenue. Here, we will discuss aspects like:

  • Lead to Customer Conversion Rate: Understand the percentage of leads transforming into customers.
  • Cost per Lead: Determine the amount spent to acquire a lead and strategize accordingly.
  • Customer Acquisition Cost: This metric, varying across funnels, helps strategize your budget effectively.

Revenue Metrics: Tracking Business Growth

Your business's growth and valuation are intricately tied to your revenue metrics. In this section, we will examine:

  • Monthly and Yearly Recurring Revenue (MRR & YRR): Staple metrics indicating your business's size and growth trajectory.
  • Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): Learn how to gauge and influence this number to improve your business's financial health.

Influencing Factors: Shaping Your SAAS KPIs

Various factors within your business operations influence each SAAS KPI. Understanding these influencers can help in optimizing your strategies. We will explore landing page effectiveness, sales material quality, offer strategies, and how they mold your KPIs.

Expenses and Other Vital Marketing Metrics

Apart from the above, knowing your monthly expenses, operating costs, and other marketing metrics like brand reach and the sales cycle is crucial. This section will offer insights into managing your payments wisely and understanding marketing metrics that matter.

Leveraging Tools for SAAS KPI Tracking

To stay on top of your game, leveraging tools that offer in-depth insights into your business is essential. One such tool is Cyfe, which allows you to create dashboards that provide comprehensive insights into your business, covering aspects like ad spend, social media engagement, and much more.

Conclusion: Embrace the Power of Data

While SAAS KPIs might seem a dry topic, understanding and utilizing these metrics can revolutionize your business growth. Remember, the key to successful business management is knowing your numbers and effectively leveraging data.

The post Why Tracking The Right SaaS KPIs Will Help You Scale More Quickly appeared first on Done For You.

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The Software And Tools You Need To Manage Remote Teams https://doneforyou.com/the-software-you-need-to-manage-remote-teams/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-software-you-need-to-manage-remote-teams Thu, 28 May 2020 14:00:09 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10859 Today, we’re going to talk about software and tools to manage remote teams. Now, we have had to do it remotely for a long time. So I’ve been doing this for 14 years, and I’ve never had an office outside of the house. Do you know what I mean? We’ve always just done it remotely. […]

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Today, we’re going to talk about software and tools to manage remote teams. Now, we have had to do it remotely for a long time. So I’ve been doing this for 14 years, and I’ve never had an office outside of the house. Do you know what I mean? We’ve always just done it remotely.

When the pandemic and the lockdown and everything happened, my wife and I joked a little bit that we had been training our entire lives to do this very thing, which works out at the house, “be forced to work out of the house.” It’s just a different scenario than it is because I’ve never had an office to walk into and manage remote teams or walk into and get a status update.

Like everything we’ve done has always been online, using GoToMeeting, using Zoom, using Slack, using Basecamp and Trello and Asana, and like all of these tools have always just been how we’ve done it, and using things as simple as like a Google Drive or Dropbox to share documents and files back and forth. This week has been the tools and technology we’ve needed to manage remote teams.

The first thing I want to kind of talk about is some of the stuff you’re going to need. Every business has people and processes. Those people and processes, there are lots of tools that you can use.

The ones that we use, we use Basecamp for project management. We use Google Docs, Google Drive for spreadsheets, and processes like SOPs, standard operating procedures, like that kind of stuff. We make use of those tools.

Outsourcing

In terms to manage remote teams, if we need to outsource something that we don’t necessarily have like in-house, like let’s say if we need a graphic designer or a banner designer or whatever, then we’ve gone to Upwork before.

Upwork is an outsourcing company that lets you manage remote teams. So basically any provider can go and put a profile up and then bid on jobs. And then we as employers, can go to Upwork and then post the job that we want help with. Do you know? So that is kind of how Upwork works. Ask Sunday is another one and so is Fiverr.

Let’s talk about the intricacies of each of the different platforms, how we find people, how we use tools to post jobs, how we use tools to manage remote teams, and all that other stuff.

Upwork and Fivver

We’re going to go to Upwork. We’re going to start with the outsourcing piece and Fiverr. In terms of finding people, the best person that you can hire is somebody you already know, somebody who is already proficient in something. Sometimes the budget doesn’t necessarily allow it.

If you are a startup and you’re looking for a graphic designer, sometimes you just have to go to Upwork. Every once in a while we’ll get a call, somebody will come in and say, “Hey, I want you to run our ads,” and they don’t have an offer up there. They don’t have any ads up.

I’m like, well, if it’s like literally just a startup and you’re not all that solvent if this is your last $500, then what you need to do is you need to spend $100 or $250 and have somebody go set up a campaign for you and then spend the other $300 in ads. You try to flip that $300 into more money, more leads, which brings you more money, and leads that you can work, and all of that stuff. In that scenario, the best way to find somebody is Upwork.

  • Outsourcing Team Members

Basically, you can just go to upwork.com and then just hit the get started or watch a demo and it’s going to show you how. In the early days, all of my team members came from Upwork. I still have programmers that originally came from Upwork. They were mobile and web development team members. We have found images, like banner designers on Upwork.

I’ve never hired copywriting on Upwork. For the most part, I’ve always just done design and programming on Upwork.

  • Posting Job Projects

You can find great bloggers on Upwork too. You post a project and then they bid on it. And what I will tell you is when you’re posting a project on Upwork, I always make sure to include three things whenever I’m posting a job or a job description.

The headline is exactly what I want, so bloggerfordoneforyou.com. Then what I did before I posted that project was I went through and wrote like an SOP almost, like a standard operating procedure or like things that I wanted every blog post to have. For instance, every blog post that somebody from Upwork writes for us has a great keyword-loaded headline.

It has the keyword phrase in the first line of the blog post, the last line of the blog post, and then it is roughly like a 1% keyword density throughout the rest of the blog post. It has images, nice prominent images, preferably multiple, and those images have the keyword phrase in them. There is internal linking. All of the blog posts are between 1,000 and 2,000 words because that is what Google likes right now.

I went through and kind of wrote up all these guidelines. And then inside the job posting, I posted a link to those guidelines and said, “This is what I’m expecting of you, and I need two articles a week, three articles a week, and I will give you the keyword phrases for those articles to write for.” I made it very, very simple for them to understand what the project was, and that’s the biggest thing. You want to make it simple when you’re outsourcing projects.

You want to make it simple and easily understood. And the simpler you can make it, the better quality you’re going to have and typically the cheaper you’re going to end up getting talent for because they don’t have to put a whole lot of thought into it. I found that to work well.

When I hired that particular role, I didn’t hire just one person. I hired three, and I wanted each of them to write at least two articles. I think it was two articles a week. Then one of them turned out to be good, so she ended up writing a lot more. That was kind of how that worked.

You can do the same thing with programming. One of the things that Patch and I talked about last week, or maybe it was Mars, talked about giving a very difficult first task. Making sure that the first task is not easy so that you know they’re with you for the long haul. I think that is a really good idea too, and it works well for developers, programmers. Writers are writers. Writing is just a pain in the ass anyway.

If they can bust out a 1,500-word blog post twice a week that is good, then that’s good. Also, in looking for talent on Upwork, I put a lot of emphasis on the way they’re responding to my job postings. So in the job posting, it has a good title, it has exactly what I want, and then the third thing it does is, I say, “Do not copy and paste a blanket reply to this job posting, and do not be part of a team.” I want one person to do this well, and it’s the same thing for the programmer. Moreover, I wanted one programmer to be able to do it all, as opposed to being part of a programming team and they use Upwork as a feeder system for leads into their agency. I didn’t want that.

I wanted one person to do it for me, so I included that in the job description, don’t reply, don’t be part of a team, don’t copy and paste a generic reply. These are the projects we worked on, and this is what we’re good at, and blah, blah, blah. Tell me exactly what you’re going to do for me. And then especially for writers, I make sure that their reply is grammatically correct.

It is as on point as it can be, and it’s conversational. There’s no broken English. I mean, if there’s ever like a microcosm of how they’re going to write for you, it is that reply, because that reply is going to be… That’s the thing that’s going to set them apart. They’re trying to impress you, and what I want is for them to try to impress the readers of done for you.

Do you know? So that’s how I find people on Upwork. I don’t ever take the cheapest. I don’t ever take the most expensive. There’s a way you can hide bids that you don’t want to see that you filtered out, so I always hide those. I narrow it down to five or six. I kind of communicate with those guys, and I’ll usually try to pick two or three depending on the project.

There’s like one that wins or two that win typically. I’ll give them a couple of weeks to just kind of test them out and then we’ll go from there. So that’s how I use Upwork.

Ask Sunday

The other one is Ask Sunday. Ask Sunday is a VA company. So basically you can hire a virtual assistant for lots and lots of different things.

Some of the services that they offer are they do data entry, research, tribal planning, customer service desk, outbound calling, like all of that stuff. This is a service that lets you do all that, as opposed to finding a person who can manage remote teams. And then Fiverr is a way to get something done cheap, really quick. Like if you want a logo, you can go in and just search for a logo and it’s going to pop up all the different people who are going to do logos, starting at $40, starting at $120, starting at $50.

There are lots of different prices. It was five, I mean, that’s why it’s called Fiverr, and then they went to 10, and now it’s not five anymore. You’re able to still get good work. There’s one that’s 1,500 bucks.

You can still get great work, and it’s a lot cheaper than if you were to hire a designer straight out. Those are the three resources for finding talent to extend your services or your, whatever, without necessarily having to hire somebody from scratch. Does that help? Do you like that? And then in the comments just say yes, no. Okay, cool. All right. Let’s see, we’re going to talk about next.

Those are my outsourcing. It used to be Elance and oDesk. I used to hire a lot on Elance, and then Elance and oDesk merged, and then they did an IPO. So now Fiverr, or not Fiverr but Upwork is a publicly-traded company, so they’re solid. Every once in a while, we do some stuff. I have a couple of open contracts on Upwork for programming and stuff.

I mean, it’s a good company to extend your team, and then they also do some monitoring on manage remote teams and all of that kind of stuff too. It works out nicely when you’re trying to find somebody.

Project Management

Basecamp

In terms of project management, let’s go over to Basecamp. Basecamp is a project manager that we use internally for all of our stuff. Asana is another one.

Asana and Trello

We talked about Asana yesterday, and then Trello was another one. Each of them has its flavor, and there is about 70,000 other project management software out there. So really it’s just about finding one that makes the most sense for you. Trello is very… So you have your tasks and then you kind of go sideways.

You can see here, you have your tasks and they’re set up as cards, and then you move those cards depending on where they need to be in the project flow. Then you have Asana, which still does have some card-like functionality. Asana has changed a lot, largely I think because Trello was so popular. And then we have Basecamp and Basecamp is kind of a very… It’s very extensible. I mean, you can do a lot with Basecamp, and Basecamp has some great client-side functionality and manage remote teams.

Now, we just started using it more with clients, and it is working a lot better now for what we need. I’m going to be moving away from using Dropbox because we can use Basecamp for file storage. Some things are just a lot more seamless now with Basecamp. It’s very much the industry standard.

I think they have 20 or 30,000 people who use it, 20 or 30,000 companies. So yeah, it works out pretty nice, and everything will manage remote teams. You can create your templates, and this is how I do it. For all the major services and stuff that we sell, I have templates for each of those services. For instance, when we build a sales funnel, then there is going to be…

Here, let me see if I can do this. I’m going to show you how I have my template set up, I think, which will help you understand kind of how to templatize this stuff for yourself. I just need to remember what my login is here. All right, here we go. Okay. If I want to manage templates… So I’m going to manage my templates. What do you want to talk about…

Let’s look at a base webinar funnel. Okay, cool. All right. Now, I’m going to move and I share this new screen. There we go. All right. Basically how I have Basecamp set up is we have our templates. Whenever a new project, a new client comes on board, I have a template. Let’s say a webinar funnel. A new webinar funnel client comes in, then I just deploy this webinar funnel template, and then I modify it based on what we’re doing for the client.

I assign my team to the different pieces of it. Inside Basecamp, there is a Campfire, which a Campfire is just a… It’s a chat. I mean, there’s nothing more than that.

Slack

We use Slack for chat, and we invite our clients into Slack, and then we have some partners and stuff in Slack too.

We use Slack for all of that. I have a paid Slack account that does video and audio and all that. There’s the message board, which our clients use every once in a while. They’ll drop messages here and then we’ll figure out where to put it inside the to-dos. Then we have the schedule, which is all of the dripped out tasks or all to do’s.

They arrange themselves in the schedule, so you can at a glance see what your schedule is, what your team’s schedule is, and all of the other stuff. There are automatic check-ins. So on Monday or Friday, you can send a notification to your team members that have them reply. What did you do this week? What are your blockers? Like a status update kind of thing. What are the results of this campaign? Like whatever which makes it easier to manage remote teams.

Your team responds. The client sees that. You see that. So it’s a way for you to keep on track. Then you have docs and files, which docs and files are kind of like a Dropbox. Do you know? It’s a common folder that everybody in your team gets to have, and then your clients can also have access to the parts that you want them to have access to.

If you want them to have access to a folder so they can upload their stuff there, then you would just give them access. Also, if you want them to have access to the document that shares where they give you the logins, then you can do that here. If they update a password, then they can just log in and change it themselves without having to like go back and forth with email.

I will tell you that since we started implementing this for clients, our emails have drastically dropped, which is a lovely thing. I don’t fear email as much. It used to be when I sit down and I check my email and it’s like whoa, bam, you got 150 emails, like 80 of them need to be answered from clients, because they’re not sure where they are in the process and you can’t fault them for that. Because so much of what we do, it’s done for you.

When we’re writing a webinar, I don’t need your involvement in writing the webinar. We do an onboarding call. I figure out what the offer is. We write the webinar. We send you a revision one. There isn’t a lot to go back and forth between it. We’ve done this so many times and for so long that manage remote teams is easier to do.

Then revision one hits, we make the modifications. We do the final, the finishing touches, then I’m going to record the webinar. It’s a very seamless process. I just was told this yesterday. For people that have worked with a lot of other marketing agencies, there’s always go back and forth and there’s always an agency. Give me this. Give me that. They’re just wasting time. The fact that we don’t do that, sometimes it’s unnerving from a client standpoint.

This helps everybody stay on track, in the process, everything’s good to go. Then docs and files, we’ll throw logos up here, video files, any kind of press releases, logins, whatever. As you can see in this template, basically whenever this template is deployed, there is an example proposal.

This backs up everything that the client saw, and then we always drop the real proposal, the signed contract in here too, so that it’s here. But the real magic is here in the to-dos. Whenever this project is deployed, all of these to-do’s or automatically deployed as well. As for us, for our onboarding, our onboarding is four steps. Well, three steps for the client.

We send a welcome email, and in here, so my account manager, there’s a copy here for the welcome email. There’s the copy for the welcome email, and what they can do is they can just copy that, drop it in an email, and then send it. It’s ready to go. Then we set up software accounts for all of our software that they’re going to need.

Then we set up a Dropbox folder, which is going to be going away because we’re using Basecamp now, and then I record a project walkthrough, or whoever sold the project records a project walkthrough for the team. This is what we’re doing. This is a website. These are the assets they have.

This is the type of sales funnel we’re building. This is the call to action, the offer, all of that stuff. And then I go through and I just start assigning all the tasks. The tasks: write webinar copy, write webinar promo email sequence, write webinar replay email sequence, write lead magnet, write, lead magnet promo email. As I said, we’ve done this so many times.

You can have sub-tasks in here, but typically, I just record a video, some explanation, some memos on what we need here, and then we just manage remote teams iteratively. We go through and it’s version one, version two, version three, that kind of thing. So that’s how we use Basecamp in project management software in general. It works out nicely. It’s a nice seamless process. You can do the same thing in Trello or Asana or whatever.

Google Docs

It’s totally up to you. Let’s see. And then Google Docs. Google Docs is pretty easy to explain. There’s one thing I kind of want to show you, and I just set this up this morning, but I think it might be an interesting example. Inside Google Docs, I mean, as you know, these live streams have become…

My GSDdailies have become something that I do quite a bit. I do them every day, but I’m leveraging them through blog posts and whatever. And I just put together a procedure for having one of my team members adding these MP4 files, the transcripts for the MP4 files, as blog posts, because I’m 10 days behind right now. I was pretty well able to keep up, but I just haven’t been able to recently.

What I did was I recorded a video on how I do this. The video is about 30 minutes long, and then I put together this little spreadsheet. The spreadsheet says, okay, the date published is 5:18, so that was last Monday I published this podcast. It was episode 46. And today, this one is 54, so that’s how far behind I am.

Published it at 10:00 AM. This is the URL that is currently sitting on Amazon S3 because I uploaded it there. Then I had it transcribed. And what I need for my team member to do is log in, grab the transcript, put it on Done For You, on the blog, the way that you know that I do, go through Grammarly, keyword load it, optimize it, all that stuff, all stuff that she knows how to do. And then all she has to do when she’s done is just mark it off.

This is the date that it was added. So this morning, in my example, it was 5:28 is when it was added. Then we also have a second podcast that we’re starting. And once this process is good and dialed in, I mean, there’s going to be weirdness at first. There always is whenever you deploy a new like SOP or a new procedure.

There are always things that you forget because you know the process, you forget to communicate them. So I expect that the same will happen here, but we can always improve on something like this and it will get better in time. So whether we’re doing one show, two shows, three shows, four shows, writing a bunch of transcripts, then this is the way. And all I did was recorded this procedure in Snagit.

We talked about Snagit I think yesterday, right? I mean, the day before. Snagit is a screen capture software, so I recorded a 30-minute video on how to do this in Snagit. I exported it as an MP4 file. And then from there, I put this spreadsheet together and I put the whole thing on Basecamp and assigned it to her.

If you want to go look at Basecamp, yeah, and I assigned it to her. That was it. Other than that, that was kind of how we used Google Drive, that was how we used Basecamp.

For Questions and Guide

If you have any questions at all, just go to doneforyou.com/blog. Did you guys like today’s presentation? Did you get stuff out of it?

Now, if you would like to go through, if you would like to have an Action Plan Call on how to build your sales funnel and how to start your business online, on how to get traffic for your business, go to doneforyou.com/start, fill out the little form, and then the next thing after that is you will be scheduling a call on my calendar.

We will go through, we’ll talk about your business, we’ll talk about what your goals are, and then basically what you need to be done, and then we’ll figure out if there’s a way that we can work together. If so, then that’s awesome. If not, that’s awesome too. And tomorrow is Friday, so we have two shows. We have the GSD Daily at 10:00 AM, and then we have Sales System Experts at 11:00 AM with Aaron Parkinson.

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10859
Guide On Face To Face Sales On Zoom App https://doneforyou.com/how-to-do-face-to-face-sales-on-zoom-calls/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-to-do-face-to-face-sales-on-zoom-calls Wed, 20 May 2020 14:00:18 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10800 Jason Drohn: Hey, what’s up? This is Jason Drohn from GSDdaily. Welcome to episode number 48. We are going to talk about Face to Face Sales via Zoom Calls. I believe, and with me today is a very, very special guest. You see him on the screen, Patch Baker. How are you doing, Patch? Patch […]

The post Guide On Face To Face Sales On Zoom App appeared first on Done For You.

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Jason Drohn:
Hey, what’s up? This is Jason Drohn from GSDdaily. Welcome to episode number 48. We are going to talk about Face to Face Sales via Zoom Calls. I believe, and with me today is a very, very special guest. You see him on the screen, Patch Baker. How are you doing, Patch?

Patch Baker:
I’m good buddy. Glad to hang out with you.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, man. Patch and I have had a couple of conversations in the past and this dude knows more about more things than anybody else I’ve ever met, so-

Patch Baker:
You can’t start out like that, bro.

Jason Drohn:
Oh, you know. Well, this is high-ticket face to face sales from shit week, so basically. So Monday we went over strategy sessions and selling on strategy sessions. Yesterday we went over basically what you can sell, like assisted learning, group coaching, masterminds, boot camps, all that kind of stuff.

And today we’re going to learn about how to sell some high-ticket face to face sales stuff on Zoom. And you love selling stuff on video, right?

Patch Baker:
Yeah, for sure. I won’t even take phone calls anymore. It used to be I’d try to get really good at phone closing, and I’m not saying that there’s not a place for phone closing, I’m definitely not saying that.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
You’d be surprised, man. I don’t take phone calls at all. I send them over to Morgan and she books a Zoom call or we just don’t talk, and I do that with everybody. But the really good thing is I’ve created that kind of culture, everybody knows that if they want to talk to me, they have to book a call. I don’t do this to them though. Lots of people use Calendly links to sell.

Jason Drohn:
Oh yeah. Yeah.

Patch Baker:
And anybody who’s somebody… Everybody is somebody, but anybody who you want to talk to, don’t put them on the AI line with saying, “Hey, just hit my Calendly link.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
Right? Because it’s like a real smack in the face to a lot of people.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
It’s just personality out of it.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah. It’s interesting that you bring that up because like we use Calendly link, scheduling links in software. In our funnels-

Patch Baker:
In software, yes.

Jason Drohn:
… in Pipedrive, in whatever. But a referral-

Patch Baker:
And it depends on where you start. It depends on where you start.

Jason Drohn:
Yes.

Patch Baker:
For example, if they start in a Facebook bot and then you say, “Hey, pick a time and we’ll meet up.” They’d been talking to a computer the whole time. When they contact you directly and then you can say, “Oh, here’s my Calendly link,” and then I have to go work for a computer, you put me under day, we call it the AI line, and when you do that, it’s turnoff. Right?

Jason Drohn:
Oh yeah.

Patch Baker:
So back to the original of, I used to try really hard to close people on the phone, but the unfortunate part about being on the phone is that you don’t have that face-to-face contact, and a lot of times to sell high-ticket stuff, I just want you to think about this from a customer journey standpoint. In order to sell high-ticket stuff, you typically always have to educate them about the product, the service, the course, the security, the investment, the whatever it is.

So if you have to educate them, I just want you to think about it, on the phone, they could be doing dishes, they could be taking out the trash, they can be messing around with kids.

Jason Drohn:
True.

Patch Baker:
You can’t understand whether or not they are seeing you and understanding you. Even right now you don’t even know that you’re doing it, but you are agreeing with what I’m saying, so you’re shaking your head yes, which means I can move on to the next piece-

Jason Drohn:
Thing.

Patch Baker:
… or the next topic. If you’re sitting there and you’re going, I know that I need to stay on that topic because you don’t get it yet.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
So as part of the face to face sales sequence and face to face sales cycle, I can pull two or three or five closes by watching your face and understanding where you are in the conversation, and I can only do that on video, I can’t necessarily do it on the phone unless you’re super talkative. If you’re engaging with me and you can get through… I can keep asking questions and you keep doing answers, then it’s easier for me to close you.

But most people are not like that, most people do subtle things. They’re either shaking their head, they’re slamming their eyes, they’re doing whatever to let me know, hey, they’re good with it, they understand it, but they don’t believe it, or hey they don’t understand it. They don’t understand how we got from point A to point C, so you go back and talk about B real quick.

This is really cool too, I can also see which part of the pitch is really enticing to them. So a lot of really good high-ticket closers, we’re actually sending out small little subtle things trying to understand where you are in your life journey, so therefore we can figure out what is the thing that makes you tick. Is it straight-up dollars? Does it help others? Is it impact? Is it education? What is it? And then I adjust my close to fall in line with your things.

Now, every good face to face sales process, every solid face to face sales strategy has multiple different entry ways into the same exact product service, digital products, investment, whatever we’re talking about, there’s multiple entryways into that. One of the things that we have to do is either one, on the automated side, we have to tag you to understand which one of those you fall into so that we can put the messaging that resonates with you, or if it’s just to high-ticket close, then when I’m on the video with you, I have to do all those subtle little things.

“So Jason, what’s been going on in your world, man? What’s the next big goal that you got?” And then just start pegging on those things so that I make sure that whatever closing technique that I’m using should fall directly in line with what your aspirations are. I have to make sure that the product does fulfill on that piece that you want to do or that goal that you have, and then it’s just all roads lead to Rome. Right? My product or service is the answer for every single objection, every single issue.

If it’s not, just say that and get off the phone, get on another call.

Jason Drohn:
Right. Right, right.

Patch Baker:
Right? Don’t waste your time trying to close something that is just not a good fit.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, totally. A couple of times you’ve mentioned different kinds of closes, so can you talk about some of the different kinds of closes? You have like emotional, so-

Patch Baker:
Oh man, there’s so many of them. We could talk about this for six weeks.

Jason Drohn:
How about a couple that you use often?

Patch Baker:
I don’t know. I’m one of those people that I play the person. Face to face sales is a chess game, there’s a lot of people out there that are still playing checkers and those people might get a win every once in a while, but the guys that are playing chess, the guys that are really doing some stuff, they’re three or four or five steps ahead, and as irony would have it, we… I say we, like the collective royal we, like the collective whole, but I don’t try to do things to people, I try to do things for people.

You and I have had this conversation about clients where you got to beat them into submission in order to drag them to success-

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
… but some people really need certain things, but most of the time you’re selling them on the sizzle and then you actually give them what they have to have in order to get to the next step. So I do a lot of that kind of stuff. I do a lot of, they’re like reset closes, which is nothing more than you build them up, build them up, build them up, build them up, build them up, and then you say, “Okay, let’s reset and go back to the beginning. What would be the next logical step for you and your business to move forward? This is what I think it is.”

And you get them start to talking about if you were their vendor or their… If you a part of them in some way or they were using the service or product, what would be the next logical step for them to take? And then what happens is they start pitching you on why they would be a good client or why they’d be a good fit. And what happens then is you say, “That sounds like a great idea. Let’s do that.”

Jason Drohn:
Right. That’s good. I really, really like that. So how do you handle objections?

Patch Baker:
Head on. Face first. There’s really no objection… You think about it, people don’t need to be sold if they already know that they need it or they’re smart enough to know that they’re not smart enough to handle it. Those are the two reasons that people buy without needing to be sold.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
Let’s just say something happens and you have to go to court, we’ll call it a frivolous lawsuit cause nobody does anything wrong. So let’s say you have to go to court, you call an attorney to hire the attorney, and the only thing that you’re really doing at that point is price shopping like how much is it going to cost me? That’s all you really know.

Jason Drohn:
And is he going to keep me out of jail?

Patch Baker:
Right. And then the second thing is you don’t hire the attorney and then tell him how to litigate.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
Or you don’t hire him and then go to court and be like, “I think you should be telling the judge this.” It just doesn’t happen like that. So if you’re doing high-ticket closing, one of the main things in my opinion that you have to do is you have to set the stage that you are the expert in that field, so this is not like a client-vendor relationship, this is more like a partnership, we’re going to work on this together, but at the end of the day, you’re going to listen to what I have to say, you’re going to do what I tell you to do, and we’re going to come out on top.

The same way the attorney would, the attorney will say, “Hey, send me these documents, send me this paperwork, give me this timeline.” You’ll do all of that kind of stuff even though you hired him to work on your case and then he told you what to go do-

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
… and you do it.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
So that’s one of the biggest things that I do as part of right before the close, I’m closing the whole time really, but right before I’m like, “All right, I’m going to send you over this contract or this proposal, or whatever we’re doing.” I’m going to say, “Hey, so I just want to make sure that when you sign this document that we’re going to become a partner in this together. I’m the expert, you’re hiring me to be the expert, so let me help you get to that next spot. You’re good with that?” “Yep. I’m good with that.” “All right.” I just send it over to your inbox.

And that’s the final thing because the very next thing that I’m going to do is once I get their signed contract, or proposal, or the money changes hands, or the invoice goes out, or whatever the next step is, the very next thing I’m going to do is an onboarding call where I set the stage 100%, and then introduce my team, and I turn it over to my team and I don’t really do anything else other than to just check in.

So I think that is another great thing that you can do. I hear lots of people talking about things like servant leadership.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
I’m not opposed to certain servant leadership, but it’s more on the leadership part than the servant part.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
Right? You are helping them, and I get the gist, but what happens is a lot of people that talk about servant leadership have too much on the servant side and they just become doormats for their clients, and that, it doesn’t make anybody feel good. There’s not enough money to make it happen to where you’re cool with it, and eventually it’s going to run spaces and you’re going to burn out on that person.

Jason Drohn:
Right. For the most part you do mostly inbound leads, right? Like somebody comes in to purchase any of your high-ticket stuff, it’s all inbound, it’s not outbound. Right?

Patch Baker:
I do outbound also. Yeah.

Jason Drohn:
You do outbound too?

Patch Baker:
Yeah.

Jason Drohn:
Some of the stuff that we covered earlier in the week was building face to face sales systems, automated webinars and stuff that end up booking face to face sales calls into strategy sessions, and then the paid traffic handles all of the awareness building, and by the time somebody comes to a call, then they usually already at least lightly know what the offer is.

They might not know what the price is, they might not know that there’s how it… They know it will help them, but maybe not directly know how it will relate and benefit them.

And then on the face to face sales call, the face to face sales call is more just to a glorified order taker. And the process can be sold for courses, and masterminds, and consulting, or coaching, or anything proposal-based or whatever.

Patch Baker:
The final call to me is more like playing cleanup.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
Just making sure that every last minute question is answered and given some more confidence because it’s really the first time that that person is going to be able to have a back and forth discussion-

Jason Drohn:
Yes.

Patch Baker:
… because most webinars, I would say a majority of webinars are prerecorded, therefore there’s no real way to have any interaction unless you were on the first one.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
And because of that… People know that, people are privy to that. So sometimes, and I’ve done this myself, I go through a lot of other people’s funnels to see what’s shaking and what’s going on, and pull the nutrients. It’s part of my keeping on the tip of the spear, I’m learning too. I’ve called people before, even though I knew I was going to close on something just to see what those people said and to make sure that customer service is at a level that I feel confident with if I’m going to buy this high-ticket thing.

If we’re talking about high-ticket being, let’s say it’s a $5,000 course on how to buy rental property. What I want to know that whoever I’m going to didn’t send all of their customer service to like some third world country-

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
… not saying that badly, but they may not understand my question and I want to know that ahead of time before I get myself into this $5,000 deal.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
So I think one of the best things that you can do as part of the call to close or the video to close, one of the best things that you can do is make sure that the people that are answering that have really, really good understanding of what their lane is that they can talk about before they have to escalate it to you for you to close it again.

Jason Drohn:
Yep.

Patch Baker:
So I’ll say, “Hey, you can talk about these 17 things, but if you get into one of these five things, you have to schedule that person to talk with me so that I can close it.” And those can be 15 minute calls.

Jason Drohn:
Right. Right. Yeah, totally.

Patch Baker:
Which is crazy because most of the time, the average length in my experience, the average length to close on a call to close with somebody other than me or the person that was on the webinar and they’ve had a 30 minute call.

Jason Drohn:
Nice. Yeah.

Patch Baker:
But if they get to talk directly to me, it’s only a 15 minute call.

Jason Drohn:
Right. Right.

Patch Baker:
Which is crazy, but, or whoever was on the webinar to begin with because they already feel like they got a relationship with that person. And most of the time, the only things that they… This is how it starts out. They have one question that you could answer in like two minutes or less, but 13 minutes of that is going to be them telling you how unique their business is and how different it is than every other business on the planet-

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
… and you almost have to just let them talk it out because it makes them feel good. They can build confidence, that’s another thing. They’re building confidence in themselves to be able to ask you the question. You give them the answer and sign the paperwork and done.

Jason Drohn:
Yup. For everybody listening, Patch, how many businesses do you own an interest in?

Patch Baker:
29.

Jason Drohn:
Okay. So 29 businesses and he literally just said every process is the same.

Patch Baker:
Everyone is the same. They’re all the same. I don’t care how cool do you think you are, your business is exactly the same as somebody else. None of us are doing anything that’s new, we’re just taking nuances from several different businesses. You can make a lot of money in the gaps between two businesses.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
Fundamentally, they’re all the same; you need money to operate, you need people to do work, you need to have something that you can sell. You have to be able to collect that money in a way that pays the bills on time.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
Fundamentally, they’re all the same. And that goes for illegal businesses too, right? If you were selling crack, it’s the same thing; you have to have product, you have to make money. You have to have face to face sales people, it’s all fundamentally the same. And we’re laughing about it, but the reason why I say that is because there are so many people that build businesses, they feel that they’re so ultimately different.

That what happens is they operate in this fantasy world that they have to do things outside of the norm. Things that would work for other companies won’t work for mine-

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
… and that just doesn’t make any sense because every single day they’re trying to recreate the wheel instead of just bolting wheels on their SPV, their Special Purpose Vehicle and just move it down the track. And the track is nothing more than getting it to and from the market.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
That’s it.

Jason Drohn:
Yup.

Patch Baker:
Now you can go to the market on a commercial on TV, or on Facebook, or on Google, or Google Shopping, or YouTube, or Snapchat, the list goes on, and on, and on, but you have to have some kind of way to communicate with your audience. And if you put out the right message to the right person at the right time, you will make face to face sales-

Jason Drohn:
Yep.

Patch Baker:
… differently than trying to force feed something that’s not working through the market.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
So let’s talk about that point too because it’s a really good point-

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
… around high-ticket face to face sales versus small-ticket face to face sales and the strategies between the two.

Jason Drohn:
Yep.

Patch Baker:
So every single thing that you will ever sell has an ascension ladder. If it does not, you do not have a complete product. Accordingly, everything that you’ve ever bought in your life from anybody that knows what they’re doing in business and has a successful business, they all have an ascension ladder. They start off with a base model and they work up from there.

It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about a car, getting a house built, appliances, phones, software, it doesn’t matter what you’re talking about, they all have an ascension ladder. If you don’t know what an ascension ladder is, it’s nothing more than starting off with a base model or sometimes we call it a tripwire where a small amount of dollar, maybe it’s a $1.99, 99 cents, 7.99, 14.99 whatever, and then it slowly starts building up the value and it creates this curve, and the curve is a hockey stick. It literally is.

It starts off really small and it goes up, up, up, up very quickly, but if you build them right, it’s the next logical step for you to advance in that direction that you said you wanted to go. So let’s just use an example. Let’s say we’re talking about software. Software, it might let you get a freemium model where they bring you in, you could start a count for free, but then you can slowly start spending money to get either more access to the software, different features in the software, more email addresses, more customer CRM people that you can maintain.

Or maybe it’s that you do a free plus shipping book offer that leads to a course, that leads to a bigger course, that leads to our mastermind, that leads to $100,000 mastermind, right?

Jason Drohn:
Right. Yeah.

Patch Baker:
But it’s just slowly stepping those up. Well, here’s the difference. The difference is on the tripwire offers or on the small offers, usually we can do that below the AI line. We can do 100% autonomous, we can have a machine, or a computer program, or a system, or just buttons that lead you through to complete your transaction in a cart where you never talked to a human. That is typically the entry point into my CRM.

So if you went through, the machine walked you through all the steps, you put in your credit card, you then got moved over to a bucket that’s now my CRM, from there I’m going to send you an email, I’m going to step you into maybe a free Facebook group, and from that Facebook group, I’m going to ask you to turn on your notifications. I’m going to ask you to go fill out this form. I’m going to give you some kind of other free thing, maybe a PDF download, or some kind of checklist, or something.

So I’ve gotten you to come all the way through and do a bunch of stuff, now you’ve given me so much data on you, what you downloaded on, what you clicked on, what is your interest level there? From there, I might bucket you out and tag you differently, so I say, “This person already told me that they were interested in building a website and starting a podcast.”

So then I start sending you out my, “Hey, here’s a $49 course on how to start a podcast. Here’s my $149 course on intro into starting a website.”

Jason Drohn:
Yep.

Patch Baker:
And then I might step you up again and I say, “Hey, we have a service where we’ll come in and we’ll do your entire website for you. We will set up four funnels for you. We will do this and that and the other. Oh, but you need videos. If you need videos, here’s a $49 course on how to film videos at your home, and here’s the links of the microphone that I used, and the lights that I used, and everything,” that also go out to Amazon. They kick me back a couple of dollars. All that kind of stuff.

That is an ascension model, and if you have that and you keep speaking directly to the people, you will eventually get them to a point where they’re ready to make a big sale. That big sale typically, you have to run it to a video close where I’m talking to them directly because I want to sell them into a $30,000 mastermind on how to build websites and turn money online.

Jason Drohn:
Right. Totally. Yeah. Aaron Parkinson who has been blowing up our comments here. Aaron and I are partners in a couple of things and he said that basically every 30 minutes of video that you’re on with somebody gets you about 500 bucks. So-

Patch Baker:
Yeah. True.

Jason Drohn:
… typically, so a bunch of videos is required or a bunch of face-to-face or whatever’s required for high levels of cash. The ascension model, love it. So you use basically like a low-ticket for $4.99 whatever buyer, and that’s the entry point into your world. And then you march them up through some low-ticket offers and some affiliate stuff, which is… So the affiliate side, not many people get it anymore.

I grew up on it and you grew up on it, but now it’s like with… Everybody was selling $2,000 courses and giving me 50% commissions on stuff, but now they don’t do it anymore. So you have like Amazon’s affiliate program and Commission Junction and stuff gives you a little bit of money. But the ascension model is fantastic for converting cold traffic and turning them into buyers who then know they can trust you, love you, and then they end up ascending into some sort of an upper-end something rather than-

Patch Baker:
Do you know what else it does? I’ve coined the phrase, Zoomies. Zoomies are like the tire kickers of Zoom. They go to every webinar, they go to every Zoom call, but they’re just kicking tires. They’re not actually interested in buying anything. Attack of the Zoomies is they’ll get in mid-2020. All right?

What the ascension model also does for me, it tells me that the only way that they got to a Zoom call with me was they’ve already bought, I’m talking to a past purchaser.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
This means they’re not just tires kickers, which means that I can spend a little more time on them and they’ve already paid for my time in most cases.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah. Totally.

Patch Baker:
The collective whole has paid for my time to be on that 50-minute call.

Jason Drohn:
Right. Right.

Patch Baker:
Which is different. Just booking a cold video call for an hour? That’s another thing. Dude, people will book your time out like it’s nothing-

Jason Drohn:
Oh yeah.

Patch Baker:
… and then not show up 10 minutes before.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
And it’s not just that they… Thank you for the email that said you’re not going to make it 10 minutes before, but now I can’t book out that hour.

Jason Drohn:
You’re right. You end up losing twice.

Patch Baker:
You lose twice, that’s right. That’s right. And people just don’t care, so I broke it down and said, “Look, you don’t get me for an hour.” I may get on a 15-minute phone call and decide that you get another hour.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
Right? Because you proved some kind of worth to me or some kind of value or that you’re serious about what you’re talking about and then we’ll get on for an hour, but I don’t book out hours anymore at all, ever. I think the first time that we talked, we got like 15 minutes and I said, “Let’s book another call.”

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, you did. Yeah, it was.

Patch Baker:
Yeah.

Jason Drohn:
You share your screen a lot on these face-to-face sales calls, right?

Patch Baker:
Oh, for sure.

Jason Drohn:
So what do you share on your screen for instance?

Patch Baker:
Yeah. We all understand how case studies work, right? You typically send out a PDF case study and you expect people to read it. They don’t read that stuff, but if I share my screen and I go through the case study, and I directly apply that case study to their business, it is so powerful.

Jason Drohn:
Makes sense.

Patch Baker:
Because you can say, “Hey look, we did this for this company, and how about we reflect on your businesses. We could do the same thing but we would augment this piece and this piece for that piece in that piece.” And they’re like, “Oh man, that makes total sense.”

Jason Drohn:
Right, right.

Patch Baker:
It’s a whole different way.

Jason Drohn:
Well, it’s interesting because you talked about the ascension stuff and like right now, and what has been super popular is the free plus shipping book offers.

Patch Baker:
Right.

Jason Drohn:
But now with non-essential shipping, maybe you’ll get your book, maybe you won’t, everybody switched to digital, which is awesome because of fulfillment. So we built quite a few of those low-ticket digital funnels and it’s nice because you just pull up the screens and say, “This is what we did for them. Do you want something like this? Okay, cool. We’re going to switch this out. You’ll have a video here and so on and so forth,” and then, “Do you want that? Okay.”

Patch Baker:
Yeah. And when you directly relate it to somebody’s business and show them that their business is not unique, it’s just the application of making their company’s message fit inside the mold of whatever else we know works. There are certain things that we just know from spinning hundreds of millions of dollars that certain things work for every business.

There is a model. If you look at… We were coming, just talking about this, my wife and I were just talking about this on TV shows. There’s programmatic.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
It’s always the same. And she happened to have some TV show on, and I don’t really watch TV, I don’t even know what show it was, but there’s this guy and he’s… Something that happened, you could tell, the police were there and something had happened and I was like, “That dude’s guilty.” And she was like, “What time is it?” And I said, “It’s 10:02.” She said, “Nope, it’s not him.”

I was like, “How do you know that?” She’s like, “Because every show is the exact same, but about 10:45 you’ll find out who the killer is and they’ll spend the last 15 minutes prosecuting them.” She’s got it nailed, right? The same thing is true with just about every funnel you will run. There are some crazy ones. I worked with a guy for a long time who… He did a really cool docuseries and that was his launch thing. And he would give away the docuseries that were like 12 hours long. He would give it away for free for like three days, but you could only watch eight hours of it.

And then he would say, “Hey, look, if you want the rest or you want to support me, pay for the last four hours,” and the last four hours was really expensive, but it was a model that worked and that was a new one that I hadn’t seen before. I tried to do it on something else and it bombed. It’s just the way that he sets everything up. It’s unique, but it’s still the same exact principle of, you have to get them to come in and give it a try. Then you have to build value the whole way, then you have to ask for a sale. It’s still the same model.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah. I teach a lot on small successes and it’s not like going from zero to a sale. It’s clicking the ad, and then from the ad they got to go to a face-to-face sales page, they got to scroll down the face-to-face sales page, click the play button. Go down, hit the add to cart button, wait for the add to cart button to load the order form, then go find their credit card, read… So there’s like 13 steps between-

Patch Baker:
They’re microtransactions.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah. And everyone-

Patch Baker:
Sometimes the energy transaction that has to happen for them to go get that credit card is more than they’re willing to do at that moment.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, totally.

Patch Baker:
If the credit card is downstairs, most people will be like, “Ah, I’ll get it tomorrow.”

Jason Drohn:
I do. There’ll be a few of them like, “Yeah, my wallet’s downstairs, whatever. I’ll go back to it later.” And sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. But that’s one of the things about Amazon and Apple Pay. It’s like I’ll buy whatever on Amazon because it’s like they already have my credit card. All I got to do is I just got to remember the last four digits. And then, God forbid, I got to reenter my security number.

Patch Baker:
Right. Right. Well, here’s another one. Talk about how hot ticket face to face sales is depending on the method which you’re using to get them on the call with the person that is actually the face to face salesperson, which is different because you have a scheduler and you have the closer. Well, the crazy thing about that is that the scheduler believes unless you tell them otherwise, that they are trying to help in the ultimate sale.

So they find themselves talking about things that are not their place that could mess it up for the closer. So we actually teach our schedulers, we teach them on how to close the next call, not-

Jason Drohn:
Got you. Right, right, right.

Patch Baker:
Because their goal is to get through every objection to get the person on the next call and make sure the person is there. So if you’re giving credit to people for booked calls, you should only be giving credit to book calls to actually show.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
So we teach them, “Okay, these are the main objections you’re going to get for booking a call. These are the ways that you get around those.” And then we’re going to also send out a reminder. If it’s more than four days, we’re going to send out a reminder with another piece of high-value content that’s bonus material the second day into that four-day wait so that you keep them warm and top of mind so that when the closer gets on the phone four days later, they’re excited to be on the phone with the closer, whoever that is.

So you don’t want to hit them every day because now, from a customer journey perspective, it seems as though you are pitching too hard and you need the sale, instead of you’re doing them a solid by giving them something that they actually need.

Jason Drohn:
Yep.

Patch Baker:
Have you ever had this happen to you? I don’t know why people do this. This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. But there are automatic feeders out there that every time you email somebody, they automatically pull that email and put you into their face-to-face sales sequence.

Jason Drohn:
Oh, I hate that.

Patch Baker:
Right?

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
I was cool with you until you did that to me, so I just for fun, and mainly because I wanted to prove the point. What I started doing was I started taking those people, I would tag them in a special bucket and I would send them every offer that we have. All of them, all… You think about it, they’re getting pounded by hundreds of emails because I put them in a special tag to basically everything.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
And they’re like, “Dude, you’re just blowing up my inbox.” “Oh, you mean like this one?” And I reply on the one that they sent me originally and I’m like, “Oh, you mean like this one because I was calling you to buy your company and you started pitching me on your offer or whatever.”

Don’t do that to people. If people are in a conversation with you, keep them in the regular loop, and then once you sell them, then you can put them into those remarketing email chains and all that kind of stuff.

Jason Drohn:
Well, continuity is an important thing. As you said, if they sign up for a face-to-face sales call, you send them the helpful stuff, but you also don’t want to in the middle of that, send them to some other affiliate offer or something that takes their focus away from you.

Patch Baker:
Or you start giving them discounts.

Jason Drohn:
Right. Right.

Patch Baker:
Here’s a good one. Remember where we are in the journey here. We have gotten them to agree to get on a call with the closer, then before the closer can even get on, you’ve sent them a 25% discount or 50% off, or whatever.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
So I told this story recently, I’ll tell it again because it was really funny. I had to drive one place all the time for work and I saw this really cool shop on the side of the road where they made these handmade hammocks and they hand did outdoor furniture like winter stuff and whatever that nylon string is or whatever. And they handmade them right there on the side. They’d be out there every day with their little looms and they were doing all this cool stuff.

So anyway, there was this really cool dining set, I had seen it like 50 times. In particular, one day I was on my motorcycle, one day I pulled over and I was like, “Dude, how much is that thing?” He told me it was like 1,900 bucks. I was like, “Sweet, I’m going to get my truck. I’m coming right back. I’m going to buy that thing.” He was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. What if I took 30% off?”

“Okay. But I’m just going to my house to get my truck. I’ll be right back, I’m on a motorcycle.” He’s like, “50% off, you take it today.” I was like, “Dude, okay, 50% off, sweet.” I got to think for 65% off. I walked in, gave them my card, they ran it. I said, “Okay, I’ll be back. I’m going to get my truck.” I went and got my truck and came back.

That dude wanted to sell so bad, I would have paid full price for it because I thought it was cool. I’d already seen it 50 times. I knew I wanted it, I was going to give him full price and he just wouldn’t let me walk away long enough to get a vehicle that I could transport it. So it’s like that thing too, you can’t be in the mindset that you need a sale.

In summary, if you need a sale to make the payroll or keep the lights on or whatever, do yourself a favor, don’t ruin your audience. Go get a part time job to pay the bills until you can get the clients that you absolutely want to have because those clients that you needed and you took for a lower price just to pay the bills is killing your audience.

And if you do that, eventually you’re going to find yourself in a place where you can pay the bills, but the stress that those people are putting on you is just too much for you to bear. Most of the time you burn out and you just can’t ever really get ahead.

Jason Drohn:
Right. And the high-ticket offer piece, which was where we started, it’s entirely made up of the audience. It has to be-

Patch Baker:
It is.

Jason Drohn:
… the right audience and the right person who’s going to be able to take the best advantage of what you do. And they might be a very small set of people.

Patch Baker:
Yeah.

Jason Drohn:
It’s just finding that very small set of people.

Patch Baker:
Yeah. And not only that, when you get that small group of people, they will get you other people through referrals of that small group. But if you taint that audience, let’s say you have like some really high rollers in that audience and then you start bringing in tire kickers and adding them to the audience, that core group of your real purchasers, of the people that really matter to grow in that business, they will start going away.

They will start breaking off and saying, “Well the group is not what it used to be.” And you can really water down a good core group that will keep you a lot of dollars coming in the door. And you see a lot of masterminds that they bring… When it was just 50 or 80 people, it was great. Then they try to grow, now it’s 100 or 120 people, but they’re not the same caliber as the core group of 50 that you had.

And then all of a sudden the core group of 50 goes away, and what you’re left with is this mediocre crowd that just isn’t as good as it used to be.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, yeah.

Patch Baker:
Here’s another thing that you can accidentally put in offer to a core group that is below their caliber and destroy the group too.

Jason Drohn:
Yes.

Patch Baker:
You have to make sure that the up face to face sales, the bump face to face sales, the cross face to face sales, all that stuff is on par with the core group that you have inside of your audience. And if you just want to do another launch for a low-ticket item, what happens is as soon as all those people see it, they’re like, “That’s going in a different direction than what I am.” So you have to really understand who is in that audience and you have to be willing to remove people that don’t fit in the audience.

Give up that 1,000 bucks, or that 5,000 bucks, or that 20,000 bucks, or the $100,000. Give that one up because since you were willing to give that up, the group understands that you are really focused on the core group and they will go replace that $100,000 that you gave up with three or four or five, $600,000.

Jason Drohn:
Right. Right, right, right. Totally. Yeah. It’s interesting because there’s just a lot of people in the high-ticket space and that’s all they do is six, seven, 10 $15,000 offers. They don’t mess with the free plus shipping books, they don’t mess with the low end stuff. It’s an audio program for five grand, the 60 minutes worth the body because the information in that audio program is capable of making them 100, 200, $300,000.

Patch Baker:
What you’re talking about is an ascension gap. This is a whole different way to do this.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
So think about like a ladder, it has regular rungs and that’s your ascension ladder. They need to do something to bridge the gap to get to the next rung and the next rung. If you put the rungs too far away, they can’t reach the next rung, and if you put them too short, they’re going to be going up every single rung, but they’re not going to be going anywhere fast.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
Now, if you turn that ladder into a board, they can’t climb it all, it’s just like a steep hill, they can’t go up. The ascension gap, sometimes we create it as marketers and what we do is that’s where you’ve seen where you’ll be on a webinar or let’s say you’re in a training module. You’ve already gone through the webinar, you’re now in the training and they’ll say something like, “We’re not really going to go into this subject. If you want to learn more about that, we have this other course that you can go to, which is the next level, but today we’re only going to talk about this and this and this.”

That’s creating this ascension gap because what you’re trying to do is take them off of this ladder, walk them across this pier and take them up this ladder.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
Like the Chutes and Ladders type thing, right?

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
So you can create those, but you typically, and this is Ninja, you typically want to take them to a different named something. It might be in professionals and then you’re… Or you can move, you can go across the platform and go to this, which is professionals elite.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
Right? For instance, you can go from this group and you’re going to join this group, and you create such an ascension gap that they have to make a major purchase to get from one group to the next group that’s a higher level.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
And that is Ninja because the people, you can use a lot of those low end offers down here in this group, then you selectively pick the people that are engaged, making moves, have proven that they’re smart or they say intelligent things. Then you can go grab those people as an individual and say, “Hey, you might be interested in this over here,” and you can cherry pick those people out.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Patch Baker:
But the low-ticket offers is a great model to get thousands and thousands of people in to then be more selective about who you move to that bigger ladder.

Jason Drohn:
Well, and you already provided the answer for this, which was based on what they do, what links they click, what survey responses they have.

Patch Baker:
Yeah.

Jason Drohn:
Most good CRMs you can score that person, so like if they buy these three products, we’re 500 points or whatever, and then you can say, “All of these high point people, all get triggered into an autoresponder sequence for the other tier, the other ladder.” So it’s interesting.

Patch Baker:
If you’re really Ninja, you can also do some other analysis beyond just the surveys they take or the purchases that they make. So you can do things like… I’m not saying that we do or don’t do this, I’m just saying, you could get a VA to every single new person that comes in. Similarly, you’re trying to get them on Facebook somehow.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
Then you cross-reference between their Facebook followers, their pages, their Instagram to see if this somebody is somebody that you really want because for example, let’s say for example I get somebody like Roland Frasier to click through on a video ad because he’s doing the same thing that I’m doing to him, which is going through his stuff to see who does what. He’s not going to buy my $47 offer, but he came through.

So then if I get a list of X amount of people that a VA would say, “Hey, you should probably talk to this person, this person, this person, this person.” I reach out to those people and say, “Hey dude, I saw you came in through whatever, whatever.” And then you start this conversation that’s completely different and you can probably skip the lower group and take them straight to the higher group.

Jason Drohn:
Makes total sense.

Patch Baker:
Yeah. Besides, some people are not interested in the low-ticket offers, they’re interested in making money moves and you need to be able to weed those people out too and be able to talk to them directly.

Jason Drohn:
Right. Yeah. In the same way, there’s tech that will help find those people. There’s a lot of CRMs.

Patch Baker:
Yeah, there’s a lot.

Jason Drohn:
So right stuff. Man, shit, I could talk to you all day, but it’s coming up on 11:00 here, so we should probably wrap everything up. First of all, thank you so much for-

Patch Baker:
Yeah, man.

Jason Drohn:
… jumping on. It was awesome. Dude, the information was incredible. Is there anything you want to leave everybody with?

Patch Baker:
No. Whether you have a low-ticket offer or you have a high-ticket offer, the thing that you just have to remember is to have pride in making the content when you first start it.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Patch Baker:
But once that is done, you have to set your pride aside, you have to run it out to the market. If the market responds positively, do more of that. Consequently, if they don’t respond positively, it’s you not them. Therefore, just take the pride away and just understand that you haven’t done what you needed to do to build the value to get them to take the next step.

If you just inwardly reflect on that and say, “Hey, what can I do to speak more intelligently, or better, or more simply to this audience?” Your offer will work, and most of the time it’s because you are using… We’ve seen this in every industry. Furthermore, lots of offers are made with the assumption that anybody that’s watching it already knows a certain amount of things.

You’ve been on some of my calls, I break things down to like the lowest common denominator and that is a six-year-old. Right? Or call it a 13-year-old if you have a really, really difficult face to face sales model, but there’s really nothing that you can’t explain to a 13-year-old, and you just gauge the people as they’re going through that. Are they getting it? If they are, great, ramp up to a 17-year-old, or 21, or 25.

You do the math in your head, however, you want to do it, but just start off from the bare minimum, explain everything. And then as they walkthrough, you can pretty much figure out where you need to be and what’s the natural equilibrium for your audience. And then you know how to talk to them every single time.

Jason Drohn:
Right. Dude, it’s awesome. All right. Thank you so much. We’ll catch up again soon.

Patch Baker:
Yeah, let’s do it, bro. Thanks for having me.

Jason Drohn:
Bye.

Patch Baker:
Bye.

Get This Sales Funnel Custom Built >> Click Here!

 

 

 

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How To Sell Professional Products And Services Through On Website https://doneforyou.com/how-to-sell-high-end-professional-services-and-products-online/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-to-sell-high-end-professional-services-and-products-online Mon, 18 May 2020 14:00:13 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10757 In this GSDdaily episode, we’re going to talk about selling professional services. Last two weeks we ended up talking about creating products, creating digital products, and packaging ways, packaging things to sell your knowledge and expertise, whether it is high-ticket professional services, whether it is a mastermind, whether it is a digital product, or membership […]

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In this GSDdaily episode, we’re going to talk about selling professional services. Last two weeks we ended up talking about creating products, creating digital products, and packaging ways, packaging things to sell your knowledge and expertise, whether it is high-ticket professional services, whether it is a mastermind, whether it is a digital product, or membership site, or whatever. So that was the last two weeks’ worth of material. We talked about creating SaaS software, we talked about a lot of different business models, but we didn’t necessarily cover how to sell it.

Today and this week we are going to talk about how to sell that stuff, in particular high-end shit. The baseline, $1,000. Anything that is above $1,000 and is a complex offer, then you need to sell it through a strategy session or a consultative sales call. Through the course of the week, what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about qualifying your buyers and different sales models that you can use to get people on the phone. Ultimately, you’ll have that sales conversation with them, that consultative sales conversation.

Throughout the week, I have a couple of guests coming on to teach you their strategies for selling expensive stuff. One of them uses Zoom. He’s been using Zoom pre-pandemic, but he uses Zoom to sell things up to $100,000. All through relationships that he builds virtually through sales funnels and Zoom, and all that other stuff.

professional services
What we’re going to talk about is automating your sales, your lead acquisition piece to a degree, automating the lead acquisition to the point where they’re scheduling a call with you, and then pitching your professional services on the phone or through a Zoom call, or doing some sort of consultative thing.

Basically, this is having high-ticket sales with strategy sessions, a great way of selling professional services, so you can go over and click on that, and Genevieve says hi, so hi, Genevieve, how are you doing? I hope you had a fantastic weekend. And then there’s another blog post, I’ll drop that in a minute. But basically, so consultative selling, how to get high-ticket sales with strategy sessions.

2 Kinds of Marketing Acquisition Processes

1. Outbound

Here’s the thing. In your acquisition process, there are two kinds of marketing acquisition processes, one of them entirely outbound. So you have your business development reps, you have your sales reps who are cold calling. They’re picking up the phone and boom, boom, boom, boom. Its higher goal is to get somebody to agree to a call, or agree… so they have to work through the gatekeepers, and this is all the cold calling bullshit that you read in books and dial until whenever, and that stuff is fine. It works.

There are very, very high-ticket companies that do very, very well. I’ve talked to software companies where their average ticket is $75,000, their average enterprise-level customer. And they have a team of BDRs, or business development reps that that’s what they’re doing is they’re outbound. So they’re just going through a phone book or just mining databases, whatever, and just cold calling, to get agreement for their professional services and products.

And if that’s you, that’s awesome. There are some local companies here, I was actually just telling a partner of a local company that I know of that has a bunch of sales reps, and the sales reps are getting maybe a deal a month each.

2. Inbound

In an inbound strategy and an inbound process, your sales reps should be lining up six or eight sales calls a day. No outbound, it’s all entirely inbound, so those people are scheduling a call on your calendar and then you’re just literally picking up the phone when it’s time to then go pitch this person, and you already know about them because they filled out an application to book a call. So that’s one of the reasons why this appointment setting, this appointment scheduling is so important.

Now there are a couple of different models that we use to book appointments, so the first is, we have… there’s a great example of it right here. Almost any page on the website goes to this page. It is a sales page for getting sales funnels done, so basically you can watch that video. Here we have an application.

FQL Regeneration Form

This application here is what we call an FQL regeneration form, so it’s conditional logic. If we start to fill out that form, notice how some different questions pop up, and those questions are triggered based on that email address.  As soon as you enter a character in that email address, then it’s like, bam, the rest of those questions fire out. Now once you go through business, so I’m just going to enter some random stuff here.

Now, as soon as I check any of these boxes additional fields come out, tell us about your business, yearly revenue, email size, blah, blah, blah. Then the next step, schedule a call. When they hit that button, now they’ve applied. They’ve filled out the form to talk to somebody on my team. We know how their business is doing. We know enough about their business that we can go do some research on them before they book their call.

In your business, this questionnaire is going to be different, so it’s going to be different based on the information that you need to have for your clients. You’re going to have different questions, you might have different logic, whatever. But at the end of the day, you want them to give you a little bit of information. Then they click the button, they go over, schedule a call on your calendar. So it’s the scheduling, it’s not even an assistant who is trying to book a call on your calendar.

All you have to do when it’s time, and literally, my calendar is just lit. My entire week is already booked now to talk about professional services that can be offered. I think I have some spots on Friday. But basically, the week is set. People start filling in next week. I’m just picking up the phone and calling when I’m supposed to pick up the phone and call. So that’s the process behind the consultative selling piece. That’s why this process, that’s why this strategy works so well is because people, raise their hand and say, “Yes, I want you to call me.” It’s not an outbound thing.

I want you to call me. And the best sales funnels have some education in there, so they know before the call is even set what they’re going to be pitched. They have an idea of what the offer is. They might not know the price, they might not know the logistics, but they have an idea of what it is they’re going to be buying.

People went to your website, they clicked around. I can always tell when somebody is a buyer because they are clicking on the website, they’re visiting all the pages, they’re watching the videos…  All as it relates to our professional services. I read a metric once that, and Aaron Parkinson and I have talked, for every 30 minutes of a video somebody watches, then they’ll spend $500 with you, or $1,000. I have found that right before somebody schedules the call then they tend to go and watch a ton of video.

They’re clicking around the website. I have seen people, they’ll eat up two or three hours’ worth of video, just to make sure the message is congruent through all of it before they book the call, but in doing that, they’ve already sold, so the sale ends up happening quick. So the more material you have, the better.

Supporting Materials of Your Offers and Services

Now that also means that you have to have material. You have to have some supporting videos of your professional services, you have to have a Facebook group, you have to have something that people can kind of dig into and see that you are who you say you are before you can sell that $10,000 thing, you know what I mean? Now, why is appointment scheduling important? So with appointment scheduling, they’re raising their hand and saying yes, they want you to call them.

Then in that appointment, in the scheduling piece itself, a lot of times we’ll send… well, we used to just send a conference call number or we would call them directly, anymore though, it’s a Zoom link or GoToMeeting link. I don’t know, somebody just ripped on me for being old-fashioned because I wasn’t using Zoom and I was like, hah, Zoom’s not secure. Because we used to use GoToMeeting, but it also is a standard. I’ve had a GoToMeeting account, I think, for 13 years now or something.

professional services

Appointment Scheduling

You can optimize your sales conversion with appointment scheduling to chat about your professional services, so you can end up placing conversion pixels on your appointment scheduling pages so you know how people are moving through the process, and then you’re also able to close a sale faster with appointment scheduling. So that’s kind of the nuts and bolts behind why consultative selling works and how appointment scheduling works out for you. Now here are some tips on how to qualify prospects better, so I’m just going to kick over here.

This is how to qualify prospects better. First of all, as I said, you want that form because you want their contact details. You need to know, a, what their name is, email address, phone number, cell phone, all that stuff is.

You need to know how to get a hold of them. Even if you send a Zoom link or a GoToMeeting link or whatever in the calendar invite, which is, a lot of the calendaring tools are kind of set up that way. Calendly, you can have a Zoom link and it’s just a meeting link, and then inside Zoom, you can lock down the room. So in scheduling, in sending those calendar invites you to want to make sure that you have their phone number. Not all of them are going to show up. You’re going to have to pick up the phone and call some of them, and sometimes the ball’s just going to happen on the phone. It won’t necessarily just happen in Zoom for your professional services.

Know your prospect’s information before scheduling a call

Make sure to grab their contact information in that first form, this form right here. Whatever their first application form is, you want to make sure that you grab their contact information. You also want to ask them why they’re booking a time to meet. So I’ve trained a lot of sales reps over the years, and sometimes they think that it’s obvious why this prospect is booking a call when it isn’t.

The better understanding that you can get about somebody before they get on the phone with you, the better job you’re going to be able to do to prepare to pitch your professional services. Even if that’s just five minutes of preparation, just getting your head straight so that when you get on the phone you’re dialed in and you know how this call is going to go. You’re not flying blind. Even now on sales calls, if I’m flying blind, I can make do. I’ve been on thousands of them, so I can make do and move around pretty well. But it’s way, way better if I just take five minutes and just do a little bit of discovery before I jump on the phone.

Just go to their website, click around, see what they’re selling, see what they’re doing well, see what they’re not because, at the end of the day, everybody likes a compliment. So one of the things that I do personally and I have my guys do, is when somebody schedules an appointment with us, whoever gets that appointment needs to send an email and say, “Hey, thanks so much for scheduling an appointment. We’re looking forward to it. I checked out the website and the website looks, the design’s great, the flow’s great, the copy’s great. Your products look awesome”, whatever compliment. “But it looks like the sales material’s a little bit broken, but it looks like you’re not collecting email addresses.”

There was a movie, I think they called it a compliment sandwich. I don’t sandwich it with another compliment but I do ask a question at the end, so compliment and then problem and then question. And the question is usually something simple, so the question will be how expensive is your offer, or how are you getting traffic, or what are your plans for the future, or whatever. So you ask a question that is in line with the reason they’re reaching out to you.

If they reply, awesome, and if they don’t reply, they at least knew you took an initiative. It’s going to increase your show-up rate on the call itself. So that is super, super important in terms of booking strategy sessions and getting people in the door.

You want to do discovery. Where are they coming from and what have they tried. Usually, I just have an open paragraph that says, “Let me know the things you tried in the past that worked and the things you tried in the past that didn’t”, or, “Tell me about your business”, or, “Tell me about your goals and aspirations”, that kind of thing. Armed with that kind of knowledge you’re able to more effectively get them what they need more quickly. The call might be 45 minutes, half an hour. Some of them are shorter, some of them are long. Some of them go an hour and a half or two hours if you have the time. You want to make sure that you’re able to give value for the time they’re on the call. That’s the consultative part of these consultative sales calls. You want to consult.

Guided collateral, do some future pacing, dollars, and cents. I try to ask a money question to a degree, and I usually, when I’m working with clients I’ll have them ask a money question. It doesn’t necessarily have to be how much are you willing to pay. Or what is your budget for these professional services, but it does need to be something money-related. One of the ones that we’ve asked for a long time is, what level of professional services are you looking for. Done for you, done with you, or just online training? I don’t think I have it on this application. I think I took it off a while ago. Yeah, it’s a yearly revenue, because we started dealing with bigger brands, so it’s not necessarily just startups. Startups, however, you should probably ask that kind of a money question on it.

After they schedule their call, then what happens? Pick up the phone, call them. Do a little bit of research. I have an e-book somewhere that breaks down our strategy session selling process, so I’ll dig that out and we’ll give it out tomorrow. But the sales process itself, first of all, you get on the phone. You call them when you’re supposed to. Then usually there’s some sort of rapport building, where you from, what’s the weather like there? Right now, you guys staying safe, what it’s like pandemic-wise? Are you guys locked down, or whatever. So it’s nice to bring in some sort of recent, not a recent event, but weather and location are always great questions to kind of start with. They also build some rapport because that person might have been in your area.

I’m in Erie, Pennsylvania, and everybody has a story about Erie, it’s a cousin who lives here, it’s them driving through between New York City and Chicago, it’s, I stayed in Erie for a night because my grandma was sick, for whatever reason, and likewise there are some hotbeds. I’ve never been to New Zealand or Australia or UK or anything, but there are times when I’ve been where they are, where I have family members or friends there or whatever, so that’s always kind of a nice rapport-building point. But it has to be genuine, too. I mean, if it’s not genuine, then you just don’t follow this model because you’re not going to sell anything.

That’s the other thing about this is phone sales, especially video sales, Zoom call sales, you have to truly believe that the money you’re charging is what it is what it’s worth. They’re going to get 10 times the value when they work with you.

Because if you don’t believe that, it’s going to read in your face, it’s going to read in your language, your body language. I mean, they might not be able to see you because you’re on the phone if you’re on a phone call, but they can hear it in your voice. So it’s something you just need to believe it. That’s one of the biggest things that separates good sales guys from bad sales guys.

So after you build a little bit of rapport, then oftentimes it’s just asking questions. You figure out what you’re selling and then you’re just asking questions, figuring out why they called, why they’re interested, what brought them to you. Sometimes you just start at the beginning of the journey. So what led you to me? Was it a Livestream video? Was it a search? Did you see a piece of content? Did you download something? What were you looking for when you came to find me?

Because oftentimes that will start the conversation, which then helps them kind of unwind some of their problems, troubles, challenges, fears, aspirations, and then it’s just like having a good conversation, having a good conversation with them. I’ve never followed a script. I’ve written some scripts for some folks, and the scripts are fine, but scripts never, ever, they never do as well as they do just a straight-up conversation does.

If it doesn’t necessarily feel like natural language, it’s going to convert worse than natural language. Some scripts are great, scripts are fine for training new people but eventually, you’re going to have to kind of let them do what they do. To establish some rapport, then you just have a conversation about your professional services! You ask some questions.

professional services

Why you make the call?

The goal of the call is to get them to go where you want them to go. That’s the point of a good sales conversation, so you want them to arrive at the solution that you are selling, ideally, at the same time as you are, you know what I mean? So if you have 45 minutes for a call, then you start kind of getting it in there about 35 minutes so you can talk about the offer a little bit, and that’s the part that takes the practice.

When I first started doing sales calls, I was so weird about it. It is because it was like, sometimes I would hit it just right, sometimes I wouldn’t. I’d start winding into the offer and kind of start winding out. You know what I mean, but it’s fueling the ebb and flow of the conversation about your professional services. Moving in the direction that you need them to go. And there are all kinds of really, really interesting things that you can do.

Yes, ladder stuff, you can follow Grant Cardone’s sales training, so there are all kinds of sales guys out there. I’ve read all Grant Cardone’s stuff. Some of it I agree with, a lot of it I don’t. To me, it’s more just about offering solutions and offering value and being a good human being and arriving at the decision with the prospect. Is this a great thing, or not?

Send a Proposal

We get a yes or no on the proposal, and that’s kind of a whole different Livestream. Send a proposal, we get a yes or no on the proposal, and then we start with just onboard. Now I have been through building a lot of sales funnels and offering professional services. I have seen a lot of other types of fulfillment and sales funnels, called state of sales strategy. For us it’s call, proposal, call usually, and sometimes there’s a couple of calls. Then it’s a yes or no, or it’s a yes or maybe, usually. The maybes oftentimes turn to yesses a couple of weeks later, a month later, whatever, especially right now in the pandemic.

I have seen other strategies where people will grab a credit card on the phone. Then that’s the down payment. If they’re charging $25,000 for a thing they will charge $2,500 as a down payment. Set up the payment plan with that credit card. I’ve seen that happen, too. One thing about high-ticket offers that you need to consider is that oftentimes a credit card isn’t going to charge the whole thing. You might need three or four credit cards. Also, you might need to take payments for your professional services. There might need to be a wire transfer or a contract or a 10-month payment plan.

There are lots of things that you need to go about. Things that you need to take into consideration when you start working with some of these upper figures. This is because somebody can’t just put it on a credit card. They can write a check. They might have to break credit cards up over a couple of days, it just depends.

So the pitch itself, you can take a credit card on the phone, you can set up a payment plan. There are funding and lending experts who will finance that amount for you. Then you can pass them off to the lending folks, the working capital folks. There are a couple of places that will finance and PayPal Credit will do it. There’s PayPal Credit, so you send a PayPal invoice then somebody can finance their purchase through PayPal.

There’s a lot of ways to collect the payment. One of the interesting ones, I was through a funnel about six months ago and the sales rep didn’t make a pitch verbally. They didn’t say anything on the phone, so I listened to a recording of it. They didn’t say anything on the phone. Their pitch on the sales call was, “If you get an email at the end of the day with an invitation to join us, then there will be a link that you can click and then go enroll.”

Of course, everybody got the link to enroll, unless they were just plain out unqualified for it. I heard it was doing pretty well. I’ve heard that particular strategy. It doesn’t even have to be kind of queasy or weird about pitching and talking money on the phone. I’ve talked to a lot of businesses that are. They don’t like pitching, they would rather somebody else sell.

To me, it’s like, your world revolves around the cash flow of your business. Why aren’t you okay with pitching or selling? Sometimes they want the sales to do the selling for them. But if you’re uncomfortable making a pitch on the phone, which I was when I started. When I started like seven years ago pitching, doing high-ticket sales on the phone. If you’re uncomfortable, then sending a link might be a way to do it.

You can send a link, just drop a link in an email. Say, “Hey, here’s the link to purchase and enroll, go there.”. With us, we always talk about the price. We send a proposal reinforcing the price as opposed to letting the proposal surprise them. I don’t like to do that, but other people do. Iit’s just about finding your mix, finding your thing that works. That’s one of the things. This week we have a couple of different experts coming on to talk about high-ticket sales and how they do high-ticket sales, so you should be able to find a strategy that you like in them, and then kind of go from there.

For Questions and Guide

I think that’s about it for today. If you have any questions at all, go to doneforyou.com/blog, and if you would like to book an action plan call with me where we kind of go through and talk about your business, design a sales funnel, the whole deal, go to doneforyou.com/start.

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How Do you Earn By Blogging https://doneforyou.com/12-revenue-generators-thatll-supercharge-your-blog/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=12-revenue-generators-thatll-supercharge-your-blog https://doneforyou.com/12-revenue-generators-thatll-supercharge-your-blog/#comments Fri, 15 May 2020 14:00:19 +0000 http://curately.org/?p=677 Having a website of your own can be a pain.  I know.  There’s this constant expectation that you’ll be posting new stuff and updating it from time to time. You get by not putting any time and effort into it, but here’s the thing… Your audience needs you to add new content to your site […]

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Having a website of your own can be a pain.  I know.  There’s this constant expectation that you’ll be posting new stuff and updating it from time to time.

You get by not putting any time and effort into it, but here’s the thing…

Your audience needs you to add new content to your site so they can get to know you and your business – so they can like you and trust you.

Google needs you to post new blog posts to your website because that’s how they know you’re relevant and deserving of the traffic that they want to send you.

Your power users – the folks who LOVE you and actively go out and spread the word about what you’re doing for them – want something that they can share from you because they look smarter because of it!

You see, having a website and keeping it fresh with new content is of much greater importance than you might be putting on it…

But, I get it.  Your website or your blog isn’t making you any money so why waste the time?

Today, we’re going to cover that.

You see, there are 13 different ways that you can monetize the pages of your site, from selling stuff to posting ads to running a job board.

We tend to be myopic in our thinking that we JUST sell affiliate products or we ONLY post banner ads…  What ends up happening though is we cap out our revenue because we aren’t diversifying our cashflow generators! That’s how to make money blogging…

That, my friends, is a big mistake.

So, let’s get into it.  13 revenue generators to supercharge your site…

How To Make Money Blogging: 12 Blog Monetization Strategies

Admittedly, there are hundreds of ways to make money from your site.  You can sell high end consulting or Kindle books or protein powder.

What follows are my quick tips for how to make money blogging… Stuff that I’ve done in the past (and still do) as it’s done pretty well in generating revenue…

1: Selling Your Products

Although not the easiest to start, selling your products and services is (almost) always the most profitable. Firstly, you aren’t splitting the money with anyone else.  Secondly, you have an audience and distribution, so you know what they want and what they’ll buy.

I’ve read a lot lately about information and how it’s dying.  I don’t think that’s quite the case – but it IS changing!  Gone are the days of Clickbank ebooks making a killing for $47 a pop.  Sure, some of that still works but we’re seeing far fewer stories like that.

Products that are selling; video courses, memberships, Kindle ebooks, higher-end hybrid courses (course plus coaching), and events are all thriving.  If you need proof of that, just check out any of the marketplaces, like Udemy or Kindle.

I’ve also done a podcast in the past on effectively preselling products…

Now, the bad news.  Running your offers is awesome and it’s one of the best ways to answer the “how to make money blogging” question, but there are things that you’ll need to be successful.

You’ll need:

This is a longer path, so it might be smarter and simpler to start with affiliate marketing or banner ads…

2: Selling Services

Another way you can make an offer to your audience is to sell services.  That might be websites, consulting, coaching, or masterminds.  Your audience will tell you what you need to sell.  They’re usually pretty vocal about it.  That’s how to make money blogging…  For them at least!

I’ve had a Marketing Done For You Service for years, where I work with clients directly.  It doesn’t make a huge portion of revenue but I get incredible satisfaction from it, which is why I still do it.  It can be trying at times if a campaign isn’t working out as planned, but those phases symbolize growth, which is something we all need!

Examples of some services you can offer through your blog:

  • Coaching on something you are exceptionally experienced in (or what your blog topic is about!)
  • Consulting for individuals or groups based around the topic you write on
  • Starting a mastermind for like-minded people who all share the same purpose and would benefit knowing each other.
  • Hourly services for smaller, freelance types of projects

There are lots of different ways to take this one.  Just listen to your audience and figure out what you want to do in the years to come…

3: Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is where you sell products that aren’t your own, but you get a commission.  Sometimes, that commission can be 75% to 100% of the purchase price.

I’ve done a LOT of affiliate marketing, and written a lot about it over the years.  Some of the best material I have can be found here:

At the end of the day, affiliate marketing is about solving a problem for your audience.  It doesn’t matter that it’s not your product – if it’ll help it should be in their hands!  You still get paid for it!

As an affiliate, answering the question, “how to make money blogging,” you usually make the lion’s share of the money and you deal with next to zero of the hassle…

4: Banner Ads / Ad Network / Private Sales

A few days ago, I posted a very long, very thorough explanation of ad networks and their place in the blogging monetization ecosystem.

Here’s a link for you to check that out >>

The premise of it is this…

By putting ads from Adsense, Doubleclick, or one of the other native or contextual ad networks you get paid.

Sometimes, you get paid on a cost per click (CPC) basis (every time someone clicks, you get paid).  Other times, you get paid on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) basis, where you make money every time someone sees your ad.

There’s another way to profit from the real estate on your website that wasn’t mentioned…

Private Site Buys.

As an advertiser, private site buys are the holy grail of media buying.  When you buy ads directly from a website owner, you can negotiate better rates (much better) and you effectively cut out the middleman (the ad networks).

Now, Buy Sell Ads started as a way for bloggers to list their inventory and get paid.  They still do some of that, but they’ve grown up a lot.  Now, you need a certain amount of traffic and blah, blah…

The BEST way to get private ad requests is to simply put a page on your site, in the main navigation area, detailed your traffic, your demographics, banner sizes, and the cost.

There’s a LOT of money exchanged in Paypal for Private Site Buys every single day…  Keep it open as an option for your site as well.

5: Text Link Ads

We talk about text link ads a little bit in the ad network article, but they don’t produce near the volume that they use to…

The idea for how to make money blogging is that someone gives you money and you put a link to their site in individual articles or on your whole site.  It used to boost search engine ranking incredibly well.  Now though, it serves as a great way to get native traffic to your landing pages and sales pages.

There will be a time or two that you’ll be approached by someone offering to buy a link on your site.  The nice thing about text link ads is they can be upsold pretty readily…

If someone offers you $50, tell them you only do yearly deals, so it’d be $400.  They save 4 months and you get all the money in one shot.  They’ll pay you and you’ll never hear from them again.

(NOTE: Remember to take the link off your site though!)

6: Sponsored Content

Sponsored content is a bit like a text link ad, but it’s usually more time-consuming.

Typically, it comes in the form of writing paid reviews for companies.  In terms of how to make money blogging, they’ll give you some money and the product, and you’ll write a review based on your experience.

The vendor hopes to engage your audience and get some business out of it.  You, well you get to demo something cool, tell your friends about it, and get paid to do it.

Plus, it’ll be a piece of content that you don’t have to think real hard about writing…

These might also come in the form of advertorials, which are content marketing strategies.  They’re fine – just make sure to choose wisely!

7: Site Sponsorships

Site sponsorships are where someone sponsors your entire site.  I see them a lot in woodworking because I’m constantly trolling through wood projects, looking for weekend projects.

Here’s a great example: Ryobi Nation

Ryobi is a tool company and they sponsor bloggers who build stuff… Simple enough.

They give them tools and (maybe?) pay them for their involvement, and the bloggers share their experiences through the Ryobi tools.

I don’t know what the requirements are, like if they have to take photos with the merchandise on every post or what…  All I know is I see Ryobi all over Pinterest in browsing through wood projects.

There’s no reason why you can’t have a sponsor for your site…  Maybe a piece of software or a corporate partner who pays some of the hosting bills…

8: Job Boards

Job boards are another great source of income for bloggers who have a strong audience.  A great example is Problogger’s.

It’s simple, clean, and makes Darren plenty…

The trick is having a blog that has enough traction where you have both people LOOKING for jobs and people who need talent.

9: Sponsored Mailings

Sponsored mailings, otherwise known as ‘solo ads’ are great for a burst of cash too.  If you’re building an email list, and you should be, you can rent your list out to anyone who wants to pay for it.

Entire industries have been built on buying data, both email addresses and mailing addresses… And an industry that you’d be participating in if you allow other people access to your list.

The prices are largely determined by responsiveness and list size and can go up to $70,000 for one mailing…  That’s for tens of millions of people, of course, but you get the idea :0)

The process?  A vendor approaches you for a mailing.  You charge him/her money.  They send you their email copy.  You mail it out.

Done.  Doesn’t get much simpler than that now, does it?

10: Brokering

As a blogger, you are at the center of the action.  You have buyers, sellers, creators  and consumers.

All on the other side of your blog.

Connecting them in a meaningful, financially beneficial way is what we call brokering.  It takes getting to know the people who follow you, but the simplicity of this model can’t be overstated.

If you connect a vendor and an affiliate, you should get 10% of everything that’s sold.  If you connect a creator with a consumer, you should get a finder’s fee.

You need to wedge yourself in the middle and make the transaction happen, but you can do it because it’s your site!

11: Podcast Advertising

Everyone’s got a podcast it seems.  Way back in 2006, I started my first one… Way before they were cool!

Since, I’ve started and stopped a few of them, always getting too busy or caught up which is entirely my fault.  Today, I considered starting one for each of our software properties.

Will that happen?  I’m not sure.  But, if you have one, you might as well be selling sponsorships!

Revision3 started with one show – Diggnation.  The stumbled on how lucrative podcast sponsorship was.  They were drinking a type of tea on the show and the place that carried it ended up selling out, so…

Diggnation started accepting cash for sponsorships.

Since, Revision3 has grown to be a HUGE brand, with millions of podcast viewers every month with their shows.

There’s no reason why you can’t start selling advertising blocks on your podcast!

12: Video Advertising

This last one is something we’ll see a lot more of.  With so much content being created and consumed online, it only makes sense that a lot of those videos will start having ads that the creator is paid for.

Now, Youtube and the video creator split the ads that are before the content… But, ads IN the content are solely paid out to the creators themselves!

Like podcasting, we’ll start to see in video commercials, like what’s on TV, rather than letting Youtube suck up all that space…

If you’re into video, then start thinking of creative advertising packages that you can offer sponsors!

Your Next Step…

If content marketing and blogging are important to you, but you just don’t have time to sit down, do the research, and write blog posts from scratch…

GSDdaily Episode 45

Today we’re going to talk about how to make money blogging, 12 tips that will supercharge your website. This serves two purposes. The first is to recap the last nine episodes, which we went through and talked about creating products, selling services, coaching, consulting and building software.

We went through and dove deep into nine business models. Huge business models that you can use in your business if you choose. We’re also going to dig into some additional things, affiliate marketing stuff today. This kind of serves as the capstone for this last couple of weeks’ worth of material.

For those of you who are new to me, my name is Jason Drohn, and I am the creator of doneforyou.com. We specialize in helping people build and sell their stuff online. We create and sell. Create their digital products, their coaching programs, everything else, and then also automate the sales process to make it easy from a growth and scalability standpoint.

how to make money blogging

How to make money blogging?

We talked about nine of these revenue generation strategies in the last nine episodes.

1. Selling Your Products

The first couple of days we talked about selling your products. You can sell your products. You can either sell eBooks, you can sell video courses, membership sites, the things that you create. Those things would be information-based. If you have a particular skillset or something you’re good at, or an experience that you have, or something you lived through or something you worked through, and you can help other people make that same transformation, then they will pay you money for it. They will find you online, and then whether it’s a book, whether it’s a course, they will learn that from you.

Right now in this pandemic that has never, ever, ever been more true, because people are learning stuff and they’re spending money on education. They’re pivoting, they’re upping their own game. They are on this self-development, personal development kind of journey. Everybody is all at the same time.

Information products are selling better than they ever have. And more people are more comfortable with spending money because they have to now.

Selling your products is a great way of generating some cash flow from your website.

It’s also the most scalable way, and you’re not trading time for dollars. You’re not trading hours for money. In terms of how to make money blogging, you’re a trading product for the money.

You’re creating a product, you’re packaging it once, and then you’re selling that thing 10 times, 100 times, 1000 times. Also, you’re still selling that knowledge or that information, but you’ve replaced yourself. You’re learning how to make money blogging because you’re able to sell a lot more of it and you’re not personally responsible for delivering it and fulfilling it.

2. Selling  Services

We talked about selling professional services, I think it might’ve been yesterday. And this is selling… I mean, it can be accounting, it can be legal work, it can be web design, it can be coding, it can be graphic design. You name it, you can sell services online. The primary kind of way that you generate those leads is you have a video on your website and then you have them click the button below the video to apply, or fill out the form underneath the video to apply to then talk to you.

how to make money blogging

That’s the modality of how you sell services. With services, they’re highly complex and they’re expensive, services are. They’re more expensive than a $67 digital product. Do you know what I mean?

You need somebody to express interest, and then you’re probably going to be closing on a sales call, or at least some sort of a consultative sales thing because people want to know that you’re able to customize your offer for them. Even if you’re selling logo design. You’re rarely going to get top dollar for logo design and also be able to sell it without talking to somebody.

You can think of Fiverr as a great example. For them to sell services, they have to only charge $5. So is your design work rather than $5? Well, I’d hope so. On Fiverr, sure, you can sell a great volume of things and then upsell as you create a relationship with somebody, and that’s an entire business model all unto itself.

But at the same time, when you’re trying to figure out how to make money blogging, you’re not going to come right out of the gate, charge a $1,000 for logo design and then hope to sell it through an add-to-cart page.

Selling services requires a relationship and it requires handling.

Somebody when they come to your website, they need to have a way to raise their hand and say, “Yes, I’m interested. How can I get more information?” And then you call them. So that’s how you sell services.

3. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing we’ve touched on a little bit in the past. Not necessarily in the previous series, but in these sessions we’ve talked about affiliate marketing. So you can sell affiliate products, and if you go to like ClickBank.com. This is an affiliate network. Go and sell digital products through ClickBank and then get paid 50%, 75% commission on those products. You can also go to an affiliate network like commissionjunction.com.

You can become an advertiser or a publisher, and you can promote things on commissionjunction.com. Get paid a commission and you can do the same thing with Amazon. So you can link to anything on Amazon. Amazon affiliate program. It’s called Amazon Associates. If you’re an Amazon affiliate, you can link to anything on Amazon and get paid as an affiliate.

If you’re recommending a book on Facebook, you can make 4%, which isn’t a lot, but it’s still something. You get paid for everything somebody orders within 24 hours. If they buy the book and they also buy dishwasher detergent and supplements and a TV, then you get paid on all of it within a 24-hour window.

That’s another way to figure out how to make money blogging. I used to do a lot of affiliate marketing. We still do a little bit here and there. I don’t go out of my way to do affiliate marketing anymore.

Even if I post something on Facebook, like a book or something, I don’t go track down any affiliate link and then post it. But if it’s there, then I will. Sometimes for CRMs and stuff, you can get affiliate links and software, and they pay monthly recurring. So when you get a sale, then that sale continues paying you for a long time.

4. Banner Ads / Ad Networks / Private Sales

Banner ads are great when you’re learning how to make money blogging. Whenever you have a banner ad on your website, you can go to a company called BuySellAds. And on your website pages, you can put banner ads.

BuySellAds is a place if you have a lot of traffic coming to your website, you can submit your site to BuySellAds, and then they might include you. Probably the best and easiest way to just get started though is if you go to Google AdSense. Google AdSense is a way to earn money on your website by showing ads. And Google manages it.

It’s the other side of their AdWords platform. Businesses come in and they spend money to advertise to people. Here they’re spending money in AdWords, and over here we have bloggers who are posting those ads on their website. Google is then taking that money and then splitting it with the publisher.

In answering the question, how to make money blogging, a great way is AdSense is. So you can go to, I think this is adsense.google.com. And that’s just google.com/adsense. Sign up for an account, and then you can generate money from the people who come to your website.

They click ads and then you get paid per click, or sometimes you get paid per 1,000 impressions. You’re not going to make a lot of money with AdSense. That’s not a great way of going about how to make money blogging.

I mean, you can, but you’re going to make far and away more money selling services or selling products. But it is a way to generate revenue. And there’s an entire school of thought that you can just have 300 websites, and then each website is generating $100 bucks a month. So then that adds up to some pretty significant revenue. This is fine if you want to manage 300 websites, with the content and everything else. So you just have to figure out what it is you’re looking for.

5. Text Link Ads

TextLinkAds is another one that I used to make a lot of money on. When I got started trying to figure out how to make money blogging, TextLinkAds huge for me…  TLA was a website. It was kind of a broker service that, what they would do is they would give you $50 bucks or $100 bucks to put a little text link on the sidebar of your website.

This was way before the SEO stuff started cracking down. It was my absolute biggest way of generating revenue before I knew what the hell I was doing.

I was making $600, $700 a month just with this little block of TextLinkAds because my site had a pretty good page rank on it. That was 12 years ago, 11 years ago, maybe. That practice has since kind of gone away because Google found out that people were doing it to artificially rank in the search engines, which was the primary reason people were doing it.

But now, some people are going to email you on your… So I probably get four or five of them a day now. People are wanting me to put an article on my website and they’ll give me $50 bucks for it. Or they’ll want to put a link in my content or they’ll scan through my blog posts and find a keyword phrase they’re trying to rank for. And then they’ll email me and say, “Hey, I’ll give you $100 bucks if you can put my link right here.”

That’s a quick way of figuring out how to make money blogging!  Or sometimes they just want it for free. But oftentimes they tell you they’ll pay, they will pay. So if you want to do that, that’s fine.

My strategy is different. I mean, every keyword phrase on the site is there for a reason. A lot of the keyword phrases that they’re looking to monetize, I also want to monetize, and it’s worth more to me not letting them monetize that because I’m ranking for it. So, there’s that, but it is a way to generate revenue.

6. Sponsored Content

Another one is sponsored content, kind of in that same TextLinkAds vein. People will pay you to place their content on your site, or also for you to write content promoting them.

It’s all content-based, but they might pay $50 an article for you to review their offer or review their product, whether it’s physical or digital or whatever. Or they will send you a full article and it’ll have three or four of their client links in it and then they’ll pay you $50 bucks for that article. $50 or $100, or whatever.

Just know that they’re getting something out of it too. I mean, they might have three or four clients all with links in this article, and each of those clients paid them $100 to then pay you $50 to put it on your website.

There’s always that. I mean, sometimes you can reach out right to the end-user and say, “Hey, I have a lot of content if you want a link.” So there are lots of things around sponsored content, but it’s just an important understanding of how the money transfers in this so that you can then maximize your revenue. Do you know what I mean? So like here, the vendor hopes to engage your audience and get some business out of it.

7. Site Sponsorships / Podcast Sponsorships

Site sponsorships and podcast sponsorships are big. Well, they were. They were big. There was an article I was just reading yesterday morning. I might have posted it somewhere. But it was talking about how the podcast revenues are down because advertisers are pulling out of the market.

how to make money blogging

If you want to start up quickly, podcasts are great ways to do it right now, if you want to drop some money in a podcast sponsorship. That’s a good way of figuring out how to make money blogging…

How very few things fuel a startup quite the way a podcast sponsorship does. I don’t know that that is true or not. I’ve never sponsored a podcast, so I don’t know. I think the article was in Ad Week. But it was interesting because podcasts and site sponsorships are kind of in that same vein. There’s a lot of advertisers that are pulling out of the market right now.

If you want to sponsor the posts of a website or the podcast episodes… Which podcasts live on in perpetuity. Do posts, but podcasts you still get traffic from those sponsorships forever.

I had a podcast like 10 years ago. It was just dumb and I was just playing around with it. And I think I had like 13 or 14 episodes, and it was a site that I first started called JD’s Blog. The content was random. I just kind of talked about whatever I was thinking.

The content wasn’t very focused, but I stopped updating that site. And then like two years later I logged back in and there were like 50,000 people who had downloaded that podcast over the two years that it was just sitting there.

That was well before a lot of podcasts started. But podcasts have this incredible longevity, this incredible lifespan to them. So a podcast sponsorship wouldn’t be a bad idea. But the site sponsorships are a little bit less sticky. The site sponsorship, unless it’s attached to like a post, you’re probably not going to get any long long-term traffic from it.

8. Job Boards

Job boards are another one. If you have a site with a lot of traffic, you can get away with adding a job board.

A great example is a ProBlogger job board or anything content marketing-related. So if you have a lot of content marketers who are coming to your site, you can go to the job board, and then other businesses know that they can come to you for content marketing.

9. Sponsored Mailings

Sponsored mailings are another one. Solo ads. So if you have an email list, then you can charge $20 per email send or whatever. Not $20, but like $200 per email sent, or $1,000 per email sent. What you’re going to do and how you would kind of base that metric, is you know that if you send an email, you’re going to get roughly.

Let’s say you get roughly 2,000 clicks. Well, each of those clicks is worth roughly $0.50. So that mailing will cost $1,000. So that’s typically how people end up pricing their sponsored mailings.

10. Broker Deals

In some other passive ways, you can broker deals. As a blogger, you’re really at the center of the action. So you have buyers and you have sellers, you have creators, you have consumers, so you can create opportunities around the content.

If you contact the vendor in an affiliate, you can get 10% off everything. So this is where some of the second-tier affiliate marketing comes into play. You have content, you might have an affiliate, and then you have a publisher. You can bring those two together and make 10%. It’s glorified business development, is what it is.

11. Podcast Advertising

We talked a little bit about podcast advertising up above, and I said something about… I wrote this article four years ago.

12. Video Advertising

The two big ways now, the two big, easy, low cost, easy ways of getting started with video advertising is you just upload a video, either a video or a bumper ad, to either Facebook or YouTube. And then your video is served up before the actual video starts, or it’s sort of up in the stream, depending on the length.

how to make money blogging

You have a video that is presenting itself as a commercial, and you’re only paying like $0.01 per view or $0.02 a view. I had a webinar last night and we were digging through some video engagement. And there was one live stream that I did that we kind of went through the stats, and I had spent $120 promoting this live stream. And for the $120, I got 122 people who watched the entire live stream from beginning to end.

Somebody is on Facebook and they’re just scrolling through and then they see my live stream. The live stream is like 27 minutes long. And then they just sit back and then they watch it.

It’s like, I can’t say that I have done that in a very, very long time. I don’t know what I would have. I don’t think I would just grab a live stream and then watch it for 27 minutes. My live streams aren’t all that entertaining, so yeah, it was interesting. But video advertising, it’s easy to get into, especially when you start with a live stream and then you promote it. Or you do clips or bumper ads, little six-second video clips and then you upload them. Yeah, that’s pretty nice.

Next week’s GSDdaily Topics

Now, next week we’re going to talk about going in and selling online, selling on the phone. It was an idea that struck me yesterday. I think we’re going to have some guests. We’re going to have some guests who are going to come on and talk about some phone selling strategies. I’m going to reveal some of my tips for selling on the phone, and this is going to be high ticket stuff.

Some of the things we talked about during the week were selling coaching, selling consulting, selling high ticket digital products, all of which require a sales call.

Next week, it’s going to be entirely about selling high ticket offers on the phone. And I’m going to walk through some of my processes and then there’s going to be some guests who are going to walk through some of theirs.

I’m excited about it, it’s going to be a lot of fun. I’m still waiting back to hear from a couple of people to see if they want to share some of their strategies because they’re pretty behind-the-scenes people. And I know they sell the lights out and they know they sell the lights out, but I don’t know that they want to get on publicly and share their strategies. So I’m kind of hitting them over the head a little bit.

But yeah, I think that’s about it for the week. If you have any questions at all, go to doneforyou.com/start, and I will be glad to get on the phone with you, answer any questions, build up an action plan, all that good stuff.

Get This Sales Funnel Custom Built >> Click Here!

 

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Unlock Your Fortune: The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Services Business from Home https://doneforyou.com/start-a-service-business/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=start-a-service-business Thu, 14 May 2020 14:00:28 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10596   Introduction: The Power of Starting a Service Business from Home Today, we’re diving deep into starting a service business right from the comfort of your home. If you have a skill, knowledge, or a service you want to offer, this guide is your roadmap to generating leads and closing sales. The Philosophy Behind Starting […]

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Get Started With An Action Plan Call >> Click Here!

 

Introduction: The Power of Starting a Service Business from Home

Today, we're diving deep into starting a service business right from the comfort of your home. If you have a skill, knowledge, or a service you want to offer, this guide is your roadmap to generating leads and closing sales.

The Philosophy Behind Starting a Service Business

Today is exciting as we discuss how to start a service business. I've read and listened to "Think and Grow Rich" multiple times. One of the key takeaways from this book is the immense value of offering services to people as a way to generate wealth.

start a service business

Types of Services You Can Offer

When you're starting a service business, the possibilities are endless. From financial planning and legal services to sales strategy and even travel planning—there's a service for every skill set. We've built sales funnels for various industries, including lending, credit repair, and franchising, to name a few.

The Basic Framework of a Service Business

The essence of a service business lies in solving a problem. Prospects usually find you through a Google search or a targeted ad on social media platforms like Facebook. Once they land on your website, the goal is to convert them into a lead.

Sales Funnels: The Backbone of Starting a Service Business

When you're starting a service business, having a sales funnel is crucial. Typically, after a prospect downloads your lead magnet, you can direct them to a bridge page that addresses common questions and leads them to your sales pitch.

The Importance of Personal Branding in a Service Business

One fundamental aspect to understand when starting a service business is that you're essentially selling yourself. Your brand becomes a significant part of the business, and balancing brand aesthetics and conversion rates is crucial.

Striking the Balance: Branding vs. Conversions in Starting a Service Business

When starting a service business, your brand is a critical asset. There are generally two schools of thought: those who prioritize branding elements like logos and colors and those who focus solely on conversions. The sweet spot lies in the middle—valuing brand equity and conversion rates. For instance, if an orange button boosts conversions by 12%, then an orange button it is!

Crafting the Perfect Sales Funnel for Your Service Business

Understanding that you're building a personal brand is crucial when starting a service business. The right website and sales funnel can make or break your business. Prospects will reach out to you online or over the phone, and you'll need to tailor your services to their needs. This is especially important in the current pandemic landscape, where client needs rapidly evolve.

Adapting to Market Needs: The Legal Services Example

Take legal services as an example. Many lawyers have pivoted to offering PPP funding services due to the high demand in recent months. This underscores the importance of flexibility and adaptability when starting a service business.

Productizing Your Offer: The First Step in Starting a Service Business

Service-based business sales funnel leads to a qualified sales call because services are inherently complex. The key is to productize your initial offer. This means packaging it neatly, making it easier for the client to understand what they're getting.

Standard Packages: The Optimal Sales Strategy for Starting a Service Business

When you start a service business, offering standard packages is the most effective online sales strategy. The "good, better, best" pricing model, popularized by Marcus Lemonis on MSNBC's "The Profit," works exceptionally well in service-based businesses. These packages serve as your foot-in-the-door strategy, enticing clients to explore your more customized and complex—and often more expensive—offerings.

SEO: The Unsung Hero of Starting a Service Business

In the early days of local marketing, many businesses would offer Google Maps optimization as an initial service. This foot-in-the-door strategy would open doors for more comprehensive services like SEO and PPC campaigns. Similarly, when starting a service business today, SEO remains vital for driving organic traffic and improving your online visibility.

Customization: The Final Touch in Starting a Service Business

Even with productized service packages, clients will still seek customization. It's essential to offer flexibility in your boxes to meet each client's unique needs, making your services more appealing and worth their investment.

start a service business

Expanding Your Reach: Geographic Targeting in Starting a Service Business

When you're in the initial stages of starting a service business, it's crucial to aim for the largest geographic area your business model allows. With the power of digital advertising platforms like Facebook and Google Ads, you can easily target specific demographics across vast regions. For instance, removing interest-based targeting from your Facebook Ads can significantly reduce your cost per acquisition, as algorithms have become incredibly efficient.

The Power of Algorithmic Targeting

By setting broad parameters like age groups and gender, the algorithm can do the heavy lifting. This approach can result in a 30% drop in lead costs and a 45% reduction in acquisition costs. The takeaway? When starting a service business, go as big as your geographic limitations allow.

Virtual Client Interaction: The New Norm

Given the current remote work environment, there's no reason to limit your service business to a local community. Use phone calls and Zoom meetings to interact with clients, expanding your reach and credibility through case studies and testimonials.

Local vs. Global: A Case Study from Erie, Pennsylvania

Even if you're based in a small town like Erie, Pennsylvania, digital advertising can quickly expand your reach nationally. Unless your business is tied to a specific location, such as real estate, aim to target as large a geographic area as possible when starting a service business.

Time Management: The Crux of Starting a Service Business

Every service business has a limit on the number of clients it can handle without sacrificing quality. You'll eventually hit a ceiling, whether it's 10, 20, or 50 clients. This is where you need to decide whether to expand your team or diversify your offerings.

Leveraging Your Time and Skills

If your client list and waitlist are growing, but want to maintain a work-life balance, consider hiring additional staff or offering digital products. This allows you to focus on what you do best: content creation, speaking engagements, or other high-level tasks.

Referral Campaigns: The Hidden Gem in Starting a Service Business

Don't underestimate the power of a well-executed referral campaign. Your existing clients are your warm traffic, and their recommendations can bring in new business. This is an essential strategy for anyone looking to start a service business successfully.

Final Thoughts: The Scalability Challenge

Starting a service business comes with its own set of challenges, including scalability. You'll need to decide whether to grow your team, diversify your product line, or both. The key is to be aware of your limitations and make strategic decisions accordingly.

By understanding these various facets, you'll be better equipped to navigate the complexities of starting a service business in today's digital age.

The Blueprint for High Ticket Service Businesses: The Fully Qualified Lead Funnel

When starting a service business, one of the most effective tools at your disposal is a Fully Qualified Lead (FQL) Funnel. This funnel is designed to generate leads and ensure that those leads are well-suited for your services.

What is an FQL VSL Funnel?

FQL stands for Fully Qualified Lead, and VSL stands for Video Sales Letter. This funnel begins with various traffic sources like Facebook, email lists, retargeting, and Google Ads. These sources direct potential clients to a landing page or an advertorial, often a blog post or case study detailing your services.

Traffic Sources: Where Do Your Leads Come From?

The funnel can accommodate multiple traffic sources, including Facebook, Google, and retargeting campaigns. The key is to choose platforms that align with your service offering. For instance, Google traffic is particularly effective for legal and financial services.

The Role of Advertorials and Landing Pages

Once the traffic is directed to your site, it lands on an advertorial or a landing page. An advertorial is a case study showcasing your expertise and success in solving specific client problems. This case study includes a link that directs the reader to a Video Sales Letter (VSL) promo page.

The VSL Promo Page: Your Sales Pitch in Video Form

The VSL promo page features a video that aims to persuade the viewer to take action, usually by clicking a button or filling out an application form below the video. This application gathers essential data that prepares you for a more meaningful conversation with the potential client.

Scheduling and Reminders: The Final Steps Before the Sales Call

After filling out the application, the prospect is directed to a scheduling page where they can book a time for a call. Automated reminders are sent out to ensure that the chance remembers to attend the scheduled call.

The Sales Call: Where Leads Become Clients

The marketing process is considered complete once the lead is generated and the call is scheduled. The next step is the sales call, which could be a strategy session. This is where you discuss the client's needs in detail, walk them through your offer, and, ideally, close the deal.

What Happens if They Don't Schedule a Call?

If a prospect doesn't schedule a call, the funnel usually triggers a nurturing sequence or presents them with additional offers. This ensures that you're not losing out on potential clients.

Looking Ahead: Consultative Sales Calls

Next week, we'll delve deeper into the art of consultative sales calls, particularly for service-based businesses and coaches. This will include guest insights and focus on effectively selling your services over the phone.

By understanding and implementing a Fully Qualified Lead Funnel, you're setting up your high-ticket service business for success. It's not just about generating leads; it's about developing the right leaders and converting them into loyal clients.

Get Started With An Action Plan Call >> Click Here!

 

 

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How To Start A Software Company https://doneforyou.com/start-a-software-company/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=start-a-software-company Wed, 13 May 2020 14:00:07 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10592 Jason Drohn: All right. Hey, what’s up? This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to GSD Daily. This is episode number 43. I’m here with my new best friend, Mars. How are you doing, Mars? Mars: Hanging in, man. Hanging in. Jason Drohn: Nice. So first of all, nice setup. Mars: I got this stuff from my […]

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Jason Drohn:
All right. Hey, what’s up? This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to GSD Daily. This is episode number 43. I’m here with my new best friend, Mars. How are you doing, Mars?

Mars:
Hanging in, man. Hanging in.

Jason Drohn:
Nice. So first of all, nice setup.

Mars:
I got this stuff from my fiance actually, but thanks. This is in her apartment right now where I’m in.

Jason Drohn:
Nice. So what we’re going to talk about today is… Just to kind of throw it out here. So we’re going to talk about how to start a software company. So the first 10 minutes or so, I’m going to kick through this idea of software-as-a-service, how to start a software company, MVPs, and then I’m going to show as a little simple wireframe of how I got started.

Mars is going to break into all of the crazy shit he’s doing. We just started talking about how to start a software company just before this and we’re like, “Shit. We should just go.”

Mars:
He used to back this up. He’s like we were in the middle of talking about what we’re going to talk about. Then he goes, “I’m just going to go.” So here they are, dropped in.

Jason Drohn:
I think we should probably just pre-frame this a little bit. So the software is something that I started five years ago. When did you start a software company for the first time?

Mars:
Depending upon how you look at it, probably about eight or nine years. But before that, I was sort of dabbling with it. But heavy like eight or nine years.

Jason Drohn:
Okay. In our estimations for how to start a software company, and this is kind of what we’re talking about like on Mars and my estimations, the software is the easiest thing to sell because you’re selling access. You’re not necessarily selling like an info product to dream or a pie in the sky kind of thing.

You’re building something cool to then sell and you’re making it available to everybody for a small monthly retainer, typically. But when you talk about software to other people, as Mars said, their eyes kind of glaze over. They’re like well it’s kind of this weird like voodoo dark or mystic bullshit like how to start a software company than being able to sell it.

Jason Drohn:
I can kind of relate because when I first had the idea to start a software company, I came from the info product space, and software was… I mean, it’s like, “Well, no credit card free trials? How the hell are you going to make money?” So it’s just different. Then you kind of research how these big companies start a software company and get into selling software and it’s like you can’t follow their business model because they have venture capital and everything else to burn.

Mars:
Funding.

Jason Drohn:
Right. It’s an evolved business model. It just is in general. So I want to just kind of kick through some slides here real quick. And then I just want to kind of bring everybody to the same place and then we’re just going to we’re going to get rocking. All right. First of all, when you start a software company… If you don’t know what SaaS software is, it is software-as-a-service.

There are all kinds of offshoots now, banking as a service and all sorts of stuff. But SaaS is like kind of the genre that we’re talking about. It’s a cloud-based hosted software. We have created six SaaS tools over the years and it’s designed to solve one problem quickly or at least that’s kind of the first thing it does. Mars, when you start a software company, you’re building something that solves one thing, right?.

Mars:
Always. It took me a while to figure that out that just make it solve one thing and do not overcomplicate it.

Jason Drohn:
Right. Let’s see. MVP products. So MVP stands for minimum viable product and it does one thing simply efficiently. It solves one problem and that one problem is it should be something that thousands to millions of people will pay for the problem to be solved.

We’re streaming out of a piece of software called StreamYard right now. It does one thing well which is its streaming software. It gives you access to different social networks. Those are one thing well. It’s 49 bucks a month and there are thousands of people who pay for it.

The MVP product is something that can and should be sold but will probably go through a beta test with a few users when you start a software company. Now some of the positives of software that you get monthly revenue, users pay for access.

The software works reliably every time as long as it’s coded well. So if it’s coded well, then it consistently works, or it’s consistently broken. You are not the deliverable like other info products. The software is deliverable. From a negative standpoint, it’s expensive if you’re not a programmer. Mars and I both paid shit loads of money to have programmers do shit that didn’t work.

Mars:
That’s been the official measurement, by the way, a shitload. Like multiple shitloads of money.

Jason Drohn:
This is why I like him. So, to start a software company and elegantly designing an MVP product can be challenging and the cost of acquiring new customers is oftentimes higher, especially if you’re doing a 14-day free trial.

Of course, it can be hard, because you’re going to be paying 20, 30, 50, 60 bucks per new user and you’re getting paid nothing for that. So that’s one of the reasons funding comes in.

Now, the build process, and this is kind of where Mars and I are going to jump in his pool is the wireframing piece. So what you want to start a software company, you want to kind of set up the screens and figure out the logic and figure out how the screens are going to map into each other.

You as the product owner, the business owner, the SaaS platform owner should take the time to develop these screens including all the buttons, the text, the design elements, and all that stuff.

Then when you’re happy with that you send it to the developer and say, “This is what I want to be done to make it all work.” It’s very like 37signals Basecamp methodology but it works well, and it makes it crystal clear how it all needs to work.

What you’re seeing is the first four wireframes for our software, which was Scriptly. So this is the home page and it’s like campaign one, campaign two, campaign three, edit preview dashboard, or edit preview download.

Then you can pick some different email autoresponder sequences and you can still see this. For any of our Scriptly access members, you still see this dashboard in there. Then different form types and then the download box. So this is as simple as really like start a software company it needs to be. Now, I’m going to over to our little combo. So what do you think, Mars about the software?

Mars:
One thing that you just demonstrated there that I hope anybody who’s checking this out will pick up on is how uncomplimentary developers need to be, meaning you don’t need to be any kind of developer or anything like that.

What you have to do is think like how the heck the user is going to think and then gear everything towards what’s the result for the user. I do try to keep it to one result and maybe two or three secondary related results. I’m always thinking what’s the result that they’re getting at?

I hadn’t seen your software before. I heard of it though and I never actually saw it. I’m like that is perfect because I get just from even looking at your mockup before the designers did it like what this thing does. It’s awesome.

Jason Drohn:
Thanks. So the first piece of software we built was time slots. That was my first move to start a software company. I literally logged into Photoshop and I just put a box up on the screen and said… I put my logo there and then like the header bar and then what I needed in.

When I was looking for developers for that thing, I called… So I had three… Was it two stateside? One UK-based SaaS company and then I ended up hiring a developer off of Upwork.

In researching how to start a software company, everybody said, they were like, “Well, it’s going to be 45, 50, $60,000 to build this thing. I sent them my little Photoshop drawings and they’re like, “Well, you’re going to go through the build team then you’re going to go through the UI team, then you’re going to go to the implementation team.”

I was like, “I don’t want teams. What I want is one freaking developer who knows what they’re doing. That’s all I want, one person. I don’t want to move the teams. I don’t need any project, whatever. Just one person.”

Mars:
It’s funny. I went through this entire process that you’re describing and I haven’t talked to anybody else about this. The only people I know that start a software company, the first guy that I work with, actually Mike Koenigs is the one that actually turned me on to this and then I start with his teams and I realized, “Wait a minute. I could do this.” But he had a big team and I was like, “Man,” and it was like a lot of money per month to keep them on and all that stuff.

But then I realized like what you’re saying, I just need one guy. One guy who can take what’s in my brain or it could be a gal if you want. It’s a gal. Then take what’s in my brain.

Either I draft it up in Photoshop, the same way as you, and then holy crap, the next day sometimes it’s like done, or maybe two days later you’re like, “Crap, that wasn’t that expensive or time-consuming. Holy smokes.” Then you got to market it which is what I’m good at.

Jason Drohn:
Right. Scripting, I think in the process of how to start a software company, I’ve spent about seven grand before we started selling it. The first time we sold I made 12.

Mars:
That’s pretty typical if you do a decent job. That’s like…

Jason Drohn:
And I think it relies on having that very simple singular focus. That MVP product solves one thing does that one thing well. I think we had like seven email sequences in there when we first started selling it.

Mars:
That’s awesome.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah. Now, we have, I think it was 48 or 49. Something like that. So do you want to start kicking through your screen? Do you want to start sharing stuff?

Mars:
Yeah. Sure. I don’t want to overcomplicate things because like… I started talking about this and then you went, “Go, go time.” So here I go.

Jason Drohn:
Good.

Mars:
Anybody who’s listening who wants to start a software company, I want them to realize some people are there already. But I wanted to show pretty simple something that’s in the good process. Something that I already built that drives a lot of my leads and then kind of how I map it out first before I go into Photoshop and do what you did, which is how everything connects.

This is a semi-complex but not super complex map. But basically, it’s just like where do things on the page link to and where those things then link to. I got a screen to share, right?

Jason Drohn:
Yup.

Mars:
So let me do that because if I don’t people won’t be able to see my screen. So let’s see, screen sharing now. Let me know when I’m living in Houston. All right. There we go.

Jason Drohn:
There it is. All right. There we go.

Mars:
When I learned how to start a software company, this first one is this particular branding version is my fiance’s. You can see her little icon there at the top. But I have a couple of other versions that are the same thing. I put them in a different market with different partners and stuff.

One of the times when I go in and I work with people, I’ll do like a white label version for them. I’ve made quite a good chunk to go off in that too where I white label my stuff. Most of them are conversation, but there are all kinds of ways to monitor it right. This one here for her business, she’s a blogger and likes social media and online business coach.

People are struggling with a certain thing and a lot of times people aren’t responding to their posts and stuff like that. That’s a thing. For instance, I’m not going to go too deep with it, but let’s say, this is a great headline. Then I’ll scan it.

This one scans based on a Word database tested by humans. So rather than just sort of randomly. So this is sucky. Right now it’ll give me synonyms and then tell me which ones are better to use in there.

Jason Drohn:
No way.

Mars:
Yeah. Let’s try extraordinary. Let’s try extraordinary. And then you can compare… I don’t want to go too much into it, but this is an extraordinary headline. If I test that, it should go up because that was a slightly higher thing. So that went up to 5.2.

Now, you can change all kinds of things in it, and then it does all kinds of other junk which I don’t want to go into, but you can store up all your headlines and then compare and save them. You can scan for emails versus email subject lines versus blog headlines versus Facebook ad post headlines because there are different rules for all those things you can’t use certain characters in them.

If you use certain words it makes them bad because Facebook doesn’t like certain things. So the database is checking against the specifics for that particular medium. If I change it right now to let’s say… Right now it’s probably a blog post title.

Well, let’s say I change it to a Facebook ad line. It’ll scan differently for Facebook than it does for… Facebook doesn’t like parts of that. It’ll tell you why it doesn’t like it so you can improve. I don’t want to go in too deep. I just want to-

Jason Drohn:
This is so badass. This is fucking awesome.

Mars:
Before I made up my mind to start a software company, I used to do this by hand, dude where I would go through and look at my copywriter’s stuff. I didn’t know why I wasn’t liking things or why I was liking things, because if you’re talking to a female audience for some male audience and this thing does scan female versus male and how people like certain words.

Like for instance just one word, the word gun, okay? Women hate that word and dudes don’t hate that word. Now, as copywriters, we kind of intuitively know that. But if you say I’m scanning this for women versus I’m scanning this for men or older people versus younger people or high education versus low education, it comes back with different numbers.

But the point of it was, actually the hook line, I call that the hook line, that headline versus subject line, versus add a line or whatever, but that opening line if that doesn’t catch them, we all know they’re not going to read the rest of it. So that’s really important like working with a bunch of copywriters and trying different people out and also working with designers and staff who tend to throw things up without you realizing that they even did it.

I needed something for them to go, okay, this sucks versus this is awesome or at least this sucks versus this is maybe possibly okay. If I have a process, I’m like, “How do I automate this, and then how do I sell it, and then get people the result?” Because I am a service provider at heart, right?

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Mars:
And this is the thing when you start a software company. Now, that’s an important distinction because a lot of us are service providers and how the heck do you scale yourself. How do I take my knowledge and how do I do it in a way that’s going to sell a lot which software sells better, in my experience than info products.

Anyway, my point is that’s an example of a finished product versus this which is one that I’m working on right now, which is my video testimonial capture tool. The idea of it is it helps people create so that you don’t have to ask people for testimonials.

A lot of people like it and the problem is in all my years of like… We’ve broken a lot of records and I was an ad agency guy before I was in online and info-marketing and stuff. The only thing that I’ve ever really done super well, in my opinion, is like… When I don’t understand how a product works… Like if somebody brings me a lady’s shaver.

I remember very specifically working with Gillette, they brought this new shaver that they were trying to do and it’s supposed to be for dudes, first of all, the thing that they wanted to do, and at the end of it, I was like, “All right, you need to make that think pink. Go back to the molds and make it pink because there’s too much competition in your marketplace. Let’s just turn it into a lady razor.”

We did that. And then what we did was we actually had people use it and then I got feedback from the people who used it about what they liked about it, which was different than what the client thought that they liked. I talked to the people who used it which is your social proof, your testimonials, right?

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Mars:
Case studies and so forth. So the only thing I’ve think I’ve done well other than putting together pretty stuff like I like visually beautiful things and things that sound well is understanding what the heck the end-user is feeling, like about it and then leveraging that proof, their feeling basically to get other people to go, “Hey, that person is just like me and they’re getting the result that I want.” So I want it, right?

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Mars:
The current version of it, and I have a running version of this it’s called Proof Factory. And the only reason why I made it was because I have the best test video testimonials on Earth. It’s Bob Proctor, Tony Robbins. It is all kinds of people that I’ve worked with that are like this dude is amazing.

Also, it is easy for me to sell myself and they’re all on video saying it and like I didn’t coach them, but my girlfriend, she’s sucks, the dude at getting testimonials.

She’s gotten so many people results from ground zero up to six and seven figures way more than me. I don’t even understand how to take it because I’m impatient. I don’t have time for them to figure out how to write a headline or how these kinds of things she does.

She worked with somebody for a year or two years who are to be hopeless and we’ll never find the path towards a successful one. She’ll work with them and she’ll work with them indefinitely and be like get them to the point of making money and no longer happen to be in a cubicle, et cetera.

But the thing is she doesn’t collect testimonials and I’m like you got to get testimonials. She’s like, “I feel awkward. I don’t want to ask people.” So basically I built her the sloppy original version. I said just send this link out and I had the developers like crank a video capture thing. It asked them a series of questions versus what some of the other video testimonial gatherers do where it’s the story of transformation.

Before I was working with Michelle, blah, blah, blah. Since working with Michelle, I got results XYZ and then my favorite thing about Michelle is blah, blah, blah. So basically ask some a few questions instead of just, “Hey, record how you feel about this thing.” The way that this is set up, I don’t want to go into it too much, but essentially when this person is done, there are different ones for different…

Jason Drohn:
Like little recipes.

Mars:
Yeah, yeah. So the template is there so that the actual… To start a software company, I went from scratch though because I haven’t even have built those parts off. It basically sends people a form like this and they capture their video here and then they just tell you what their profession is.

I have it set up so that I get the important stuff on the front side because sometimes they’ll go all the way through the process. That’s another problem, that boasts, and so tell us, and those kinds of things. It just captures one video, which is great, but it doesn’t tell the transformation story which is what marketers we know is the key to that.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, totally.

Mars:
So anyway, this here is in the process right now versus being done. All I want to do is explain kind of in addition to how it works is because of whatever because I’m not here to sell it, but the idea is she had a problem that she was coming. I didn’t go, “Ooh, I’m going to make this, and then it’s going to sell a whole ton of stuff.”

I have so much of that original Proof Factory now, dude. It’s like I didn’t even put a sales page up and people were coming to look for it, asking me how they could get it. Then I put a crappy sales page up and then I just have so many… I think I have 3,000 users right now of just the old version.

I’m like I should probably do something serious about this. And because I have funding, my funding from the original MVP which is the minimum viable product, since I have people from that, the users that are paying me monthly I can afford to pay my designers, my developers, and myself to work on this, make it look really good, make the user experience good with the original version but that MVP work just fine, dude.

I mean, people use it. They send it out to their email list. Agora publishing has used it, Rich Schefren has used it, Bob Proctor has used it, all these people have used it, and I just want to clean it up. But I’m now self-funded because the thing sold itself.

After all, it solves that one problem which is either I have to ask so many people for proof or I don’t want to ask anybody for proof because I’m scared and I’m nervous depending upon your situation, and your thing solves that problem. And it also makes like a little section for your sales pages and stuff where the videos are all there and you can arrange.

Jason Drohn:
So cool.

Mars:
I wanted to talk through how I do it, which part of me was like, “Okay. I’ll just show the simple kind of like one or two wireframes.” You did that part because you don’t want to smack people in the face with overwhelm. But I mean, this is about as complicated as it gets. What you showed in this are about as complicated as it gets, which is the logs. Let zoom it a little bit.

Jason Drohn:
Well, I tell people whenever I have a conversation about software like you have to think hard about this for like an hour like literally. This, what you’re seeing on the screen is you thinking hard. It’s no different than creating products. It’s no different than writing your table.

Mars:
It took me four hours. It didn’t take that long.

Jason Drohn:
Right. Yeah. You just have to concentrate and focus on it for a brief amount of time and then the rest of the work on the screens flows out of this document. You can just fucking show up and do something and as long as you have this map in front of you then it will guide you the rest of the way. This is the hard part.

Mars:
Yup, that’s a good point. You’re right. This is the toughest part of the whole thing because selling it is pretty easy for me. If you got a decent thing that solves a single problem and that it really can be basic and simple, but if you got something that solves a problem and you put it in front of people and they can see that it’s…

The info product… I always say that the so software and widgets like the templates and the checklist and then the software, they’re the things that make the info product easy to digest because an info product can be a little scary. It’s like, man, I’m going to have to watch how many videos. I’m going to have to read how many articles or how many pieces of written material.

There’s this written material that goes with this, dude. There is like how to do a good job of collecting your proof and what social proof is and what the best kind is. But this thing automates 90% of that stuff for you so you don’t have to…

It relieves that much of the workload. So in a nutshell though because I don’t want to spend too much time on this because I like to just riff on why do it and what the psychology behind it is. But basically, I sit down and I go, “Okay. What stuff does it need to do? What are my main pages over here towards the left, screen left? And then what do the things that they link to?

Like for instance, this one has a main dashboard when they show up and then it has the thing that you just saw which is the template. Then it has the different kinds of things that you can kind of do in there and then it links to these other pages. Once my developers understand that they can look at it and go, “Okay. I see how this works.” Because there, that’s another thing we should hit which is how do you find developers that can [crosstalk 00:22:34].

Jason Drohn:
Yeah. I figured we can do that next.

Mars:
Yeah, yeah exactly. But once I give this to my lead dev, he just basically at this point was… Because we have rapport especially, but even when I first started working with him, he could take it and build something up and go, “How’s this?” I’m going to stop the screen share. On a serious level, dude, I would go like, holy crap, how did you build all that. I didn’t even explain any that to you, right?

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Mars:
You can go on and the math makes sense, right? And I’m like, “Wow.” So he would get it like I don’t want to say 90%, but it would be a solid 60 to 70% of the way there just because I gave him a sketch of how things flow and I was like this is way easier than I thought.

It was way simpler than I thought. It’s hard work, but it’s simple. It is not complex. It’s like this is way simpler than I thought it was going to be to just do this and then all of a sudden. My guys are fast, dude. I don’t know how fast your guys are, but I always think of something.

To start a software company, the final product takes a while to refine, but the [inaudible 00:23:32] that thing is knocked out in a day or two days or three days sometimes and I got something I can sell. And as long as I’m clear with people, “Hey, this is the beta version,” and I never mislead people, that’s a key thing. I say, “I just want to get this out.”

So really you are going to get first access to this, but here’s what it does and then I do a little screen demo and they’re like, “Holy crap. I needed that problem solved. Here’s my credit card.” They’re levitating credit cards out of their pockets through telepathy or telekinesis and it’s floating into the computer, and it’s like they’re sending me money.

Jason Drohn:
Nice. So how do you establish pricing for your software? What is your methodology there?

Mars:
Ironically, I have a software tool that helps me price things based on the degree of paying from the problem-solving, the competition in the marketplace. That’s the next thing it was called. It’s called Offer Simple where it helps you understand how to price things because that’s the thing that as marketers, we all know how to price things sort of intuitively.

Jason Drohn:
But there isn’t a calculator that says X, they’re Y.

Mars:
There will be because I can’t stand the fact that there isn’t. Because I’ve worked in so many different industries and so many different types of products, fitness and fitness coaching, and all these different things. Relationship stuff, pickup artist. There are all kinds of things.

There are commonalities between all those spaces in terms of what your front end is and what the ranges are for that and what the threshold is. And then it’s industry-specific. My point with it is to answer your question more directly, I usually will lead with…

On an MVP, I’ll make it like dirt cheap like under 50 bucks always and usually under 20 bucks as long as I’m not going to eat my lunch on the server costs and stuff like that.

To start a software company, I want to get people using it for five or six months so that I can figure out how to have to make it better. I know how to make go from Proof Factory to Proof Simple, the new version because I’ve had users go, “This part is confusing,” or I’ve had them go, XYZ, ABC.” And I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t even think of that. That’s a really good idea. Thank you for helping me develop my software.” Usually, the person that does that, dude, on a serious level, I just give them a free account.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, totally.

Mars:
Because I’m going to make an extra 50 or 100K from that little piece of advice that they gave me. That’s how you start a software company. It’s like I kind of owe them karmically. So I price usually, initial MVP is… I’m just going to throw out actual numbers, it’s not always this, but like sub 50 for sure. And usually sub 50 per month.

Then a lot of times I’ll do the free trial thing. It depends on the thing. I tend to not like to do the free trial as much. I’ll give like a teaser version to get them using it. My whole goal is, however, I got to do it and this is key. This is a writer downer. I would try and deliver three nuggets per thing that I do. This is nugget number one. There should be a little nugget, nugget alert.

Jason Drohn:
You have that board over there.

Mars:
Yeah. And I do actually, thanks.

Jason Drohn:
There it is.

Mars:
This is a nugget alert, all right? My whole thing is whatever I do, I used to is to get people into the chute while delivering them the result and I don’t hold back on the result and go, “You can’t have this.” But I want whatever they do, and Google is the best at this. You can’t get rid of your Gmail account.

You can’t get rid of your Google Docs, your Google Docs account because you got stuff stored in there. So I could care less about if I don’t make money right off the rail so much. Sometimes I’ll justify that as free. I just never want to undervalue my stuff.

But like low, the low price gets them in the chute. Have something valuable to them at that point. I either video testimonials all living inside of my servers and stuff. I do make it so that they can download it if they want, but it’s never going to be as easy to use and as automatically digestible and easy to the result as it is from inside my system.

After that, it isn’t hard to get somebody, “Hey, you want to do the monthly? It’s 29,” or whatever it is, 27 bucks a month or 47 bucks a month, whatever it is. Because they’re like, “Well, shit. I already got the result. I didn’t have any video testimonials before now I have five,” whatever their thing is.

All my stuff is in this account. So that sort of under 50 down to free, but make it sticky. That’s nugget number one. If you make it sticky, whatever your thing is and you own the thing that they… Well, I don’t want to say you own it because they own it, but you hold access to it. It isn’t hard to get somebody to go like, “Yeah. What the heck. I’ll do this.”

Jason Drohn:
Right, right. Totally.

Mars:
Way easy doing info products.

Jason Drohn:
Well, in talking about how to start a software company, one of the things that you said was interesting which was you get some folks in and then you maybe six months down the road after they’ve been in for six months, five or six months then you have enough value.

They’ve given you enough information that you can then flip into like a bigger product or whatever. After working with a lot of clients on a lot of different things, like you being in this game for a long time understand that the payoff sometimes is in six months, a year, two years, three years. Not necessarily in six weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks.

Mars:
Yeah. However, though honestly is I always ask myself, and this defines whether or not I focus on something or not because I used to just build whatever I wanted to and then I ended up in that spot where I wasn’t getting paid until later, but I usually did get paid later for it.

But that’s not necessary because the only question you have to ask yourself, and this is nugget number two is how valuable is this right now? Is this solving an immediate pain for them so they can make a little bit of money right now to develop this better?

I used to be very money guilt one of those people who’s very money guilt sort of like, “Oh, man. I feel bad, I just want to help people.” Because I do genuinely like helping people, but then I realize it’s like a lifeguard. You can’t help people.

When you think about how to start a software company, you can’t save people from drowning if you are drowning because you aren’t worried about whether or not you stay alive or not. So I did go into the thing of realizing, “Okay. I honestly can’t develop this past the MVP into the beta version and the gamma version and stuff unless if I can figure out how to charge something for it so I’m not going upside down on it.”

I generally say do it and sometimes I’d BS myself. I’m not going to lie. But most of the time I go would somebody pay for this right now? A lot of it is just talking to people. When I tell people about Proof Factory, the current version, and especially now that I’m telling them about Proof Simple, they’re like, “You got what?” Agora, the financier.

They have all kinds of text testimonials, but it’s like when I told them that I have a thing and you think, “Well, it’s Agora. They’re a freaking billion-dollar company.” No. When I sat down and I talked with them I said, “I got a thing. I just set, blast it out to all your different lists and stuff and collect proof on all those.” They’re like, “What?”

They were like, “How much do we have to pay?” That’s how you start a software company!

They started to want to write me a check. I’m like, “Dude, this is 50 bucks a month, man. I’ll give you the enterprise version.” But if somebody gets the lights up like that when you’re talking to them about it or whatever, it’s like okay, that’s going to sell, therefore let me charge something for this.

Jason Drohn:
Right. In the meantime, let me go tell my developers they need to build an enterprise level.

Mars:
Right, exactly. I did that. I was like I didn’t think of that. There are companies out there that need it.

Jason Drohn:
That’s funny. Finding developers, so what has been some of your… How do you find talent?

Mars:
Okay. So I’m going to give the kind of simple version because if I do a thing that’s based on my talent that I was born with, sometimes you can’t explain how you’re doing your thing. Most of the things that I have are skills. There’s the stuff that I learned along the way because well, dammit, I better learn it, or else I’m doomed, or somebody that I care about is going to get hurt or whatever.

Noticing talent is a… It’s the only talent I have. I can size somebody up and look at them and go, “Okay, this person can sing.” They’ll ask me, “How did you know that? We didn’t even talk about that?” That’s because when we were talking about songs and stuff, your pupils dilated, your vocal tonality changed, et cetera, but from a systematic way of doing it, it’s not related to my talent.

The way that I start a software company from scratch. First of all, there are countries… And please chime in on any of this, because you know the same stuff that I know. There are countries out there, nation, states out there where the cost of living is so much less and all things development did not mean to be learned in college.

If you talk to any developers, they will tell you it’s counterintuitive to learn in college because you’re usually three or five years behind what’s going on right now. After all, it’s fast. It’s like marketing. The stuff that you learn from a marketing textbook is usually a decade old. It doesn’t work anymore. So the same thing with development.

Everything that a developer needs to learn nowadays is learnable on the Big G, Google, right? So this is the person geeking it out on it and they’re not practicing all the time. It doesn’t hurt them to have some foundational like college, higher education. But usually, it’s just, will they geek out?

The thing that I do though past that and especially if I want to do it in a scalable way, no matter where I’m looking at, I don’t care if it’s US, Canada, Germany, Lithuania, Philippines, wherever is I test people. I have a developer test and here’s how I stack my test.

This is nugget number three and now we’re clear on mandate nugget, nugget number. So seriously write this one down because this is like a secret to everything. I test people when I run an ad to find people if they didn’t come through a referral and even if they came through a referral I still run through a similar process.

I have a process where people come in, they take a test and it’s kind of like the, what’s that test in Star Trek that Kirk cheated on? The something that’s a Japanese name. I can’t think of it, but he gamed the test so he could win. But the whole purpose of the test was to see how people handle failure. I can’t remember it but that test.

Kobayashi Maru, I think is what it’s called. I have that. So in other words, if I have 50 people all come in and apply for the gig, and I don’t mind paying somebody if they’re good at what they do. In my case, I know how to monetize it. So that’s not a problem.

I want somebody who’s going to do a good job. What I do is I give them a test that will take them depending upon whether it’s for video. Here we’re talking about developers. Developers, copywriters, whatever the thing is that I’m testing for.

They cannot pass it in the amount of time that I give them. It’s a three-part test that they cannot pass and what I want to see is how the heck do they handle not being able to finish it? So this is a three-part test.

You have exactly an hour to take this test. For developers, it’ll be like how good are they with PHP? How good are they with JavaScript and stuff like that? It just depends on what it is. Then there’s no way for them to pass it. It takes an hour and a half to finish that test by the best guy that I know and they only have an hour to get it done.

To start a software company, you get three types of people and I only hire one of them. There’s the type of person who goes… Well, there are four really because there are people who just don’t respond at all.

There are the people who, in terms of people who respond. This is a solid-gold team hiring nugget. Some people respond and they go, “Your test was no way to finish it, man. It’s BS and I’m glad I’m not working for you.” And I’m like, “Hasta la vista, baby. You’re out.” They gotta go.

Then there are the people who don’t finish the test, but they submit what they have and they go, “Couldn’t get it done. Sorry. The test was a little too hard for me. I guess I don’t make the grade.” Now and again depending on how they write that message to me, I’ll hire somebody.

The ones I’m looking for are the ones who go, and this will be one out of 30 people who will do this. But then I’m hiring that person and then my whole team pretty much all of them have been with me for a decade. Seven to 10 years.

They’ll come back and they’ll go, “Hey, sir. Sorry. I couldn’t finish the test. That third one was a little bit harder than I thought it was going to be and unfortunately I needed about another 10 or 15 minutes to get this done.

I’m submitting what I have now as per the instructions, but I’m going to finish the test anyway because I want to get it done.” Because they’re bought in it anyway because they’ve made it. So they then submit the thing to me and honestly even if the work is not perfect, I don’t care because the ethic is there, right?

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Mars:
That’s my system for how to find developers and start a software company. I don’t have to deal with them past them submitting the final version of that, whatever the test was. I do this with video guys like I said copywriters, developers, and so forth.

To me, other than where you source people at because I find people in Germany are the most expensive, but probably the best. I find that people in the Philippines sort of hit-or-miss. It depends. People over in the Indo area like in Pakistan and India and so forth, that’s sort of hit-or-miss.

For whatever reason, the way that they develop sometimes isn’t as organized and for whatever reason, I don’t know how they were educated or whatever. I tend to like the Baltics though because they operate slightly like Austrians and Germans however they’re thinking, but they’re cheaper.

They’re less expensive because their cost of living is less. So my team is all Latvia, Lithuania, mostly Lithuania, or for some Russians and stuff like that. But then where you source them is something. So I’m curious what your answer is to this. But then past that is like how you vet them, right?

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Mars:
So what’s your secret? Where do you find people are at and what’s your process for finding people, I mean, outside direct referrals and stuff.

Jason Drohn:
So I have a kind of a similar testing process early on, similar testing process, but I don’t make it so that they can’t complete. So I will have to incorporate that into everything.

Mars:
How gold, dude. How do we handle that not being able to do it?

Jason Drohn:
I have had developers for a while. So the first US-side developers were referrals for the most part. It was one referral that brings in a different referral, additional referrals. But as far as like kind of the core team who built all of like…

The original software was just like Upwork. Posting a job on Upwork, interviewing them, testing them then ultimately I hired two guys that I thought were good and then one of them ended up staying with me and then he started putting it together where he was. Now he’s the leader of a team in… It works out pretty well that way, and everything just kind of flows through him so he’s a project manager.

Mars:
Where do you get really good developers? It’s different for different types of work because I found like web development, you can find people. In the Philippines, it’s not that hard anymore. It used to be a little bit tougher. But where do you find that for deep coding? I’m picking your brain right now. So this is not all just for you because I’m looking for something particular, but where do you find that you get the best sort of higher more complex development tool competent type people? Is there a place where you found it works?

Jason Drohn:
Utah.

Mars:
US-based. Right exactly. That’s great. Utah specifically, if you look down to the state.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, US-based. It depends. So we have a coding team in Pakistan and they’ve been with us forever. They’ve built a lot of stuff. They’ve done a lot of PHP stuff.

Mars:
Really good guys over there.

Jason Drohn:
Totally. So we started building access and access was built in React JavaScript and they didn’t know much. My original team doesn’t know much of React so they’re hiring a React guy now as of this morning to handle some of the recoding stuff because React was upgraded from a programming language. It’s where we coded in an older version. But in terms of kind of some of the more complex stuff like we found we’ve had really good luck in Utah.

In Utah, they have particular like districts, but I’ve never been to Utah so I have no idea. But from what I’m told, they have this space that’s kind of set aside called Silicon Slopes which there is a lot of badass programmers there.

Mars:
It’s the Mormon Silicon Valley. That’s basically what I’m picking up from that.

Jason Drohn:
Basically, yes.

Mars:
I’ve been to Salt Lake City quite a few times because I had a bunch of clients in different areas and stuff there a lot, but I didn’t know that about developers. That’s an interesting thing.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah. They have a lot of coder-developer boot camps. DevMountain is one of them. So it’s like a coding school. There are the coders who end up being instructors. There’s a lot of companies, a lot of startup companies in Utah now, a lot of tech startups. Although, it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out with the pandemic and how all of that. So I was just reading in Andreessen Horowitz’s blog post, the venture capitalist.

Mars:
Yeah.

Jason Drohn:
He was saying right now like it’s never a better time to start a software company. If you don’t need a lot of funding because there are only so many venture capitalists who are like actually funding right now, but talent hasn’t been cheaper in a long time because there are so many people out of work.

Mars:
That’s actually what I’m finding too in a bunch of different areas. It isn’t just in development.

Jason Drohn:
No, no, no. Yeah.

Mars:
It’s amazing. Everyone who’s gone like, “Oh god. The struggle we’re in.” I was thinking, dude, and this is a little sidebar, but I wrote this piece on my great-grandfather. He’s my great-great-grandfather, but my grandfather taught me how to paint like portraits. Oil portraits were my originals spur-like crafted business.

He would sneak little things in about stuff that had happened to him when he was younger. He went through World War I like 70 million people died. World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, Spanish flu, all these things. It’s like a billion people total through all those things and right now so many of my friends are like, “Man, this is so…” It’s like, “Dude, get…”

I mean, look, anybody dies and it’s a bad thing. Anybody gets sick and it’s not a good thing, but right now for my business, I mean like it’s awesome, dude to be honest with you. And that isn’t pandering to people who are worried about…

I see a lot of people doing like, how to make money in the pandemics. It has nothing to do with it. I just find that talent and drive right now are like through the roof, dude. Through the roof, dude.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah. I think the drive is the big one. I mean, there’s a Tony Robbins’ quote that fear and excitement are the same emotion under a different context.

Mars:
Oh, yeah, yeah. That’s great.

Jason Drohn:
When this all started, for me, there was just kind of an overwhelming feeling of excitement because the world is changing literally. But under a different context, a different pretense than that same feeling is fear. Which way are you going to use it? Are you going to use it to fuel your drive or are you going to use it to sit in front of the couch and watch Netflix?

Mars:
Right, because some people try and numb it, right? But here’s the thing that I’ve learned in terms of… And you already know this, but like this is a study that I read. So one of the things, that first tool that I showed, that headline tool, checks for three variables.

It checks for negativity or positivity for each word. It checks for a feeling of empowerment or disempowerment for each word and it also checks for excitement level for each word.

A word can be very negative like the word gun is a negative word overall to most of society. Rifle, gun, handgun, all those words are like that. It’s very interesting to see how those sorts. But the thing is for excitement level, how excited it makes somebody feel.

The word gun is one of the hot words, one of the top 20 hot words as you can imagine. But the point of it is, the study that I read which is actually what got me into that list that I built that to a law firm is that the single greatest number of people buy when their excitement level is elevated.

It doesn’t matter if it’s negative or positive. You could call that fear or positive excitement, enthusiasm. Both of them are forms of excitement. So fear versus enthusiasm. If you want to motivate somebody or get them to take any kind of action, the main thing you got to get them to do is get excited which is why sometimes you look at people and you go, “What the heck is this guy selling? He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The thing isn’t even all that great, but he’s super excited on camera.”

I’ll tell you right now those guys, they sell stuff because they understand one exciting core thing is the key to motivation and right now people are… I take excitement as a sort of the neutral version of enthusiasm versus fear.

People are excited. They’re either enthused because they’re like, “Holy crap, I finally have an excuse to sort of build my business or [inaudible 00:45:02] thing over here.” Or they’re afraid. But either way, the one thing it does is the hive is swarming and right now finding developers, finding video guys, finding customers, finding clients.

I mean I don’t want to jinx myself. I don’t have any wood to knock on. [inaudible 00:45:16] Anyway, the level of excitement right now is through the roof and anybody who understands that especially when it comes to software sort of answering that excitement whether it’s fear or enthusiasm is like you’re set, dude. You are set.

Jason Drohn:
I think we got one more thing to cover. So we talked about building software, we talked about developers, we talked about pricing. The one thing left is how do you find the traffic? Are there some ways kind of some tried-and-true Mars approved to traffic generation strategies?

Mars:
I got three.

Jason Drohn:
Okay.

Mars:
And they’re the basics. They’re the basics, but those are my three versions. So number one is like for instance a headline tool, the way Michelle uses it because she’s the content marketer. She does not like selling. She’s in the blogosphere. So she goes out and she just shares it in different groups and does a post about how to write…

She’s got a thing called Lingo Dynamics which is basically about the different ways people perceive words and how they use them, and the word charge of things. So she’ll anchor to that sometimes. Sometimes people are like, “I’m not getting any results and social.” People come to that from the places where she’s posted her content and that being the link that she associates with the post.

So from a free traffic standpoint, posting on Facebook to your groups and even on your profile and stuff like that, super easy if you got a piece of software where there’s a free level that they can play around with, okay?

Jason Drohn:
Good.

Mars:
That’s number one. Number two, obviously like Facebook ads and so forth. No brainer. If I say, “Hey, are your ads not converting?” I’m very specific. I don’t just say to you, “Your headlines suck.” That’s a problem. Hey, your ad is not converting. Here’s probably why your ad line probably is doing these things. Here’s a free tool. Come check it out. The tool itself, the free version is optimized. You get them to opt-in.

Then the last one for me is partner stuff. Because I’m pretty well-connected and this is something everybody can do, but everybody has some level of connection to partners. It’s just a matter of how high the influence is, i.e. when I was doing a project with Agora with Rich Schefren and Agora Financial recently, and then I showed them Proof Factory.

Joe Schriefer, the guy who runs Agora Financial was like, “Dude, I need that now. I need it in all my divisions, et cetera.” While we were doing the campaign itself, I mean I as a service provider, my team came in there, did the live stream, and then it was like Russell Brunson, Ryan Deiss, Katrina Ruth, all the heavy hitters because Rich knows them. And Rich knows me. I am an opportunist.

Rich Schefren is a really good friend of mine so I was like, “Dude, how about this. You don’t have any tools with your newsletter. So what about if we give a hook line dynamic away as a thing, as like a kicker to push people off the fence. Hey, you’re talking about getting this. I also want to give you this cool thing so you can synthesize all this information.”

So basically every hour, because it was a 24-hour broadcast, every hour a little commercial with me ran that was like, “Hey, get this thing.” And I always just put like for my nose down or my goatee. This is rare for me to be in a video like this.

I just started doing it. I started the same as you because it’s like I’m compelled to do this at this point. I’m a behind-the-scenes guy, but my point is free traffic through content, link to something for free that gets up people the result, and then have it optimized so that you can get them in the chute.

Paid traffic, very specific target. Not just headlines but specific ad lines, email subject lines. I’m targeting different audiences with a very particular result from that tool, and then partner stuff which is just like you and I are talking about. Not that I don’t know what your audience is like, but at some point like, “Hey, dude. Let’s do a promotional thing.” That kind of thing comes up all the time because the tools are good.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, totally.

Mars:
So those are my three general sorts of traffic approaches.

Jason Drohn:
Dude, I love it. Facebook ads are paid. You have great free group stuff. For the people who want a little bit kind of a grassroots strategy, a little bit of organic. Then you have the partner thing which is always good, leveraging partners and leveraging relationships. It takes a little bit of time to build up those partners and relationships. But I’ll tell you right now because everybody is locked inside, everybody is craving connection.

Mars:
I’m six foot five, dude. This is the thing I noticed. Michelle and I talk about this all the time. If a woman is well-endowed… This is going to be horrible and I hope I don’t offend anybody in your audience, but let’s be honest. A lot of times the reason why they’re not necessarily… A dude is a buff, it could be, either way, they don’t have to learn how to talk.

People just let them in the club. They give them a job. They do whatever. We all know that that’s a reality. It’s the same thing when you’re six foot five. When I’m in person with somebody, my presence, just because of my size, honestly it’s compelling and profound.

But virtually, it’s tough for me dude, because it doesn’t translate… When they meet me in person, they go, “Dude, you’re a freaking giant.” Tony Robbins is the only person… There’s one other dude that’s bigger than me in the space in which I travel.

In-person, it’s not that hard for me so I’d be making connections, but online, it’s been tough because I’m like a dumb buff guy in away. I don’t know how to do the virtual thing. Michelle is great at it. She’s like five… I think not even five feet. If I say that, she’s going to get mad at me, but she’s five foot according to her.

She’s from Alaska where there were no connections, no networking parties, or anything. She is like a master of doing stuff online. But even I, even sucky at doing virtually not in-person stuff, right now I am having the best time and I’m going, “Man, I should have been doing it this way the whole time.” Fun places and stuff like that. So that opportunity is through the roof right now.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, definitely. Well, man. I am so excited. I think we need to figure out what we’re going to talk about next and just talk about that.

Mars:
I’ll tell you what, man. So when Dr. Daigle… Chris Daigle is a mutual friend of ours. He was like, “You need to follow this, dude.” I was like, “Okay, Daigle.” He’s telling me this so therefore I must. But what I’ve discovered just in interacting with you like in the few times, because we’re new friends, is like that I need to be doing something with this guy. So at any point that you want to do anything or you need anything from me, man, I’ll just come out and say it, just let me know because I always get a feeling when I should do something. I don’t care if it’s a year from now or tomorrow. It doesn’t matter.

Jason Drohn:
Certainly.

Mars:
At some point, dude, let’s do another thing because I [inaudible 00:51:54] that I could talk about. At some point, I want to interview you on our show. There are three very specific things I want to ask you about. I’m going to keep them kind of a mystery right now.

Even just in our few discussions so far, I’m like, “Man, he knows something about this thing that everybody else that I talked to think they understand.” And your way of synthesizing it is very similar to mine, only you have different information than me. What I mean by that is I’m fairly balanced between a sort of creative brain and a logical brain. I’m leaning towards the creative brain, but pretty close as compared to most people who are heavy one way or the other. And you’re the same way.

I find that for me anyways and my audience of people that type of brain resonates because I don’t want somebody who’s just delivering me the technical tactics and so forth. I just have a hard time with that, man.

But I also don’t want somebody who likes feathers and crystals like fluff. I’m not getting any meat potatoes out of it. My meal has to be balanced. So I’m hoping you and I do some cool stuff. I’ve enjoyed this interview.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, I love it. I’m excited. Cool. So thank you, everybody, who watched us riff for 53 minutes. We’re going to do something else fun. I don’t know quite what it’s going to be, but we’re going to talk about making some money or something. I don’t know.

Mars:
Okay.

Jason Drohn:
All right. I’ll talk to you soon.

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Strategies On Starting Your own Agency At Home https://doneforyou.com/starting-a-marketing-agency/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=starting-a-marketing-agency Tue, 12 May 2020 14:00:27 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10589 Today, we’re going to talk about starting a marketing agency from your house. Marketing agency, branding agency you name it and offer services, internet marketing services. Basically, whatever digital services you want. Right now, starting a marketing agency is a great idea. And it’s easy to do! First of all, if you’re new to me, […]

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Today, we’re going to talk about starting a marketing agency from your house. Marketing agency, branding agency you name it and offer services, internet marketing services. Basically, whatever digital services you want. Right now, starting a marketing agency is a great idea. And it’s easy to do!

First of all, if you’re new to me, my name is Jason Drohn. I created doneforyou.com, and my specialty is in creating and selling stuff online. Basically, or helping businesses create products, offers, programs. Then put together an automated way of selling those things through paid traffic, free traffic, whatever.

Now, back when I first started, so I started online in 2006. The first offer, the first product, the first thing that I ever did was wrote an 18-page ebook on how to pick up clients. The first three or four years that I was online was a tumultuous time because I was trying to figure out blogging. For those of you who know my origin story. I was a Pepsi truck driver and drove semi for five years. In my third year at Pepsi, I ended up going back to school.

I was driving semi-truck full time and I was also going to college full time. So I was working about 60 hours a week and also taking a full course load. I ended up finishing with two degrees in five years from school. In my sophomore junior year I ended up starting my first company, and that was in 2006.

From 2006 to like 2009-2010 was just a shit show because I started doing web design and that kind of stuff. Then fell in love with blogging and advertising and passive income. So that was where that how I got into that. It wasn’t until like 2010-2011 I started figuring out affiliate marketing.

At that time I was working with clients. I would work with a couple of clients doing the web design and whatever. I knew how to pick up clients. And I wrote like an ebook on how to pick up those clients. It was 10 strategies on how to work with local businesses. How to do this local marketing thing as it was called now, or as it was called then. Now it’s like just agency work.

Starting a marketing agency
Starting a marketing agency

Starting a Marketing Agency

This ebook ended up being 18 pages long. I gave it to a friend to put on her membership site. Then before I knew it, I had a couple of hundred downloads. I think it was 280 downloads or something, 280 new leads for this free ebook. With those leads, I ended up serving them and saying, “Hey, what would you like to be taught on? What else can I teach you?” And they filled out the survey, and I went put together a video course. So the first video course that I ever created was was on local marketing. It was called Local Money Matrix. And it was all about starting a marketing agency.

This “starting a marketing agency” piece just feels like it came full circle because agencies now, there are branding agencies, there is paid traffic like PPC agencies. I’ll just start going through the slides here.

There are branding agencies, largely design, and it might be one person, two people, three people like in an office, there’s like designed focus agencies or studios, there are direct marketing agencies and like performance marketing agencies, there is a digital marketing and new media as sometimes it’s called, it’s not called new media anymore, but digital marketing, yes, like pay-per-click, there’s social media, there’s public relations or creative or media buying or influencer agencies.

There are all kinds of different specialties that fall underneath this block of agencies, and it just depends on what you’re into, what you’re good at, what you find yourself working in. There’s a web design, there is software development. I mean, there are all kinds of professional groups that can fall underneath this starting a marketing agency banner, it just depends on what it is you want to do.

2 Broad Categories of Advertising Agencies

1. Full-service Ad Agencies

Full service or integrated agencies offer a complete range of ad-related services across all media and markets. They may use multiple tactics like advertising, email, and social media in an integrated marketing initiative. So these are your traditional full-stack agencies, they do web design, they do newspaper ads, they do television ads, radio ads, a little bit visual.

They tend to be like a jack of all trades, sometimes they are a master to none, sometimes they prefer one and the rest is just other stuff that they do.

2. Specialized Ad Agencies

There are specialized agencies that do one thing or a few things, like attract and engage influencers.

Influencer Marketing

So there’s a local agency here that that’s all they do, is influencer marketing. So they hook brands up with influencers and that’s it.

I have a friend-partner who just does Facebook ads, and that’s all he does. Well, now they’re doing YouTube and Google and stuff, but Facebook is their primary, that’s where they start. Each agency typically does something a little different. I mean, we do Facebook ads, Google ads and sales funnels, marketing automation.

The marketing automation sales funnel piece is that’s where we spend the bulk of our time. It’s every agency that does one thing or another thing well.

Branding and Web Design

Other agencies just do branding. They’re just really, really good at branding. They also do web design because their clients need their stuff online.

Now, starting a marketing agency assumes that you’ve got a special skill set. As it comes to marketing, so like Facebook ads or web development or TV commercials or video, or you’re well connected in a certain space. So you have a Rolodex of website owners or a Rolodex of like publicists or newspaper writers, you know what I mean? Like you have connections that you can leverage for the success of your clients.

Connect With Your Clients

The trick to starting a marketing agency is connecting clients with you so that you can do that thing for them, preferably on a retainer. So you’re selling yourself and the results of your thing. And that’s where the sales funnel comes in. So many of the agencies that we’ve worked within the past that we’ve built sales funnels for, that’s why we do like fully qualified lead sales video.

Basically, it is a sales video, it’s a website all centered around a sales video or sales presentation, and then underneath that sales video sales presentation is an application that somebody would fill out the application and then get added onto like strategy session call. We made the pitch and we learn about our client on our extra strategy session. Based on the session, we will figure out whether the clients are a good fit or not. In terms of the acquisition, it’s very inbound-oriented.

There are a lot of agencies that do outbound stuff and they end up spamming people and emailing them and cold calling them, whatever. It’s just not something that we like to do a whole lot. But when you start though, you want to make sure you specialize, there are lots of full-service agencies, but you don’t want to compete with them because they’re going to win.

Specialize a Niche

So as an upstart, if you are also full scale then the established businesses in your community are going to go with the more reputable brand. If you specialize in one thing, it’s very easy to differentiate yourself from everybody else. Facebook ads management is one, or print publication for eBooks in digital media. So if you can specialize in one thing and carve a niche out in one thing, then it’s easier to attract the rest of the business because you’re going to do that one thing better than the bigger agencies.

It might be logo design and product packaging, or e-commerce product shops set up advertising. You might be like an eCommerce agency. So, but even then if you’re being that we’re not necessarily community-based anymore, with the world being the internet and you can advertise for whatever you want and put sales material together for whatever you want, then attracting clients is going to be a whole lot easier if you are specializing in something.

As an example of starting a marketing agency… If eCommerce product shots set up advertising is your thing, then that’s awesome. I mean, you’re going to be picking up eCommerce clients left and right because so many e-commerce folks need the product shots, the setup, the Shopify set up or the Amazon store setup, and then the advertising for that thing too.

Starting a marketing agency
Starting a marketing agency

It’s better to specialize in eCommerce because there are hundreds of thousands of prospective clients for you in your specialty as long as they can find you, as long as you put up a couple of ads or you are ranking for keyword phrases, or you’re being referred to those people. So as long as you are where they need you to be, then you’re going to end up raking in the business into your agency.

Now, starting a marketing agency by specializing is how prospects connect you to their problem. Look at full-service firms, they’re so generic. The only reason they sell is that they have relationships that they’ve been building for 50 years. I have a couple of clients, they are traditional brick and mortar clients. Every time they get marketing material from a competitive agency, they always send it to me.

I chuckle because the material is so generic. Basically, it is, we do branding, we do print publication, we do internet advertising, we do web design. Yet it’s only two people in an office and then they outsource the rest of it or is three people in an office.

So how can three people like be specialists in so many disparate things as opposed to just specializing in one or two, and then them just being really, really good at those one or two things, and then they can send the work to other agencies.

It’s just something to think about in starting a marketing agency and figuring out what you are going to be good at, how you’re going to attract clients are just making sure your offer the thing that you’re most passionate about and you’re the best at. Or I mean, you can have a shotgun approach if you have like crazy social media exposure, like you can do whatever the hell you want, so.

But your website needs to speak to that specialization. If you do eCommerce product shots, then your website should be about eCommerce product shots. It shouldn’t be about Facebook advertising. You want a clear homepage, clear services, and lead magnets. Then you want an automated webinar with some testimonials and case studies. Any more, you need to have a sales video with a form. Also, an application underneath which lets people pre-qualify. What happens is if somebody goes to an automated webinar and they have to leave early, or they just plain old don’t take action when you tell them to, but then they think about you a month later.

They don’t want to have to sit through your entire webinar. Furthermore, they want to be able to go just to a page and sign up for the webinar. They’d sign up for a call with you. They don’t want to have to jump through the hoops when they already know you’re the person for them, but they don’t. You want to make sure that the website has a quick-start way to get in touch with you, to get ahold of you. That’s the quickest way to starting a marketing agency.

Consultative Selling

Now, all your sales are going to come through consultative selling. So as an agency, at least when you’re starting a marketing agency, I mean, we talked about product selling in the past, product selling is good for agencies, but you’re still, even if you productize your offer you sell web design, web design on average, your web design is $5,000, let’s say, or $10,000.

That website is going to have 20 or 25 normal pages with normal plugins, with normal design. So that blanket website, $10,000, anything additional onto that, then you have like some pretty set pricing. So it might be $500 per additional page or whatever, but you still are going to be selling on the phone. You’re not going to be getting the fees that you want to get if you’re running people through an order form like an add-to-cart order form.

You’re still going to be getting on the phone with these people because it is a complex sale. So that’s one of the reasons why webinars work well. Then you can retarget people back through a sales video, but this is high touch. It’s inexpensive, it’s a high price, high touch, high complexity offer, so you’re going to need to make some customization. Make sure that you understand where your customers are coming from, where your clients are coming from, what they need to be done, how they’re different than everybody else because everybody’s fucking different. Even though they might not necessarily be it’s, they’re different, their model is different. Then just understand that and then set everything up from there.

Automated Webinar

When starting a marketing agency, your best sales conversion tool is going to be the automated webinar that’s got a call to action of a call scheduling form with you or your sales rep. Basically, they come in, they hit a page. On that page, there’s a form underneath, the form pops up. They fill out the form, then they go off to your calendar. Then referrals need to go through the same sales process minus the automated webinar. It’s another reason why you have a sales video up.

Typically, a referral needs all of the information that a cold traffic person or warm traffic is going to have. One of the reasons our sales processes are so effective is because everybody has the same material leading up to like a call. They download the lead magnet and they sign up for the webinar. They fill out the form, they know what we do and they know how we do it. They’ve seen lots of examples of how we do it. Also, they know that we know what we’re doing. Referral needs all of that too.

Now, like when we get referred like I just send referrals to the front side of like our sales funnels because they get exposure to our process and us and who we are that way. As opposed to, if they just sidestep the whole thing. You end up having to teach them and train them and everything. Like we use the sales funnel for both cold and warm in the referral traffic, or all three. Then once sold, fulfillment starts. For us like we set up Basecamp profiles, we set up Dropbox accounts, we set up software access, we set up all that stuff, onboarding forms.

Once the project kicks off then we end up deploying our to-do lists in Basecamp. Tasks are assigned to who it needs to get assigned to and then we go from there. Now for pricing, so pricing agencies, pricing work. This is very definitely not a science, but for pricing, considering they are dealing with multiple clients is like having a lot of bosses.

If you have 20 clients, if there are 20 active clients on your roster, then you have 20 bosses. Depending on how you set up your organization, I mean, there’s going to be project managers and account managers, and everything else. You need to make sure that your pricing is conducive to having that level of commitment to work. So it’s going to take about 70% longer to do something with clients than if it was on your own.

I can’t tell you, there are times when starting a marketing agency, where it’s like we’ll build like an automated webinar for us, or like a sales funnel for us, and it’s like, “Wow, that was quick.” And then the same process, same team members, same everything we end up doing for clients and it takes like three times, four times, five times longer, but it’s because of the back and forth and there’s just a lot of things that you need to take into consideration when working with clients because it’s their schedules, it’s everything else, so you just need to account for that, and when in doubt charge more. Establish a price floor, you don’t work less than X amount of money, instead of packages for services.

With starting a marketing agency that specializes in ad management is X or logo design is Y, you price like Netflix. The right client is going to be easy, every once in a while you’ll get a pain in the ass. And then the middle of road pricing between the two gives you pricing simplicity. At least that’s generally how we set up pricing. It is how a lot of the agencies who we’ve worked with have set up pricing. Then you also want to make sure that you have those floors in it too.

If you want an agency but don’t want to do the selling or the fulfillment work, you should visit doneforyou.com and check out our agency network. You introduce us or send a lead, we sell it for you, we do the work and you get paid. It’s something we’ve been doing for quite a while. We sell it, fulfill it, the whole deal.

But all in all, I mean, starting an agency, it’s a lucrative way of generating some solid revenue. If you were good online like if you have a skill you do some branding. You do some video editing, you do some video work or design work or copywriting, or ads, ad management, anything. It’s also pretty easy to pick up the skills required to start an agency. So it might be a way of starting a side hustle, something that turns into a full-time gig. So it’s just keeping in mind.

For Questions and Guide

If you have any questions at all you can jump into the chatbox here and let me know. Furthermore, if you would like to talk about putting together an action plan to starting a marketing agency or to some more agency clients or to start an agency or whatever, then go to doneforyou.com/start. We’ll make sure to get an action plan for you. And I think that’s about it, it was a quick one today.

Tomorrow we’re talking about software and it’s going to be a long one. I have a guest, Mars is going to be on with me tomorrow. We’re just going to geek out on software, which I am excited about because of wireframing and starting up software offers. That’s going to be the goal, is how do you start a software SAAS project? So it’d be exciting.

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Starting Consulting Business How To https://doneforyou.com/start-a-consulting-business/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=start-a-consulting-business https://doneforyou.com/start-a-consulting-business/#comments Mon, 11 May 2020 14:00:46 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10584 Welcome to GSD Daily. Today we have a very exciting episode for you. We’re going to talk about how to start a consulting business right now. In today’s time, and space, and all that happy stuff. At first, I struggled a little bit to figure out if I wanted to talk about just coaching or […]

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Welcome to GSD Daily. Today we have a very exciting episode for you. We’re going to talk about how to start a consulting business right now. In today’s time, and space, and all that happy stuff. At first, I struggled a little bit to figure out if I wanted to talk about just coaching or just consulting.

I realized, as I was kind of going through and creating the slides for both, that they’re very similar. The output is different. The way people interact with their clients is different. But the client acquisition piece is the same.

What we’re going to do is we’re going to talk about how to start a consulting business, why they’re different, how they’re the same, what prices we can charge coaching and consulting, and really kind of drill into how you can make money with them, at the end of the day.

Right now, there’s so much experience and so much knowledge and so much expertise out there that isn’t being used, because people lost their jobs, or because people are not working, or they’re working from home, or they’re trying to establish a side hustle. There’s so much experience that really, really could help a lot of people, and a lot of business owners and a lot of just people make transformations in their life.

Being that it’s untapped, being that it isn’t bundled in a service, then sometimes it’s just hard to get started up. Today what I want to do is put a lot of that material out there. Hopefully, you can kind of latch onto some of it, and then explore what a consulting business or what a coaching business could look like in your life, or add it to something that you are currently doing.

First of all, for those who don’t know who I am, my name is Jason Drohn. I am the creator of Doneforyou.com. What we do is we specialize in helping people create and sell their stuff online, whether it is a business, or whether a digital product or whatever, building sales funnels, automating marketing, all of it kind of comes back to the create and sell the piece. That’s what we’re good at. And today, we’re going to talk about building and how to start a consulting business.

When thinking about how to start a consulting business, it’s interesting because, over the last four or five years, I have seen explosive growth in coaching. Consulting has always been there. Consulting has always been around. It’s easy to start a consulting business. Even like when I used to work at Pepsi, there would be consultants who walked through every once in a while. But coaching, in the last three or four years, has just been on an explosive journey.

And we’ve worked with so many coaches, so many coaches with their sales funnels.

Types of Coaching

At first, there was just like a life coach, or a coach, or a business coach. But now every kind of little tiny segment has its coach. And a lot of this is driven by coaches who are trying to differentiate themselves and kind of brand themselves as being a certain or special kind of coach. But some of the types of coaching.

1. Performance Coaching

You can think of somebody like Tony Robbins, even Brendon Burchard, kind of in that performance coaching world. Performance is whatever you think it is. So it might be how to get more done in a day, or it might be performed in business, or it might be a performance like athletic performance. So you can be a performance coach, and it’d still be within the vertical that you are a specialist in.

2. Skills Coaching

3. Career Coaching

Career coaching is another kind of genre that has crept up.

4. Personal Life Coaching

Personal life coaching has always been there. And any more like being a life coach, doing life coaching, it’s kind of a difficult sell because it’s like you can coach in anything. What do you coach in?

5. Business Coaching

6. Executive Coaching

7. Wellness Coaching

8. Relationship Coaching

9. Parenting Coaching

10. Spiritual Coaching

11. Wealth Coaching

If one of these sings to you, then it might be worth investigating. But really, it’s finding the niche, finding the thing that you’re good at, that you’re gifted in, that you like to do, and then figuring out how to help people there.

start a consulting business

Being a Consultant

Now on the consultant side, being a consultant is a little bit different in that there are human resources or HR consultants, strategy consultants, technology consultants, or PR consultants. So these are very business-oriented things. Marketing consultants, legal, IT, social media consultants. The White House has consultants. So it’s just different.

What is the difference between how to start a consulting business and how to start a coaching business?

Coaching pulls out answers from the clients, while consulting tells the client what to do. So when you’re a coach, your job is to ask questions, focused questions, that get somebody where they need to go.

As a consultant, you advise somebody on the right thing to do. You tell them what to do. Or you write the manual that tells them and their team what to do. That’s what a consultant does. A good coach is a good listener. They seek to understand through thoughtful and sincere inquiry, without judgment. Consultants, on the other hand, provide solutions. Now, say you’re learning how to ride a bicycle.

A consultant would ride the bicycle for a while and write you a how-to manual on doing it. A coach would have you get on the bicycle and walk alongside you. So they would guide you, as you were riding the bicycle, as they were walking with you.

Coaching vs Consulting

Coaching is the building of capacity, and consulting is helping the client resolve a particular business challenge. When thinking about how to start a consulting business, a consultant is usually a subject matter expert who provides technical and professional advice to clients, based on their significant understanding, knowledge, and experience. Whereas a coach helps clients find their clarity and answers.

Now it’s very rare that a good coach is a good consultant. It’s also very rare that a good consultant is a good coach. It does happen, but a lot of times, when somebody says they’re a coach, they’re a consultant, and vice versa. They might be a consultant and they’re a coach.

Like myself, I’m a much better consultant than a coach. And a lot of our clients, are better coaches than they are consultants. It’s just, do you ask a lot of questions? Do you help your clients arrive somewhere through their inquiry, and their answers, to the questions you ask? Or do you just give them the answer? If you give them the answer, you’re a consultant, which is where I like to play. It’s not even where I play. It’s where I just end up being.

Now when you’re coaching, you help them explore possibilities for themselves that they might not see. When you consult, you take those possibilities and provide them with options, based on your knowledge and experience. So you still show them the possibilities, but then you say, “Based on what I know, these two are your paths. And you pick one and then I’ll help you get there.” So that ends up being a consultant.

Whereas a coach is going to say, “These are the four things that you can do.” And then start asking questions. And then those four things, it might be throughout a couple of days, or a couple of weeks, or whatever, but then the client ends up picking one of those four things and going that route. And then the coach kind of steers them that way by asking questions. But they do it on their own, as opposed to a consultant who is like, “You need that one right there.”

This top of how to start a consulting business is getting more and more popular every single day. We talked about this. Sales offers and processes between coaching and consulting are similar. So when we build a sales funnel for client acquisition, the process between coaching and consulting is the same because you still need to get somebody to raise their hand and say, “Yes, I need help.” That help could be coaching or consulting. It just depends on what the bridge is… as I hit my microphone. It just depends on what the bridge is into the sales call, or into the offer.

If somebody watches a video, clicks the button below, fills out a form, and says they need help with organizing their HR department, it could be a coach. The coach could help HR clients organize the HR department. Or it could also be a consultant. It could be an HR consultant. So the offer doesn’t matter. People are going to end up raising their hands and saying, “Yes, I need help.”

Now when you’re a coach or consultant, you’re selling yourself. You’re selling accountability, you’re selling the results you are providing. You’re selling transformation, at the end of the day. It doesn’t matter how you get there. That ends up being what your offer is, is transformation. So with the right website, the right sales funnel, which is usually like an automated webinar sales funnel, or a sales video.

We call them FQL sales funnels. Like two or three weeks ago, we did an entire workup on these FQL sales funnels for, let’s call it, a fully qualified lead video sales letter funnel. They watch a video, they fill out a form underneath, and then they’re into your process. That form kicks over to your calendar application, and then they go from there.

But generally, what you’re doing in your sales funnel on your website is you’re generating consultative sales calls. So to sell, after you start a consulting business, you have to relate your coaching or consulting offer to their business. When you’re looking at our grid, the grid is we have complexity on the bottom and price on the side.

Coaching and consulting end up being a high complexity, high price offer. So you are smack squarely in the middle of an automated webinar sales funnel with a sales call at the end. You can use a sales video if you have some testimonials and some case studies and stuff. You can use a sales video too, and then get them to apply underneath, or if you built a brand for a while.

That’s how you sell the coaching or the consultation. And really, the coaching or the consulting package is generally made up… generally, as in there are other things you can throw in here… but normally when you’re selling coaching and consulting, what you’re selling is you have the number of times you’re meeting every month. So the access frequency. Which is typically you meet weekly, you meet bi-weekly, or you meet monthly. Oftentimes weekly is too often, and coaches and consultants end up doing bi-weekly. It depends on what kind of coaching and consulting you’re doing and how quickly you start a consulting business.

If you’re doing executive coaching, executive consulting, weekly ends up being pretty frequent. Unless you have a very high-level kind of person, then the frequency of coaching ends up being… it’s just too frequent. It’s not enough time for your client to do anything. Because there are only seven days. Five days working. So you give them homework, you assign a task, you tell them to read a book, whatever. It’s unlikely they’re going to be able to do what you want them to do. So bi-weekly ends up working a little bit better usually. Or monthly, if it’s a slower commitment. But other kinds weekly work out great.

Modality

The other thing to think about is your modality. Is it video chat? Is it phone calls, or group calls, or email check-ins or Slack, Skype? Now, most of it is video. It is Zoom calls.

  1. video chat
  2. phone calls
  3. emails

Now with everybody craving community, craving being social while still being at home, everybody’s looking for video chat. So video chat has just become the default way that we communicate. But phone calls works. Group calls works. Email check-ins every once in a while, it’s a good idea, Slack, Skype, it’s also a good idea. And it might be that if you do a weekly video call, you have one kind of pricing tier. And if you do a monthly phone call, you have a different kind of pricing tier.

I have clients who charge $4,000 a month and they don’t get on the phone. It’s all email. Or it’s calling me when you need something. So it’s basically like a $4,000 support system. So it works for them. Their clients are happy to pay it because they’re being helped with things that are worth more than $4,000 a month. I mean, these end up being 50, 100, 150, $200,000 deals. So it just depends on what you’re offering.

The other thing to think about in your offer is how long you’re going to be on the phone, or how long you’re going to be actually in process with this person. Is it 15-minute sessions, 30-minute sessions, 60-minute sessions? So understand that it’s not just 60 minutes or 30 minutes. I mean, you might be on the phone for 30 minutes, but then you’re taking notes.

Then you’re thinking about this client and thinking about this deal and this project, and this whatever, a couple of hours a week, off and on. So this client, although you might be on the phone with them for 30 minutes, is taking up three or four hours of headspace. So what is that worth to you?

A lot of times where I get kind of caught in the weeds is I’ll do six or seven sales calls in a week. And then, in my head, I’m building all those sales funnels. And then at the end of the week, I’m just burnt. Because it’s like, wow, I built all this stuff. And it’s like, I didn’t build a damn thing. I built it all in my head. So all of that headspace was being occupied by all of these projects. So it’s just something to think about.

Scheduled in advance or as-needed calls. There’s another thing you kind of have to just wrap your head around. So do you want them like every Tuesday, or every Wednesday, every Thursday? Or every other Thursday you’re going to kind of pencil in a time for them? Or is it just as needed? Do they just call when they think they have something to talk to you about? Two different pricing for each probe. And then, of course, specifics to what you’re going to be helping your client with. You want to know what kind of transformation you’re going to be making in their life.

Possible Monthly Earnings

Now when it comes to how to start a consulting business, the most successful coaches and consultants, the ones who have done the best with us, are high ticket coaches. So these are people who are typically charging like $2,500 a month for four one-on-one sessions. So it might even be 2,500 a month for like two one-on-one sessions. That tends to be the pricing that works well. It’s 2,500 a month for four sessions. 1500 a month for two sessions… I don’t know that I have a slide on this. I do not.

Now, this sounds like fucking great money. 2,500 a month. But like I just said. So let’s say you’re making 2,500 per month for four one-on-one sessions. That sounds awesome, right? So there’s only 40 hours’ worth of time in a week. So you have one-hour sessions, four times a month. Now that one-hour session, like I just said in the last slide, that one-hour session takes up 30 minutes of notes, and then two and a half hours of brain post-processing time. So, I mean, you’re looking at four hours a month dedicated to that client.

So if you’re spending four hours on a client every single week, how many clients can you have? Well, you can have like 10, 12. Most coaches and consultants that I’ve worked with, end up topping out at about 10. So at $2,500 a month, you’re looking at 25,000 a month in revenue. Again, that sounds like great fucking money.

But then you start to factor in health insurance, and taxes, and technology, and computers, and the internet, and Zoom subscriptions, and team, your VA for scheduling the appointments, and the advertising for when one leaves and you got to replace them. So you start scheduling in all of that kind of business expenses, And now you’re looking at eight, 10 grand a month for having a full calendar that you are working your ass off for.

Does it make sense? Are you still excited about how to start a consulting business? I mean, you would be the judge of this. But does it make sense? Do you need more? Do you need to up your prices? Is it possible to do maybe bi-weekly sessions? Do you need to do less but make more? Do you need to jump into a video course plus coaching? There are lots of other ways which is the next thing. A thousand per month for group coaching. So it’s 10 per group and two calls per month.

Now you’re making 10 grand for two calls per month, and you don’t have near the headspace that you do on one-on-one sessions because the groups tend to coach themselves. You end up being kind of a moderator on these group coaching calls. So it’s just a different model, just a different way to think about it. Or 5,000 for three months, prepaid. So it’s 5,000 chunk upfront, and maybe this particular client is either bi-weekly schedule, or they schedule whenever they want.

It’s up to you. It’s your business. How you structure it is totally up to you. You need to provide a transformative and accountable result to them. That’s what you’re selling. You’re selling the transformation, you’re selling the accountability, and helping them work through stuff.

Now, using tools like Zoom or GoToMeeting, you can most likely target the entire country with your advertising. Perhaps all English-speaking areas of the world. I mean, we have clients in the UK, we have clients in New Zealand, Australia. I don’t do straight-up coaching, but there is a certain element of what we do that is consultative. So it doesn’t matter where you go if you’re using digital.

Use Digital

Now everybody’s using digital. You have to use digital. So you can target all of the United States if you’d like. And then you can establish your credibility through case studies and testimonials on your website. Or just literally blanketing shit with live streams, or blog posts, or whatever. And then getting referrals from existing clients and friends is always a good one too, and social media helps with that a lot.

Be Accessible

When you start a consulting business, you want to make sure to be accessible. So many people, when they’re working as coaches or consultants, they think that this is true, this is a laptop lifestyle. And at the end of the day, there isn’t a laptop lifestyle. You still literally need to be where you say you’re going to be. Also, you need to answer the phone. You need to schedule. Furthermore, you need to be sitting in front of a computer at certain points of the day, or your phone, or whatever. You need to provide the thing, the result, that people are paying you for. So you want to be accessible.

In your contract, you want to make sure you establish your working times communication preferences. Like if you don’t plan on working on the weekends, then have your hours in your contract. If you prefer to be emailed, then have that in your contract, or Basecamp, or Slack, or whatever. If you want to do coaching calls on GoToMeeting as opposed to Facebook video, make sure to put that in your contract. So that way, everything’s clear right at the very beginning.

If there are any services performed when you start a consulting business, which is a great upsell. It’s a great way to charge more money for what you do. So like done for you services, or do it for me services, DIFM, any kind of tech work, or written plans, or manuals, like any of that stuff. It’s great upsells. Either upsells or great value-adds to your coaching offer. And at the end of the day, every single individual consultant or coach we’ve worked with really tends to have a max number of people they can work with. 10 to 20 is usually the ceiling like I said. 10, if you’re doing weekly one-hour sessions. If you’re doing half-hour sessions or bi-weekly sessions, you can usually go up to 20.

It’s really important to know what your ceiling is, and also that you’re happy with that in terms of time and revenue. If not, it’s time to think about the products and team building. So go back to some of the sessions we recorded last week about creating video courses, creating memberships, creating e-books. There is this thing called assisted learning. I can’t remember if we touched on it last week or not.

What assisted learning is, is where you have a coaching component, but you bundle it as part of your course. So you might sell a membership site, or you might sell monthly, like a monthly video course where somebody logs in to get access. And then you sell, so then you have a coaching component to it.

So the course itself, I mean, it might be 2,500 a month to get access to the course plus you. And then you get on once a month with them, and then answer any questions they have about the training material or any questions they have about the thing. Or maybe you do office hours. Like in our accelerator, that’s what we do. We do office hours. So there are two times throughout the week, it’s a three-hour block of time that you can get on. We can all just rip through pages, or copy, or headlines, or ask questions, or whatever. It’s just how it works out pretty well.

That is how you start a coaching and consulting business, either full-time or as a side hustle. And really, it’s just about figuring out what you want to offer, figure out what kind of transformation you can make in somebody’s life, figuring out what kind of skills you can share, and what you’re good at, and what you like doing, and then offering that for sale.

Now, I have done this long enough that I know that sometimes there’s a big disconnect around the value your services have compared to how much you think you can charge for it. And what I will say there is, generally. So if you’re able to help somebody, if you’re able to make a transformation in somebody’s life, then you should be paid for it. So it doesn’t necessarily.

Anything business, anything money, investing, stock trading, like anything that has to do with money, of course, the ceiling is how much money does it have to do with. So if you are a business consultant and you can make an introduction to somebody… or a business coach… make an introduction to somebody that generates a hundred thousand dollars in sales, then, of course, your value is pretty high because you just generate a hundred thousand dollars in sales for this client.

Whereas if you are a coach, let’s say a stress and anxiety coach, or a parenting coach. Let’s say a parenting coach. So the parenting coach doesn’t have any immediate kind of… it doesn’t flip into more cash or more revenue. But by reducing the stress and anxiety of a person to then let them make more money at work, or let them be more of who they are, or let them get in shape, there’s value there. It might not be 2,500 or $4,000 a month, but it is something.

It might be $500 a month for a coaching call and a course or something. So your pricing would be related to the value somebody was getting. And of course, supply and demand. If you are, really, really in demand, you can charge more, of course. But really, just charge what you’re happy with and people will pay it. And I think that’s about it.

For Questions and Guide

Anybody has any questions, just go ahead and drop them in the comments here. And then if you would like us to go through and talk about your offer, we’re putting together some create offer kind of programs, creating coaching programs, creating that kind of stuff. So there’ll be more on that in the next couple of weeks.

If you would like to talk about putting together your sales funnel, your offer, your ad campaigns, or whatever, go to doneforyou.com/start, and we will put together an action plan for you.

And I think that’s about it. Tomorrow, I think we’re going to talk about agencies, then Wednesday is software. So if you have anything at all, let me know. Go to doneforyou.com/start, and I’ll talk to you soon, all right. Thanks. Bye.

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Building Subscription Website Online https://doneforyou.com/subscription-websites/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=subscription-websites Thu, 07 May 2020 14:00:38 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10533 In our GSddaily episode today, we’re going to talk about how to create subscription websites and membership courses. And we’re going to walk through a couple of different versions, a couple of different variations, or ways to set them up. If you don’t know who I am. My name is Jason Drohn. I have been […]

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In our GSddaily episode today, we’re going to talk about how to create subscription websites and membership courses. And we’re going to walk through a couple of different versions, a couple of different variations, or ways to set them up.

If you don’t know who I am. My name is Jason Drohn. I have been doing this for a very, very long time. My specialty is helping people create and sell their stuff online. Whether that is digital courses, or coaching programs, or consulting, or whatever. We’re pretty good at it.

This week what we’ve been doing is we’ve been talking about different ways to monetize your knowledge. To make money through information products, for the most part, this week. Next week, we’re going to talk about some different modalities. Things like software, or we’re going to talk about software, and we’re going to talk about events and some of the stuff like that.

Now, Monday we talked about digital products. We talked about eBooks. Tuesday and Wednesday we talked about video courses. And here’s the thing, video courses, and subscription websites, work tremendously well. You’re probably always going to be using a membership structure. Because you’re going to be locking, and protecting content.

What you’re going to end up doing is your videos, and your eBooks, most likely you’re going to be trapped, or locked behind some sort of a membership login. That people can’t just download them and freely distribute them to whoever they want. What ends up happening is, you’re going to end up putting them inside subscription websites anyway. You can use that as a way to generate monthly revenue.

If you have a certain number of videos that you want to protect. Or eBooks that you want to protect, you can use a plugin, or put that stuff inside of subscription websites, and then it protects it. And then you can also charge monthly for it. Do you know what I mean?

The presentation is How To Create subscription websites & Courses. And how to monetize and sell those subscription websites and courses so that you can generate some great recurring revenue.

subscription websites

Membership Courses

Membership courses are the easiest and the absolute most lucrative form of digital product long-term.

They don’t require a lot of handholding, typically. Especially like a low-ticket membership. It can be a $37 offer, $37 a month, $67 a month, $97 a month, $10 a month.

You can sell a lot of people in those programs. And then all you’re doing is you’re adding to the membership content, and people are getting value from it, and they continue paying. Every membership has a churn though. It might be three months, it might be four months, it might be seven months. A lot of it depends on what the pricing is, and then what kind of impact your content, your material is having on the person. Those are the two things that kind of influence that churn.

Different Forms of Training

  1. text in the video
  2. audio
  3. text, ebooks, manuals
  4. PDF
  5. video

Now training typically comes in the form of either text in the video. Sometimes it’s audio, all stuff you’ve already learned about. I mean, we talked about the text on Monday. Text and eBooks and training manuals and white papers, and all the different styles of content. The different things that people call PDFs. And then yesterday we talked, or Tuesday we talked about video.

Extracting audio from those video files. And that becomes your video and audio course. And then yesterday we talked about all of the different ways that you can capture your video and audio on your computer and create products. We’ve already covered all of that stuff.

The subscription websites are purely the mechanism that kind of locks it all in and distribute access. A membership course is related more to how the product is fulfilled. And the types of material are the videos, they’re audio texts, there’s group coaching. And you hit all three modalities for online learning.

Subscription

People are hearing, they’re reading, they’re watching, they’re seeing. You’re able to impact everyone with a course. You can also charge a much higher total or monthly if you want. You can do an annual subscription. An annual subscription might be nine months of what a monthly would be. Or you can give a bigger discount on an annual subscription would be six months of the monthly.

Let’s say you were charging 10 bucks a month. You can sell an annual subscription for $90, and somebody saves 30. They end up saving a chunk of change and you locked them in for a year. Now if your churn is typically three months, then you just made six months more revenue by selling that annual license. It’s just something to think about when you’re going through this.

subscription websites

What is the best way to create a membership course?

Now the best way to create a membership course is to do all videos. We have talked about video many, many times in these GSD dailies before. But having video and doing the video once and then transcribing that video is where you need to be. I was just talking to a guy. And we were talking about bridging the gap between organic traffic and paid traffic. And transcribed live streams do a phenomenal job of bridging that gap.

You can boost the live streams to paid traffic, and then you can get them transcribed. And then you’re hitting that organic traffic piece. It works out pretty well that way. Your membership site should be created in the video, and then you have the course transcribed. And then you create your manuals from that. Or your books, or your downloads, or whatever. People can download them, print them out, highlight them, whatever.

That’s how the text-based membership content should be created. You can send those MP3s to a transcriptionist. Like, you can go to Upwork and just post a job for a transcriptionist and you’ll get a hundred applications. I very simply just go to Rev. Rev.com, and they transcribe great stuff. And it’s $1.25 a minute. And now you have all three types of content. You start with the video, you pull out the audio, and then you have the PDF, the book. And you have all three types of content for your subscription websites, which gives maximum value for your members.

Setting Up Membership Site

Now, in setting up subscription websites, it’s pretty formulaic. The easiest… Well, I shouldn’t say the easiest way. The easiest way is to use a piece of software like Teachable, or Kajabi to set up your membership site. That’s the easiest way. You’re also going to be paying for it every month. It’s up to you if you want it to be easy, you don’t mind paying a couple of bucks. That’s awesome.

1. Teachable

Incredibly simple to use. And has some of the front-end sales material and functionality.

2. Kajabi

It has the marketing and sales material functionality and then does the memberships and the logins and everything else, video hosting. All of those platforms take care of all the hard work of the kind of trying to stitch something together. But if you want to own the data, and you don’t want to pay monthly for it, then what you do is build a WordPress site.

3. WordPress

You build a site in WordPress. You find a template that you like. Might be something you find on Invado, or you can pick a free template, it doesn’t matter. And then there are lots of different membership plugins. We’re going to go through two of them.

WordPress Plugins

Wishlist Member

The one that we use most often is Wishlist Member. It’s 97 bucks, nothing crazy, one time. You watch the training videos, you get everything configured, and then you set up to integrate.

Stripe

You integrate payment processing with Stripe. Stripe, super easy to get a merchant processing account. Everything is online. You don’t need to fill out any paperwork. You don’t need to mail anything. We don’t need to talk to anybody on the phone like you used to way back when. So Wishlist Member, really nice to get everything up and running quickly.

Email Autoresponder Software

I’m going to go through a little bit of the setup in today’s daily just because I’m doing it for a client. Might as well, right? Now you also with the membership plugins, you can integrate your email autoresponder software. So that when somebody purchases they’re automatically added into an email list. This is great because you can take them out of the prospect list. We love some marketing automation. And then you can add content and make sure membership privileges are set up accordingly.

Members Accessibility

Somebody has access to one product but not another, somebody else might have access to all products, they’re in your mastermind group. And they have access to all six of your product, your courses. Just don’t allow nonmembers too much access. Give them enough. Give them, if you can do like free stuff. If you can do a couple of free lessons, that’s awesome. I mean, you can do free lessons in Kajabi. You can do free lessons in Wishlist. You can do free lessons in Teachable. Teachable makes it super easy.

If you want to do that, that’s fine. You can even do like a couple of weeks ago we talked about a multi-video launch sequence. Those are probably easier to set up, rather than creating somebody a username with a login, and password, and all that stuff. And then they have to log in, watch the videos. It might be easier just to put together multiple videos in a sales sequence. And then have them opt-in for those videos. But it’s the same either way. I mean you’re still going to give access to a couple of videos, and then try to upsell them at the end. So, that’s how like you would invite non-members into your membership.

1. Drip Content

Now some thoughts. First of all, you want to drip content, usually. Meaning doesn’t deliver it all at once. If somebody signs up monthly, you want to drip content monthly. Or have a plan for weekly content. It goes out a week, after week. And most membership plugins will let you drip content. They might get a video a week. Or two videos a week. Or a video and a PDF a week. So you only ever have to be in front of your oldest member. If your oldest member signed up last month, you only need to be like in month two. The end of month two, or month three to… You’ve just got to be ahead of that person. You don’t need all of it at once. It’s one of the nice things about memberships.

2. Affiliate Offers

You also want to be sure to put affiliate offers inside your membership pages. I was just talking about this yesterday. When you’re creating a course, mention the software that you use. Or mention the people you learned from, or mention whatever. If there’s an affiliate offer, or I mean, like literally you could have an affiliate link to an iPad. You can have an affiliate link to a USB drive. Talking about USB drives. I mean I think this thing was a hundred bucks or whatever. So you can have affiliate links for everything and get paid affiliate-wise.

We used to do a lot of this where we would create like a low-ticket front-end course. And then we’d have some affiliate links in the backside. And the affiliate links were generally like half… We’d make half of what we did on the front side, we would make through the affiliate programs. And then that becomes a passive revenue stream for everybody going through the course. Make sure to use affiliate links where possible.

3. Give away Bonuses

Then you also want to give, it’s encouraged to give away bonuses. Giveaway a video, or an ebook, or something that people didn’t know they were going to get. Surprise them a little bit. And it might be, it’s good to surprise them right before they rebill. Like if the rebill is on the monthly rebill… This is one thing you’re going to have to figure out about churn is if the rebill is in 30 days, which for the most part they are, you’re going to want to send them something like the 27, day 28, to get them to be excited about re-upping. Because day 27, day 28, they’re thinking about canceling. Especially if they’re in like month three, month four, month five.

They might not be, but by and large, we’ve built and sold hundreds of subscription websites for clients. And a lot of times like day 27, day 28, you always get that. Rarely, anybody’s ever going to cancel into a new cycle. They might like immediately after, like a day after, because they were going to cancel but they got rebilled.

But, they always cancel at the end. If you can send them something special, send them a bonus right before their next rebill. You’re going to keep a lot more people with you for longer. A bonus is a great way of doing that. Hey surprise, day 27 of this current billing cycle, you get this PDF. And then day 27 of the next billing cycle, you’re going to get access to the special workshop, or the special quiz, or this little freebie app that we coded up. There are lots of ways to do it. And you also want to decide whether you want to do a monthly membership or onetime payment.

Monthly memberships are great because you can make recurring revenue. The onetime payment, however. Especially right now, people aren’t all that excited about monthly payments. People are canceling and charging them back. The annual is kind of where you want to be. We try to sell the annual, try to sell one time, and then if they maybe upgrade, you can work the monthly membership back into it. But what we found is that if you have a monthly membership, let’s say your monthly membership is $37.

Let’s say 10 just for the sake of math. Let’s say your monthly membership is $10, and then you offer an annual subscription. And say the annual subscription is $60 so they saved. It’s half off if they buy the annual subscription. Then about 60% of people are going to buy that annual subscription. So if they’re presented side by side, and especially if they’re presented.

It was called the decoy method, which a friend of mine coined I think way back in the day. It’s who I learned it from, at least. His name is Mike Hill. But so basically it’s three different pricing options. You have your low ticket, your mid ticket, and then your high ticket. So, generally what you want to do is you want to call attention to the mid ticket, which that upsells them into the high ticket. So it might be like $10 digital access, $25 digital, $25 magazine access. Or like $27 digital and magazine access.

Do you know what I mean? Something, so like you want to make that middle one just not a good deal at all. Just like apparent that they need to, they need to pick one of the other. And they usually go to the upper one because it’s a combination of the two lower. It’s an interesting strategy. Now locking content inside subscription websites discourages sharing on black-hat sites, and through friends and family, and forums. It still does happen though.

People are going to download the stuff. Now, since the video is so prevalent, I mean we talked yesterday about Vimeo and Wistia, so you can lock your content in Vimeo or Wistia. And again, somebody can download them. There are browser applications, that will let them download the video. But, by and large, they don’t. By and large, they leave it alone. It’s locked in there, and it’s good.

You can have a forum, you can have profiles, you can have… A lot of people just use Facebook groups for this. That’s how they foster community. And it’s a good idea to have a forum inside a membership site if you want to grow that membership site. There’s a great book called The Membership Economy. And basically, it talks about the community that memberships provide. And it’s not just a membership as in like you’re paying membership for something, but you’re a member of something.

How when you’re a member of something, then you tend to take ownership of it, and you tend to promote it more longterm. A great example, actually was, I think the Tribe course closed down last night. And they did huge numbers. They might be closing down today. I don’t know. I haven’t followed the launch, other than the four people now who have asked me what I thought of the program. Which, is a good program. I went through it a couple of years ago for a client.

But the Tribe has an incredible community around it. They are subscription websites about building subscription websites. And of course, the members in it are super passionate about the membership sites in the community. It’s like just members all the way around. But it had a huge launch, and people showed up. The community was engaged. The whole community was engaged. I mean, everybody. The internet has been buzzing about it for the last couple of days. If you’re in the internet marketing space, you know this. That’s part of the membership.

Also, you want to survey members to see what they want to do next. If you are finishing month one, and you have month two’s content in the bag, see what they want from month three. Send them a survey, send them an email saying, “Hey, what do you want to learn? What can I teach you next month?” And you will be surprised at how quickly they will respond, and also how much insight they’ll give you into what you need to create. And then of course, what you need to sell them. Because that’s the other side of it.

Membership Prices

Now memberships, if you expect somebody to pay monthly, we have done $37 memberships, $5 memberships, $97 memberships, $497 a month memberships. I would say that for in an introductory membership, $37 and $97 if you want like a… If it’s going to be a solid membership. If you want like lead gen? It’s like a buyer generator, then five to $10 that it’ll have like a year, two years, three years churn. People will be in that thing forever because it’s more complicated to cancel a $5 a month program than it is to not. They just won’t. You’ll have people in their membership forever.

So $37 to $67 is kind of where you want to be. You can go up if it’s like a mastermind or a very, very solid group. You can do $297, $197, $297. It just depends on where you want to go. I would always make sure to price an annual subscription in there too. If they sign up for the monthly, then you can upsell the yearly. Or you can, as I said, you can just show all three prices next to each other, and then they can make the choice themselves. And there’s a lot of people who will just naturally gravitate to that upper price. Because they don’t want the monthly, we all hate membership. We hate monthly’s, just in general. Human beings hate paying for something monthly.

But we do if it helps us substance subsidize the cost. But if you make it a no brainer, for them to jump into annual, then you get your money faster and they’re locked in for at least a year. It ends up being a win, win for you.

Now let’s go around the web and we’re going to check out some plugins. And then I’m going to kind of show you… I’m going to just go to walk through Wishlist Member, so you can see the dashboard, see how it all works. And then we’ll kind of close up shop. I’m going to switch browsers here. All right. Is that helpful? Do you guys have subscription websites’ thoughts? All right. I’m going to stop sharing my screen. Oh. I got a weird hair thing and my bald spot back there. That is fun. All right.

All right. Somebody gave me a thumbs up because of my bald spot joke. That’s funny. It was probably my wife. Was it my wife? No. It was not. That’s awesome.

All right. We have a Wishlist. Wishlist Products is the membership that we use. We also have lately been using LearnDash a little bit. I’m just going to go right to left here. So WordPress… LearnDash is a plugin that allows you to set up a WordPress site, and then you can… You set up a WordPress site, and then you install the plugin, and then what it does is it sets up the membership functionality for you. So it handles your members and handles your content.

It protects your content, it protects your images, it protects your downloads. It also does some pretty cool things. This particular one does. I mean, you can do checkout through it. So it will process payments for your membership course for you. There are, you can do like certifications, or like group buys. You can sell somebody like 50 licenses. And then their people can use those 50 licenses.

There’s some cool advanced stuff with LearnDash. It is probably one of my favorite of the fancy plugins. It is. It’s super nice. You can do drip feed content. There are engagement triggers. It has some gamification in there. You can do certificates, and points, and badges. All, really, really cool stuff.

Then there is Wishlist Member. So Wishlist Member is a very, kind of stripped-down version of… But it does great. I mean, it does what it does extremely, extremely well. Wishlist Member is the first membership plugin… Well, it’s the first easy membership plugin that I ever used. I used it years ago. There was a course that showed you how to go through and build subscription websites in aMember.

Remember, way before… You can kind of tell how old this is. I mean like look at this thing. Like, this is the interface right there. But an aMember was a membership software. It was flexible sure. It’s still very old. And we have a client that is running it. A member, right now all their stuff is built in an amber. and getting them out of it would just be, whatever.

Wishlist Member, super easy to use. This also does drip content. It handles your memberships and it will run your sales. It will do your marketing automation and protect your content. And we ended up buying a developer license years ago. Years and years ago, and it has worked out nicely for us.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to go into subscription websites that are running Wishlist Member. And then I am going to go from there. This website is running the Wishlist Member. You can see down here over on the left-hand side. I just installed it. Just installed this morning. I want to walk through some of the different settings.

Basically, when you install Wishlist Member, they have this little like onboard… They create all your default, generic pages. You can go through and set a page for non-members. And set a page for people who are on the wrong membership level, or cancel their membership or any of those things. After registration, they go here. And after the login, they go here. The main and most important thing is you have your members listings here. You can go through and add in all of your members.

And then we have levels. The levels are the different things that you’re going to charge money for. In this particular instance, we have one membership. And this one membership… We set up the level, and it gives us this little registration URL. So if we copy this and then go into… Not LearnDash. We’re going to just copy this. Maybe it won’t work, maybe it won’t copy like it’s supposed to. No. We’re going to need to do this. We’re just going to copy it the long way. Where we highlight and hit control-C. There we go. All right.

What’s going to happen, it’s going to send us to a membership registration page. I am a new user. We enter our first name. Jason Drohn. Blah blah blah. And then username. Now we’re going to submit the registration. And what I’m doing is I’m registering for that membership category. It doesn’t like that I used my same email address. So, J Drohn. All right.

I’m going to hit, submit the registration. And the username I chose already exists, because of whatever. Anyway, you get it. We ended up going in. We create subscription websites. It adds to me as a member. And now all of my levels, everything that I want access to get unlocked. We can have as many membership levels as we want. And how the drip functionality works is we have membership one, then…

It might be membership week one, and then membership week two. How you set it up, is membership week one has access to so many, to these four modules. And then membership week two has access to these additional four modules. And then you just drip them. You step a member through that process. They go week one, week two, week three, week four. And the modules get unlocked for them.

That’s how you would drip somebody through. There’s actually, in Wishlist Member is called a sequential upgrade. We’re going to move somebody from membership to, the next level is going to be like membership week two. After seven days. You see how that works. Or you can do it after 30 days. You can do month one, month two, month three. Everybody’s moving through it at the same time. You’re not dropping a bunch of content on them all at once. And they go that way.

Underneath integration, you can integrate with any… Well not any, but a lot of shopping carts, to one shopping cart. We generally use Stripe or SamCart. There’s UltraCart, PayPal, there are Autoresponder integrations here. We have ActiveCampaign, AWeber, Infusionsoft. There are webinar integrations too. Basically, payment comes in, membership gets unlocked, and then we add this person to the buyer’s list over in AWeber, or over in ActiveCampaign, wherever it ends up being. That is how you would set that up.

And then really the only thing, like after all this stuff is set up, you just need to start adding your content. In the content section, we go to pages or posts. Whatever content you’re trying to protect. And then we just check all of the ones that we want to protect. All these have the… Well, that one has a lock. But these don’t have locks. These are currently unlocked.

We’re just going to edit the protection status to protect it. I would hit apply. If I wanted to add levels, I would just hit, add levels. And then we’re going to go to… Let’s see, so I can remove it. Yeah. Add levels. And this is going to be membership. And then, apply. Then that would make sure that all of those pages are only available if somebody is logged in, and part of the membership. Does that make sense? Cool.

That’s about it for memberships. Oh. I did want to show you the other… This is if you want to manage your membership. You want to dig into WordPress and all of that. That’s cool. If not, then Kajabi is a brilliant platform for building subscription websites, delivering content. It’s a knowledge commerce platform so, fantastic software works well. You can set up marketing pages and sales funnels and all that stuff inside Kajabi.

There’s another piece of software that we like, which is Teachable. Teachable, we have a client who is running Teachable right now. You can set up quizzes, they also do video hosting. It’s very dragging and drops. It’s very nice. You can do some pretty intricate curriculums in here. And it’s not hard at all to set up. If you want kind of a software solution to just handle all the brunt of the individual settings and stuff that we just went through, you can look at Kajabi or teachable for those.

For Questions and Guide

If you guys have any questions at all, you can just go to DoneForYou.com/blog. Or if you want to set up an action plan called, where we talk through how to set up subscription websites for you? How to create the content. How to sell that content. And how to build a sales funnel. How to do the marketing automation that powers at all. Go to DoneForYou.com/start and I would be happy to jump on a call with you. And I will talk to you soon.

All right. Tomorrow is Friday. I don’t know what we’re going to talk about tomorrow. I’m not sure what our roadmap said. Let’s see, tomorrow we are going to cover… We went through eBooks, subscription websites, membership sites, video courses, audio programs we kind of covered.

Webinar programs and teleseminar series. Let’s do that. We’re going to go through and talk about doing… We’re going to talk about doing multi-day, multi webinar boot camps. That’s it. I think that’s a pretty solid one for today or tomorrow. Cool. I will see you tomorrow. Have fun. And if you need me, let me know. Go to DoneForYou.com/start and I’ll talk to you soon. All right? Thanks. Bye.

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Tools and Software For Creating Video Course https://doneforyou.com/how-to-make-a-video-course/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-to-make-a-video-course Wed, 06 May 2020 14:00:42 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10530 Today’s GSDdaily will be about how to make a video course, including all the tools and tech to create a video that you can sell online. Now, I have a collection of shit sitting in front of me, so we’re going to go through all of that. For those of you who don’t know me, […]

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Today’s GSDdaily will be about how to make a video course, including all the tools and tech to create a video that you can sell online. Now, I have a collection of shit sitting in front of me, so we’re going to go through all of that.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Jason Drohn, creator of Done For You. Basically, we help people create and sell stuff online. At the end of the day, that’s what we do. And that is usually through clarifying sales messages on building automated sales funnels and then also, analyzing tech and creating courses and all that other stuff.

This is a digital product creation week or Create a week if you will when we teach how to make a video course. Monday we talked about creating eBooks. Yesterday was Tuesday. It’s all these days have just kind of like compressed it together. It’s been kind of crazy, but so Tuesday, yesterday we talked about creating video courses and I ended up going along and we didn’t get to the point, the part where we talked about tools and technology, the things that you use to create the digital courses to create the material.

how to make a video course

At the end of the day, when you’re trying to learn how to make a video course, literally all you need is a computer. I mean, you can use a laptop, doesn’t matter what you have, as long as you can get your stuff into the computer, you can get your knowledge, your audio, your video, and then you have a way to capture it and record it and encode it and put it into a membership site. We’re going to be talking about membership sites later on the week.

Tools Needed To Make Videos

So first, in getting into how to make a video course, I want to talk about physical stuff, and then we’re going to talk about software and all the software to use.

1. Mic

Let’s start with mics. I got this little boom mic, which I like quite a bit. So this thing plugs into an iPhone. And little windscreen and it ends up becoming a microphone. It’s a directional mic that you can end up putting on the front end of something like this. This is a nice little portable unit.

Basically, you put the mic on, and then you’re able to attach your phone to it here, and then you’re able to steady your camera as you’re walking around with both hands as opposed to … I don’t even know where my phone is, as opposed to like holding it in front of you. So yeah, I’m not sure where my phone is.

This works out pretty nice for that when learning how to make a video course. I’ll end up throwing the Amazon links somewhere, but we have a Rode microphone with a little fuzzy thing that works as a wind deflector.

2. Stabilizer

Then we have this unit and it ends up working as a stabilizer. A lot of times those are the things we do when we walk around. Another very cool little tool is this setup. It is one-handed, it’s just like a little boom. I don’t know all the technical terms for these, but it’s just a one-handed mount and then you attach your phone to it or you can also attach a little GoPro and this is like a no-name GoPro. I ended up buying four of them so that I could do some multi-camera angle stuff in Final Cut Pro.

We have this and then this ends up extends, so you can throw your phone in there. So also nice for walking around when you’re capturing audio and video in person, full-motion video.

3. Camcorder / Go Pro / iPhone Video Capture

I get a lot of questions, your iPhone will work better, will work better than most camcorders. So this camcorder, HD camcorder, and I haven’t made a whole lot of use of this yet because I bought it to do live streams at my standing desk and I haven’t had time to install it, actually hook it up. That’s my process for how to make a video course.

This camera is going to feed through this little card and if you see there’s an HDMI, it’s right there. So there’s an HDMI mount on one side, and then there’s a USB mount on the other side. What it does is it takes the input from this HDMI cable, feeds it into this, which then feeds into the computer.

You can do it, you can live to stream it. I mean you can end up hooking up through StreamYard and stream directly from the camera to Facebook or YouTube. Or you can set up a hardware box called a SlingStudio. And I’m going to show you one of those in a minute, so you can have three or four mounts, so three or four cameras, including your iPhone.

Then it feeds through a controller, which you can manipulate. And then when learning how to make a video course, that streams out to the World Wide Web. So also very cool tools in terms of capturing video. But like I said, so the new iPhones they capture in 4K video, that unit captures 1080. I mean, it was a relatively cheap camera, it’s nothing too crazy, but it serves its purpose, which is capturing video.

At the end of the day, your video doesn’t have to be high-res because when you’re streaming from YouTube or Facebook or even Wistia. They re-encode your video anyway and it degrades some of the quality. You don’t need super high-res stuff, especially when you’re streaming on free platforms. If you own bandwidth as Netflix does, then it makes sense. You have a super high-res version.

I use these little mounts quite often. So this little mount is interesting. I think I got it from Amazon a long time ago, but basically, you can pull this off. You can pull off the camera and then this fits in just a backpack or whatever nicely. Just toss it in your backpack or your bag and attach a camera onto the front side of it or the top of it. So the GoPro, which uses a normal camera mount and then you can screw a GoPro onto it, and then now you have like a ready-made little tripod that you can set up on your desk just like that. So that works out pretty nicely.

As for how to make a video course, I use these quite a bit for capturing video. But my favorite is just sitting in a standing desk or standing at a standing desk and when capturing video.

4. Gimbal Mount

My all-time, probably the thing that I use the most often though is this mount. It’s a gimbal mount. So basically, this works as a stabilizer, and then so it orients the camera right there. It orients the camera and then it steadies it for you. I mean basically, you can hold out in front of you like a selfie stick and then there you go. You can hold it out in front of you like a selfie stick and it is moving with you as it’s going.

Let’s see. There it goes. Yeah, that’s not going to do it because I’m not on my phone on there. But there you go. There it is. It was hiding behind stuff. If you put this on, we have the phone and it kicks up. Now, so it follows wherever we go, which is pretty cool, right? What happens is you can turn your phone on. I’m just going to kick on the camera and we’re going to turn the video so you can see this. Yeah, you can see that. Okay, cool. So what we can do, you can …

I’m not sure how this is going to work. You can see how it’s staying nice and steady. Now if we switch the mode, when going through the process for how to make a video course, we’re going to switch the mode and now I can turn and it stays always in the same place.

See it staying always in the same place? If we switch the mode again, it turns with the camera or it turns with your movement. So these things are super cool. I think I got this one at Best Buy for a hundred bucks. There are lots of more expensive things. I also added a little attachment, which ends up being a little tripod. So you can set this thing down and then you can record whatever you want from there.

So then what you do is you just hit play and then you can talk to your camera, record it, it encodes, it adds it to the photo library. Then you can export it to wherever you want to go. So you can send it up to Facebook if you want. You can send it to YouTube, you can put it in iCloud. Once the material, once it’s in there, then you’re off and running in terms of what you can do with it. Your material, your content has been captured.

Now, all of this to say these are just some fun tools! When how to make a video course, you need a mic. Oh, and the other thing is this mic, I use these mics all the time. So this is Audio-Technica AT2020, so it’s my favorite mic. I love this mic. I use it for all of my videos, all the sales videos. It’s being used right now actually. So I’m just going to turn this off and, all right. So that is our video stuff. I don’t have crazy camera equipment. I will probably end up upgrading my camera equipment eventually because we’ve been doing a lot more video. These videos are super simple to do. Just a webcam is all you need.

Software for Creating Videos

All right, now we’re going to switch to some software. Is that cool? We’re going to go look at some software that you can use to edit and create videos when figuring out how to make a video course. Where do you want to go first? Let’s continue talking about capturing video and capturing information. Then we’re going to go and I think we’re going to edit some video. Is that cool? Want to edit some videos together? All right, perfect. And hello from France. That’s awesome.

how to make a video course

Camtasia

Right now you’re looking at a piece of software called Camtasia. Camtasia is a screen recording and video editing software. There’s a free trial for it. It is preferred, I think is probably one of the only ones that you can use on Windows. So basically what it does is it lets you on a Windows machine, you can record your screen and then you can record your audio, and then you can edit that and it’ll record the webcam too.

It’ll record the different feeds and then it will let you move them around, splice them, cut them, you can even do some background noise editing stuff. So it ends up being a pretty nice piece of software too. When you don’t know too much about video editing, Camtasia works well.

ScreenFlow

ScreenFlow is its competitor, its rival, but ScreenFlow only works on Mac. It does the same thing. The interface is a little bit simpler, as with most things Mac, and I like ScreenFlow pretty well. So it’s what I do all of our screen capture stuff in.

It’s built by a company called Telestream. Also, it’s economical, 129 bucks for a free trial and super, super-nice, super easy to use and you can drag your clips in. You can do a screen share, screen record. You can record the webcam, you can record your audio. It works well from a linear video editing standpoint. Record one video, you’re going to edit some imperfections out. You might swap between cameras and mics and stuff, but you’re not necessarily going to do crazy multi-camera, multi-clip, throw-in background audio, all of that stuff.

When I do really simple video edits, even for full-motion video, I usually use ScreenFlow because it’s simple to use.

iMovie

If I do simple full-motion videos and I’m going to do some background music and stuff, then I’ll usually use iMovie.

Final Cut Pro

When I do some of the more complex stuff than I use Final Cut Pro.

Walkthrough in using ScreenFlow

Let’s look at a sales video. Do you want to see a sales video? What have I done in ScreenFlow? So we’re going to look at some VSLs. Oh, there’s one. Okay. So this is a web development video sales letter that I did. There’s no camera on it. So there’s no like face video, there’s no full-motion video. But I want to show you kind of how I built it, you know? Basically, what I did was I had a PowerPoint presentation. Here, I’m going to … Let’s exit out of this a little bit.

This is the inside of ScreenFlow. I had a PowerPoint presentation, I wrote a script and I added, I created some PowerPoint slides out of that script. So the script is typical video sales letter stuff and then I overlaid some video on top of it. But to get that underlying VSL pretty well dialed in, I recorded it using ScreenFlow. And you can see like right here, there’s a little applet. You hit the record button after you configure it, but you hit the record button and then your webcam is recording, your screen is recording and your audio is recording.

All of that stuff is recording.  What ends up happening is you have this, so basically you have these channels. Now, you have your audio channel right here. So this is all audio and then you have your screen channel. And then if I was to do webcam, I would have my webcam channel.  What I can do is I can just drag and drop the channels on top of each other and then go through and create a video. I do this for courses, I do it for sales videos. Anything that is video, this is what we end up doing. So here we have, so I’m just going to play this real quick and then I’m just going to kind of edit it up and chop it up. Here you go.

… address, phone number. Now, your website needs to attract-

Prospects and leads.

Let’s say I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that particular piece of it. All I have to do, I’m just going to go through and just make it. There’s our audio track right there. I’m going to select both of them and then I use the hotkeys. And in this T is cut, but it looks like in the edit is split clips. So there’s all your content here. But what we do is we split it and then let’s say right here we’re going to split this guy. We’re going to split it and the hotkey is a T. Its going to split this and then so we’re going to do this and then we’re going to just delete that out and then we’re going to move this clip and we’re going to join these clips up. So that’s how you would end up editing video.

If you had a clip that you wanted to go above it, you just drag it above. You would drag this one below, which accomplishes the same thing. You can drag them all up. So that’s how you would edit sales videos using ScreenFlow.

Walkthrough in using Camtasia

Camtasia is very similar. You’re going to have your different channels and then you’re going to edit those based on where it needs to go. Does that make sense so far? So, you record the video and then you edit it, and then what you do is you hit export and you’re going to export it. We’re going to export it to the desktop, it’s going to be normal, letterbox content and that’s it. We just hit export and then all of a sudden it is exporting as an MP4 format to our desktop and then we can use it for our courses. Does that make sense so far? All right. Awesome.

Walkthrough in using iMovie

Now, next level up in terms of video editing, we’re going to go play with iMovie. So if you don’t have an Apple, then shame on you. No, I’m just kidding. From a video editing standpoint, I had a client call me yesterday and they asked and I think movie and photo editor on Windows is a kind of an editing tool. I’m not sure. I’m not sure what some of the more advanced video editing software is. I know that there are some, Adobe has one. Also, I tend to kind of stay in the Apple wheelhouse with iMovie and Final Cut Pro just because it works well. At least for me, it’s kind of how I learned. That’s all.

All right, so we’re going to go look at iMovie now, and we’re going to look at some stuff there. So, we’ve got some projects. All right, I’m going to save that guy. And then let’s see. This is just the testimonial video. Oops, looks like the video is missing. Okay, cool. This particular video from here, so this is our video track and we can pull different videos and different stuff down. We can add this stuff to our library or our video. Lots of different stuff here.

But basically what we’re going to do is if you right-click, all of your options are here. We can detach the audio, and then it detaches the audio and makes our video clip kind of float above the audio clip. Then we can go through and we can pull this audio clip down to like the master audio. We’re going to make this guy the master. So this is now the master audio clip and it is unlinked from the video clip. And then what we can do is with this, we go back to edit and then we split. Let’s see.

Again, I use the hotkeys here. The hockey for splitting a clip is commanded B. So it splits and then we can go through and we can split it here. And if we want to split the audio too here, and then we can delete out entire chunks, and then we can start moving stuff around. And so basically again, it’s layered, layers on layers. You have your channels, you have your audio channel and your video channel. So that’s how you would end up moving stuff around on iMovie and creating. And then from an export standpoint, you would export as a file. You save it on your desktop and then bam, you are now exporting your video file to your desktop and you can upload to Wistia, you can upload to Vimeo, which we talked about yesterday. That’s where you would have your videos hosted.

Walkthrough in using Final Cut Pro

Let’s see, I think the next place we’re going to go to is Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro is the next level of video editing software. When you want to do stuff that isn’t necessarily in iMovie, you’re going to go to Final Cut Pro next. Final Cut Pro I think is $299 which is a steal for video editing software, especially as good. Final Cut Pro, you can do professional editing in. I have mastered 1% of Final Cut Pro, all the things that it can do and I can get around okay.

So, let’s see, I got to go find the library to open up. This is where I do like … So I’m going to pull up my DIY Builds videos. So the DIY Builds videos, I have a channel on YouTube for just doing stuff around the house. And so this is a, I pulled the tree with a tractor, so I like did a little video on how to do this, but you can see again, it’s professional-grade stuff. I mean, so you have like your collections, your projects, and events over here. And then you have your media and then you have your video window. And then over here you have your library properties and any kind of properties for the project.

Here we have our title clips and you can drag those around and then we have these guys and you can move them. You can move these clips up and you can kind of stack stuff on top of each other. So I’m just going to not do any of that stuff. So there is all kind, but it’s the same thing. Like I have a track here. So this track right here is our video track and there is an audio component to that video track. And then I have a little bit of background music. So we have …

What we’re doing here is we’re pulling a tree out of front landscaping, the front gardens.

And then you can hear the background track, the background audio kind of start to kick in the background. And then this is my voiceover. So like if I was to put all this down, then you hear just the tractor, then there’s a little bit of background, then there’s my voice over there.

Not cleanse a whole a lot but …

Is that pretty cool stuff?

This is our …

Yeah. So this is Final Cut Pro, it’s video editing. It’s a high level when it comes to how to make a video course, but it works nicely.

Now, you don’t need to get into Final Cut Pro. You probably don’t even need to get into iMovie to create video courses. But this is where you will end up going if you turn it into something that you’re going to do a lot of, you end up going to more expensive cameras, better editing stuff. Do you know what I mean? So it ends up working out pretty well that way.

Now, in terms of, so we talked about editing, we talked about capturing, we talked about ScreenFlow, *which is a low level when it comes to how to make a video course… And we talked about Camtasia software. Is there anything else I’m missing?

how to make a video course

Streamyard

Oh, StreamYard, we can talk about StreamYard a little bit. This is the software that we use for live streaming. Nice stuff. And currently, we are living. You can see that I’m using the software right now. There’s another one that I have used restream.io, which is also very nice software, but I like StreamYard better.

SlingStudio

There is a hardware solution called SlingStudio, which is a badass. So this SlingStudio is perfect for how to make a video course!

It’s a hardware device and, you plug, it has little packs that you plug into the cameras and then through the HDMI port, and then those packs send the video to this hub. And then this hub is the thing responsible for the switching of the camera feeds. And you can see here, he’s actually on an iPad switching the camera feeds. This device is awesome. I think one of the reasons I’m geeking out on it is because I had a call with a new friend yesterday. And so, he walked me through his setup, and like literally he’s got a multi-camera set up with a SlingStudio. And I’m like, I just need to go build one of those.

Don’t be surprised if we radically upgrade our live streaming solution in the next little bit because of him and how he’s put together his process for how to make a video course. You’re going to meet him next week. We’re going to talk about software.

This ends up being a great, another solution to give you some like studio capabilities without actually having to spend an arm and a leg on studio stuff and it integrates with mobile phones and all that stuff natively too. So this works out well. From what I understand this thing sends traffic through Restream so you can do multicasting, multiple broadcasting in the same place. So I think from a video, audio standpoint, that’s it.

QuickTime

I mean the other nice, the other probably potential thing that we can talk about is QuickTime. QuickTime gives you a simple quick way of doing a movie recording, which is your camera. You can hit QuickTime and movie recording and start a camera record. You can do an audio recording, you can do a screen recording.

Audacity

Another piece of audio recording software that I’ve used is Audacity, Audacity Project is the name of it I think, Audacity recording. Yeah, free, open-source, cross-platform audio software (which is important when it comes to how to make a video course). But anymore, I mean with your voice notes app on a phone or there are so many MP3 voice recording apps that those work just as great. You can export them as an MP3 file and you’re perfectly fine.

And then I would say the only other probably tool that I use a lot for video and it’s on my phone is this app.

Teleprompter

It’s an app that just basically’s a teleprompter app. It’s a teleprompter app for how to make video courses. And what I can do is I can put a sales video or put a script on.

It’s showing through the camera and then what it does is it counts down for you and then it starts scrolling, so you can see and read. Notice where you’re looking right there and you’re reading right below it. Pretty cool when figuring out how to make a video course, right?

You don’t even seem like your eyes move, which works well and it works even better with this thing. So you can hook it up so that this is sitting up in front of you and then you are recording your videos, your sales videos right in front of you. So it ends up working out pretty nice to record sales materials.

Content ends up being more of a stream of consciousness kind of thing. Like you don’t necessarily record courses from the script, although you could. It’s probably more of a pain in the ass than anything to record them from a script. So that would work too. I think that’s all I got. I mean, we talked about video, we talked about audio, we talked about editing, we talked about live streaming, we talked about even a teleprompter and how to make a video course from scratch.

For Questions and Guide

If you guys have any questions at all, go to doneforyou.com/start, sign up for a strategy session with me. We can put together an action plan for you.

Tomorrow we’re going to talk about membership sites. We talked about eBooks Monday, video, yesterday, and today. We’re going to talk about membership sites tomorrow and locking all of it in. I think I’m going to show you the inside of a membership site and a couple of ways to kind of set it up and how to manage permissions and stuff. Then Friday, I don’t know what we’re going to talk about, but we’ll figure it out.

I will talk to you soon. Book a call, doneforyou.com/start, if you want to go through an action plan call and I’ll talk to you soon. All right, thanks. Bye.

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Best Strategies in Creating Online Courses https://doneforyou.com/create-online-courses/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=create-online-courses Tue, 05 May 2020 14:00:44 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10527 Today we’re going to talk about how to create online courses from scratch, allowing you to sell your experience and knowledge and all of that good stuff to help make transformations in other people’s lives, which I’m pretty excited about. I mean, right now is the time to be packaging your training and material and […]

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Today we’re going to talk about how to create online courses from scratch, allowing you to sell your experience and knowledge and all of that good stuff to help make transformations in other people’s lives, which I’m pretty excited about. I mean, right now is the time to be packaging your training and material and knowledge and all of that stuff. There has never been a better time. People are opening up to digital training, and that is exciting.

Digital training is selling so well right now. I was just telling one of our clients that we had them put together a book. Yesterday we talked about selling eBooks and creating and selling eBooks. I had him create and sell eBooks or create an eBook over the last couple of weeks. It was all just basic stuff that he has had in his repertoire for a while. We’re putting together the sales material and sales videos and upsells and all that stuff for it because that’s what you get when you’re a client of ours, which is pretty cool.

Today we were talking about creating online courses – namely how to create online courses, video courses. Basically, he has a plethora of video information, video stuff as well, so we were talking about different ways you can package it and then sell it as an upsell offer.

I wanted to go through and talk about how to create online courses and why video courses are important and how to go through and create those video courses and get the ball rolling.

For those of you who are new to me, we pick up people watching this show every single day. My name is Jason Drohn. I created a website called Done For You. We do a lot of sales funnels, marketing, we run traffic. To put it very simply, we clarify marketing messages, we build automated sales funnels, and we understand and track data, so we add stories and we make stories make sense from the data so that we can optimize and split test and all that other stuff. That is kind of the real high-level view of what we do. But what we’re going to do is dig into some of the stuff that makes what we do tick, which is digital products.

create online courses
We are going to talk about how to create online courses and setting up video courses from scratch. Video courses are the norm. They’re the standard in digital training. It used to be eBooks and it used to be audio programs. Half of those cabinets are filled up with audio programs from clients that we’ve digitized and stuff that I have bought over the years, audio programs, video programs, DVD programs.

Now everything, for the most part, is locked behind a membership login. The stuff is created digitally, it lives digitally, it is fulfilled digitally. There is no cost of fulfillment. You don’t need to worry about CDs or recording studios or anything. This mic is all you need. That’s it. They’re easy to create. You just have to know how the pieces come together.

Oftentimes they’re supplemented with PDFs and eBooks. The written stuff is a supplement to the video course. So you deliver the video and then you can give the transcript as a supplement, as a PDF that somebody can download, print out, highlight, all of that stuff.

Video also lends itself to higher product prices. It used to be just literally having a video course meant you could charge $2,000. From a perception standpoint, having an on-demand video course library was huge. Not so anymore. Now, 10 years later, you don’t have video, you’re doing something wrong. Having a video, of course, is definitely what you need to do now.

One of the major benefits:

The video has the capability of teaching people in the modality that they most like to see.

You do voice, of course, because you’re listening to it. You can do the visuals. I mean most of what we see we pick up from body language. Then you can also do textual, meaning you can get the course transcribed and now you have a text copy of what the videos are. That becomes your manual, your training manual.

There is in some niches, the training manual is the thing, it’s the gold, you know what I mean? The physical box products. I’m thinking about real estate investing. Those higher-end products, now they’re delivering their video digitally. Speaking of real estate clients. But yeah, the book is sent to them through the mail or they leave the event with the training manual in hand that they can go and highlight and stuff.

Even my wife, she’s doing a fitness certification and they still have the book, and the book isn’t required. The book is a free plus shipping offer in addition to the digital training. But she’s pretty pumped up about the books. I think a lot of your customers are going to be the same way. What you can do is you can record the course and then get the book transcribed and then you can go through and turn that into your manual, the thing that you’re going to be using to train from.

People prefer Videos

Now that broadband internet is the standard, people prefer videos as opposed to reading PowerPoints and training for them. Not to mention they’re used to watching YouTube videos and in lots of cases learning from YouTube videos. I mean, how many times in the last month have you gone to YouTube and searched for something? You’ve looked for an instructional video about X?

I was just on YouTube this morning trying to figure out how to make a bootable USB drive for my Mac. Let’s see, the last thing, repairing ceilings, because I put my foot through the wall, walking on the attic above it, or put my foot through the ceiling. All kinds of instructional stuff on YouTube. People are used to watching YouTube videos. We’re used to watching some videos for instructional material. Now that brings up an important caveat. The thing that you’re teaching should not be available… It can be available on YouTube. The complexity of your offer, one video can be there and it should paint a picture of one particular thing.

But your entire course has value in that it’s a bunch, it’s 60 videos or 30 videos or 12 videos that talk about solving that one particular problem and putting somebody through a formula or putting somebody through a process. It isn’t one video as a standalone video. It is great and it makes sense, but at the same time, it’s incomplete. It’s useful, but incomplete, which is how to create online courses. So UBI, meaning that it is useful but incomplete. It is a collection of eight videos that is useful unto themselves, but it’s only complete if they also purchase the upsell. So it’s just something to think about.

Making a Video Training

With video training you can record your screen/presentation, you can record your voice. Currently, I’m recording all three. Voice, screen, and camera using StreamYard, but you can use it with Camtasia and ScreenFlow. We’re going to talk about that software towards the end of this. But at the very minimum, you should be recording your screen. Very, very minimum. And then you can create these PowerPoint presentations or these keynote slides relatively easily.

1. Brainstorm a Topic

Doing video training’s largely the same as an ebook. First, you want to brainstorm a topic. You want to go through, figure out what you want to talk about. You want to mind map that thing and figure it out. Kind of storyboard it.

  • Where are your users now and where are they going?
  • How are they finding you?

Let’s get everybody on the same page. Like we did yesterday in the eBook. Let’s get everybody on the same page in that first chapter and do a discovery module.

Then from the discovery, where are we going next? What is the next thing? So after you standardize everything, what is the next thing they need to learn or discover from you to experience that transformation that you are helping them achieve?

2. Create a training outline or a mind map

3. Create the PowerPoint slides from that mind map

It ends up being a very linear process. Create the mind map, then you create the PowerPoint slides from that mind map, that brainstorming session. And then, once you kind of flesh out the PowerPoint slides, let them sit for a couple of days and then you record them. Very similar to this.

4. Start Recording

I mean I’m recording PowerPoint slides. Use a video camera to record those things, and then you can use a piece of software Camtasia or ScreenFlow to edit that video, edit that screen capture. Basically how it works is the software captures everything like layers. You have an audio layer, a video layer, and then another video layer. So you have audio and one video layer is your camera feed.

The other video layer is your screen feed. You can mix and match, cut, you can move some stuff around so you can drop your camera or the screen layer or whatever, wherever you want. I’ll show you a little bit of that. If I can get ScreenFlow to work without messing up my camera. But we can do that. Then you just edit up the video, you export it as an MP4 file and then you can go on from there. Then you encode it as MP4. You upload it to a server.

create online courses

Stream Your Video

There’s a couple of different places you can stream video from. Wistia is a video streaming place. We would recommend not putting your course videos on YouTube, just because they’re not protected.

They are protected in that nobody is going to look. You can make them so that they’re unpublished, meaning they’re not published, they’re not publicly viewable on YouTube, but they’re still there. If somebody has a link, they can go and find it.

1. Wistia

What we do is we use Wistia, which Wistia, the videos are locked inside Wistia, and then the only way for the video to play is if it’s embedded on a page, which makes it nice because then your videos truly are private. And then Wistia also, you can download the videos out of Wistia if you know how, but not many people do.

2. Vimeo

Vimeo has a pro account and I like Vimeo just because it’s cheaper from a per video standpoint. So Vimeo’s pro accounts, you can also do the same thing. You can upload the videos, you can do some light editing in there. And then it also protects your videos because they’re not publicly viewable on Vimeo.

It gives you some nice stats too. Those are the two places that we end up having for our video courses.

Selling Your Videos

Now in terms of selling your videos, there are lots of different ways that you can monetize your video content once it’s out.

1. Individually

So, of course, you can sell your videos individually. You can sell them for $4 and 95 cents or a dollar or $10 or $20 or $1000 if you want to not sell any. You can sell them for 1000 bucks apiece.

2. Group / Package

You can sell them as a group so they’re all fulfilled on the same webpage. And we have a little course called a funnel flow made simple for sale for $4 and 95 cents that is that that’s a collection of eight videos. We sell them for five bucks. They’re 20, 25 minutes apiece and it walks through sales funnel setups. Hugely valuable, it’s great in terms of a learning curve.

It’s great in terms of getting people actionable quickly, and it’s five bucks. I mean it’s cheaper than a cup of coffee. It makes a lot of sense there. You can sell them as collections. They’re simply fulfilled on the same webpage too. So it’s one video and then you know… It’s all the videos and then they can just pop open the video and watch the video and then close it and that’s it.

You can protect them behind a webpage or a membership site. You don’t necessarily have to. If they’re not publicly viewable and it’s five bucks and it’s a collection of videos. Does it need to be? Maybe, maybe not. You can also set it up inside of a membership site and then deliver those videos either as one chunk. So let’s say somebody spends $97, they get access to all your videos, your entire course, all at the same time. So they get modules one, two, three, four, five. Boom.

They get access to all of it at the same time. Or you can drip them out. Module one goes out, week one, module two goes out, week two, module three goes out week three. Lots of ways to set it up this way. Kajabi is a great one. Kajabi works nicely. Teachable works nicely too for two pieces of software that will help with how to create online courses on your own and you don’t mind paying for software monthly.

We like using WordPress and a membership plugin like Wishlist Member, and then having the videos fulfill from Vimeo, but Teachable and Kajabi is kind of a low… It’s software, so it’s high tech, but from an experience standpoint, you don’t need a whole lot of experience to set it up.

Those are probably the two platforms that I would default to if you’re trying to set all this up and you’re not real good with your websites, Teachable or Kajabi is to going to work out well. And they also have a video hosting baked in, so you don’t need an outside Vimeo account or a Wistia account for those. And then, of course, they’re locked behind a membership login. Lots of ways to set up the fulfillment of your course.

You’re more than welcome to set up a call with us and we’ll go through it. So doneforyou.com/start, let me just drop a banner here. You can set up an action plan call and we will go through this stuff with you. Let’s see or check out my ticker, consultingsession.com, that’s pretty cool, right?

I think I’m going to let that one ride for a little bit. Video training or you can send them a DVD through the mail. It’s a legacy option. It is what it is. You can use a service like disk.com to automate this. You upload an ISO file and they burn it and send it. It’s pretty cool. But who the hell uses DVDs anymore? From an archival standpoint, it might make sense.

Best Practices on Creating Online Courses

Now, some best practices with how to create online courses. Lengths can be whatever you prefer. It can be long videos or short videos. It doesn’t matter. Most people shorter videos, 5 to 10 minutes. I have a couple of clients who insist that their videos are two minutes to three minutes because they want short, choppy.

That way somebody can go back and watch them. I put a lot less thought into how long the video is as opposed to how much information is in the video. And I also create a lot of videos now, so I don’t necessarily think that. I think two to three-minute videos are great for social media. They’re great for all that stuff and maybe someday I’ll actually take all of this video content that I’m creating and chop it up into smaller snippets and then send it out to social media. Maybe someday, maybe not. I mean it’s whatever.

Most of our videos, when learning how to create online courses, most of our course content videos are 5 to 10 minutes. Some of them go a little bit longer. The ones that are more in-depth as in the material end up being more how-to and more structural and procedural, those typically go longer.

My dailies have been averaging 30 minutes. I think it’s an okay timeframe. It just depends on your personal preference. It depends on your audience. Prices are not set in stone for video training. Most membership sites, most video courses start at 97 bucks, while others are $1,997, so $2,000 video courses. It just depends on what kind of transformation you’re providing for your users, who your users are, what the value of your course is for them.

When determining how to create online courses There are business startup video courses that are 97 bucks and they make money through upsells. There is a bigger membership kind, of course, that is $197. There’s one launching right now, which everybody’s going crazy about. It’s a $2,000 offer, so it just depends on.

It depends probably more on how you’re going to sell it. I mean a $97 offers is all you need to sell it as a sales video. However, for a $1,997 offer, you need a webinar or you need multiple videos. You need a lot… Or even a sales call. You just need a lot more sales material to sell a $2,000 thing.

Now, let’s see. So thank you for the thumbs up. I’m getting a lot of thumbs up. I appreciate that. Paul, you’re in here too. That’s awesome. So some value adders for video training. Value maximizers if you will.

These are additional revenue opportunities that your video course can provide. Your video course should be sold as a standalone offer, of course. $97, 197, 297, 997, but then there are lots of ways that you can generate additional revenue from your video course if you choose and if they work for your business model. So your video course can stand alone. But to maximize the revenue you can augment coaching. This is called assisted coaching. We’re going to talk probably next week about coaching and setting up coaching offers and selling coaching and services and stuff.

But with how to create online courses, you can sell it as your front-end offer and then you can add coaching into it. It might be $297 per month with a coaching element, and that coaching element can be group coaching, maybe once or twice a month. Also, it can be one on one coaching once or twice a month. It just depends on how often you want to get together with your folks, you know what I mean?

If it’s once a month or once every two weeks or even once a week for something higher price. You want to be very careful about doing this augmented coaching-assisted coaching model. You want to be careful when it comes to time equals money. So what I mean is you can sell a lot of digital courses. You can sell hundreds or even thousands of copies of your digital course every month. And if there’s a coaching element, you’re always going to be linked from a time standpoint.

Maybe at that point in how to create online courses, at the front end, and then you sell coaching services as an upsell for more money. You just have to think critically about how much time you have in a week and how much you’re going to be devoting to your clients and then what impact that’s going to have on the rest of your business and the rest of your life. It’s just something to be cognizant of.

Another thing you can add that people find a lot of value in is a Facebook group or community, to encourage interaction among members. The community piece, people will continue paying for… If you upsell a $97 Facebook group or a $97 community after a video course, people will continue paying the $97 just for the community, because they get that much out of the community. So it’s a good upsell. It’s a nice upsell to sell. You can also do group coaching or one on one coaching as an upsell. So this is straight up, no assistant coaching. This is you go through the course, it’s an eight-week course or whatever, and that’s going to be $997 and then I will coach you over here.

We might talk about some of the stuff from the course, but we’re going to be coaching on something different and it’s all one on one or it’s all group. So you can think of maybe a career course and then life coaching or a business development course and then life coaching. So the business development is part of life, but then coaching is life coaching. Do you know what I mean?

Then you can also include affiliate links inside of your membership area or your video area for additional commission-based revenue. This is passive. I was just talking to a client last week, and when we used to do a lot of this kind of stuff… We still do it here and there. It’s the biggest part of the business model. It used to be you sell the front end course and then you just crush affiliate links in it and then you make money from an affiliate link standpoint.

But now, when trying to help a client with how to create online courses for their business, what we do is we end up working Done For You or coaching or consulting or whatever into the video course itself. But before we did any of that stuff, we’d sell a front-end course and then we’d… The affiliate links inside the course would be for software, would be for other products, would be for things to help the member, the buyer get the result that we were trying to get for them.

For instance, we had a course on setting up an affiliate generating website. And then we used to promote the theme, the keyword research software, a bunch of other stuff inside the membership for them and then we ended up making a bunch of money. HostGator hosting is an easy one. If you have anything business development, you can link to HostGator and they’ll pay 110 bucks or a hundred whatever per new user. Or you can link to audible.com and they’ll pay 20, 25 bucks per new free trial or whatever. So there are lots of different ways that you can generate money from the affiliate links inside your membership.

Just some general thoughts about how to create online courses, I got another call so I got to get going. But you want to make sure that your videos are as secure as possible. Use Wistia or use vimeo.com to host your private videos and then publish them inside your membership site or use Teachable or Kajabi because they have their video hosting. You want to make sure to keep your videos on a private server, one that you control, so if you’re going to host your videos yourself or yourself, then use Amazon S3 for that. Amazon Web Services has an S3 platform. Maybe someday we’ll go into it. Don’t trust your money-making videos with public services like YouTube or Vimeo. Vimeo standard, notice Vimeo standard.

Make sure that your audio levels are pretty consistent in all of your packages, videos. Literally, this thing doesn’t leave this tripod and the sound is the same regardless of… Well, I try to make sure that the sound is… I know where the sound should be set, let’s put it that way. Use a good microphone. This is an Audio Technica AT2020? Yeah, AT2020. It’s about a hundred bucks on Amazon. Just search for it.

If I wanted to be diligent about doing exactly what I’m telling you about, I would have an affiliate link ready for this thing, and it might even be buyaudiotechnicaat2020.com and then I would just drop it in the comments here so you can buy it, and then everybody watching the video later could buy it from that affiliate link. That is an example of using affiliate links in a course.

You want to transcribe your video’s audio into text, and rev.com is the platform that we use for all of that stuff. And again there’s another great affiliate opportunity. I have no idea if they even have an affiliate program. But if they do, I’m sure they owe me money. And some resources. Capturing, you want video… I think we’re going to end up doing. We’re going to do a resources video for video training tomorrow because I got a ton of video shit that I am going to go through. So we’re going to talk about capturing on video, webcams, mobile phones, all of that stuff, Camtasia software. So tomorrow is going to be creating video courses, number two and we’re going to talk about all the tools and stuff, because of this slide I could talk about for half an hour.

With that, did you like it today? Did you learn anything? All right, fantastic. We’re going to do part two of this video tomorrow. It is going to be resources and cameras and stuff, and I have nothing super high tech. It’s all pretty low-tech, but it works well. We’re going to talk about that and I will see you tomorrow, all right?

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Transform Your Business: The No-Fail Guide to Writing an eBook https://doneforyou.com/simple-steps-to-writing-an-ebook-and-selling-it-online/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=simple-steps-to-writing-an-ebook-and-selling-it-online Mon, 04 May 2020 14:00:01 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10523       Introduction: The Ultimate Guide To Writing an eBook Welcome to the world of Internet marketing! You might be wondering how to get started if you’re new here. One of the most effective ways to establish yourself and generate leads is by writing an eBook. This guide will walk you through the entire […]

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Introduction: The Ultimate Guide To Writing an eBook

Welcome to the world of Internet marketing! You might be wondering how to get started if you're new here. One of the most effective ways to establish yourself and generate leads is by writing an eBook. This guide will walk you through the entire process, from idea to publication.

The Importance of Digital Products in Internet Marketing

Before diving into the guide to writing an eBook, it's essential to understand the role of digital products in internet marketing. Digital products like eBooks, video courses, and membership sites are not just additional offerings but the backbone of an effective marketing strategy. They are valuable lead magnets and can be upsold into higher-ticket items like coaching and consulting services.

The Roadmap: Different Types of Digital Products

Writing an eBook is just one of many digital products you can create. Others include video courses, audio programs, membership sites, and software. Each of these products serves a different purpose and appeals to various audiences. The key is to choose the one that aligns with your skills and business goals.

Know Thyself: Aligning Your Skills with Your Digital Product

Consider your skills and preferences when deciding what type of digital product to create. For example, if you're an extrovert who loves interacting with people, a webinar or teleseminar series might be more your speed. On the other hand, if you enjoy the writing process and can spend hours crafting content, writing an eBook could be the perfect fit.

The Power of Testing Before Creating

One advanced tip for newcomers is to test your product idea before fully committing to it. You can set up a website, create a sales page, and even add a "buy" button to see if your product resonates with your target audience. Use tools like Google Analytics to track clicks and gauge interest. If the data looks promising, you can create your eBook or other digital product.

Guide To Writing an eBook: The Step-by-Step Process

Planning Your eBook

Before you start writing an eBook, plan out its structure. Decide on the chapters, sub-sections, and key points you want to cover. This will serve as your roadmap during the writing process.

Crafting the Content

Once you have a plan, start writing. Focus on providing valuable information that solves a problem for your target audience. Use a conversational tone to make the eBook more engaging.

Editing and Proofreading

After the initial draft is complete, take the time to edit and proofread your eBook. This step is crucial for ensuring the quality of your product.

Design and Layout

The next step is to design the eBook. You can either do this yourself using software like Adobe InDesign or hire a professional to do it for you.

Publishing and Promotion

Once your eBook is ready, it's time to publish and promote it. Use your website, social media channels, and email marketing to get the word out.

Conclusion: Your Next Steps in Digital Product Creation

Writing an eBook is just the beginning. Once you successfully create and market your first digital product, you can explore other types like video courses, membership sites, and more. The sky's the limit!

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By following this guide, you'll be well on your way to writing an eBook that establishes your authority and is a powerful tool for lead generation and internet marketing.

writing an ebook

Writing an Ebook

Today's lesson is going to be a guide to writing an ebook. It's the simplest of them all. Ebooks or PDFs, when I first got into this idea of digital products, ebooks were like fucking game-changers. People were charging $37/47 for a PDF download from a website, which was revolutionary. That was, well, 14 years ago, 12/14 years back then. And then Kindle came out with an E-reader, the ugly Kindles, the ones with the keyboards, but it revolutionized digital reading. So now there are Kindle books, iBooks, and a lot more.

The idea of digital books is commonplace, whereas before, you had to in the confirmation email where you sent the PDF. You had to link to Adobe Reader, a free program everybody could use to read a PDF. But you had to link to it because the software wasn't native on a PC yet. Browsers didn't have it automatically embedded in their browser. You had to download it to read it. And now, you can open an ebook no matter your device.

Writing an ebook is the least complicated information product in the world to create. It's short in form, like reports. They're brilliant for lead generation, little eight to 10-page PDFs, meaning you can give them away and easily collect email addresses.

The process or guide for writing an ebook is a PDF that you sell and distribute from your website, allowing you to charge more and keep 100% of the sales price. That's what any book is; an ebook is something you sell. It's a digital file you sell. You can keep the money. Ebooks typically sell for $37/$27 if you're selling from your website.

Right now, many people are selling for $4.95 as tripwire offers or as low ticket introductory lead generation, buyer qualification type offers, and they work well there. That's the idea for these digital files. You can also sell them on Amazon Kindle or iBooks. However, you will be making less per sale due to Amazon and Apple's extensive distribution network, so you have to pay a percentage because of their distribution. But first, let's talk about putting them together.

1. Structure

Typically, in writing an ebook, you need to have a structure.

  • cover page
  • table of contents
  • a bio
  • introduction/story
  • body
  • conclusion.

You've read books; you know what books look like. The important thing is figuring out the hook and transformation you will make for your reader. At the end of this, we will talk about mind mapping and putting together your ideas in a book form because the software is pretty straightforward.

2. Word Processor

All you need is a word processor to write an ebook.

  • Google Docs
  • Microsoft Word
  • Apple Pages

You can export all of those word processing software as a PDF, and then your PDF is good. Then you're done. They all have a native inbound table of contents, scripts, and stuff. The software takes care of all of that stuff for you.

3. Brainstorming the Topics

The hard part is brainstorming the topics, the table of contents, and the things you want to discuss. The hardest part of the guide to writing an ebook is figuring out what your case will be and what you want to talk about. Because once you have that, you can go through and fill in the paragraphs between the content.

You can also record audio or video and then have it transcribed to quicken the process using software like rev.com, which is precisely how I create these podcasts. I Livestream these things, then send them to a transcriptionist, pay a buck for 25 minutes, so they transcribe the content into texts. And then, for me, I can use it however I want. I can put it in an ebook if I want, and I have. I can add it to the blog, and I do, so there are many different ways once you have the content that you can use or write it. And then, when it's done, you export it as a PDF, and you upload it to your website.

You export it, a PDF file, and you put the PDF file in your WordPress site, or on Amazon Cloud, or in Dropbox, or whatever. However, you want to send that PDF out, and then you link to it. And then boom, you have a digital file that you can sell for 27/37 bucks, five bucks, ten bucks, whatever you want to sell it for.

4. Ebook Cover

Now, I recommend putting together an ebook cover. It can be a digital cover like this where it's standing up. It's pretty, it looks like a book, and that's fine. It conveys that it's got a tangible feel to it: trust. Then there's some mental imagery there and all that stuff.

I have found lately that having an image in an even block, a flat photo works just as well because even on Amazon, people are used to buying books with just a flat idea. It doesn't need to be all this, although it can be if you would like. I use a piece of software called CoverActionPro to create that. I'm sure there are a million other ones. I don't even know if CoverActionPro is around anymore, but there are Fiverr people who will do it. Even though people understand that they're downloading a document, they like to see it. We have some graphical representation for the book. It doesn't have to be a book, but we want to have some imagery representing it because they want to see a cover.

Having an image also increases conversions three or four times. If it's just a straight-up text-based sales page, then it won't convert as well as it would if it had an image that did represent the book. You can get ebook covers designed on Upwork and Fiverr. As I said, you can use a Photoshop plugin. I'm sure there's standalone software you can use for it. And if you're using Upwork and Fiverr, post a job on the job boards and choose a bidder. It's going to end up being pretty cheap.

5. Ebook Format/Length

Now, there are a couple of different formats when you're writing an ebook that you should be familiar with. They're not formats; it's more terminology about different ebook lengths. So, I think of 30 to 100 pages for an ebook. That is something that somebody's going to sit down and read and go through and all that. Now, a guide, in my way of thinking, is 10 to 30 pages, so it's enough to get into a specific topic but not enough to go nuts with it. Do you know what I mean?

A report is usually given away for free, and it's 8 to 10 pages, or you charge a couple of bucks forward, or it's in addition to membership or something very concise, very particular. It's 8 to 10 pages, meant to solve one problem. So, it's just how I view digital downloads. There are lots of other ways. You can call it white paper. You can call it a one-pager or two-pager if it's super short. So, there are lots of other things you can call ebooks, but those are the ones that tend to resonate the best.

Also, this isn't a hard and fast rule, but it seems to be the norm. Many people use the words temporary or interchangeable. So a report is something you give away for free, a guide has punchy, quick value, and an ebook is meatier and should be less expensive. It's one of the reasons why we like our Funnel Factor Report. I call it a master guide because it's 274 pages long. It's not even an ebook; it's way more than just a guide to writing an ebook. It should be a textbook.

6. Ebook Pricing

Several titles, manifestos, blueprints, and video reports. I have heard that before. Typically, pricing for your books, if you're downloading it from a website or enabling to download it from your website, let's say, you're going to charge 27 to $37 for it, 47 to 67 is less common. You can get away with that for a digital download if it's highly specialized, like a particular tech procedure. Something will have a very high transformative effect on your user if it's technical.

Kindle, iPad, and Digital Reader are usually 10 to $12. They can go up to 40, but if it's a digital download through a different marketplace, they're usually 10 to 12, 10 to 14, somewhere in there. Ours are typically priced at 9.95 for digital readers, and then the books are generally 14 bucks like the paperbacks. So, that tends to be where it is.

Mind Mapping

Now, I wanted to walk you through that the idea behind writing an ebook isn't revolutionary. It's a Word document you export and put on your website as a PDF. That part's not complicated. The hard part is getting through the creation of a table of contents and thinking through the idea. So we're going to go in mind map just a little bit. I want to introduce you to mind mapping. I did this a couple of weeks ago, and everybody liked it. So we're going to do it again.

Now we're going to go to MindMeister. MindMeister is my favorite mind-mapping tool. And then, we're going to go through, and we're going to create a mind map from scratch. Let's say... I need to show you my screen, don't I? That would be very helpful. All right. I will stop this screen and share my next screen, the other application, so that will be my mind mapping application. All right. Okay. You can see my screen now. Now I'm going to make it big. There we go.

When brainstorming your book, usually start with a mind map. Let's say the book is How To Create Digital Products. It is kind of what we will discuss this week, but How To Create Digital Products. Well, the first thing you want to know, this will be chapter 1, is. We're going to call it Discovery.

Usually, the book's first few sections are Discovery or some introductory material to ensure everybody's on the same page.

Chapter 1: Discovery

Discovery is going to be skills and talents. We want to ensure you're talented and know what you're doing. Goals and aspirations: your digital product in your book must fit into your goals and how you want your life to look.

Proficiencies

Then we get into proficiencies. I probably didn't spell it right. But the experience, what you're good at, and then transformation, what you can help others with, will be your Discovery. You'll go through an introspective journey and maybe figure out what you can help others with.

Chapter 2: Product Types

Your next chapter, chapter 2, is going to be Product Types. And so once we know what we're into or can help other people with, we will talk about how to package that stuff. It can be found in the guide to writing an ebook, building video courses, membership sites, or associations. Then, once we know what kind of products we will create, how about we discuss designing those products?

Chapter 3: Marketing

We're going to do marketing: Marketing Those Products. Now that we know the next chapter is Marketing, we will need a website, not a webinar.

We don't need a webinar for this. We will need a website, Google Ads, Facebook Videos, etc. And then, after that, we're going to talk about upsells, let's say. So will all those other services we can sell as a companion to that front book. Companion offers. That might be consulting, coaching, and so on.

What we did was we just basically brainstormed what our book could be or could look like. You can take yourself through a similar process, a similar brainstorming process. We started with nothing and said, "Okay, we want to create a book on digital products.". If you look at any book, your first chapter is usually introductory material. What it's doing is bringing everybody to the same point, to the same understanding, the same level of experience.

Everybody picks up a book with different messages in their head and different ways of thinking, education, backgrounds, and experiences. They pick up this book, and now you're trying to push everybody into the same train of thought.

The first chapter usually sets the baseline for that train of thought. So Chapter 1: Discovery, generally. You need to know these things to get to Chapter 2. Chapter 2 is where the actual meat of the book starts. Chapter 2, in our case, will be "In writing an ebook, video courses, membership site," whatever. And your chapter 2's going to be different. Chapter 2 might be.

If you write about business development, it will be one thing. If you're writing about how to make money online, MLM offers, or real estate investing, your chapter 2 will be different. Chapter 3 typically builds on chapter 2, and chapter 4 builds on chapter 3. And then, in the end, you recap the entire book, and before you know it, you have an ebook that A, you can sell, and B, will transform somebody's life.

It will be a work you can then use to generate more business, create more revenue, unlink time for money, live a placeless life where you can do what you want, work with who you wish to, and all that stuff. So, that is the idea behind digital products. That's why writing an ebook and creating video courses, membership sites, and everything else are influential. Now, we went a little bit over today. Does anybody have any questions in the comment box? Just let me know.

Okay, cool. So today, we talked about writing an ebook. Let's look at a roadmap here.

Tomorrow, I think we're going to talk about video courses. We might do audio programs. We might tie it in with video courses. I'm not sure exactly how we're going to do it yet. We'll probably do video and audio together because you rarely see audio without the video.

Usually, video is created, audio is stripped out, and we'll discuss that tomorrow. Still, I will put together a course video, slides, and everything. Tomorrow, we will discuss different video software and getting in there.

 

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Sales Conversion Tips: How To Have Successful Sales https://doneforyou.com/sales-conversion-tips-how-to-maximize-sales/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=sales-conversion-tips-how-to-maximize-sales Fri, 01 May 2020 14:00:29 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10892       Video Transcript: Jason: All right, I think we’re living. Aaron: Well, my screen says we’re living. Jason: Yeah, so my screen says we’re live too. So we must be live. Aaron: We must be live. Jason: We must be live. Aaron: Again. Jason: Yeah. So how are you doing besides being super-productive? […]

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Video Transcript:

Jason:
All right, I think we're living.

Aaron:
Well, my screen says we're living.

Jason:
Yeah, so my screen says we're live too. So we must be live.

Aaron:
We must be live.

Jason:
We must be live.

Aaron:
Again.

Jason:
Yeah. So how are you doing besides being super-productive?

Aaron:
I'm doing amazing. I've always known that when crazy things happen in the economy, there are people that struggle and there are people that benefit. It's been the same in every economic crash since the dawn of time. And in this particular economic situation, those who have been digital or go digital are seeing-

Jason:
Massive growth.

Aaron:
Oh, it's like 2014 all over again.

Jason:
All right.

Aaron:
It's crazy. And being the owner of an agency, every day that I think I'm going to get to take just a little breather-

Jason:
Yeah, it doesn't happen.

Aaron:
It doesn't happen. This week, I had a staff call and there were three new team members I've never met on that-

Jason:
Nice.

Aaron:
On that team call. And I was like, "Man, this is awesome."

Jason:
All right.

Aaron:
I have this great team that's building constantly. And every time we build, I'm like, "Yeah, we got built more," because I got six more amazing opportunities that are ready to go right now. So I will officially, I believe reach our first wait-list this week.

Jason:
Wow!

Aaron:
Have you ever had a wait-list? Have you ever had a wait-list before?

Jason:
No.

Aaron:
No. I can't hire and train people the way I want to fast enough to keep up with what's happening, which is a good thing and a bad thing.

Jason:
Totally.

Aaron:
So yeah, traffic's cheap. People are-

Jason:
Traffic is cheap, sales conversion tips are plentiful.

Aaron:
Sales conversion tips are plentiful, people want to learn, people want to buy, people want to pivot a career. And the inter-webs are where it's at.

Jason:
Yep, I agree with you.

Aaron:
I have a doctor that I've been seeing because I've had some back issues I've been working on. And he was saying, and I was saying, I feel a little bit guilty about it because we're doing so well. And I know that a lot of people are struggling with that. That bothers me. But he said, "No, man, we need people like you. How is the economy going to rebound if everybody's doing well?" He's like, "So many people have this lack of mentality where they're like, "Well if I'm not doing well, nobody should do well." Trust me, I want you to be crushing it." So there's a group of people out there spending money into the economy to build it back up. If there's nobody making money, we're all screwed. It's really bad. So, the Amazons of the world hiring their 100,000 temporary workers and the Zooms of the world and the Gilead, the medical side producing vaccines and ventilators.

Aaron:
And I mean, I talked to this guy the other day was selling hand sanitizer and you want to talk about sales conversion tips we brought you the topic of today's call. Do you want to talk about conversions? I mean-

Jason:
Sell hand sanitizer right now.

Aaron:
Yeah. And one of the guys that's in my mastermind, he's like, "Yeah, we got hand sanitizer up. We were out in a week and a half. We're a million behind in a week. So there are always opportunities. It's figuring them out and capitalize on them?

Jason:
Yep. Totally.

Aaron:
I'd like to make sure that you see The Hulk.

Jason:
Yeah, totally. Very nice. I don't have a coffee cup right now. I have an empty coffee cup because I drank it on the last call.

Aaron:
Do you want to stop?

Jason:
Right, pause.

Aaron:
Can this proceed without coffee? I had to stop and go get it, which is why I was one minute late. I was like, it's not going to happen. If you need to, I can pause and wait.

Jason:
I'm good. Thank you.

Aaron:
How are you doing good sir?

Jason:
I'm fantastic. Busy. It's Friday, which means nothing in our line of work. I mean, I see your shit's green on Slack on Saturdays and Sundays, and mine is too. So it is what it is, but-

Aaron:
Is that our industry or is that just our nature?

Jason:
It might be just our nature. It might be. Well, I was even telling a client. I was like, "Yeah, today is..." and she said something. She was like, "Yeah, today's Friday." And I was like, the weekend is like this fascinating mental construct. It means nothing in terms of what we do. But yet you still look forward to it to some degree. Oh, it is Saturday, which means I'm choosing to sit here and do or whatever.

Aaron:
And you know what the thing is, I get super-excited for the weekend.

Jason:
Yeah, you get something done.

Aaron:
Yeah. It's the time I get to focus on the creative stuff where nobody's bothering me. So, I'm like, "Yeah I get to go to work now," after I've worked for 50 hours in the regular week. I'm like, "Ooh, what do I get to work on today?" This is what I want to do. And obviously, that comes with the whole balance conversation. Fortunately, because we work from home when I want to go play football in the backyard with my kid, I just go in the backyard and I just stopped. I went for three hours plus walks with my wife in the middle of the day, this week because I could, but then I came back and started working again because we can work whenever we want that's the benefit of what we do.

Aaron:
And it's hard when the gold rush is on, you're sitting on the couch and you're watching some Netflix or something, watching some Breaking Bad and 40 minutes in you're like, "This is not a good use of my time right now." When the sun is shining, "You need to make hay," as my grandfather would have said. That's what I'm going to do, make a lot of hay right now.

Jason:
Yeah. I hear ya. So today we're talking about sales conversion tips.

Aaron:
Awesome.

Jason:
So we're doing what? So what was it, what number are we trying to get to five, five conversion mistakes or sales conversion tips or what?

Aaron:
I think we could start with three and then maybe expand, into as many as our genius will allow today. Maybe we'll say, let's say five because as soon as we say three, we're going to say multiple, more.

Jason:
Cool. So I'm going to write these because in the chatbox here, so converging tip number one, what is it?

Aaron:
Sales conversion tips tip number one for me is to create an irresistible offer. And I think a lot of people oversimplify what that means, but you've built. How many sales funnels have you built in your life?

Jason:
Over 400, last time I counted.

Aaron:
That's a lot of funnels.

Jason:
That's a lot of funnels, yeah.

Aaron:
And so many people think when they come to our agency that it's all about the traffic. They're like, "I'm not converting you fix it." And my response is, "I can't fix a shitty offer." That's rule number one. So that's why we say on our website, we help successful businesses, scale to new heights with digital marketing. Because I don't want to... I mean, you could hire me to fix your offer, but don't expect that the traffic is going to fix your offer. So, let's talk about key elements to an irresistible offer. You can go first or I can go first, it doesn't matter to me, but you've built a million of these and so have I. So what are the things that influence people's buying decisions, i.e. sales conversion tips? You go first, I'll add-in.

Jason:
Yeah. I think a big one right now is meeting somebody where they are and not somewhere you want them to be. So, as of right now, when the pandemic hit all of the marketing material, including sales conversion tips copy and everything swayed very hard towards this is... So, this is where you are right now and this is where you want to go, but meet you where you are. So right now, restaurants are shutting down, stores are shutting down blah, blah, blah. People are staying home, you're sharing your office with your wife or whatever, and this is how what we sell or what we provide or offer, this is how it can make your life better, it can transform your world somehow. To meet somebody where they are as opposed to painting this ideal picture and then hoping that they go there. Do you know what I mean?

Aaron:
I think that's a great vantage point on it. And I saw something I think from I don't know if it was Digital Marketer, something a couple of weeks ago that said, be cognizant around your messaging, showing ads that are in a party with a bunch of landlords lined up outside the front door looks moronic right now because nobody's doing that. So you're not connecting with the audience at all where they're at right now. Address where we're at, don't give too much energy to it, paint the picture where you want to go. Like you're saying, meet somebody where they're at. And, there are only two reasons why people buy, what are those two reasons? Number one, to avoid pain and number two to increase pleasure.

Aaron:
And there are multi-variants off of each one, but you can dumb it down to those two to eliminate pain, to increase pleasure. So then, you have to ask yourself, okay, in this current economy, if we talk about decreased pain, where are the pain points for people? The pain points for people are, they're not making enough money, they're not getting enough exercise, they're bored, they don't know if their job is going to be around long-term, they don't know if their career is going to be relevant moving forward. So if you can speak to the current scenario, the current economy, the current state of the union and then address those particular fears and then give them a solution that makes sense on the way out, then you're going to be speaking directly to the people that you want to be speaking to, and you're going to have clarity in the messaging because you sound current, you sound relevant and you're solving the problem or you're increasing pleasure. And it's the same with e-commerce right.

Aaron:
We talk about e-commerce products all the time in our agency, which is that there are only two types of products, there are the brand products, and a skin cream would be a great example of that. Where there's a million skin creams. We have moisturizing droplets and anti-wrinkle and who cares? So you got to craft a story around it, a story around the face, maybe charities you're involved with maybe social impact you're doing, leveraged influencers and bonds, other people's audiences. That's a brand play. And there's, what I call the holy shit products where you see a video in Facebook or Instagram or whatever and the moment you see it, you're like, "I must have that," because it's either speaks, it's either solving a pain immediately, or it's increasing pleasure exponentially. And it's just like, "I got to have it."

Aaron:
And if you can take the stance of I'm going to try and be in the holy shit category and build the story and the brand around it, then it's far easier to convert people because you've got their attention immediately by speaking to that, avoid pain or pleasure right off the bat. One of our friends that we're working with right now, they're putting on seminars for financial education products. Speaking to the economy, people are trying to protect their money. People are trying to figure out how they're going to make more money in the future may be retirements have been hit, whatever.

Aaron:
And they've got a system that's going to allow people to rectify that immediately with a 30-year track record expert. That's a very current needed Lucian speaking to the state of the union. Very, very easy to convert. Now, if we came out and said, "I've got some nice high-end speedboats with kitchens and bathrooms and champagne on tap," what the hell are you talking about right now? It's not relevant whatsoever at all. So it all starts with the messaging and understanding where the pain is, or how much value and happiness you can bring and then tying it in with the current state of the union and paving in their mind that direct path from where they are to where they want to go. And some people call that copywriting, some people call that messaging, there are a million different ways. But if you can put the right message in front of the right person, you're going to convert all day long.

Jason:
Totally. So I think number three, in moving in that same vein is something around free content. Establishing value through free content right now is working extremely well. Always has, lead magnets of course, but now it's like the modalities are different. Before it used to be like free reports, PDF downloads, a little one-time video, or a multi-video sequence. That stuff still works. But I think the dynamics around it have changed a little bit. So especially videos. Videos and Facebook groups we talked about last week, hugely popular. As opposed to a kind of a paged layout, we've talked about some models in the past where there is VA's calling on the phone, one-on-one kind of conversations that it's not necessarily the expert, but it's somebody calling on the expert's behalf to say, "Hey, you're important to us."

Jason:
And I know even in our sales conversion tips and a lot of our clients and sales funnels, automation gets you 90% of the way there. But that last 10%, which is a personal touch, like a personal email, it's a personal phone call. It's like that stuff is the stuff that drives people over the edge in terms of sales conversion tips. Would you agree?

Aaron:
Yeah. And that's the system, we talked about is the system. You have to ask yourself, what is the why? Why does it do that? And it's because value equals credibility. After all, everybody's being pounded with all this information all the time. When you deliver that extra piece of free content when you get more eyeballs on you when you have somebody reach out on your behalf, like a VA, and thank somebody for downloading X or buying X. If you put them into a private Facebook group and deliver the content and answer their questions for a couple of days, it's all that context of, or that concept I should say, of the more value you give, the more credibility you establish as being different from everybody else who's just out there hawking what they're hawking.

Jason:
Right. Right, right.

Aaron:
And I think we talked a little bit about this last week, about how we believe that for every hour of value, you give somebody, you can sell around 500 to a $1,000 product. Because people buy, a great video if nobody's watched this before, is to go watch Simon Sinek's Start With Why TED talk. And I worked with Simon about 10 years ago when he was relatively new on the scene. And that video, when you break it down into one phrase in that TED talk that I've remembered forever, is that people don't buy from everybody, they buy from people they like, and they trust. So your job is not to try to sell to everybody. Your job is to try to sell to people who believe what you believe.

Aaron:
So in your messaging, if you're talking about what you believe. I believe the world is like this right now. I believe people are looking for this outcome. I believe that people are scared. I believe that people want to get back to the new norm. I believe that people realize now that their jobs may become redundant or how we work has changed forever. How we shop has changed forever. And this is how we are going to capitalize on it. Then you're speaking to people with your beliefs and those people that believe the same thing as you, they're going to convert like hotcakes versus having a big generic message and trying to convert everybody because you'll repel. If you talk about what you believe, you repel the people you don't want to buy and you attract the people that you do. Some people call that polarizing some people call that belief-based marketing. It's been something impactful when it comes to sales conversion tips forever.

Jason:
Well, and especially in these last couple of months, because there is such a polar difference between people who believe this is an opportunity and people who believe this is a curse. And it seems that people who are grasping this as an opportunity are the ones who are doing well right now, primarily because they're leading everybody online, which is everybody right now. Do you know what I mean? And then you have the other side who believe that it is, who are scared or fearful or whatever. And then it's just there's such a polar opposite now at play in the public.

Aaron:
Yeah. And I subscribed to this one podcast, they're a publishing company. And I've been watching the emails come into my inbox for the last week and they know exactly who their audience is, because every single email I get right now is doom and gloom and fear and the world is ending, every single one. And what they're selling, they're giving this amazing content to support their beliefs. And I do legitimately believe that they believe what they're saying. I don't think they're doing it just to sell stuff. Because they're bringing some amazing experts on government experts and military experts and all these kinds of things. But they know that their audience responds best to fear. And they will then sell them the solution-

Jason:
To the fear.

Aaron:
To fear. If they were in there going like, "Yeah, we don't think this is that bad, jump on this webinar and hear why their audience won't respond. They know their audience, they know the current mindset of that audience. And they believe that same thing. So that's the bane they're... And I actually like put it in a different folder today. Because that's not me. I don't believe what they believe. So, they did the right thing, they've polarized the...

Jason:
Totally.

Aaron:
I've moved them into my, not my spam folder, but this is one that I don't want to see.

Jason:
All right.

Aaron:
I won't look at it anymore because it's not what I believe. But they are selling a ton of products to people that believe that this is the end of the world and they need to get a life preserver and preserve [crosstalk 00:21:49] and safety, all that kind of stuff. And, and I'm not saying they're wrong. They could be right. It's just not-

Jason:
What you believe in.

Aaron:
But yeah, they're crashing and I've seen their numbers and I'm just printing money. Here's a crazy thing. I don't know if you've ever seen. Maybe, I don't know if we can post this up here. Part of the mastermind I'm part of it has a URL that shows the top 100 Shopify stores at any given time by sales conversion tips volume.

Jason:
What is it? I haven't heard of this.

Aaron:
Okay. I will. I wonder if I can pull it up.

Jason:
If you can see the screen, you can pull it up in Google. Pull it up on your browser. And then, I think you can share your screen on the lower, in the lower bar it should say, share screen.

Aaron:
I'm trying to think of where I saved it. I put myself on the spot here to pull it up. If you do a quick Google search it'll take you to just put top-grossing, Shopify stores, right now. There's an IP tracker that they do. Anyways it wasn't the point of where I'm... The point of where I'm going is that I was scrolling through the top 20 the other day, just to sort of seeing what was trendy, right now. And one that I came across was Jawzrsize. Have you heard of this?

Jason:
No.

Aaron:
So I almost fell off my chair, because I saw a couple of ads for it on Facebook. And I was like, "Were people buying that?" And then I pull up the top 100 Shopify stores in the world right now. And it's in the top 100. This is pure insanity. Do you know how much money is that firm is making? That's crazy. And I'm going to try and pull up the actual site itself and see if we can show it. Here we go right here. All right, so how do I share my screen on this?

Jason:
So if you're looking at our window, our street mirror window, and the lower part of underneath our pictures it says share screen. So you would share, just pick your screen.

Aaron:
I'm on it. Just like that.

Jason:
Oh, look at that. And then I have to add it to, there we go.

Aaron:
All right. Check this out. You ever saw this before? No. Get a chiseled jaw.

Jason:
Wow!

Aaron:
How it works. They got this little video. It comes with multiple strengths of these things that you put in your mouth and you bite down on them. It's got a gazillion reviews of, hey, this was my no jaw before, this is my new jaw, girl, got this guy recouped from surgery. This is the guy that created it, he broke his jaw or whatever, and he had to rebuild it, and blah, blah, blah. And it's a box with these spongy things in it that you just chew on and you increase the strength of your jaw. I've seen the ads for it. I was like, "Oh, that could be kind of cool." Some people think this is a holy shit product that they have to have immediately because it's in the top 50, I think right now of Shopify stores worldwide, which is crazy to me.

Aaron:
But they're speaking to something that people consider to be a real pain, like a real pain point for them. "I have no jaw. I've got a double chin, I look fat and it's driving me crazy. So I'm going to buy these things I'm going to chew them all day long until I have an iron-looking jaw." And I think, I'm not judging the company. I think it's amazing-

Jason:
Yeah lovely.

Aaron:
... stories I love. But their ads have targeted the pain point of a group of people to be making that kind of revenue. I love that. I love that kind of story.

Jason:
That's crazy. I've never heard of them. That's because I'm not-

Aaron:
You don't care.

Jason:
Right. So, that's awesome.

Aaron:
Yeah. And they're converting like crazy. And maybe we should show people like one of our Ninja Tools today. Sometimes I think people, they automatically know all the stuff that we know and they don't. And I take it for granted, even with my team. You know about Facebook Ad Library, of course, because you're a smart guy. So I'm pulling up Facebook Ad Library. So for those people who don't know what Facebook Ad Library is, Facebook Ad Library is a place where you can see all ads from any company at any time as part of their transparency, push with Facebook. And you can see exactly what those companies are running for ads. And if you're looking for inspiration or you're looking for ideas, or you want to funnel hack something-

Jason:
This how you do it. It used to be back in the day, there were tools like Adbeat and some of the other ones like for Google keyword tool, for mostly Google ads, you could pull up all like a Google keyword phrase in the ads they were running and how long those ads were running and all that other kind of intel-based stuff. So, but Facebook has this Ad Library now.

Aaron:
Yeah, because they have to do the government's privacy for that. So can you see my screen right now?

Jason:
Yep.

Aaron:
So this, I just went in and punched in the page, right? Jawzrsize boom! 23,000 likes, 56,000 posts, this thing's brand new too. And they've got all of these videos just showing people chewing on these things, which cracks me up. We're just looking at this?

Speaker 3:
When I first saw this product I thought it was kind of crazy. I didn't understand what the benefits would be, but I'd seen some before and after pictures on the website, I thought to myself, what, I'm 48 years old. My face is starting to look a little bit aged. Wouldn't hurt to try. So after 30 days, I could not believe my before and after pictures, I rolled back the hands of time, 10 years.

Aaron:
All right.

Jason:
It's brilliant.

Aaron:
It's killing it, absolutely killing it right now. And of course, you can't show before and afters on Facebook. It's against their terms of service. So now everybody's who's got smart is I'm just going to blur that-

Jason:
Yeah totally.

Aaron:
And put shown on site. A great workaround, and probably works better because then there's the curiosity aspect that now, well, I want to click to the site and see, what it looks like. Before you just saw the before and after, that's cool. Now it says shown on-site and you're like, "Well, now I want to go to the site." It's probably backfired on Facebook. It's probably increased sales conversion tips the way that it's happening now.

Jason:
Yeah. That's funny. All right, we are, we're running up on 30 minutes. I think we wanted to keep it at 30 minutes, right?

Aaron:
I think 30 minutes is good-

Jason:
We got through three, I think. I mean, there were all kinds of weird little sales conversion tips.

Aaron:
Oh man, we can keep going and going and going. But number one is to be current. Understand your audience, understand their state of the union mentally. Speak from that perspective, focus on pain or pleasure, and a clear outcome. Number two is in your messaging, speak to people in the context of what you believe because people will buy from you if they believe what you believe. And those are the best types of customers. And content is king.

Jason:
Content is king.

Aaron:
The more times people see you, the more they like and trust you, the higher your sales conversion tips are going to be. And we could probably list off another 10 and maybe we'll do that in the next episode. But if you start with just that, then you're way ahead of the average Joe.

Jason:
Love it. All right, thanks, Aaron. I appreciate it. We'll talk to you soon and we're on next Friday at 11:00 AM.

Aaron:
Yeah. Same bat time, same bat channel.

Jason:
All right. See ya.

Aaron:
Later.

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Accelerate Lesson 5: Launch – How To Get Traffic To Your Website Fast https://doneforyou.com/accelerate-lesson-5-launch-how-to-start-getting-clicks-to-your-offer/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=accelerate-lesson-5-launch-how-to-start-getting-clicks-to-your-offer Sun, 26 Apr 2020 14:35:04 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10261       Video Transcript: Hey, what’s up? This is Jason Drohn, welcome to today’s presentation. This is the third presentation of the day, which is pretty crazy. Today we’re going to talk about launching your product and how to get traffic to your website fast… In other words, launching your offer out into the […]

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Video Transcript:

Hey, what's up? This is Jason Drohn, welcome to today's presentation. This is the third presentation of the day, which is pretty crazy. Today we're going to talk about launching your product and how to get traffic to your website fast...

In other words, launching your offer out into the world. Monday we talked about brainstorming, coming up with ideas, and then Tuesday we talked about putting your idea through an offering framework. Putting together the marketing avatar, putting together the outline, putting together all that stuff. Then Wednesday we talked about creating the offer, actually no creating the thing that you are going to be selling. Thursday we talked, yesterday we talked about sales funnels, setting up automated sales processes that are going to push your offer out into the world. Today we're going to talk about launching it.

Now, there are two different ways that you can go about moving product. The goal for moving product, the goal for launching is to get as many eyeballs on your offer as you possibly can. At the end of the day, that's all there is to it. You want to get people who are interested, who have a problem that you can help them solve. You want to get them to your website, watching your sales video, consuming your material and then ultimately buying from you. I mean that's what business is. The goal of marketing is to help as many people as possible find your offer, find what you do. That's really what we're going to talk about today. That's the part of getting traffic that a lot of people struggle with.

So the questions is always, "How to get traffic to your website fast?

I have a friend who says, "You don't have a traffic problem, you have a money problem." Like there's never traffic problem because there's so much traffic out there online, you just have to pay for it. You just have to go get it. At the end of the day, that's all there is to it.

Now, there are two types of traffic. There is a free traffic and there is paid traffic. I'm referring to free traffic and paid traffic in the monetary sense, all traffic costs something. If you want free traffic, you are going to be spending time to get it and there's no guarantee that that traffic is ever actually going to happen. There's nothing guaranteed that says that anybody's ever going to show up to your website if you go the free route.

When figuring out how to get traffic to your website fast, there are ways to ensure that you are going to be getting traffic. Livestreams is one way, that's one of the reasons why we do live streams. Content is another way, so posting blog posts on your website, you're bound to get some traffic. It might not be the best traffic. It might not be a lot of traffic, but you're going to get some traffic, some clicks. Now if you want a lot of traffic, you need to post a lot of content. You need to do a lot of live streams and even then it's going to take a while for the traffic to hit.

I used to do a lot of SEO and when you have a website that is ranking well, then you can count on the traffic coming, you can count on it coming quickly if you know what you're doing in terms of targeting the right keyword phrase. Used to be, now not so much anymore. Now it's hard to get ranked for the keyword phrase that you want and basic command to search engines quite the way you perhaps want to.

So is slow so it's not a great way of figuring out how to get traffic to your website fast.

I'm talking a lot today, so regardless of what keyword phrases you're trying to rank for, what you're trying to launch, one of the most full-proof ways of getting free traffic is what I have been doing, what you've seen me do. Which is do these live streams and then transcribe those live streams and put them on a blog post, and then get ranked for keyword phrases?

Like right now we are experiencing like a 15% improvement in traffic week to week. They, my friend, is how to get traffic to your website fast!

It's like kind of stepping up like we have a baseline so let's say this is our baseline and then we have month one or week one. Then we have week two, we step up and then week three we step up and then week four we step up. We've been doing this for five weeks. It is an incremental improvement, we are roughly generating twice as much traffic right now as what we were five weeks ago. It's not an insignificant amount of traffic, this is all traffic we don't have to pay for. These people are interested in what we do in one shape or form and they come, they read a blog post and then they leave. In leaving, we also are retargeting them so now we're putting together these pretty intense like buyer pools based on them coming to the website and everything else, so that is nice.

It takes a lot of time and even that it's not free. Like the software that I'm using to stream these, it is called StreamYard. StreamYard is $49 a month, which is pennies compared to the value that we get out of it. Like $49 would get us 50 clicks or 75 clicks or 20 leads or whatever. We are getting thousands and thousands and thousands of visitors because of this technology.

There are freeways to get a blog post transcribed, Otter.ai is one. I'm just going to start kicking around on the screen here so you can take a look if we go here. All right, so I'm going to share this screen and I'm going to go find that screen. Is this it? All right, there it is. Okay, cool. Otter.ai, O-T-T-E-R.ai is a blog post service. I like my stack for these live streams is streamyard.com for the streaming. Streamyard.com does the streaming and we're life right now so that's why you see it now. Then Otter.ai is a tool that you can use to transcribe your content.

Now it's machine transcription so there is nothing crazy... I mean, well, it does a great job for what it does. The problem is, it is a word for word transcription. When you say so and um and uh and all the imperfections, then it transcribes all that stuff. It also blocks it all together as generally like there's no intelligence kind of breakouts as far as paragraphs go.

But if you're looking for how to get traffic to your website fast, this is one way of doing it!

What we do is we use a service called rev.com. Rev.com you can see that I'm in here quite a bit, but rev.com is, I'm not sure if I can go back to the homepage. I'm logged in yeah, it's just going to keep bouncing me here. I could log out, but whatever. Rev.com is a buck 25 a minute and the transcribers are awesome, great transcription service. For me yeah, these 30-minute sessions cost 40 bucks for every one of them to be transcribed.

I post them as blog posts and then all of a sudden I'm getting traffic for them for all kinds of keyword phrases because it is legitimately a 4,000-word blog post. Not many blog posts are usually that long so this is an example, this one. Yeah. This was a GSDdaily blog post that I added, how to write an email copy that gets opened. This was Wednesdays and basically, it's a video and then button. Oops, I need to put this over on the screen that you can see.

This is my free traffic strategy, my free traffic growth strategy here. When I'm asked how to get traffic to your website fast, I usually share this...

I've shared this with a couple of people and they freaking love it and they are implementing the results the same way. Starts with the live stream, you get it transcribed and then you drop the embed code for YouTube on the blog post. Then you've got the button and then you have your just... The only reason this is here is so I can push the transcript down because it is kind of ugly. Like look at this, there's no formatting. I send it through Grammarly.

Grammarly likes to do all the checking and make sure that my punctuation and stuff are right. I didn't write it, it's rev.com did, so I make sure the grammar and punctuation, all that stuff is good and it's just a wall of text. I don't think anybody's going to read this, but the search engines love it because the keyword phrase, write email copy is literally in this text 17 or 18 times. Here, watch this, write email copy, 16 times so look at all of that.

Google knows that this article is about a written email copy, so we're going to be ranking for a write email copy. There's a video with all kinds of write email copy in there. Like all of it, all of it points to the fact that this article is about to write email copy, writing email copy so that is a free traffic strategy, getting clicks now. It might take a week, might take a couple of weeks. Done For You is an old domain, 12, 14 years old or something. I've only had it for two or three years and we have been writing content on it for two or three years.

When I first started so last two, is it two Januaries or three Januaries ago? I think it was two Januaries ago, might've been three but basically, I went to Upwork. I was spending a bunch of money on traffic and I went to Upwork and said if I can spend $1,000, so if I can take $1,000 out of my ad budget and start building content, start having ghostwriters or writers, bloggers write content that can get me free traffic forever then it's a good deal.

I started to do the content marketing angle and since then we've published 450 or 500 blog posts but now most of that work is taken over by this live streaming process because we just pump out articles so fast. 4,500-word article for 60 bucks, 70 bucks give or take, all in so that's how we get free traffic, so free traffic launch strategy.

Then what we do is we couple that with a paid traffic strategy where we boost these live streams. I want to just take you real quick into my ad account here where we can see how those live streams are, they influence, we can end up doing some pretty, pretty good numbers for some not a whole lot of money. Then how that influences paid traffic strategy, so here we are inside one of my ad accounts and I'm just going to open this up a little bit.

Now if we go into... This is our live stream campaign. Now, for the most part, I spend $5 a day promoting live streams. It's not a lot, but because I'm doing a live stream, at least one live stream every day and this week I've been doing two a day and today I did three. Like all of this little, tiny chunk kind of stuff adds up but here, let me just take you through some of the results. I think you can see this stolen stream here, so let me just make it a little bigger.

All right, so you can see this. All right, so I have three different ad sets. There's an ad set for sales and conversion, an ad set for startups in creators and an ad set for content marketing. Now if we go sales and conversion, then you're going to see there's a couple of live streams that I added in here, a couple of the GSDdailies. The one that's still on is an automated webinar live stream and this is just the live stream, including all the fucking off at the beginning and the random stuff at the end and whatever. Like it's just a rip of the live stream, no edits, no nothing.

The ad itself is Jason Daily number 16 automated webinar, blah blah, blah. The captions are saved to the video and then we have a call to action and the call to action is for the sales funnels page, which I don't plan on anybody clicking. Like I don't think anybody's going to watch it and then click over to a sales page, that's not the point. The point is we want to get people who are interested in the thing that we're doing, interested enough that they're going to watch like 15 seconds of the video.

15 seconds on Facebook is what is called a ThruPlay. If I just go to video engagement, then you will see for, how much have I spent? I've spent $22 on this campaign, which is nothing. 1,400 people watched 10 seconds of this video for $22. 2,600 people watched three seconds for $22, so the impressions were 5,400. The only thing I care about is how many people watch like 10 seconds. How many people watch ThruPlays is 15 seconds and then wow, we had 23 people watch the whole thing. Like really? Really? That blows my mind, blows my mind. Here we had 2,000 ThruPlays on this chatbot funnel for $56. Again, just ridiculous. I mean these things are half an hour-long, like just a random and then boom you get somebody watching it for half an hour, it's nuts.

The reason we do this though, we don't get the clicks, so the video engagement is why we do it. Let me just look at, so performance and clicks, I just want to show you how little I care about the clicks in this aspect. The conversion rate is average. The engagement rate is above average. The quality ranking is above average, all good things. We only got six clicks, so it was $3 and 67 cents per click, which is fine. 100 clicks in total though, which is solid and the average percent, so they on average watched 26 seconds of this video. It's crazy.

Now the point is, these live streams I don't care about the clicks. What I want them to do is if we go into audiences, this is where you start to see where it all makes sense. Our cold traffic, actually let's go there next. Our cold traffic, let's look at the targeting here. Targeting is going to be in your ad set. Now in the ad set if we look at the targeting we find this is a cold traffic ad. Meaning, so I even say cold traffic ad in the ad set there but inside this ad, so we're just spending five bucks a day and our reach is pretty exponential. This is a 100% lookalike audience so I created a lookalike audience of all the people who have been to our VSL, our sales funnel, development sales page. Then I put them, I created, kind of dripped them down through filters.

Everybody who is living in the United States between the ages of 35 and 64, both men and women who they're interested in Brendon Burchard, Frank Kern, Grant Cardone, Mike Dillard, and then also our career coach, executive coach, life coach, life coaching, all the life coach kind of skills. Then we're putting automatic placements, so automatic placements include Facebook, mobile, Instagram, not Instagram because these are long-ass videos, but wherever we can show it, we are optimizing for a ThruPlay. Then that is it, that's targeting, it's a cold traffic audience.

Then what we're doing is anybody who watches, so we're going to go over into audiences. Anybody who watches more than 10 seconds, who watches more than 15 seconds or a ThruPlay, they end up getting put into a bucket. Here we have video views, all 15 seconds. I mean we have 2,300 people in this campaign right now. In the last 30 days, 2,300 people have watched at least 15 seconds of the video. 4,000 have watched 10 seconds, 1,100 watched 50% of our Facebook ads, Facebook video, video ads. 50% watched the sales funnel video, so there are lots of different ways to kind of cut it up.

Now anybody who watches more than 15 seconds ends up getting put into a group and better yet, we can create a lookalike audience. We're going to do this, we're going to create a lookalike audience of people who watch more than 15%, so this is going to be our United States group. Then 2.4 million people are going to be in this segment and we're going to just say create an audience.  That's a lot of people when you're trying to find out how to get traffic to your website fast!

Now it's going to create the audience and if we want to add those people into our campaigns, all we need to do and keep in mind this, so because we're going to come back to it. All we need to do, let's go back to the ad manager. We're going to go into that live stream, the live stream audience, which is right there. Then we're going to, so we have yeah, there was one out and we're going to go in here. Actually no, we're going to go to ad sets, edit the ad set and then we're going to just add that new segment that we just created. Right here we're going to search existing audiences and then we're going to add that lookalike audience, that lookalike video views audience. Now our targeting is a little bit more, we have more people so in this sense, anybody who watched more than 15 seconds, we created a lookalike audience of people just like them. Now they are going to be seeing our ad too.

The ad set has been saved. Now I'm going to show you the re-targeted ad. When we set these things up, it's a two-staged approach. We always have the cold traffic ad that typically is a video or a live stream and that thing is being pushed out to all of the cold traffic people. Facebook gives bonus points to live streams because it's kind of all done in their platform.

Then all of the people who watch at least 15% of the video, we re-target them into an ad like this. Now I just set up this ad so we're looking at Facebook, let's see, sales funnel cold. This sales funnel cold ad is kind of an anomaly. Hardly ever do we go after cold traffic and try to get them into like an ebook but that one's work, really, really well so $3 and 56 cents a lead. This campaign is one, so it's a re-targeted ad. Anybody who watches more than like 15 seconds of a video or comes to our website, then we try to get them back into a sales process.

If you're looking for how to get traffic to your website fast, FB ads are the best way...

We have re-target and then we're going to hit edit and you will see that here we are targeting DFY website traffic for the last 30 days. VSL sales funnel traffic, and also anybody who was engaged for more than 10 seconds with one of our videos. They watched 15 seconds or more of a video, 10 seconds or more of a video. All, so 75% of a video, 50% of a video.

If they've watched more than 10 seconds of a video, they are in this campaign, they are seeing our re-targeted ads. Then also we kind of again drill down through locations, United States, New Zealand, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia. Those are the five big countries that we do business in. The age group is a little bit laxer just because it might be website traffic that comes in, 30 to 65. Right in the range of folks we're looking for when deciding how to get traffic to your website fast...

Then here we don't have any demographic or interests in this re-targeted campaign because we know we could, we could step them back down through like interest groups but here's the thing, they're engaged with us. They watched enough of a video, so unless they were scrolling and then they just kind of stopped on a video that didn't apply to them, then they're probably pretty hot. I mean they at least should be there.

The same as if they came to our website as they had to kind of mess up to hit the website. We don't try to make them jump through hoops when we need to figure out how to get traffic to your website fast.

I mean, Facebook isn't the end all be all in terms of their algorithms, so every once in a while somebody who might be super interested hits a website and it's like, well, we're not going to filter them out if need be.

Then the rest of this campaign is pretty set up, it's on automatic placements. We can have manual placements too, so we can just do mobile or desktop or whatever but automatic has seemed to work pretty well. The image that was working the best was this image here. I actually, I wasn't real happy with the click cost, so I switched it out to a video. This is the image and then I switched it out to this guy, there we go so you can watch the video here. It's literally, I ripped it off of a sales page. It's just an MP4 file that has an intro and then that's it. That's it. Right, nice and short, so it's just meant to engage because it will autoplay on devices. It's meant to engage them and move them into a re-targeted campaign and that's about it.

There is a lot here. Basically what we do is we kind of go through and we start with organic traffic and then we kind of move to paid traffic. That's how to get traffic to your website fast.  You can start with a live stream, you start with a video. We write scripts for our clients, so we'll write Facebook ad scripts for your lead magnet or your webinar or whatever and kind of move into edit it and all that other stuff. It ends up becoming kind of a nice, simple process for rolling out.

Every campaign is a little bit different. The startup campaign, whether you're working with free organic traffic or paid traffic, whether you have money to invest in paid traffic campaigns. This strategy works tremendously well for bonding clients to you, for attracting people into your world. Then ultimately to get them to push them over the edge in the buying journey, in the story arc of purchasing from your company.

Now, this is the last lesson for accelerate. This is the last lesson and we walked through exactly how to create and build information products. Just judging on how a lot of the messenger feedback we got, the content was like literally, this is the same stuff we teach our clients. The only difference is we pull people, we pull our clients through. Not only do we help you brainstorm, but we also try to create the product for you so there are lots of things. We build the website, build a sales funnel, all that stuff.

Here is what I'm doing. In the next two weeks, I'm welcoming you to set up a call with me where we talk about your idea, your product, your business, the thing you want to launch, the thing you want to grow, the thing you want to scale. You and I are going to talk about how we put an action plan, a strategy around that. We're going to talk about rolling it out, whether it's an idea that you're looking to launch and you're looking to create an info product, create an ebook, create a video course, a membership site, whatever. You're just looking for somebody to help you through it.

Or you have something, maybe something that has been sitting on your hard drive or sitting in the recesses of your mind or whatever, but you have something you know and you want to grow it, you want to scale it then also book a call with me. Go to doneforyou.com/jd. The better ones that go through are probably consultingsession.com, just go to consultingsession.com, book a call with me I'm going to toss in a banner here. Consulting session, so there we go. There we go, so consultingsession.com that's it. I even added a little ticker there for you and then here are the comments, to book a call. All right, so to book a call, go to consultingsession.com. I'm happy to work through your idea, your problem, your business, and all that stuff. Figure out, see where it leads.

We have training. I've done these hundreds of times for clients and I would be happy to help you put your product together, put your business, launch your business, scale your business, like the whole deal. To find out how to get traffic to your website fast, go to consultingsession.com, fill out the little form, then book a call with me or just send me a message on Facebook and I'm happy to help out.

For the next two weeks, let's see, it is the 17th, so for the next two weeks, we're going to be doing this. The program that we are launching is going to be, the program is going to launch on the fourth. My fourth is going to be the start of our accelerator. May fourth we're going to start and get everything going and the accelerator is going to be, well we'll talk more about this on the call, but it is going to be an eight-week boot camp. We're going to go through and build it all as a group and work through the creation process and I'm going to help. At the end of the day, we're going to move through it together, launch together, create together, and tell this pandemic to go to hell together. That's going to be a lot of fun.

Go to consultingsession.com, book a call with me. If you have any questions at all, send me a message or book a call and I will talk to you soon. All right, thanks. Bye.

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Accelerate Lesson 4: Automate – Setting Up A Simple Sales System That Converts https://doneforyou.com/accelerate-lesson-4-automate-setting-up-a-simple-sales-system-that-converts/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=accelerate-lesson-4-automate-setting-up-a-simple-sales-system-that-converts Sun, 26 Apr 2020 14:31:29 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10254       Video Transcript: Hey, What’s up? This is Jason Drone. Welcome to today’s accelerated presentation, accelerate the lesson. Today we’re going to talk about setting up a simple sales system, a simple product sales funnel, that is going to get sales through the door so that you can start generating revenue as quickly […]

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Video Transcript:

Hey, What's up? This is Jason Drone. Welcome to today's accelerated presentation, accelerate the lesson. Today we're going to talk about setting up a simple sales system, a simple product sales funnel, that is going to get sales through the door so that you can start generating revenue as quickly as possible from your idea. Now, if you've been following with us, Monday, we talked about your idea, putting together your idea so that you can start generating some cash flow with it. Then Tuesday we talked about, qualifying your idea, outlining your idea, and putting it through what we call a framework, an offering framework. So that is a combination of the marketing avatar and the outline of whatever it is we're going to be building and asking the simple question, what do I need to do for my prospect, my customer, for them to have a transformation in their life to adopt some of those skills and strategies.

Then yesterday we talked about unlinking time and money. And in unlinking time in money we were able to differentiate what we needed to do to start selling our product and perhaps maybe doing a service. So the product gives us scalable availability, so we can sell, 100 or 1000 of those products again and again and again, or we can sell services, in which case it is very much time equals money, but that money is usually pretty substantial. We can bring those two things together and have assisted courses where we have the framework of a course and then we do some coaching or some consulting or some services or whatever and we're able to charge top dollar without necessarily working hard to do it. So it just depends on where you want to be. Some people are 100% product-focused and that's fine. Some people are a 100% service focused and that's fine.

Where a lot of people are going is where they come in, they meet in the middle. So today what we're going to talk about is a very simple framework, a simple sales system that you can use to generate some conversions. And I put there's a small presentation. I went through it this morning as it relates to offering to a sequence. But it's the same thing holds because it's a little simple sales system that you can implement immediately. And tomorrow we're going to talk about paid traffic. We're going to talk about a growth plan for generating traffic on a budget that is content-based and everything else. But the idea here is that what we want to do is we want to launch. We want to start building trust with our tribe, with people.

And the best way to do that is oftentimes it just by giving them content. So generally whenever we launch a new product, this is how we start. We start by doing a Facebook ad to a blog post, or an advertorial, or some piece of content. So the Facebook ad is super simple. This is, can't find time to write blog posts? There's a better way to do it. And then that the image is, how to write website content that drives conversions through a simple sales system. Now this image oftentimes is a video, so we do a lot with videos, which is perfect because videos, you can do a lot of things. You can retarget based on how much of a video somebody watches. But for this example, an image works great too. So they click the ad, they click the image, and then they go to spot number two, which is a blog post.

Now it is very difficult to break into a market without doing some sort of content building, content marketing at the same time now. So especially when you're starting, you have to have content. The content can be blog posts, the content can be articles, the content can be video, but you have to have content. Content gives you a triple threat between getting organic traffic, which you love because you don't have to pay for it, bonding with your end-user, your target market, which you love because that means you're going to generate more cash flow. And it also can be used as sales material in your simple sales system. So well-written blog posts push people towards a purchase. We've been using advertorials for ages both online and off. If you open up a magazine, you're still going to see advertorials, which is an article that is written by a copywriter. So it was very focused on getting you to where you need to go. But it's still an article and still content. It's still great to read.

So blog posts are great ways of building trust and more than that, the prospects, the folks who read the blog posts are on our retargeting list. So whether it's AdRoll, whether it's Facebook, whether it's whatever, they are on our retargeted list and we can show them banner ads and we can show them videos and you show them Facebook ads that help bring them back to our site. But in this particular sense, the ads that they're going to see are specific for an opt-in. We want to get the lead at this moment. So they were already on our website, they clicked an ad, they were on our website, we spent 20 cents, 30 cents, 60 cents, whatever to get them to the website.

Now we're going to start capitalizing on that. Now they are in our retargeted list, so we're going to show them an ad that then brings them back to an opt-in form. Your simple sales system is going to consist of the opt-in form, a landing page, a sales page. But typically it's a landing page that gives them something for free, a lead magnet. And this lead magnet, we attempt to help them solve one small problem. So we are looking to give them a tool or give them a strategy or give them some sort of an aha moment in their life that can help them in some way. So maybe it's a little loophole or it's a little hack or it's a little tip or it's something. It's some smaller part of the larger whole, which is your offer. So we talked about setting up a DIY home recording studio.

That was the example that we used to outline on Tuesday. So a great lead magnet is the top three mics that you need for your home recording studio. Now the top three mics, it's just a little tiny bit of really good information for them. You can also embed your affiliate links in there, so you can get paid as an affiliate, which is awesome. But it's value and people will download it. And then the person who downloads that particular lead magnet, they're going to be interested in how to build the rest of it, how to put it all together. So it ends up working well to get the right person into your mix. So they're on their retargeted list. They see an ad, they may click the ad, the second add, that second click from an ad, and then they come over to your website, they opt-in and now we have their email so that we can start bonding with them, promoting products to them, sending offers to them, sending affiliate offers, whatever.

But the most important part of the simple sales system is that we have their email address now. It's a deeper level of commitment than just a retargeting pixel or just a social share or whatever. So then after we have their email list, so they go from this page, which is opting in, to this page, which is a sales page. We want to peel off buyers at this point. So this particular offer is a free 14-day trial for a piece of software. But you can have a course that you're selling and it can be a four to $7 offer or $5 off or $10 off or whatever, but people are never more engaged than they are with you the second after they opt-in for whatever it is they're opting in for. So you will get great conversions on this page. And that's why we end up doing it because a buyer is worth a whole lot more to you than just a free lead.

So it ends up being a great use of your time putting this offer up. You get the peel buyers off of your traffic and you also get to create the self-liquidating offer, which is, let's say you spend $10 and you make $12 on the backside immediately. That's a pretty good deal, right? I mean you're just going to put as much money into that thing as you can, right? Not the idea here. So if we can get this offer to be self-liquidating, then our leads are free and we're just trading money or making money on the front end, which is a dream. That's the goal of every simple sales system. So that's the idea with this confirmation page offer. And we've written about it, we've talked about them quite a bit, but the confirmation page is the best place to place an offer.

Now at this point, they either continue signing up with you or they don't. So if they don't take you up on this offer, then they should be getting a set of product promo emails. That's all automated in the simple sales system.  We have their email address, so we're going to send them emails trying to get them back into the product cycle. If they click the add to cart button, which is the next page, so if they click the add to cart button and then they don't buy, then they get shopping cart abandonment emails. If they buy, they become a new member, a new customer, then they get the onboarding emails. So you have a lot of little automation pieces in between here. So if it hit the sales page but doesn't buy, then you send them product promo emails.

If they click through to the order form and then they don't buy, you send them shopping cart abandonment emails. If they purchase, then you take them off of all promo material and then you send them onboarding emails. And if you have upsells then you know you would send them the upsells at that point. So this little simple sales system, I mean it's not that big, we have our ad and then we have a blog post. Then ad number two and then a landing page, then a sales video. So these are all the content-based assets that we need to get them moving through this thing. Then we have our order form, our checkout page. And then, of course, we have our onboarding form. So these are just some of the assets that we need to have a sales funnel and all of these need to be available on a website. There are lots of landing page builders and software that can help you build, help you put some of these pages together. The problem is the pages don't matter it's the copy and email copy and everything else that you need to have something like this work. So let's talk a little bit about the jumping-off points.

Folks who didn't buy, they didn't buy the offer, you want to make sure they have the download link and that they have a way to get back to the sales page. It's the most important thing in a simple sales system because if you made them the offer and they reconsidered, you want them to come back to the sales page. You want to include any kind of language about bonuses or discounts for them. And then you also want to promote your offer for the first three or four days. And after that then you can mail the next offer or the next affiliate offer, coaching offer, or whatever. So it's the biggest part of how this all works. And I'm going to show you, I'm going to pull up how it looks from a grid perspective, because just being able to look from a top-down standpoint of how this thing works, I think is going to help with putting it all together. So every sale funnel that we build is ... All right, I'm going to throw this up. So I'm going to stop sharing this screen and start sharing the next one. So we're going to stop this screen and I'm going to share this one. And I'm going to pull this guy up so you should be able to see him. Okay. All right. So here, so you're seeing my screen. I'm going to try. All right. Oh, that's kind of cool.

All right. There we go. Okay. So I'm just trying to be able to draw on it. For a while, Keynote wasn't working on my iPad for whatever reason. So this is the VSL sales funnel, the same sales funnel that we just talked about as it goes through the sales funnel from Facebook traffic. Now the VSL sales funnel with the upsells, it's a pretty simple model in that you end up having, you have your paid traffic here, I'm going to mess with this color a little bit. So you have your paid traffic on this site, and then you have your landing page here. So that's the first landing page. So if we're looking at this a page where I'm at. I can't bring it up, but, so we have our landing page and then we have our sales video.

So what happens is somebody downloads from the landing page, they download the lead magnet, then they get hopped over to the sales video in a simple sales system, and then from there they go to upsell one and then the buyers go to fulfillment, and the non-buyers, end up going into an email sequence. So at the end of the day, what's nice about this particular process is we can have Facebook traffic come in and then we get the email lead here and then from there, this sales video does a lot of the work in terms of positioning us, the sales page ends up generating cashflow. So if we make whatever we make here, we can send it back into paid traffic, whether it's retargeting or Facebook or email list or whatever, and then it becomes a self-liquidating offer, so people just drip down through. Now if it's a webinar, then the webinar itself, so if we look at, let's see ... Okay. So I don't have any blank pages here, but there we go. Let's see if this will work. So we're drawn. I'm going to delete this guy, this guy, and this guy. Now if we have a webinar ...

All right. Now, so we kind of have the same model. We have Facebook traffic, and then we have our Google and then maybe email list or retargeting, but what ends up happening is we have this trifecta or this axis where the price is over here and complexity is down here. So more expensive something is or the more complex it is, it puts it in this grid. So this is a VSL funnel. This is a webinar with a strategy session. This is a webinar with an add to cart, and then this is a launch funnel. So basically the more expensive something is, then it's going to be one of two things. It's either going to be a launch funnel or it's going to be a webinar with a strategy session.

If it is complex, it's going to be an automated webinar one way or the other, because you need to customize the offer in one way or another. So that's the biggest part of the simple sales system - the sales funnel -  the sales funnel matrix. So if we have something expensive, like an assisted learning course that's $5,000 or a webinar course or whatever, or webinar course or some sort of a $10,000 done for you service or something like that, then we're going to usually need to sell it from a webinar. So it's going to end up going like Facebook, Google, email into a lead magnet and then that goes into a webinar registration, and then that goes into a strategy session.

Let's see the strategy session there. And then from there, they go into onboarding. So that's for this funnel right here. So that's for that funnel. Now if it's an add to cart, so it is lower price and more complex, then what's going to happen is we're going to rather than do the strategy session here we are going to end up doing an add to cart and then we onboard them that way. So it goes lead magnet, webinar registration page, then they attend the webinar and then we get it's a $497 or $997 course and then we send them to the add to cart. And then from there, we onboard them into the mix. So that's oftentimes the asset, the sales asset, the sales material is what changes when the offer is expensive or when the offer is complex.

If it is a low-end offer, I mean you don't have anything crazy to do, so VSL is how you do it. So it's a lead magnet into here. This is going to end up being a VSL and then it's going to end up going into add to cart. But VSL might have upsold one, upsell two and then kick off into the add to cart. So there's a lot of different ways to play with the sales funnel, but at the end of the day, traffic into a lead magnet, into sales collateral and that's your sales funnel. You have email copy pages, sales copy, webinar copy, all that stuff. So one of the nice things about this particular, the accelerated challenge is I've been able to talk to a lot of you who have gone through this kind of building process.

And then this execution implementation is kind of where everybody gets stuck, so what I'm going to do is you're more than welcome, send me a message in the group or send me a message personally or go to doneforyou.com/JD and you'll be able to book a time on my calendar. And we will talk about going through and creating your product, creating your business, executing this for you, building the simple sales system, the sales funnel, running traffic is the goal of that stuff. Because at the end of the day, this is difficult. We're getting to the part where it gets the less dreamy and more like, "Oh shit, we've got to do something." And that's where the rubber meets the road. So doneforyou.com/JD. And tomorrow we're going to talk about traffic. So we're going to talk about, I think we're going to do just basically a growth plan.

So a growth plan involves some organic traffic and some contents. And what we're going to do is get into this piece. So we're going to spend time right here. What do we need to do to get it ending supply of traffic, hitting our website? and then of course, how do we implement and execute on the rest of this? So tomorrow, 3:00 PM Eastern, we are doing that session. It's going to be the last session of this challenge. And then over the next couple of weeks, it's going to be about execution. All the materials are already here. All the training is already here, we just need to get going with it. So that's it. Give me a call if you need me. Send me a message, let me know what I can do to help. Go to doneforyou.com/JD to start to book a call on my calendar and we'll go from there. All right? Thanks. Bye.

The post Accelerate Lesson 4: Automate – Setting Up A Simple Sales System That Converts appeared first on Done For You.

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Accelerate Lesson 3: Create – Unlock Time And Money By Creating A Product To Sell https://doneforyou.com/accelerate-lesson-3-creating-a-product-to-sell/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=accelerate-lesson-3-creating-a-product-to-sell Sun, 26 Apr 2020 13:50:37 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10212       Video Transcript: Hey, what’s up? This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to lesson three, where we’re going to be creating a product to sell online! So lesson three is a big one. What we’re going to do is, we are going to unlink time from money. Now, here’s what I mean by that. […]

The post Accelerate Lesson 3: Create – Unlock Time And Money By Creating A Product To Sell appeared first on Done For You.

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Video Transcript:

Hey, what's up? This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to lesson three, where we're going to be creating a product to sell online!

So lesson three is a big one. What we're going to do is, we are going to unlink time from money. Now, here's what I mean by that. When you're in business, or when you're working for somebody else, generally, your time is always linked to a dollar figure. So it's $25 an hour, or $50 an hour, or $250 an hour, or whatever. Regardless of how much money you want to make, you end up having to put that much time into it. So what we're going to talk about today is a way to productize your knowledge, your experience, and it might be creating a product to sell, or creating a service to sell!

But it's packaging that thing up so that you are unlinking, you're unlocking time from money, and it is an exceptionally hard thing to do.

But to become truly wealthy and truly the master of your destiny, it's something you need to get into and understand and learn about, and ultimately implement for yourself. Well, what we're doing is, we're creating a product to sell, which is the hardest part of this entire process. It's the hardest thing to do, is to create the thing that we want to sell. So if you remember in lesson one, which was Monday, we talked about coming up with your idea, brainstorming your idea, researching your idea, putting some thought, putting some research, and figuring out what solution you were going to be solving, what problem you're going to be solving for your end-user, your customer, your prospects, whatever.

And then yesterday, we talked about putting that idea through the offer framework. So the offer framework is, it's a combination of your customer avatar, the person who you're going to be selling to, and what you're going to provide them to get the transformation that they seek in their life. Because at the end of the day, that's why they're paying you money. Because they want some sort of transformation. It doesn't have to be personal growth or emotional or whatever. But they want some kind of transformation in their life, or else they would not be investing time and effort and energy into you. So at the end of the day, it's as simple as it is.

So what we did yesterday was, we went through the offer framework and answered the very basic question. What needs to happen? What needs to be taught for our target market to transform that they need to make, that they want to make? What do I need to answer? What do I need to come with? What do I need to coach them on or teach them or whatever, so that they make that jump, that leap, and they cross the chasm, to quote one of my favorite books?

So that was where lesson two left off. Lesson three is today. And what we're going to talk about today is creating the thing you're going to be selling. So there are lots of ways to generate revenue online, that is for damn sure. So the biggest thing with making money online, making money digitally, is this idea. So just to kind of share a story, back in the old days, not the old days quite, but when I was in college and I was learning about the internet and blogging and trying to figure out this internet thing, I had one professor who used to, basically being that I was making money online, it wasn't real money, it was fake money. And so I was making fake money by selling advertising on websites and using these digital things to generate real revenue.

And the thing I loved about it was because it didn't feel like fake money when you go and put your PayPal card into the debit machine and you withdraw cash. I mean at that point it's like, "I did nothing for this. I had a website." Do you know what I mean? So there are lots of ways of generating revenue online. And that's the beauty of revenue generation. That's the beauty of making money online. That's the beauty of unlinking time from money. So at the end of the day, it's a very powerful thing.

Now when it comes to what it is we're going to be creating, so here, I'm just going to switch the screen. So stop with that screen. I'm going to share the big screen. So now you're seeing my tablet. And here what we're seeing is, go ahead and drop this in, and then I'm also going to make sure the screen is bigger. So throw this up. So when it comes to creating value, when it comes to unlocking, basically time equals money, traditionally. What we want to do is we want to cut that relationship. We don't want time to equal money anymore. So what we're doing is we're creating and packaging services together. And this is kind of where yesterday we left off.

So we're creating a product to sell, or a service to sell, our idea. So we have an idea that was then taken through the offer framework, which was the avatar in the outline of the thing that we were going to be creating. Now, outside of this offer framework, we have an idea of who we're selling it to. So we're going to be selling it to Bob or Buddy or Brenda or whatever. So what does Brenda or Bob or Buddy need to understand to make the transformation that they are looking for? Well, that transformation is going to be brought about in several ways.

So here we have our solutions. Now our solutions are, we have our purely automated ways of generating, purely automated ways of basically creating a product to sell. So this is product-based, it is 100% product-based. And here, we have things like eBooks, we have things like digital courses, we have things like audio programs. So these are our products. Each of these products has a different dollar figure associated with them.

So if we're looking at creating a product to sell, I mean an ebook is, for the most part, going to be between $9 and $37, give and take. If you're selling an ebook on Kindle, it's going to be $9, $8, $2.99, whatever. If you're selling it on your website, it's going to be closer to $27, $37, or $4.95. It depends. Your digital courses are going to be anywhere between like $67 on a ClickBank style digital course, all the way up to maybe $997. $997, well, that's a lot of money.

So is your knowledge that valuable when it comes to creating a product to sell? Does it make that big of a transformation in somebody's life that they're going to pay almost $1,000 for it? It could. Business development, it could. Stock trading, it could. Investing. Anything that is money related, of course, you can command some higher dollar figures for. And then you have your audio. So your audio kind of sits in the middle of these. So it might be $37 to $67 now. Audio used to be big a couple of years ago. Not so much anymore, because we have video products. Video is so easy to create. I'm streaming a video right now. Video is so easy to create that we don't do too many audio products anymore. But what ends up happening is, these three components kind of get lumped together into a membership.

So whether, in creating a product to sell, you charge continuity per month on this membership is up to you. It can be a one-time thing. But what's going to end up happening is you're going to lock all of this stuff behind a members' login. It's locked behind a log in anyway, so it's going to be a membership site whether you charge monthly for it. Right now, monthly fees are not all that palatable because of the economic times that we're in. But a one time fee, a larger one-time payment ends up being easier to sell. So these are purely product-based plays. Then on the other side of this scenario, you have your services. So your services are things like, actually, there's another, we have software over here too. And product based, you can think of an event as a service to or as a product. So we'll pull that back in a minute. But for services, we have consulted, we have coaching, we have done for you services, we have done with your services.

... In creating a product to sell; there is consulting, coaching, done for you, done with you. And then there are a couple of different classes. So the mastermind is a service. You have your organizer who is basically organizing the mastermind for you, leveraging relationships and stuff, and then going from there. So on the services side, this is where the higher dollar stuff comes into play. So for consulting, you can conceivably pay $10,000 a month for consulting services or $2,500 a month, or $5,000 a month, or $1,000 a month for consulting services. So we're just going to put, there are not too many consulting services that are going to be underneath $1,000 per month. Especially if it's per project or pay per performance. The same with coaching. All of our coaching clients who come in, I'm like, "You know what? For you to generate the kind of revenue that you want, you're going to need to be up above $1,000." And sell, if we're selling from paid traffic.

Because it might cost $200 to get that coaching lead. And if you're at $1,000 per month, you're five times return on ad spend immediately, the first month. And everything after that is gravy. But we need to make sure that from a revenue generation standpoint that we're able to flip that money and then invest in more paid traffic. So coaching ends up being a higher ticket. Now done for you, we're looking at probably four to five figures, depending on what kind of done for you services. If it's internet marketing. You can think of legal fees, legal CPA. I mean, shit, the accountant did my taxes last year, $4,500. Legal fees, $7,500. So anything that is done for you would fall into this category. It's service-based, done for you, four to five figures for that. And then we have done with you, which is usually less than done for you, but we're still looking at probably four figures. And then mastermind, you can have some that are $197 up to, I mean, I have friends that have $75,000 a year masterminds. So the service side is where you end up generating a lot of revenue. But here's the kicker of this deal. So right here, all of this is 100% time.

So you are still making money from the time you are investing in this thing when you are creating a product to sell or with the service that you are creating. And then you have over here I'm going to switch this back to green. So over here, you have money. And here, you are generating money from things that don't require time. So when you look at this methodology, if you will, you will note this side over here, are you going to get excited? Are you going to get excited about making $9, $100, $50? Are you going to get excited about that, those kinds of numbers? Not when you're selling one or two or three days. But when you're selling 1,000 a day, sure. When you're selling 50 a day, 100 a day. That's life-changing money. Whereas on this site, you book one consulting project for $5,000 a month. Is it going to change your outlook on life? For a little bit. You're going to be happy about that client for a little bit. You book four clients that are paying you $10,000 a month, you're making $40,000 a month, which is more than what most people make in a year.

Is that exciting for you? Absolutely. But you're still trading time. So here, really what we need to do is we need to kind of look at this and say, "How much time am I looking to trade?" Am I looking to trade a bunch of time for services, or am I looking to make money from a product-based sense? Or am I looking to do a little bit of both, where I'm creating a product to sell, and I am selling services on the front side of that? So here is what that looks like. So let me back up a minute. When you're creating your offers and recording your stuff and putting together how you're going to make money with this, now you can make an absolute fortune just playing on this side of the house.

But what I have found is, it's really easy to get sucked up on both sides. So even myself. We're right here. I mean literally, doneforyou.com. We are right there. But what am I putting together right now? What is this? This creating a product to sell. It can be packaged as a digital course and sold as a digital course, which will be down the road when I have a couple of seconds to put everything together. So by and large, you can play on both sides of the house. It's just important to realize what you're giving up on both sides. So when you're putting your material together, you can take pieces from the product side and pieces from the service side and put together what I call or what is called, I don't even know if I learned it from somebody, but this is assisted coaching, or assisted consulting.

So basically what that is, is you can take things like your digital course here, and then you can put consulting together, and then all of a sudden you have what might be called an accelerator. And that is a course plus coaching for, we're going to say $5,000. And what that allows you to do is, you can leverage some of the time benefits of having a product, and you can leverage the revenue generation of having a service, because you're not teaching the same thing over and over again. What you're doing is you're leveraging the monotony of a digital course. So the digital course is teaching them, but then the coaching side or the consulting side is providing that 10% difference in education that somebody else is going to be into. So that's the idea of this assisted coaching model or combining things from the service side on the product side. Does that make sense? All right, cool.

Now, let's see. In creating a product to sell and creating offers, there are a couple of tools. So I want to switch gears and kind of take you through some of the tools that we use to create products. Because the service side is pretty easy. The service side is, if you have a consulting model, if you are a coach, then you have that down pat. What I've found is a lot of people, they're not real good at capturing their knowledge, at capturing their experience and their information. All right, now I'm going to share our browser.

So this is a browser from earlier today. I did a live stream. So what we're going to do is, we're going to talk about capturing your knowledge, experience, expertise, and putting it together into something that you can sell again and again, so that you unlock that time equals money. And you can be creating a product to sell that you can leverage in your business. So the first thing that I want to share with you is a piece. If there was one piece of software that I could not do without, it is a piece of software called ScreenFlow. ScreenFlow is made by a company called TechSmith, I'm sorry, Telestream. So ScreenFlow is a Mac software. So you're going to want to make sure that ScreenFlow is up, that you have a Mac for this. If you don't have a Mac, then you're going to be looking at to Camtasia. So Camtasia is by a company called TechSmith. Now, Camtasia is both Mac and PC. I just prefer ScreenFlow. Camtasia is super nice too. And how it works is, I'm just going to kick it off here. So let me see if I can kind of open it and then put it within the viewer.

That's interesting. Recording video to record video. All right, so now you are seeing my screen. Let me make it a little bigger. We have like a million windows in there now. And then I'm going to pull this up because I want to show you how Camtasia or ScreenFlow works. All right, so here we have a little widget. And the widget is, you can see my screen, but the widget is letting me record stuff. So it's asking me what I want to set up. So I want to set up a new recording. It's going to record my desktop. I'm on an LED cinema display, a Mac display. I'm recording video from this pro webcam. And then, actually, I'm going to do this, just so it doesn't mess with the webcam. And it might, I hope it doesn't. I'm just going to shut this off because I don't want to do that. I don't want to screw this up.

And then I'm going to record audio. So I'm going to record audio from the display. So it's registering a little bit of a mic bump there. And then I'm just going to hit record. Because I'm live streaming this, I don't want to do it. So I'm recording right now. So basically, it is recording my screen, and you're also seeing my screen. So this is recording twice if you want to think about a conundrum there. So here we're, blah blah blah, talking about whatever. And when we talked about all kinds of product stuff. So generally what ends up happening is, I go through a PowerPoint presentation, I record my screen, and I'm teaching this stuff live.

And then what I do is after I'm all done, then I go up here, and stop record. You can see I recorded for 38 seconds. And then it's going to open up into ScreenFlow. So let me just get rid of this. And then here. So down at the bottom, down here we have, hopefully, you can hear this, but this is me playing the video file. And the video file came in two tracks. So I have my audio track here, and then I have my video track here. And you can see I pulled it out away from the play head. So now I have two tracks. I have the audio and the video. And watch. When I play head, and I'm just going to hit play.

Recording right now. So basically, it is recording my screen. And you're also seeing my screen. So this is recording twice.

Now, and I went through this.

Product stuff. So generally what ends up-

Now. So I recorded my screen. Recorded my audio. Now the beautiful thing is, I get to do this. So let's say I didn't like this section. So I select both the audio and the video track, I right-click, and I can split clips. So when I split clips, now I have two tracks. So we have a blank space in the middle. I can put those tracks back together, and I can split the clip. So I'm just going to split the clip back here just so we know that it's gone. So I'm going to split the clips here, I'm going to delete that middle section. So I just hit the delete key. And I put these clips back together. So watch this.

Talked about whatever-

Boom. So I can also do this. I can make this screen way bigger, so we can just look at what is on the iPad view.

Blah, blah. I talked about whatever, and I'm teaching this stuff a lot. And then when I-

So that is as easy as it is to record. Now, ideally, we were recording the PowerPoint presentation. We're recording something educational. Doesn't mean fricking screwing off on an iPad. But then what we do is, we go up, we can save this. Of course, we should probably save it. So I'm just going to save it on my desktop. This is going to be a just a ScreenFlow demo. Then, we're going to export this guy as an MP4 file. So we're going to export it. It's going to just zip right through because it's a super small file. Now, we're going to open it up, so we're going to go to the desktop, open it up. See? Now I have a video file that is my recording. So we're going to go ahead and just play this real quick. I'm just going to make this a little bit bigger. So watch.

Recording right now. So basically, it is recording my screen. And you're also seeing my screen. So this is recording twice if you want to think about a conundrum there. So here we're, blah blah blah, talking about whatever. And I'm teaching this stuff live.

So that video file can now be uploaded to where ever you want to fulfill your training, to fulfill your course. So let me just switch my screen back. I'm going to share the browser again. So we're going to share this guy. Now, in terms of delivering this content is the next piece of the puzzle. We recorded the video, so now we need to deliver it to people when they buy it. And there are all kinds of different ways of doing this. This is a software deal. So one of my favorites is kajabi.com. I love these guys. Kajabi is a great piece of software, and it works incredibly well for basically anything you're building. So Kajabi, a beautiful piece of software, works well. Another one, Teachable, another incredible piece of software. It has some sales page functionality, some website functionality, but you can create entire courses in Teachable as well.

So those are two options. Probably the two options that we see the most aside from just literally building it and hosting ourselves. So we use a plugin a lot of times called the WishList Member, which is a WordPress plugin, and it allows you to create membership sites inside WordPress. So you're not paying it monthly every month, and you own all the data. It's yours. It's sitting on your website, in your dashboard, all of that stuff. So ends up working out well that way. So no matter what, no matter how you want to package your material, how you want to serve up your material, teaching material, you're probably going to end up locking it behind some sort of a membership site like this. It's just important to realize that you have a couple of different pieces of material that you're going to end up using. So at the end of the day, capturing your information is the most important thing when it comes to putting these together. Hopefully, this is recording, because I see my video feed paused. I think probably because I pulled it into ScreenFlow. So that's interesting.

So by and large, thank you so much for joining me for lesson number three. Tomorrow, we're going to be talking about sales assets. We're going to talk about sales copy, email copy, webinar copy, which are things you're going to need to sell your courses. And we're going to talk about calls to action. More importantly, in a couple of days, I'm going to start setting up calls so I can give you some advice on digitizing your product and helping you create offers and sell those offers online. So just look for that in the next couple of days. And with that, I will talk to you soon. Thank you so much for joining me for today's presentation. Tomorrow, we're going to talk about, like I said, sales assets. And we'll go from there. All right, thanks. Bye.

The post Accelerate Lesson 3: Create – Unlock Time And Money By Creating A Product To Sell appeared first on Done For You.

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Accelerate Lesson 2: Develop – Starting An Online Business From Your Idea https://doneforyou.com/accelerate-lesson-2-starting-an-online-business/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=accelerate-lesson-2-starting-an-online-business Sun, 26 Apr 2020 11:59:56 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10197       Video Transcript: Hey, what’s up? This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to lesson two of The Accelerate Training. Today, we’re going to talk about starting an online business from the idea we came up with yesterday! So today, what we’re going to talk about is expanding your idea, the idea that we talked […]

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Hey, what's up? This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to lesson two of The Accelerate Training. Today, we're going to talk about starting an online business from the idea we came up with yesterday!

So today, what we're going to talk about is expanding your idea, the idea that we talked about, the idea that we arrived at yesterday, expanding it into what I call the offer framework. So the offer framework is kind of a... it's a mix between your customer avatar and a mix between how we're going to provide services for them or how we're going to train and educate them. So what we're going to talk about today is a mix of marketing avatar, and it's a mix of the outline, and it's a mix of creating offers.

So we're going to do a lot of work today toward starting an online business...  And it's all going to be customer-centered or customer-centric right now in this session. Tomorrow, we're going to talk about actually creating the product, creating the course, the coaching program, the mastermind, or whatever. We're going to talk about actually creating that thing for them. But today, we have to figure out what it is we're going to be creating. So, where we're going to start is with this idea of basically figuring out what our prospects or what our customers, what our clients need from us to be successful. That's the baseline, the base of the offer framework, are you have to answer the question, what is the best way to get the result, the transformation, that my clients want? What is the best way to help them arrive at that?

Because at the end of the day, the offer you sell when in starting an online business, as we talked yesterday, you need to solve a problem. So that is what people are searching for, that is what you're providing. You are providing the ability for somebody to solve a problem based on your knowledge, based on your experience, based on your products, based on your services, based on your help. You're giving somebody is the ability to solve a problem in their life. Now, that might be wealth, it might be losing weight, it might be relationships. There are lots of different things that people need help with. But at the end of the day, that's what you're doing, you're helping people. That might just be providing entertainment, but you are helping somebody, and you're transforming their lives in some way. You're having some sort of an effect. That's what people are paying you money for.

So what we need to answer though is, how best can we make that transformation in their lives? That's fundamental in starting an online business right now...  What is the best way to get the result for them in their lives? So there's a lot of different ways to do that. Now, originally when we started putting this course together or putting this training together, we went the digital product route. So whether you're creating an ebook or a video course or an audio course or a coaching program or some sort of service, then they all follow this general framework. But since then, we've added consulting, we've added software, we've added mastermind groups into this mix because really, all of those things are extensions of the same. In every case, in every scenario, we're trying to transform somebody's life. In somebody's life.

So the offer framework relies on how we can best do that in starting an online business! We also need to figure out who that someone is. So that's where we're going to start. Basically, in figuring out who your person is, who your customer, your avatar is, then we need to answer the questions like, we need to figure out who they are, where they live, what do they look like, how old are they, what kind of a family do they have, when do they wake up in the morning, how do they dress, where do they work? Do they work in an office? Do they work at home? Everybody works at home now, but... So we need to put an idea together of who that person is.

The best way to do it is really to come up with that avatar and then name that person. So name them, their name is Bob or Brenda or Buddy or whatever, and that is the person that we're writing for, that is the person who we're trying to help. So once we come up with that name, once we come up with that avatar, then putting together the solution for them is not all that complicated. I like to think of this is as, we work hard, we think about something hard once and then all the thinking has been done. So basically, we just need to fulfill on this thing. One of the best ways to do it, one of my favorites is to go and mind-map a course.  And in doing this, we think hard once about starting an online business and then the rest is just execution.

So one of the examples that I got was... Here we go. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. So we're going to share a window. Okay. So I like to use a piece of software called MindMeister. MindMeister is mind-mapping software. I'm just going to get this out onto the screen here. So MindMeister is mind-mapping software. Great stuff for basically putting together some rather complex ideas and doing the thinking once, as I said. So in coming up with the offers for what it is you're doing what we want to do is we want to start in the middle.

So we are going to create a new mind map. Now, once a new mind map is created, then we have the center. So we know who we're going to be marketing to, we're going to be marketing to Bob or Brenda or Buddy, we have them in our mind, and we know what it is we're going to solve because yesterday we talked about... We did some business idea generation. Today, we're starting an online business - or at least getting it fleshed out!

We looked at keyword phrases and we tried to figure out where the holes were in the market so that we could then fill them using our expertise. So what we're going to do here is we're going to put together the framework for our solution, whether it is a course, whether it is a coaching program... We're going to talk about that in a minute.

Once all this is built, we're going to talk about some of the modalities behind it. Because really, it's dependent on price and complexity. So, one of the messages that I got in Facebook Message was a recording studio, so a DIY recording studio. One of your fellow Accelerate members just did a... just put one in their house, and there were video recording and audio recording, same thing. So, studio. All right. So they were wondering if they could put together a video product on putting together a DIY recording studio in your house, which is awesome and timely, and I wouldn't mind having one because I have a webcam and...

So the idea was A, can you put together a course for a recording studio? And the answer is yes. And then B, is there a way to upsell people? What are some of the monetization strategies for this DIY recording studio? After all, we're starting an online business to make money, right?!

Well, you can sell your course, of course, of course, but you can also sell affiliate programs. You can sell coaching, you can sell pick lists. So there are lots of other ways that you can monetize this DIY recording studio. But what we're going to do here is we're going to put together, we're going to brainstorm what a course would look like. I encourage you to do this with your idea too. It doesn't have to be with fancy software, you can do it with a piece of pen and paper. It's really up to you.

So recording studio. Now, we are going to add our first layer, our first set of... our first layer of modules here. So generally, the first module, module one, is always going to be a discovery module. So discovery is always the first lesson in starting an online business.

So in discovery, you try to figure out what you don't know. Do you know what I mean? So, the discovery of a DIY home recording studio is going to be, what room are you going to put it in? How big? Let's just start filling this in. So room and space considerations. We're going to desks, furniture, and then... Let's see what else. What else are we going to need from a DIY recording studio standpoint? We're going to paint any sort of demo if we need to do anything to the room.

So the discovery is all of the things that we need to do to make room for the DIY recording studio. Now, the next module, I think, is probably going to be something related to... I know it's going to be something related to equipment. So we want to make sure that we have the right equipment. So for the video, we're going to need some video cameras, we're going to need some mics, we're going to need some stands, we're going to need some... probably that eggshell kind of stuff that is on the walls, the noise deadening stuff. So, noise deadening or sound deadening or sound dampening, so that it's not echoey. But that's all going to be in the equipment category.

And then we're probably going to need another section that is software. Because you can't have a recording studio with just a bunch of components anymore, you're going to need some sort of software. So I think Logic Pro is one, audio software, might be video. So, Final Cut Pro is a software video tool. The streaming that I'm doing right now is StreamYard, so maybe there's... that you need to do some streaming out of the DIY recording studio. I'm just going to say streaming just for... There's a SlingStudio, which I believe is a video appliance that you can hook up some mobile phones and stuff too.

All right. So we've got some software, some hardware considerations there. Let's see. Now, how about storage? I don't know, I'm not the DIY recording studio person, but... So here, we're going to need some files for hard drive space. Let's see. We're going to need probably a server. So there are lots of things that we can teach about in coming up with this idea for DIY recording studios. So what's important is that you have four or five modules, and you can kind of walk through these. This ends up being... Discovery is the first module, and then equipment ends up being the second module, and then the software is going to be the third module, and then storage is going to be the fourth module. And then the fifth module might be...

Let's see. If you're going to be recording, you're probably going to be sending that music somewhere or those videos somewhere. So maybe this is... The last one is publishing. So where are you going to publish the files to get paid may be or how to put those MP3 files or whatever on Spotify, so that you can make money per stream or whatever. So it's just one example. Now, let's go over and look at a previous mind map that I did for the last course that we put together. So let's see, there's one for sales funnel. This rapid product creation one is pretty cool. It's very timely for this one too.

So this is a mind map that is just a very, very, very quick course for starting an online business that I created a long time ago and then I just updated it, but I haven't done anything with it yet. So basically, it's called rapid product creation, and we start with an idea. So we survey a list... It's a very, very focused course. If you have an email list, you can survey the list, then you can go through and ask the audience what they need more of and then figure out what's hot in the market. And then module two is your record. So you do a live call, and you do either audio or video recording, and that ends up being a coaching call. Then you convert that material into email copy, blog posts, sales copy, all that stuff, and then you make the offer, the sales page, thank you page and payment button, very, very simple, little tiny two-page funnel, and then you do some followup.

So this is a quick hit strategy for starting an online business. But what I was able to do in thinking through this is now I can say, okay, module one is going to be the idea. And then we're going to survey the list and then we're going to have four or five slides talking about the audience, and then we're going to talk about what's hot in the market. So being that all of the thinking has been done, I can create this course super easy and super on the fly. So that's the idea of putting together the roadmap for what it is we're going to create. Because the next piece of this is figuring out how we're going to sell it. So this, right here, could be a course, it could be a coaching program, it could be a five-week workshop. The question we have to ask ourselves is, how are we best able to get the transformation in somebody's life? How are we best able to teach this thing so that they can move forward after going through the product or the book or the coaching program or whatever and apply it in their life?

So this is our sales phone course. It's phenomenally huge. Super huge. There's paid traffic, there are webinar sales funnels, there are FQLBSL funnels. The idea with this is, yes, it is a course, yes, it is five hours worth of video, probably 60 videos in length. It's a very big course. It's a very expensive course. But we're also able to move through it with mentorship. So what we can do is we can sell the course, and we did, we sell the course every day, and people can go through it at their speed, or we can separate this as an eight-week course.

We can go through and put somebody through each of these modules so that they can learn it, experience it, implement it, ask questions, and they can get the transformation that much faster. For us, we get to charge a little bit more money, for them, they get a much higher satisfaction, and they're able to move through it and get the result more quickly than what they're used to. So that is a huge, huge, huge benefit. When you're looking at your ideal customer, your Bob, who is going to be buying your thing, buying your services, buying your product, your information, your expertise, now, what is it they need to... What do they have to do to get the result the fastest?

So, to that end, we put together a little framework for the offer framework for starting an online business, put together a little... It's a two by two spread that walks through how... in terms of pricing, where the pricing needs to be, and then also what kind of sales funnel you need to implement to get this thing live. So let me share it with me... I had this shared already, but it seemed to break. Okay. So, here we go. I'm going to pull this up on my iPad and then you get to check it out here. All right. So it is sharing. Okay. So I'm going to stop this screen, got to see some of the walks through there, and then I'm going to share the entire screen. All right. So I'm sharing the entire screen. Then I'm going to drag this guy up.

You've seen this grid in some of my promo videos. I've been talking a lot today. It's a two by two axis. The reason I love this thing is that it was patterned after something that Steve Jobs did. So Steve Jobs, when he got fired from Apple the first time he left and Apple embarked on creating... They had over a hundred different products that they were building, very similar to like GE at the same time. So Steve Jobs went, ended up founding Pixar, the whole deal, ended up creating an operating system and all kinds of other stuff. But ended up coming back to Apple, and he got the entire advisory board together and said, "You have over 100 products. What is a priority right now?" And everybody in their respective divisions thought their product was a priority.

He put this kind of two by two grid up on a whiteboard and said, "There are only four things we're going to concern ourselves with. We're going to concern ourselves with basic desktop and mobile, and then consumer and pro." And that informed their decisions for quite a few years after that. Then they got into, obviously, iPhones and iPads. Even iPhones and iPads, they have, still, this same matrix. Now, even with iPhones, they have the pro models. But at the end of the day, this matrix is really what we drive all of our sales to funnel decisions through. When thinking about your end users, thinking about your avatar, thinking about the products and the offers that you're going to be making...

We built the mind map out that works through what is going to be in this offer. Now, what we have to think about is, first of all, how much is it going to cost? So your end-user is going to... Is it going to be $1,000 product, is it going to be a $200 product, is going to be a $50,000 product? What is the price going to be for them to achieve that transformation in their life? What do they have to pay you? And then we have complexity. So the complexity is, how complex is it? How much do you have to customize the pitch and customize the offers so that they get it? Now, if you're thinking about a $50,000 real estate mastermind, well, it's 50 grand. You're going to have to...

First of all, you have your price here, so it's more expensive than not, and then you have your complexity, which is on this curve. It's going to be a complex offer because you have to take into consideration where they live, what they're into, what they invest in, how much private money they have, or what are the relationships with their banks or whatever. So it's going to be a complex offer, which is going to put them in this wheelhouse. So you're very complex and the price is high. Now, the legendary funnel, as you can see here, is an automated webinar with an action plan called the pitch, as the call to action.

So to sell this, we need to have the offer in place, we need to know what it is we're going to teach them, but we also need to know how we're going to deliver it, and then we need to sell it on a sales call. So yes, we're going to be able to get them investing in properties, it's just going to take a little bit of work to get them there. Do you know what I mean? Now, if we are selling a free book, a free plus shipping book, let's say, 4.95 cents, we're going to put together a book that is 120 pages. That 120-page book, it's a relatively low ticket offer.

Nothing is going on down here. The price ends up being on the lower end of the spectrum. You can't get better than free. You can't get cheaper than free, I should say. And then it ends up being a pretty easy offer to understand. It's a free book. It's a free book on real estate investing, let's say. It has some strategies on no-money-down deals or it has some strategies on fix and flips or whatever, but it's a free book.

So here we have this... we're in this wheelhouse, this igniter funnel wheelhouse, and the offer ends up being a VSL funnel with upsells. So here, what we're doing is we're sending them, through a sales video, a prompt, and they watch some of the sales videos they buy, they process their card through an order form, and then they're marched through an upsell sequence. So the first upsell is typical $37, and the second upsale might be $97. So we move them through the sales funnel that way. And then we have our outlier funnels. So here, we have a mid-price product... I'm sorry, an upper-end product that is not complex.

So a multi-video launch funnel is going to work well for this upper left quadrant. And then here, we have an automated webinar funnel that is sold with an add to cart button, so sold directly to an order form. So at the end of the day, that's really how we sequence our sales funnels, it's how we put offers together, is not only do we figure out what we need to teach, but we also figure out how much we need to charge for it, what the complexity is to get somebody to purchase that offer from us, and then we build everything as it relates to that.

So tomorrow, we're going to talk about actually recording and fulfilling and selling... recording and fulfilling and capturing information. Because at the end of the day, you want to sell something online that is one too many. So even fulfilling services is great. You can spend time fulfilling services with a one-on-one person, but do you want to have a big team of people? Do you want a small team of people with digital fulfillment? Do you want coaching products and offers and everything that requires a lot of time and energy to work with? So there are lots of questions in regards to how your business is set up and how you're going to be digitizing your product.

But at the end of the day, what we want to do is we want to create high leverage activities. So if we can put some of this together as video the video products or books or reports, or if we can offload some of that education, some of that knowledge on to something that you just hit a play button and then you can fulfill, you can support that on the backend, then it ends up being a great deal for you. You can charge a little bit more money for it, because you have a video course plus a coaching program, and the two things end up working well together.

So tomorrow, we're going to talk about recording audio, video, capturing information, fulfilling membership sites, all of that stuff, kind of the techie recording, editing stuff. And then after that, we're going to get into... we're going to revisit the sales page and the marketing, and that's going to be Thursday and Friday. So if you have any questions at all, send me a message in the group here, just let me know, and I will be happy to answer it, and I will talk to you soon. Right? Thanks. Bye.

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Accelerate Lesson 1: Discovery – Finding And Validating Your Business Idea https://doneforyou.com/accelerate-lesson-1-your-business-idea/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=accelerate-lesson-1-your-business-idea Sun, 26 Apr 2020 11:20:15 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10187         Video Transcript: From A to Z, this startup process, so you can release in the launch and create your digital products, your services, your coaching offers, consulting offers, even SAS like software. So you can start and do it live. You can start and start selling it online. So just a […]

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From A to Z, this startup process, so you can release in the launch and create your digital products, your services, your coaching offers, consulting offers, even SAS like software. So you can start and do it live. You can start and start selling it online.

So just a couple of quick things. This lesson, lesson number one is, is going to walk through coming up with your product or your service. Brainstorming for a business idea, the thing that you want to build a business around, is so important because to do something you're passionate about, but it is also important to do something and sell something and create something that you're going to be able to sell. And those two things are not always the same. Oftentimes like you might have an idea and the idea just doesn't work or you don't have enough marketing capital to put behind it.

Or the idea is flawed or the execution of the hook is flawed and it's really hard to salvage that. So what we try to do is we try to do some research early on, which gives you a great business idea! Of how the product or service or skill or whatever is going to translate into revenue and dollars. So that is what we're going to talk about today.

Lesson two is putting legs around your product or service, putting together an outline for the digital product, the book, the service offering, the coaching program, whatever. But putting together an outline that will help your end-user, your buyer, your customer, your client move from where they are right now to where you want them to be because of your services.

Lesson three, which is probably going to be Friday, is going to be figuring out what format you need to fulfill your service in or your product or whatever. So whether it's an ebook or whether it's a video course or a membership site or something you have to do on-demand. So we're going to work through a couple of little lessons, a couple of problems, no problems, but we're going to work through and figure out how your product needs to be delivered.

After we get through the business idea section, next week we're going to talk about creating your product, like recording it, hosting it, editing the videos, doing all of that stuff. And then we're going to talk about selling your product. So this will... What sales copy is, what email is, merchant account providers, and all of that stuff that's going to be towards the end of next week.

So, all in all, it might be, I mean I'm not sure exactly how many lessons we're going to have. That depends on how quickly we can get through this stuff. When I do the on-demand video series, this is a full... We might go like six to eight lessons. I don't know exactly how many lessons we're going to have. It depends on how quickly we get through. When we do this with the on-demand videos, it's four lessons. And the first lesson is brainstorming a product idea. And then also mind mapping. Putting legs to that product. We're going to split that up between a couple. So hopefully we can get some feedback in the group. Hopefully, we can work through some of these product ideas in the group and go that way.

So today what we're going to talk about is coming up with your product or service. Now, the first time I built my product, it was a last-minute thing and I've told this story quite a few times before. But basically, I was good at selling clients. So about eight years ago I wrote this ebook called Client Crusher and it was 10 methods, 10 strategies that you could use to pick up local marketing clients. And the ebook was free. I gave it away for free. I gave it to, there was this course called P3 Marketing. And I let Jennifer put it at the back end of her course. And then throughout a weekend, I signed up like 200 emails onto my list. It was the first time I made a dent in putting emails on our list, which was awesome.

So I was so excited about it. And then what I did was I surveyed that list and when I surveyed the list, I asked them three questions. What did you like, what didn't you like and what can I do better? And their responses I put together in a video course. And that was the first digital product that I created.

But I tell you to come to this point. When I released that digital product, I sold it for $67, and I remember being so fricking excited because people were learning from me without me teaching them. They were learning from me because they were watching videos and then we were establishing a common language. And I didn't have like a ton of people who were in that course. I mean I think I sold 300 or 400 copies in the lifetime of that thing. But at the same time, I was able to teach people without having to teach people, without having to like just recording videos and then going from there.

So it was a beautiful thing. And I will just always remember that kind of distance learning thing. And now like I look at what's going on from a coronavirus and pandemic standpoint and you have these teachers who are trying to figure out how to do this digital distance learning kind of teaching. Everybody is trying to figure it out and it can be a really powerful thing because I mean it makes you placeless.

So if you are creating digital products or creating eBooks or creating something that allows you to be placeless, then you're pretty much the master of your destiny. You can get through this and pivot and transition with flying colors. So that's the idea.

Now at the end of the day, it comes down... So there are two kinds of people. There're creators and there're consumers. Everybody is a consumer. I'm a consumer. You're a consumer. I mean everybody's a consumer. We consume media, we consume video, we consume things all the time. But there are a fewer set of people who are creators. They create things to be consumed. This video is something created to be consumed. The stuff that you create, the blog posts you write, the content you create, and all of that, you're creating to be consumed by other people.

And the creators are the folks who can transition what they create into revenue. And now it must be digital and remote. So when it comes to starting up a business, you need to solve problems. So whatever your business idea is, whatever thing you're trying to do, you need to solve problems.

And that's really where today's lesson starts. No matter what you're doing online, you need to solve problems. And the best way to figure out that you're going to be solving problems is to dig into this thing that we like to call keyword research, which is going to Google and having Google tell you exactly what people are searching for. Because at the end of the day, you know, I mean just by looking at people's searches, looking at trending, search history, then you can pinpoint exactly what people are looking for and then also what they're going to buy, if you're able to solve those problems for them.

So, which is so, so powerful because at the end of the day, I mean that's why people, I mean, people search Google for any number of things and they're looking for answers to their problems. Whether it's a product, whether it's a service, whether it's just a how or an article or whatever. And the important thing is that you can carve out a space, a niche for yourself and your business idea if you're able to solve those problems for them.

So we're going to flip over into Google keyword tool, which is always where I start. It's always, always, always where I start for anything. If it's any piece of content, I always go to Google's keyword tool and I do a simple search and I figure out like how I need to position an article, what I need to talk about, what keyword phrase I need to rank for. What are some of the problems that people are facing in setting up whatever, I always look and that's always where I start because it informs so much else?

All right, so let's flip over into the Keyword Planner. So I'm going to go here. All right. It's funny, we've just talked about keyword research in the GST Daily and it's interesting how few tools. It's like you use the same things over and over and over again for all kinds of different stuff. So I'm just logging in here. All right, I'm going to stop sharing my screen and then I'm going to flip over into our ad manager. Got to sign in twice.

All right. For those of you who have never been to Google's Keyword Tool, you're going to need to go here. I'm going to drop it in the comments here. There are quite a few keyword pools and that's important for your business idea. There you go. So I just put it in the comment box there. There are quite a few keyword tools that you can get into. Google is, I mean it's straight from the source. You need to have an ad account to access it. But so let me flip over. I'm going to share our keyword planner tool.

All right, cool. So you're looking at the keyword planner now. There we go. Okay. So with the Google keyword planner, in doing your market research, the most important thing is just to get started. So let's say you wanted to you knew you wanted to do something fitness-related but you weren't sure what. So what you can do is you can just start with fitness and then maybe enter.

So I just hit the tab key, maybe workout programs, exercise programs, and then we're just going to hit get results. I just want to see what kind of search results we have here. Because what Google is going to do, is it's going to return the search results for the things that we wanted more information on. But then also it's going to tell us different keyword phrases that other people or like the phrases that we're looking for.

So for instance, here we have fitness which gets 201,000 searches every single month, which is crazy. That's so many for a new business idea.  Now the top of the page bid is $1.48 and the top of page bid at the high range is $5.66. So basically some people are paying on the high range $5 and 66 cents to Google per click to be... Whenever somebody clicks on their ad, that is showing on with the search phrase fitness.

For this business idea - it is a very high-value keyword phrase. That doesn't mean anything else. This is an ad word keyword planner tool. So what it gives advertisers is an idea of how much it is going to cost to put ads up for this keyword phrase. We are using it for a different reason. We're using it to find insight into what people are searching for. So fitness gets 201,000 searches. Workout programs get 8,100. Exercise programs get 24,000 searches a month or 2,400 searches a month.

Then we have fit girl, I don't know what fit girl is, but it gets 60,000 searches a month. Personal trainer gets 90,000 workouts, gets 135,000. Fitbit ionic gets 60,000. So these are all keyword phrases that matter to somebody a matter to a lot of people. LA fitness, abs workout, CrossFit near me, chest workouts, okay. We're getting all kinds of keyword phrases here - stuff to pay with for our business idea. Now, bicep workouts, 90,000 searches a month. People are looking for bicep workouts. All right.

So, let's say we're a fitness person, and we're trying to put together a product and we don't know what, but we know that we could put together a bicep workout. We know we could. And if we could put together a bicep workout, then we're going to get 90,000 people who were searching every single month for this workout. It's funny that it spikes right there too.

Let's see. January, February, it's spiked. Oh, so it's spice a little bit during summer. I imagine all of these do. So fitness band randomly gets 14,000 searches a month probably because of coronavirus.

But anyway, so you can geek out on keyword phrases when you're coming up with your business idea. It's pretty easy to do. All right, so bicep workouts, what we're going to do is we're going to go up and now that we know 90,000 people a month search for bicep workout, then what we're going to do is we're just going to go figure out, okay. What else do people search for that is similar to bicep workouts? Bicep workouts, 90,000 people, bicep exercise, bicep curls back in bicep to workout. Oh, I mean, it gives us a little bit more insight. We can include a back workout in with the bicep workout.

Best bicep exercises. Arm workouts for men. Bicep and tricep workout. So cable bicep curl, 4,400 barbell bicep curl. So these give us some insight into all of the things people are searching for.

So what this does is, this is real-time stuff that we can include in our course. So that, which is so fascinating because I mean, all we have to do is put this business idea together, write some sales copy, write some email copy and now we can have a bigger bicep course that we can sell. So isn't that cool? Pretty, pretty sweet.

All right. Crossbody hammer curl, bodyweight bicep exercises. That's a pretty great idea for a course. Curls workout, curls exercise. Okay. So you get the idea. So you can go through and literally, I mean it's going to take what, four or five videos to put together like a bicep workout course. And then you can sell that thing for 27 or 37 bucks. And now 90,000 people are going to be searching online for it.

So whatever your market is, whatever your business idea and target market, your avatar, whatever it is you are into, there is stuff like this that exists for you. What the important thing is to make sure that you are doing something that people want. You are solving a problem that people have. You are not trying to solve a problem that you think people have or that you need to educate people that they have. Do you know what I mean?

So, I read a lot and it's interesting like Apple as a company is interesting because they did not invent the touch phone, the touchscreen phone. They did not invent a tablet but they perfected it. So they let somebody else invent it. Somebody else takes that first move or advantage and see what happened. And then they perfected it.

Like next year from what I understand, they are releasing a pair of AR/VR glasses. The code is already in the iPhones, which is crazy to me because I mean there's VR headsets. I mean you have Oculus rift and Apple's literally going to come behind all of them and just swipe all of their market shares. Because they waited a little bit to figure out what people wanted, what people cared about. There are solving a problem, the problems that they find in the market just more elegantly.

So in creating your process around your business idea, in creating your services and your products, it's important to do a little bit of research and make sure that you're finding solutions for them. Then once you find a solution, it's really what you do, are you go and seek validation. So we know the bicep workouts, a lot of people are looking for bicep workouts and we think that we can sell workout material online-centered to men with biceps or whatever.

So now if we go to, one of my favorite kind of places to research are the dummies books. So the entire dummies series, they have such a wealth of people and experience in solving problems. I mean they have a book for absolutely everything. And if they invested the time and the experience in writing a book on a topic, then you better believe that they knew they were going to sell that book. So we're just going to do a real quick search for the bicep. I just want to see if something comes up, bicep. Maybe yes, the site's loading a little slow.

All right. 76 search results for the bicep. How to do bicep curls, how to tone up your biceps with seated curls, three bicep training exercises all in weights, and exercise. So they've created some material on this. Now you're probably not going to get rich selling bicep, just bicep workouts. For your business idea, you're going to need to put some sort of a wrapper around it, which might be put an inch on your biceps in 30 days or less, or the 30-day workout, the 30-day bicep routine, or something. You're going to want to like pretty it up a little bit. It shouldn't just be like 15 bicep workouts that you can do at home or whatever.

And that's where the marketing and the sales piece and all that comes in, which we're going to talk about a little bit later. The next place I'd like to go when researching a business idea is Amazon. So Amazon, I mean books or information products. So Amazon Books. If there are books written on a topic, you better believe it's going to be able to sell. Books written on a topic and also selling, let's put it that way. So let's check out this. Books, bicep workout, or I bicep workout equipment. Okay, so here we have a training poster. Bodyweight training poster, $27 it doesn't have too many reviews, not that the reviews matter.

We have build muscle, let's see, bodyweight workouts. We have a three and a half star review. Something is interesting here. So the 15-minute bodyweight burn. The ultimate dumbbell guide, 229, 4.5-star reviews. All right, cool. We're getting somewhere with this. So men's health, ultimate dumbbell guide, more than 21,000 moves designed to build muscle. Okay? So we have a Kindle hardcover and a paperback version. Let's see. Now here is something super interesting.

We have quite a few reviews here, but check this out... This is fuel for your business idea. Amazon's bestseller ranks 97,000 paid in the Kindle bookstore, a hundred in sports training, 82 in stretching exercise, and 62 on weight training. So it is not selling all that well, but I mean it's got a lot of reviews. So I mean it is moving. Let's see what the hardcover is. So the hardcover is number 1,100,000 in books. So quite a ways down there. Let's see if we can find any other bicep work out things that are working, have a little bit higher ranking. I don't see it too much.

So what this tells us is we're probably going to need to add than just dumbbell workouts, just bicep workouts. For our business idea, we're probably going to need to have some sort of a more full-body training, but it can include biceps in there. Let's see. All right. So is there any questions over in the chatbox, let me know. Any questions? You want me to look up your market or your product on chatbox over in the comments I should say. All right, so now how about work out home.

Well, weight training for women. All right. 100 no equipment workouts volume one. So let's look at the sales rank on this guy. So understanding that we need to broaden it up a little bit. This one's a little better. Number, 30,000 paid in the Kindle store. So that one's a little better in terms of sales ranking. Now, these people are still selling. So I mean they're not getting rich off of this one ebook, but they are still moving copies of this ebook. And this particular one has a paperback as well. So let's see what the paperback is.

This is number 8,433 in books, which that's pretty damn good. So we're getting there. Just a little bit of research and we're finding where these people are buying stuff. Not these people, but we're finding where our target market is looking. And this is just a book. So whether it's a video course or whether it's a coaching program or any of that sort of stuff, which we're going to talk about in the future. This we're dialing in, we're finding it. And that's the most important part of this brainstorming exercise and coming up because like this book is definitely on the five and six-figure per year mark.

Now what's probably happening is the workouts. I mean you can make money from affiliate products like protein powders and some of those MLMs you can make money from bands, any kind of Amazon products. You can make money by selling your video courses. There are so many ways that you can generate revenue once you put something out there, even if it's free, even if it's a lead magnet.

So that's the point of today's session. Brainstorming a business idea by topic, brainstorming the niche, brainstorming, coming up with the idea of the thing that you want to grow, and scale-out. So that's your homework for tonight or today or tomorrow. So in the next 24 hours, so not 24, in the next 48 hours I should say. The next session that we're going to do is going to be 3:00 PM Eastern on Wednesday. And we're going to talk about outlining your product, outlining the product, coaching program, whatever. Whatever it is we're creating that we're going to sell, we're going to outline that thing.

So that's going to be Wednesday at 3:00. And before Wednesday at 3:00, your homework is to post in the group what you're going to create. And then we're all going to, not we're all, but we can comment on it, look at it.

Here's the qualifier though. It cannot be, I'm going to create a course for businesses. You need to qualify it. Like, tell us what it is you... I'm going to create a Facebook ad management course for media executives after the pandemic or whatever. Like, tell me exactly what it is you're going to create. Tell us what you're going to create. Because if we don't qualify it that far, then it's not going to sell. It's not going to sell no matter what we do because we don't have an end-user in mind for it. So let us know in the group, and I will see you Wednesday at 3:00 and I'll be commenting as we go. So I'll talk to you soon. All right? Thanks. Bye.

The post Accelerate Lesson 1: Discovery – Finding And Validating Your Business Idea appeared first on Done For You.

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7 Ways of Earning and Increasing Your Revenue https://doneforyou.com/ways-to-make-money-online/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ways-to-make-money-online Fri, 24 Apr 2020 14:00:58 +0000 http://curately.org/?p=1978 If you’re looking for how to monetize a website, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of ways to make money online if your only goal is to generate cash flow. When thinking about how to monetize a website though, you need to consider what your business does, and then put together a website monetization strategy that […]

The post 7 Ways of Earning and Increasing Your Revenue appeared first on Done For You.

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If you’re looking for how to monetize a website, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of ways to make money online if your only goal is to generate cash flow. When thinking about how to monetize a website though, you need to consider what your business does, and then put together a website monetization strategy that helps back it up.

Now, we have our favorites… Your sales letters, backed up by lead magnets and landing pages fueled by paid traffic sources that you control tend to perform the best over time.

… But not every business has things that they’re selling. Or, they’re just starting and don’t have the sales material and assets you need to successfully convert buyers. That’s where this blog post comes in.

What you’re about to discover is how to monetize a website with and without stuff to sell!

Google AdSense

Hands down, Google AdSense, is still one of the easiest ways to make money online. It’s easy to set up and optimizes itself based on what keywords appear on your page. Plus, you can do text-based ads or banner ads.

The downside? You won’t make a tone of money unless you’re getting a lot of traffic and that traffic is coming in on high dollar keywords.

Banner ads

 

If Google Adsense doesn’t tickle your fancy, you might consider banner ads.

Buy-Sell Ads is a self-hosted banner service that lets you post your blog details. If your site is getting solid traffic, BSA will connect you with advertisers who will pay for space on your website!

Product Reviews

 

Product reviews used to be our bread and butter. We’d review products and then generate cash from the affiliate arrangement that was set up. I still see a lot of it happening. A great example is ThePointsGuy.com. The articles are awesome and written for their customer avatar – they just generate revenue through affiliate marketing.

Blog & Freelance Services

 

If you’re good at what you do, have skills that other people can utilize, and are just not making money on your site yet… You can offer to help others with theirs! Also, you can sell logo services, writing services, theme creation, or plugin creation services on your site to earn money.

You can even go outside of your blog and pick up work on a site like Upwork.com which matches freelancers with service providers!

The great thing about this monetization model is that you don’t need lots of traffic to generate more revenue. You do need exposure from the RIGHT people to use your services though. The more customers you have, the faster your business can grow.

Affiliate Marketing

 

Do you want to sell something on your web pages but don’t have your products? Affiliate marketing is a great option for you. In fact, inside Scriptly, we’ve even got Done For You Email Campaigns for Affiliates that’ll help fast-track you on the affiliate marketing front…

The key is to find (and write content for) a group of people who are experiencing a similar problem. Then, solve that problem through an affiliate offer!

Sell Your Products

One of our favorite ways to make money online!

 

Our absolute favorite way of monetizing a website is to sell products and services directly on the pages. If you’ve got traffic, why not sell them the thing that’ll help them solve their problem? From selling eBooks, digital information products, software, coaching packages; there are so many ways to make money online.

We’ve got an entire book on that very thing, Creating Products! Click here to learn more >>

PRO TIP: If you're too busy creating your products, figure out how to sell them, etc... Schedule a call with us. We do that stuff all the time for our clients!

Build An Email List

 

One of the greatest ways to build a business online and monetize a website is to build an email list and send those subscribers relevant offers that you get paid for.

Not only that, but you can also build a relationship with your email list subscribers and they’ll stay with you for a long time – far longer than just reading a blog post and then going away, never to return.

At the end of the day, an email list will turn into your biggest cash producing asset if you decide that you want to get one started… So let’s look at some more tools and instructions on how to do that!

  • Offer a lead magnet: If you want to build an email list quickly, give away something for free. Your prospects won't sign up just because you tell them to. They need a reason to optin. Put some thought into your customer avatar and write a solid ebook or free report for them. You can also give away podcasts, videos, etc. Make sure your lead magnet is something worth value.
  • Use email marketing software: If you are serious about creating an email list, use a service to help you manage and mail to your email list. There are lots of them out there - Aweber, Drip, GetResponse. Pick one and set it up :0)
  • Use landing pages: Website pages are a huge distraction in general. To optimize the your conversion and turn as many prospects into leads as possible, you'll need a solid landing page. Scriptly's got a great Page Builder that'll get you set up fast!
  • Use calls to action: To convert prospects to leads and buyers, you want to make sure to use the right calls to action. If you're selling services, you want them to qualify themselves and book a strategy session with you. If you want them to buy something, you need to make sure they hit your order form from your sales letter!
  • Send traffic: No matter how great your offer is, you won’t get email subscribers without a quality traffic source.
  • Use social media sites: Social media is the dominant way to get more traffic and leads. There's a great write-up on getting traffic from Instagram here. You can also create Facebook pages, be engaging on Twitter and get in touch with people on Linkedin to expand your network.

If there’s anything we can do to help you on your digital marketing journey, hit the button below and book a call with us!

Click Here To Schedule An Action Plan Call >>

 

 

Need Website Traffic? Click Here! >>

Video Transcript

Ways To Make Money Online From A Website: Video Transcript

Today we're going to talk about how to monetize a website.

There are lots of different ways to make money online from a website. Whether it is a personal blog, a corporate site, or a site promoting your business... There are so many different ways of generating revenue. And one of the things that I have been fortunate enough in my career online is that I have tested and played with pretty much every single one of them.

I've done everything from affiliate marketing to creating and selling digital products, to selling links to generate cash, to coaching and consulting. There are so many different ways to make money online from a blog.

One thing is for sure - you need traffic coming to your website. YOU CAN NOT make money on a website without traffic. There are no two ways about it. If you don't have traffic then you don't have any distribution, If nobody is going to be coming to your website, there's no way you can generate revenue on said website.

So traffic is the main ingredient when you're searching for how to monetize a website. There are lots of ways of getting traffic and there are lots of ways to make money online once you get it. So I'm going to assume that you're on this page because you have some sort of traffic, whether it's 50 people a day, or 100 people a day, or 10000 people a day... You have some traffic coming to your website currently. Whether that is from search engine optimization or search rankings, affiliate emails, or paid traffic / paid ads like Facebook Advertising or Google Advertising or Content Marketing...

You just need traffic.

So once you have a website out and you have some traffic, there are lots of different ways to make money online. The one that everybody starts with, the default one, is generating advertising income. What that means is you post banner ads on your website that some company pays you for. It might be $50 a month, or $100 a month, or $200, or $250, or whatever. Some monetary figure is exchanged for putting ads on your website. Another way to do it is Google AdSense.

Adsense is the web 'publisher' side of the coin. To fully understand Google Adsense, you need to know about Google's Advertising arm.

Google has an ad platform called Google AdWords that charges businesses per click or per impression when the business' ad shows up on someone's screen and the prospect clicks through.

Google also has a sister platform called AdSense, where everyday bloggers like you and me can log in, create an account, and embed a little code snippet on our site that'll allow Google to show their advertisers ads based on the words that are on our page. Then, when someone clicks on the ad, Google will give you a portion of that ad money!

Cool, right? And simple.

Now, Google doesn't tell you exactly how much you going to getting, but it's in the neighborhood of 25% to 40%. So if you have a Google ad that is on your website and somebody clicks it, then you get a portion of what the advertiser pays Google.

Those are two big ways to make money online.

If you're not creating and selling your digital products, there's a lot of other places you can go to... BuySellAds is one. If you have a lot of traffic, then you can get your site included in their listings and they will help sell ad inventory for you...

Some people put up sponsorship pages and then they're looking for sponsors.

But the more effective way of generating revenue is by selling your things, by selling your products, by selling your services.

You aren't splitting that money with anybody else. So having your digital courses, having your eBooks, having your coaching or consulting offers. Having your offer is a much more effective and fast way of generating significant revenue. If you are good at something, you can put an ebook together, a video course together about how to do that thing.

I wrote an entire book on it called Create...

The book is about putting together an offer that you can sell on your website, day or night, allowing you to generate tremendous revenue online without needing to share or split it with anyone...

You can also use affiliate products to monetize your website. So affiliate products or CPA offers are offers that you don't own, but you get paid a commission whenever someone purchases AFTER having clicked your link. That sometimes includes people taking a free trial or when fills out a form online.

Keep in mind, these are just some different ways to make money online.

There are so many different ways to make money online from a website.

As long as you have the distribution, whether that's from paid traffic sources or organic traffic.

You just have to ask yourself, do I want to...

A) create a product and go out and find my customers? If the answer is yes, then write an ebook, build a digital course. There's plenty of material on this website for that.

B) If the answer is no though, then you want to look at maybe some other options. You want to look at advertising and generating revenue from ads, putting ads on your website, and then when somebody clicks, you get paid. Or affiliate revenue, where another product creator has created a product and you just help them sell that and you get a portion of their sales paid as a commission. You can go to a site like clickbank.com and they have thousands of offers, thousands of affiliate offers or commissionjunction.com which has a bunch of CPA offers you could pay the commission from.

GSDdaily #30 - 7 Ways To Make Money Online From Your Website

Today we're going to talk about 7 Ways To Make Money Online With Your Website. Now I feel like I kind of stepped back into some of the shit we did back in 2012. All this stuff is now cool again because we used to do a lot of work from home, make money online, affiliate marketing, how to make money from ads, how to get ranked in Google, all of that kind of crazy stuff.

It's interesting to kind of refresh all of these strategies because they are, I mean they're crucial now, especially if you have a website that is getting traffic. People still need to buy stuff and affiliate marketing is a great way of providing services and providing products that you don't have to fulfill, you don't have to support, you don't have to write sales copy for, any of that stuff.

The previous four days of this week have been affiliate marketing. We have kind of beaten affiliate marketing to death. We introduced affiliate marketing on Monday. That was episode 26. In episode 27, we talked about the different kinds of affiliate marketing programs. Then Wednesday episode 27 we talked about finding affiliate marketing products. Yesterday we talked about building a lead generation marketing engine for this affiliate mix.

Today we're going to talk about seven ways to make money online with your website. One of those ways is affiliate marketing. There are some other ones that I want to introduce you to today. Then next week we are getting into Facebook advertising. We're going to start talking about setting up Facebook ad campaigns that work, that convert, and we're going to do it based on video views, video campaigns, that kind of thing. That's kind of the roadmap of what has come in the past and what we're moving into. So that's where we're going.

Now let us start by going over and checking out kind of the source material, the source article that we're going to be talking about. So in the comments, I'm just going to drop this here, so this is how to monetize a website. All right, so in that article is where we're going to start kind of hashing stuff out. Then also to dive deeper into this and have a conversation about different ways to make money online, different ways that you can use some of what we're teaching here, to kind of get started, go ahead and join the DFY Accelerate Facebook group.

I post a bunch of stuff, training videos, articles, future episodes, all that stuff in there. If you have questions about basically getting started and what are some of the best practices for posting ad blocks or look at affiliate marketing programs or whatever, then that's going to be the best place for you to go. This article is written was a couple of years ago but the landscape hasn't changed a whole lot.

The idea of making money on a website is you have traffic that advertisers want to pay you for, that they want access to.

There's a couple of different kinds of levels of it. It might be you have 50 or 100 or 200 people a day coming to your website and they're all kind of centered around a certain niche. Advertisers will give you money for posting ad blocks or give you money per click or per impression that those ads are on. So we're just kind of going to go through this.

1. Google Adsense

Now Google AdSense is where I started. One of the very first ways to make money online that I found was using Google AdSense. Now AdSense is the other side of the coin of Google AdWords. So now if you go to Google, just ads. Google, you will hit the advertising part, the advertising section.

Whatever the reason, it's saying that I don't have an internet connection, which means you are about to probably go down maybe. So I don't know. It looks like I'm still streaming though, so that's good. So, but anyway, so maybe it's just down. Its ads.google.com, that's the advertising arm of Google. You can think of it as if a company wants to go and advertise on Google, they're going to go here, which used to be called AdWords.

They're going to start advertising for the keyword phrases that somebody's typing into the search engines. That part is pretty easy to understand. So if we go to Google and we type the words, I don't know, home repair, let's say, if we're looking for home repair, well this is an ad and then this is an ad and then this is an ad. And then here is where all of our organic listings start coming up.

These ads are all booked through Google AdWords here. So that's pretty simple. Now, there is this other service called Google AdSense and Google AdSense allows bloggers and website owners to publish an ad block inside their website they then get paid for. That ad-block is filled up with Google AdSense ads. Basically, it's the other side of the same coin.

Google is taking money from advertisers on one side and then Google is giving that money to bloggers and website owners on the other side. You can have a website and post AdSense ads on your website and every time there's a click, every time somebody, you know, there's an impression, however, you set it, then you get paid. You get paid a couple of cents. It might be two cents, it might be 32 cents. For certain keyword phrases, it might be $8.

Maximizing your AdSense earnings is a whole different conversation around the keyword phrases that are the most in-demand and the most valuable. But it can be done. You can have, like for instance there some cash-for-house kind of keyword phrases that are very, very expensive to rank for and advertise for. So if you have a website that is a cash for houses website and you don't plan on doing any cash for houses stuff, you can drop an AdSense block and then get paid every time somebody clicks an ad in that AdSense block. AdSense is one of the easiest ways to make money online on your website, bringing it back full circle. With that, it's one of the easiest ways to make money online.

You build the website and then you can just drop a piece of code in any portion of the website. It can be in the sidebar, it can be above the blog post or below the blog post or whatever. But you can drop that AdSense block anywhere and every time it displays or every time somebody clicks an ad, then they get paid. Or then you get paid, like 30 days later.

The first check I ever received for my internet marketing efforts and activity was through Google AdSense. Google sent me a check for like $104. There's a picture of it on this website somewhere, but I don't remember where it is. It's in a blog post buried somewhere. But yeah, that was a crazy day. It was like I remember telling my professor at college, "Google just paid me money to show ads on my website." Kind of crazy. That was back in 2006 maybe? Yeah, I think it was 2006. 2005, I don't know, something like that. So it was when I was still working at Pepsi and also going to school full time and the whole deal.

Another one that I did, it's not on this list, but it was called text link ads. So text link ads, I think they're defunct now. Textlinkads.com. See if anything comes up. Basically text link ads, what they were doing is they let people buy links in your like a blogroll. Like it used to be a blogroll, but it was like a section of links in your sidebar and then they let somebody buy links there, and then they... Media Whiz, text link ads with hyphens is a Media Whiz company, which I think it always was. But anyway, text link ads, it was the most profitable way. So it was like just a block of 10 links that you put in your sidebar. And for a while, I had a website that was making $100 per link, and then I had to split half with text link ads.

I was making $500 a month for just a little section of links. And those links were ended up being SEO'd, as people bought them so that they got the link juice from my site to go to their site. So it is one of the fastest ways to make money online. Banner ads are another one. So it's very similar to AdSense, but rather than Google, what it is is you're posting a banner ad on your website. So you can sell banner ads one-on-one to a buyer. When I had marketing hacks, there was Full Sail University, the college they'd send me an email and said, "Hey, can we buy an ad block on your website for six months for $200 a month?" And I was like, "Well, shit, yeah, okay, cool. Whatever."

They sent the ads, they sent the code, I dropped the code in, and then they were paying every month for just a little banner ad site-wide. So the same thing still holds. You can sell ads on your website and that is fine. You can use a service like this BuySellAds, which I have used quite a bit in the past, both to buy ads and then also to sell ads. BuySellAds is a marketplace for advertising. So you can search for websites that are open to advertising. And then you can also if you have a lot of traffic, you can list your ad or your website on BuySellAds and they will actively sell ad inventory for you. So it's just an advertising marketplace.

2. Banner Ads

One of the ways to make money online to get this started without having a whole lot of website or having a lot of traffic and also without having sponsorships is just to make up a banner ad and put it on your website and fill that space and promote like an affiliate product. And you can use a piece of software very, very easily, and inexpensively called Canva to make banner ads.

I use it for a lot of our stuff too, just because it's like ding, ding, dink, you just put it in and you're up and running. So banner ads are a great way to kind of fill a space on your website before somebody paying you money for the banner ads. So it's one of the best ways to make money online.

3. Product Reviews

Product reviews are another one. I used to do a lot of affiliate marketing product reviews. I don't anymore. That's how we did a lot of traffic or how we made a bunch of affiliate money way back in the day. But product reviews work well still. So you can review products, link, through the product review, you can link to, through your affiliate link to the product you're reviewing, one of the most consistent ways to make money online. It still works out well. You can do top 10 lists, you can do top four lists.

You can just literally do a product review and a product review only. It's up to you how you want to do it. But product reviews are fantastic moneymakers because you're tying them to an affiliate offer. In that affiliate offer, they are going down.

Now the reason product reviews work so well is because of buyer intent. So there are three classifications of buyers. So you have like your level one buyer, which is the person who they know enough to start being dangerous. Like they're starting to get into whatever it is they're looking to buy. So I used to use the example of a baby stroller a lot. Probably because Sebastian was little or just becoming a thing. So with the baby stroller, somebody finds out or a family finds out they're pregnant, and then they're like, "Oh, we need a baby stroller." And then they go and they start researching baby strollers. They have no idea of the brand, they have no idea features, they have no idea of what they need or price points or anything. But it's a discovery process.

Your level one buyer, they're actively looking for a solution for their problem, but they have no concept of what it is they're looking for really. Then you have your level two buyer who knows what they want. So that person, they're becoming familiar with brands. They know the features and the benefits they are looking for. Furthermore, they know the colors they want, they know the price range they're looking at spending.

They haven't narrowed it down to a few choices. That level three buyer is the person who narrowed it down to a few choices. So usually they're just weighing a couple of things between them and in this particular instance, with a product review or if they're looking for product reviews, they're actively looking for somebody to help them make that decision.

If they're between one or two or three offers or products or whatever, then they're looking for justification in pulling the trigger on one of them. So you, as a content creator, as a blog owner, a website owner, whatever, if you write a product review and help them make that decision, you're pushing them over the edge of whatever it is they're trying to do, whatever it is that they're trying to buy.

Your reward for that is them clicking the link in your product review and then going and you're making your affiliate commission. So that's how product reviews work. That's why they work so well. That's why you see a lot of the top 10 review sites. You search for anything like I was looking for a video wall controller yesterday. I thought a cool DIY project would be to turn this wall back here into screens. So it will happen eventually.

But so I was looking at video wall controllers and the reviews are random. This means it's not like people use them for big installations and stuff. I thought it'd be a cool DIY project to do and I thought it would be nice on like these things if that back there could light up and show something or whatever.

I started looking at video wall controller reviews and there's two by twos and one by fours and three by threes and four by fours and I don't need anything that big, where it's like four screens by four screens, so 16 total screens. But there wasn't a whole lot of like feedback on Amazon because people purchase these things usually commercially and then they install them commercially. The best unit had like 24 reviews and 24 four or five-star reviews and had very little feedback on it.

I was trying to find someone else, something else that I could kind of because I don't know what the hell I'm buying either. Aside from trial and error, I was looking for more information. And the product reviews, there were a couple of them that I saw, it was like the top 10 lists, and they were helpful.

I haven't purchased anything yet, but I mean when I do I will probably go back there, grab their affiliate link and then buy it that way, just because they were helpful when I needed them to be. So blog and freelance services, we've talked a lot about freelance services or services in general on GSDdailies. So a way that you can generate traffic coming in is you can move them into some sort of a strategy session or some sort of a consultative sales call.

4. Blog and Freelance Services

When we did the funnel week, which was two weeks ago, we talked about a fully qualified lead sales funnel. That is what this is. So basically if you have website traffic coming in, what you want to do is you want to focus all of them onto a sales page. That sales page then has a sales video with an application form underneath and then the form forwards respondents to your calendaring service, Calendly, or whatever.

Generally how you can sell services from a blog or a website. And that focusing is well done through like an exit pop or like a top bar kind of plugin. So that way everybody who comes to the website, they ended up leaving, they see the exit pop or they see the top bar and they know that you have services available that they can go watch your video and ultimately apply to work with you if they are interested in that. So that's how the blog and freelance services would work, generally.

You can have banner ads inside the blog post and stuff too, but even then people have banner blindness. But if something pops up when they're leaving the website, they're forced to read it one way or the other. Even if it just pops up once and then is set to be off for the next week, they still have to read it in order either to exit out or exit out of the website or whatever. They know you're offering services, which plants the seed in their mind if in a week or two weeks. They come back and they need you, they need accounting help or whatever, then they will be back for you.

5. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing, this entire week has been about, so but a website that has affiliate links. You can have banner ads with your affiliate links, you can do product reviews that are through affiliate links. You can build an email list and then monetize through affiliate links.

There are lots of ways to make money online that we've covered already in the previous four days of this week that you can tie into the affiliate marketing trend. There are just so many different things. You can treat affiliate offers like you would treat your internal offers, with the understanding that you can't change the sales copy, you can't add upsells. There are lots of things you can't do with affiliate offers. But the biggest advantages are you don't have to control the sales copy.

You don't have to invest in the sales copy or the website or the sales funnel or the customer service or any of that stuff. Products. You just get to send a sale which is one of the easiest ways to make money online... And that's it. Selling your products. So a couple of weeks ago we did an entire five-day boot camp on creating your products. So you can figure out what it is you like, what it is you in you're into, what experiences you have, what history you have, what you're good at, what people ask you for.

You can kind of figure out what you want to provide and create for the world. And then in that, in coming up with that, framing up that solution to a problem in the world or the public, I should say, then you can create a digital course, an ebook, a coaching program, a consulting program, a mastermind, a service, an offer that helps somebody, that transform somebody's life, in just a big way or a small way, it doesn't matter. But give somebody transformation so that they can adjust and so that their life can be better because of you. At the end of the day, people are looking for transformation when they're searching for solutions for their problems. So if you can provide that transformation and then you can sell a service or a product on your website that helps get them there.

6. Sell Your Products

It's the best way of generating money from your blog or your website is to sell your products because you control the entire buying cycle. So you start with them through your blog and then you can move them through a buyer's journey. You can move them through an automated webinar or your product or your service or whatever, and ultimately fulfill to them on the backside, and build your brand longterm. So that is awesome. That's where everyone should go. But sometimes there are stepping stones. Like for me, I didn't start there. I started with affiliate marketing. I started with having banner ads on a blog post and trying to get traffic. And then I moved into the product creation piece. So it's a journey. It's just always a journey.

7. Building an Email List

The last part is building an email list. So when I started a long time ago, forever I didn't have an email list. I didn't try to build an email list. I thought email marketing was, well, they're already here, why not try to get them to buy something? Why throw up an email opt-in before we send them off to buying a product or buying an affiliate product or whatever. And it was a mistake. So there could have been a lot more leads than we have attracted. I could have been able to scale a lot sooner if I would've grown an email list, but I didn't. And it's more like a marketing tactic. So you want to grow your email list so that you can advertise to them in the future.

One of the things that I have seen, especially through this pandemic, is the folks who can pivot. They're able to pivot because they have distribution through the email list. After all, they have website traffic, because they have some way that they're able to reach out to all of their past customers. They also have prospects or everybody's who's interested and say, "Hey look, we're doing this new thing. Come follow us here.". If you don't have an email list and you don't have website traffic and you don't have an audience, there's no one to pivot to. It's just another startup.

Building an email list gives you the best chance of future growth. And then also like just being recession-proof because you have your distribution and then you can pivot, you can start something new. You can do something different, you can use that audience to scale into a bigger audience through shares and likes and all that other stuff. But if you don't have an email list, you don't have anybody to reach out to, then you don't. So it's just a super, super important point.

As I'm saying this, just that chunk out and throw it in a different video. Then run some ads to it because everybody needs to see that message right there. Because an email list is going to save your business in the future. It sucks to build right now. I mean it's fucking hard. You've got lead magnets and landing pages and email copy and ads and exit pops and all kinds of other crazy shit. But you got to have it, for the future business and to protect your future growth. You can do whatever you want. You can sell services, affiliate products, and banner ads. Also, you can drop them into blog posts. You can write every day, you can do whatever the hell you want if you have the email list. But without it, you can't.

Those are our seven ways to make money online on your website. Affiliate marketing is one of them. Google AdSense, nice, easy, quick way of doing it. Banner ads are a nice way. You just want to remember to fake it till you make it. Grab an affiliate offer, make a banner ad, promote a friend's site or whatever with the banner ad that you control, so that you can take that place.

Nobody wants to be the first, no advertiser wants to be the first advertiser of a website. So give them the impression somebody else is paying you money for your ads. Doing product reviews for affiliate products is a great way of doing it. Offering services, selling your products, building an email list. All good stuff. So if you have any questions at all, go to doneforyou.com/GSD. That's going to ask questions and put them in the queue for the next week.

Like I said, next week is going to be Facebook ads. We're going to talk about creating Facebook videos. I'm not real sure how I'm going to pull that off yet, but we're going to try. And then, so we're going to do Facebook videos, and rolling those Facebook videos into Facebook ads. We're going to talk about audiences and demographics and ad set up, conversion campaigns, all that stuff.

We're kind of going to do a five-day intensive on Facebook ads, which is going to be pretty exciting. And then from there, I don't know what we're doing after that.

For Questions and Guide

Go to doneforyou.com/start, book an action plan call with my team and me, and then we can go through and kind of put together revenue-generating strategies, sales funnel strategies, any kind of an action plan for getting you out there and scaling. And if you have any questions, just send me a Facebook message or post in one of the groups, the Accelerate group, or whatever. And we'll talk to you soon, all right? Thanks. Bye.

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Sales System Experts: A Comprehensive Guide Into Selling https://doneforyou.com/dfy-sales-system-experts-how-it-all-began/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=dfy-sales-system-experts-how-it-all-began Fri, 17 Apr 2020 14:00:51 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10898       Video Transcript: Jason Drohn: Live here briefly. All right, so we are now live. So, say hi. Aaron Parkinson: Hi. Episode one of Sales System Experts. I’m excited. Jason Drohn: Episode one. We have no idea what the hell we’re doing. Aaron Parkinson: Well, we sort of have an idea of what […]

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Video Transcript:

Jason Drohn:
Live here briefly. All right, so we are now live. So, say hi.

Aaron Parkinson:
Hi. Episode one of Sales System Experts. I'm excited.

Jason Drohn:
Episode one. We have no idea what the hell we're doing.

Aaron Parkinson:
Well, we sort of have an idea of what we're doing.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, a little bit. Nobody's going to watch us, so this is more just a practice run because Aaron doesn't do live streams.

Aaron Parkinson:
No. I have been a guest on almost 10 live streams in the last week.

Jason Drohn:
Yep.

Aaron Parkinson:
And so, from the guest's perspective, I've been on them. But from the host perspective, no.

Jason Drohn:
No. Yeah, it'll be interesting.

Aaron Parkinson:
That's why we have you here, because you are extremely technically savvy, whereas I am good at building teams of technically savvy people and Sales System Experts.

Jason Drohn:
Right. That's funny. All right. So, why don't we just start with who you are?

Aaron Parkinson:
Sure.

Jason Drohn:
So give a little bit of background of what you do and who you are and what we're trying to build here and then I'll do the same.

Aaron Parkinson:
I am a guy who would have a coffee mug like this.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, buddy. Yep.

Aaron Parkinson:
Right? That sums it up in one shot. But, if you want real details, here it comes. My name is Aaron Parkinson, one of the Sales System Experts and I have been in the digital marketing space since the early 2000s.

Jason Drohn:
This was before marketing and Sales System Experts were invented.

Aaron Parkinson:
100%. It was before marketing was invented digitally and I probably invented half of what we use today by accident. Not because I'm smart. I got started in the affiliate marketing space. I just honestly wanted to make enough money to stay home because I just had my first daughter. Was selling cars in the day, was bouncing at a night club at night. The problem with those two scenarios are, number one, nobody makes money selling cars. It's all a lie. It's all a facade. The number one sales guy on the lot, I learned a month in, made 55 thousand dollars the year before and I was like, "Oh dear Lord, I cannot stand here on this lot for the rest of my life. After taxes, I'm going to take home 30. And my kids are going to be homeless.

Aaron Parkinson:
And then I'm like five 10 and a half maybe which is not a good size for running security at a night club. Which was my job at night?

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Aaron Parkinson:
So between the combination of those two things, I needed to find something different. But when you sell cars and you're a night club bouncer, that means you don't have a lot of skills. Guys with a lot of skills aren't doing those jobs.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Aaron Parkinson:
So I had to teach myself something new that ideally had very little competition because I didn't have anybody too smart ahead of me based on my jumping-off point.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, totally.

Aaron Parkinson:
Digital marketing and Sales System Experts were brand new. Google wasn't even invented yet. I read a couple of courses. I was like, let me see if I can throw some ads up, maybe sell some stuff. And I did. And I got pretty good at it.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Aaron Parkinson:
And then I opened my training platform because there was a bunch of people that also wanted to do that and were in my same position, and within a year we had 30 thousand monthly subscribing students in 80 countries. Which was insane, especially when you're in your mid-20s. And you're like, "Oh wow. I was poor. And now I make 100 thousand dollars a month." That's so unfathomable. That leap is so insane.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Aaron Parkinson:
And then I sold that company. I started a weight loss and fitness company with one of the trainers from The Biggest Loser TV show. Her name was Kim Lyons, it was called Automatic Body. And Michael was to try and disrupt the weight loss and fitness space. I was tired of the 10 minutes, 10 stupid pound diets that are sold in mass online. So I said, well if I created a 24-week program, super long, one change a week. Something that people could sustain longterm. Built a phone app to support it. Built a supplement line. Launched it into the world. Within two years, we had 600 thousand people use worldwide. Which was crazy. Coming back of success, we're nuts.

Aaron Parkinson:
And then the partners ended up taking that over and I moved on and started a female accessory brand called Grace Callie Designs, 100% hands-free drop shipping base. Ran that with my partner up to about a 90 million a year gross sales run rate in 18 months. Sold that to him and then I started my agency, Seven Mile Media. Which is where I am today. I am the CEO of Seven Mile Media, which is a direct response agency that specializes in Facebook, Instagram, and Google, and YouTube. And we scale already successful brands. If somebody doesn't have a successful brand yet, but they got a real concept like they want to build a funnel to do that, then that's our wheelhouse, is Sales System Experts scale, right?

Aaron Parkinson:
So, that's the boring stuff. The important stuff, I've been married almost 20 years, got three amazing kids. I live in paradise in the Cayman Islands down in the Caribbean so I'm perpetually surrounded by everybody else's dream vacation daily. I look at palm trees through my window. I wish I went outside more often, but I know it's out there if I want to. Yeah, that's me in a nutshell. Tell everybody about you. That's my five minutes, hopefully, people will watch the first episode so I don't have to repeat this every time.

Jason Drohn:
We're just going to dive into it, it's just the coming-out party.

Aaron Parkinson:
But you are the man with the best backgrounds, always. That's who you are.

Jason Drohn:
I don't know about that. I pulled this thing out for a Sales System Experts video the other day.

Aaron Parkinson:
Uh-oh, here we go.

Jason Drohn:
Can you see it?

Aaron Parkinson:
"Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work." Oh, that is good. Does not give free money and luck to people like you and me. It's all hard grinder work.

Jason Drohn:
Oh yeah. That is true. Me, let's see. 14 years ago now, I was a Pepsi truck driver. So I don't know that you knew that about me.

Aaron Parkinson:
I did not even know that. Did you know that my dad worked for Pepsi?

Jason Drohn:
No. Wow, look at that. So 14 years ago, I was a Pepsi truck driver. I worked at Pepsi for five years, and then my third or fourth year there I went back to school. I drove truck full time and went back to school full time, so I got a business degree and an MIS degree, which is where my love of technology and business comes into play. I love the intersection of the two. Well, you know that obviously.

Jason Drohn:
So, I ended up finding a PDF. Just a random half-finished report online that was how to be a professional blogger.

Aaron Parkinson:
I probably wrote that.

Jason Drohn:
You may have.

Aaron Parkinson:
I say it was probably mine because it was half-finished.

Jason Drohn:
Well, so it was funny. I remember taking it to the gym, I was reading it, I was like, "Well, what the hell is a professional blogger? You mean I can make money and write and put it on a website?" So then I started. It was how to set up a blog spot blog and then I discovered Word Press. And then I wrote for a little while and got a $100 Ad Sense check back in 2006. First, check ever, and I was like, "Oh my God, Google's paying me.

Aaron Parkinson:
You'd be rich.

Jason Drohn:
Right. There's an image of it floating around somewhere. And that was from my 15 visitors a day who came to my website. So that sent me down the spiral of, how do I get more traffic to my website? Well, you get more traffic by writing more content and SEOing your content and I was an SEO ninja. Up until probably 2012, 13-ish, I ended up selling a lot of affiliate products starting in 2009. I remember some of your earlier work. I remember seeing it on the interwebs, way, way back in.

Aaron Parkinson:
You're like, why is this guy everywhere?

Jason Drohn:
Kind of, yeah. Yeah, like what the, okay, all right.

Aaron Parkinson:
There was no competition...

Jason Drohn:
There wasn't. Your first iteration was like, you were the only talking about that shit.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, 100%. I was like, I'm going to be the only guy talking about this and I'm going to spend a million dollars a month.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Aaron Parkinson:
I win. Until Google changed its algorithm and then I was like, "Oh."

Jason Drohn:
And that's just it. Yeah, Google changed its algorithm and I had a bunch of SEO sites that were purely monetized off of affiliate stuff and making 20-30 thousand dollars a month. Free money. Affiliate stuff.

Aaron Parkinson:

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, and then the algorithms changed and all of a sudden backlinks didn't work and then you're in a free fall. And you're like, "Well, I have these digital assets" and then you start running traffic and creating your products. So that was the iteration and then about six years ago, I started doing client stuff. So, yeah Freedom Fast Lane, Bill just chimed in here.

Aaron Parkinson:
Why Freedom Fast Lane?

Jason Drohn:
Freedom Fast Lane, Ryan Moran took it over.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, Ryan's a smart guy. Nice guy too.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, Ryan's awesome. He should be on this show.

Aaron Parkinson:
Okay. Well, we'll text him after and say, "You should be on this show."

Jason Drohn:
Yeah. That works for me. I like it.

Aaron Parkinson:
100%. Freedom Fast Lane, was that all Amazon-based? Freedom Fast Lane?

Jason Drohn:
No, so Freedom Fast Lane was just a collection of internet marketing strategies we charged next to nothing for. It was just a monthly. And then Travis Sego and Ryan Moran and I did it, and then Ryan grabbed it, and then he turned that into capitalism.com.

Aaron Parkinson:
What a genius, right? Capitalism.com. I don't even want to say it. But capitalism.com was something somebody bought. I went and started searching domains that were just stupidly obnoxious domains like that. After Sam bought consulting.com. Do you know what I found?

Jason Drohn:
What?

Aaron Parkinson:
You can say this because it's still available. I found cashflow.com.

Jason Drohn:
No.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yes. It is available right now and my friend owned a domain registrar called Uniregistry. I don't know if you've heard of Uniregistry.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Aaron Parkinson:
And he's based out of the Cayman Islands. He just sold Uniregistry one month ago before the apocalypse, to GoDaddy. Good timing.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Aaron Parkinson:
And made an undisclosed gazoodle amount of money, because I know he had turned down Google for 1.1 billion and 1.3 billion already. So I don't even know what he possibly accepted from GoDaddy. And he won't tell anybody. His name's Frank. And Frank's company owns cashflow.com. So I hit them up and I said, "I want cashflow.com. How much is it? And I'm Frank's friend, so give me a discount." And he said, "No problem, it's one million." What? Come on, man.

Aaron Parkinson:
But I want it. I don't even know what I want to do with it yet. I just think, what an amazing domain that would be to have.

Jason Drohn:
Totally.

Aaron Parkinson:
Cashflow.com. All ideas on how to create cash flow.

Jason Drohn:
Oh, shit. There's a couple of good ones out there. Profit.com is somebodys.

Aaron Parkinson:
Just straight up profit.com.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah. That's awesome.

Aaron Parkinson:
Doneforyou.com though is no slouch.

Jason Drohn:
No, doneforyou.com is a great domain name.

Aaron Parkinson:
Doneforyou.com is a sick domain.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, it's a great domain. I grabbed it so ... Five years ago I started doing Done For You work and became one of the Sales System Experts and I was like, that's a great domain name and I grabbed doneforyou.io or something like that. And then I emailed the owner of doneforyou.com and said, "How much is it?" And they were like, "Well, it's going to be 50 grand." And I was like, I'm just getting started on this funnel thing, we'll see. And then I just kept working on them for three years. And two years ago, it was after Christmas and before New Years, and so-

Aaron Parkinson:
Nobody has any money.

Jason Drohn:
Right. So I was like, "So, doneforyou.com." And he's like, "All right." It was five grand.

Aaron Parkinson:
I was going to say 10. I figured you whittled him down to 10.

Jason Drohn:
No, five, yeah. What was funny was, it was like a, "If you buy this in the next 24 hours, we'll give it to you for $5100 or something." I was like, "Done!"

Aaron Parkinson:
Right.

Jason Drohn:
process this right now

Aaron Parkinson:
I get an email from Unitregister once a month, like "972 thousand. Today only." I still wouldn't buy it, but I wasn't expecting a million-dollar price tag to be associated with it. I'm sure after this episode it will be gone. Somebody will be like, "I'll buy it."

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, totally.

Aaron Parkinson:
Should we tell people what we're going to talk about in this episodes moving forward?

Jason Drohn:
Yeah. Rather than just dumb shit? Yeah.

Aaron Parkinson:
Well, let's be honest. I don't even want to do this unless it's going to be 50% dumb shit.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, totally. I mean, look at your coffee cup.

Aaron Parkinson:
Right? 100%. I have to talk marketing all day long and be super serious with clients. I don't want to come here and be super serious. Let's start with the number one thing. As Sales System Experts, we're going to talk about digital sales funnels. we're going to talk about digital traffic, we're going to talk about what's working now because we have so many agency clients between the two of us. We'll talk about what's not working now and we'll probably make fun of a lot of different people including ourselves. Along the way, I think that's probably a fair summary of what we're going to discuss for Sales System Experts.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah. And guess, I mean, we'll probably have a couple of guests who are doing okay online.

Aaron Parkinson:
Probably doing okay.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, probably doing okay. Maybe some, maybe some just Joe Schmoes who are just doing whatever.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, sometimes I like having the Joe Schmoes that nobody knows about yet, but they're doing super wizard things, and I learn from them and I'm like, oh that's smart.

Jason Drohn:
It's like all of our clients to some degree.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah.

Jason Drohn:
I mean, you pick something up and it's like, oh shit. That's a pretty cool way of doing a survey.

Aaron Parkinson:
100%. Maybe we should start with something, I don't know what you've got. Do you have more slides behind that slide today?

Jason Drohn:
No, I was just playing around because I've only ever done these myself. So, we got all kinds of different little view here that we can kick into.

Aaron Parkinson:
These types of little graphic type things.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, so we can do some.

Aaron Parkinson:
I think we should start with real-life example number one, right? As Sales System Experts, let's talk about sales funnels, let's talk about the funnel we just built.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Aaron Parkinson:
And what we were looking at yesterday and what we did to impact it.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, all right.

Aaron Parkinson:
As Joe Schmoes, we can even talk about both the funnels we're running right now. Because it was similar, and what made it work and what made it didn't and where the numbers are at.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, so let me pull up some pages here.

Aaron Parkinson:
Sure.

Jason Drohn:
You're talking about funnel factor, right?

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah.

Jason Drohn:
Shit, we got all kinds of stuff going on. I think we also need to talk about groups too. So, groups are going to be something that we should talk about.

Aaron Parkinson:
Groups are hot right now.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, groups are super hot. All right, so you guys ready? I'm going to pull this off into its browser.

Aaron Parkinson:
We had somebody watching us for a second. I wonder if there's more than one.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, there's a couple of people. It looks like we've got five watchers right now.

Aaron Parkinson:
Awesome, welcome to the show.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, Bill keeps commenting though. So thank you so much, Bill. Anybody else, you can comment here and we'll make fun of you a little bit, but it'll be fun.

Aaron Parkinson:
We should probably point out to people a simple fact about going live, which we tell our clients all the time is that, it doesn't matter who watches you live.

Jason Drohn:
Oh, no. Yeah totally.

Aaron Parkinson:
So many people are scared to go live because they're like, "Well only like two or three people show up." Or four or five or 10 depending on how famous you are. And the reality is, it doesn't matter. Because everybody watches it on recording later and lives get more engagement and more reach than anything else.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, you get both points. Both points doing lives.

Aaron Parkinson:
100%. So if you do life with four people every day, you're going to get so much more engagement than any type of content you put out longterm. And it's evergreen. It lasts forever and then you and syndicate it across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, transition it into blogs, SEO it. You can do a million things with it. So going live, if your concern is, I don't want to go live because nobody shows up and I feel like a loser, it's an unfounded fear.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, totally. It's funny because when we do lives, we'll put a couple of hundred bucks behind it for the next few weeks and then just rack up a bunch of views, a bunch of people who are jumping into a retargeting audience.

Aaron Parkinson:
Absolutely.

Jason Drohn:
But, what's cool because it's funny, I've told this to quite a few clients but, so today was my 25th GSD Daily and so every daily is about 25-30 minutes and then so I'm just getting it transcribed. Then the transcript is about 4000 words, and I've just been adding them to the blog post. I'm adding 12 to 15% of organic traffic every single week. So it's just like, bing, bing, bing, bing from all those keyword phrases.

Aaron Parkinson:
That's crazy. Break that down for people. What is an extra 12 to 15% organic do for you?

Jason Drohn:
Oh, and it's compounding. It's like compounding interest in your bank account. But it's just paid every week. You look at our analytics and it's like, step, step, step, every Monday to Friday we're stepping up.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, I see the same thing on LinkedIn right now because I have a LinkedIn strategy where I engage with people four or five times and then I send them a voice message, which is a little if nobody knows a piece of gold you can walk with. Don't type messages to people on LinkedIn. Send them a voice recording because the percentage of engagement is off, I've had so many people say, "Oh man, this is so much more refreshing than just sending me the text because I just ignore them all." Because they all harp on the same thing right, "I'm sure you get a lot of messages every single day like me, but I thought I would show you think funky wizardry." I don't care, right?

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Aaron Parkinson:
Drop a voice recording in there and there's no context to it, I don't know if I can not listen to it. It could be the most amazing thing ever, right?

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Aaron Parkinson:
I have to out of just pure curiosity. So I get way more engagement from that. But my point is, my team does this for me, and I've got 100 of these going out every three days. If you compound that over a month, all of a sudden you see my views on my profile from the last month, it's like a hockey stick.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Aaron Parkinson:
Because there are all these voice recordings in people's inbox that are still getting opened down the road, day after day, after day, right? To the engagement is just like, woo. And last month we closed 50 thousand dollars in business off of LinkedIn.

Jason Drohn:
Oh, that's awesome. All three right? Just free messaging?

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, I mean I'm paying for the process that's going a thousand bucks a month.

Jason Drohn:
But it's not the two dollars and 50 cents per click or whatever.

Aaron Parkinson:
Oh, no this is just pure organic. Just connecting with people, engaging them, messaging them.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, loving on them.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yep, loving on them.

Jason Drohn:
All right. So-

Aaron Parkinson:
Let's talk about this funnel.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, so as you were chatting there ... There it is, all right. So there's one video. All right so I'm going to share my screen here so basically, this is a funnel that I put together last weekend. So some of you may have seen it, some of you may not have. But basically what it was, was it's a 100% cold traffic funnel. We're throwing some cold traffic funnel so ... Typically when Aaron and I roll out campaigns, we're looking at our cold traffic and then a warm traffic strategy, but this lead magnet is generating cold traffic leads for about two dollars and 50 cents right now. Yesterday was a buck 89 for a cold traffic lead, like what?

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, give people some context. I think this is partly because the auction is so cheap right now on Facebook and Instagram.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, you can go ahead.

Aaron Parkinson:
And partly because it's really good and there's a lot of people home right now looking for options. But, a lead like this would normally cost you, what? Four to six bucks?

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, four to six dollars is about normal, yeah. A lot of advertisers are pulled out which has dropped the ad cost quite a bit. So we're using video ads for this too. And the video ad is not bad. It's done with the same camera, the same setup.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah... standing right where you're standing talking.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, right here. I think I waved this thing in as a little pattern interrupt.

Aaron Parkinson:
Okay.

Jason Drohn:
But that's about it. So, they hit this page. There is quite a bit of text here, so we're going to split test some different versions of this, just slimming down the subject lines and stuff because on mobile, there's a lot of text. There's a lot of words. But this page wasn't the problem. The problem was that this was the original confirmation page and so there is the sales video, and then we have a little download button here to download the PDF. And then down below, some different things are into it. And I was just adding stuff to this page as we go.

Jason Drohn:
So, Aaron, you can describe your feedback that you had for me on this-

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, this is why it's always good to have partners or Sales System Experts or have other people review your stuff. So that first page, it was like, hey you're going to get this free report, download factor and that all made perfect sense to me and the leads were cheap. And we got to this page, and the goal was not only to have people download it but then buy a mini-course. So we could turn them into buyers because buyers are always better than free leads. And so when I looked at this headline, I was like okay, it's lackluster and it doesn't have a lot of direction and a lot of people won't watch the video. The video is really good, but a lot of people won't watch your video. There are video watchers and then there are scanners of the text.

Aaron Parkinson:
So then, when I was looking down below, for me, with fresh eyes, this just looked like a whole bunch of articles. Almost just content. Like I didn't understand how it connected to the top. So when I asked Jason what the ultimate goal was, he said, "Well it's to buy this course." And I said, "Well this page doesn't look to me like anything with regards to buying a course." Until this very bottom piece where I was like, "Oh what? What is that? Oh, there's a master class?" So it's buried in the video and it's buried in this banner.

Jason Drohn:
Yep.

Aaron Parkinson:
So the focal point is way too vague on this page. And so then, we looked at some other stuff that was converting well and we talked about mirroring that and now maybe show the V2.

Jason Drohn:
So this page was getting about a 2% conversion. So basically we got two sales out of the first 100 visitors.

Aaron Parkinson:
Right, and if you look at the math on that, right? So that means we're paying two bucks a lead.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, so you spend 200 dollars, $200-ish, $250, to make 10 dollars immediately, which isn't awesome. It's not bad, so because the button will pop up because of the video play. So from a return on ad spend standpoint, I know that I will make far, far away that down the road, but what I'm trying to do is liquidate ad spend.

Aaron Parkinson:
Right, and so we were creating a buyer for 50 dollars.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Aaron Parkinson:
50 dollars [inaudible 00:26:01], which isn't horrible, but not amazing. And again, what he's talking about is that we can pitch them stuff later, and because they're buyers, they're going to buy them. But we wanted to increase the conversion percentage. I want to say the conversion percentage on this page would be like 10%.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Aaron Parkinson:
At least. So then let's see what you did after we had our conversation.

Jason Drohn:
So that was this page. So this page turned into, literally, it's the same content, it's just this page. So a little bit different text. We have an expiring countdown clock on the top. In the same video, the download button is sent to an email, the email inbox, the PDF download.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah [crosstalk 00:26:48] goes to their email and now they're watching this. So, let's just go back to the top. First off, big bold headline. "Which sales system brings cash on demand? Short video reviews, true sales funnel automation." Oh, I want to know. This is now compelling. I see that there's a countdown, I've got to get on this. There's a price tag, normally $49.95, today only I'm giving this massive discount [inaudible 00:27:10] access to it. If I'm the person that wants to just buy right now, I can buy it right now. That's the five percent that would view this page.

Jason Drohn:
Yep.

Aaron Parkinson:
Those are buyers. And for those people who want more information, now we're explaining the story, which you've done a really good job. Most funnels fail the first time out. Get access to our best performing funnel flows, which now makes sense, right? We've got automated webinar funnel, content funnel, we've got all these prices on them that are crossed out and they're all included in this. We've got some lessons, we're summarizing the offer again, all the things we get for just four dollars and 95 cents. We're getting the keys to the kingdom, a little video walkthrough of what it looks like to pique the interest. Right? And then did we have anything below this? Another call to action? No.

Jason Drohn:
[inaudible 00:27:55].

Aaron Parkinson:
So, this is much more obvious to the consumer, what we're pitching than the previous page. And there's scarcity because it's got a countdown timer and there's a more obvious call to actions on it. Maybe talk about the stats difference that you told me from yesterday and today.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, so this page has a 14% conversion at the moment. We are literally, it's seven times more buyers at the moment. It hasn't been live for very long. But this page is making the traffic, even with a four dollar and 95 cent offer, this is almost returning the traffic.

Aaron Parkinson:
[inaudible 00:28:41] with upsells and down sales? Or just front end, that first buy?

Jason Drohn:
Just with the first upsell, yeah.

Aaron Parkinson:
So including the first upsell.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, including the first upsell.

Aaron Parkinson:
Okay, so maybe for those people who don't understand what you just said there, do you want to clarify?

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, so the first upsell here is 97 dollar lifetime access to a piece of software and then there's a down-sell from there. So they fill in this order form, let me go to an upsell. We've got another countdown timer. I re-did the check out page to match the sales page there.

Aaron Parkinson:
It looks really good.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, the same thing, just form up top. Then we got some features and benefits over here. But all in all, just a redone page took the campaign, which, it was doing okay. The goal was to generate a return on the ad spend immediately, like the same day. So that we could then turn around and spend more money on ads.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, and that's important for people to know. We try to, what's call self-liquidating offer. We try to have enough sales on the funnel first day to cover our advertising spend. If you can get as much money back the first day in your offer as you spend on advertising it is called a self-liquidating offer, and it's nirvana. Because if you can acquire buyers essentially for free, then whatever you sell them after that is pure profit and that means you can scale your advertising up as high as you want without risk and fear.

Jason Drohn:
Yep. Yeah, so that's this funnel as it is, I mean, the upsells we will get to. Sales System Experts, we ended up getting an upsell but that paid for the traffic. It's just about unlocking every stage as we go.

Aaron Parkinson:
Maybe talk about that real briefly because I know we're only going to do half an hour length on these. But, we wanted to see 10% and you've got to work step by step. Everyone tries to look at the whole thing and it's too much. You've got to look at, how much does it cost me to get my leads? We [inaudible 00:30:48] them for some four dollars, we were at two dollars. So we were like, okay win, right?

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Aaron Parkinson:
Now let's move onto the next piece. We want a 10% conversion on buyers, but we got 14.

Jason Drohn:
Yep.

Aaron Parkinson:
Good enough. No need to mess around with that right now. Right? Now we've got to go to the upsell piece and ideally what I want to see on an upsell is I want to see a 15% conversion rate on my upsell.

Jason Drohn:
Yep.

Aaron Parkinson:
Right? And did we get one, did you say?

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, so upsell is right at 15%.

Aaron Parkinson:
Perfect.

Jason Drohn:
But I mean, there's one.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, the numbers are mathematically significant yet.

Jason Drohn:
Right.[crosstalk 00:31:29].

Aaron Parkinson:
[crosstalk 00:31:29], right? And the great thing about this, from front to back, that we haven't even talked about, is that there's no fulfillment cost or fulfillment time.

Jason Drohn:
Nope.

Aaron Parkinson:
We're selling information and software.

Jason Drohn:
Yep.

Aaron Parkinson:
So, if all of a sudden we get a return that's 20%, all we have to do is press buttons and increase the traffic. That's the only work we have to do.

Jason Drohn:
Yep, it's all done, it's all fulfilled, it's all created, and truly this entire course is created out of living streams that I did. It was I was like, shit I'm just going to put this together in a course and we'll sell it. It's great content.

Aaron Parkinson:
Absolutely. I love it. Well, Jason, we were going to have to start structuring this thing better.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah.

Aaron Parkinson:
There has to be an end to these. So what is our call to action today?

Jason Drohn:
Our call to action ... I think the DFY funnels group and Sales System Experts, join the funnels group.

Aaron Parkinson:
Sure. I think that's a great call to action for today.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, join the DFY funnels group. Let me grab a link here.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, the DFY funnels group and Sales System Experts, Jason's doing an amazing job every day of dropping content like this into that group. So it's an amazing place to get free content daily of what we're doing to drive digital sales through different types of funnels.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, totally. And Aaron's in the group as well, so you can join there. This Sales System Experts podcast is going to be hosted on our website Sales System Experts (salessystemexperts.com) once I get it to build. So, the meeting is registered but we need an mp4 file to send to iTunes and Google Play to establish the podcast.

Aaron Parkinson:

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, hence this video recording. And what? Every Friday at 11 am we're going to be doing a Sales System Experts podcast.

Aaron Parkinson:
That's right.

Jason Drohn:
Because Fridays are typically slow days in the agency world.

Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, everybody makes appointments with me on Friday and nobody shows up.

Jason Drohn:
Right, yeah.

Aaron Parkinson:
And then we just decided to screw them. No more meetings on Fridays.

Jason Drohn:
We're going to talk about cool shit.

Aaron Parkinson:
Share knowledge and then people would come on this call and be like, "Man, I would love to talk to those guys." They can book on a Monday like a normal human.

Jason Drohn:
Right. And you're welcome, go to doneforyou.com/start and book a call and you will see that there are no sessions today.

Aaron Parkinson:
I want to be that guy that I always wanted to be when I grew up and be one of the  Sales System Experts. On Fridays, I want to golf and go swim in the ocean to go to the beach. I just look at it through my window. It's going to be the last thing of the day on Fridays. Doing a podcast with you, and then I'm going to go to something with real people out there.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah. After lockdown ends.

Aaron Parkinson:
After lockdown. I can't go out there right now.

Jason Drohn:
Right.

Aaron Parkinson:
But soon enough, I'll be able to go out there.

Jason Drohn:
All right, man. So next Friday.

Aaron Parkinson:
Next Friday.

Jason Drohn:
At 11 o'clock.

Aaron Parkinson:
Same bat channel, same bat time.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, and your Frankenstein mug.

Aaron Parkinson:
That is not a Frankenstein mug, what is wrong with you? It's the Hulk.

Jason Drohn:
Oh, Hulk yes. All right. There we go.

Aaron Parkinson:
I'm going to bring it every Friday now.

Jason Drohn:
All right, that'll work.

Jason Drohn:
What's that?

Aaron Parkinson:
I said we'll see y'all soon.

Jason Drohn:
Yeah, see you. Bye.

The post Sales System Experts: A Comprehensive Guide Into Selling appeared first on Done For You.

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Best Ways To Create And Sell Digital Products Online https://doneforyou.com/create-launch-sell-digital-products/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=create-launch-sell-digital-products Thu, 26 Mar 2020 14:00:10 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10050 Hey, what’s up? This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to today’s presentation. What we’re going to talk about today, we’re just going to bust right into it and that is how to sell digital products. There are so many services and many people with expertise and knowledge that right now is sitting at home. What I […]

The post Best Ways To Create And Sell Digital Products Online appeared first on Done For You.

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Hey, what’s up? This is Jason Drohn. Welcome to today’s presentation. What we’re going to talk about today, we’re just going to bust right into it and that is how to sell digital products. There are so many services and many people with expertise and knowledge that right now is sitting at home.

What I wanted to do was kick off this idea, but this thing that I have had a lot of experience in, in the last decade, which is selling digital products, coaching, all of that kind of stuff. Because when you’re talking about how to sell digital products and membership sites and e-books, they give you a way to package your knowledge and sell it at scale.

Whether 100 people download your e-book or 1,000 people download your e-book or join your membership site or go through your digital course, then it doesn’t necessarily matter. Because they’re learning from you, it’s just in a prepackaged way.

I actually wrote an entire book on this called Create. The title of the book is Transform What You Know Into How You Get Paid. It is available on Amazon but I don’t think it will probably get shipped to you for the next month. In today’s presentation, we’re going to go through a little bit of what’s in the book.

We’re also going to talk about, and a lot of it, the hyper condensed form of it is available over on Done For You. If you’re on the Done For You Facebook page or on the YouTube channel, you’re going to be able to see this post here. In the question box, I just dropped a link. But basically, that is how to launch and sell digital products, a very, very condensed form.

My goal with today’s presentation was to go through and talk about packaging your knowledge and experience up into products. The different kinds of products that you can sell, what you can get from those products, as in how much you can charge from those products. And then ultimately, how to sell those products.

This literally is, I think this book is 239 pages. We have a lot to cover in the next 30 minutes or 45 minutes or so. Obviously, we’re not going to get through all of it, but we’re going to do our best to move through the information.

Let me just drop my link in here. This is the blog post that we’re going to be riffing off of. This blog post is the ultimate guide for how to sell digital products. And then we’re going to throw this…

Basically in packaging your knowledge and experience up into something that can be sold online and fulfilled online and fulfilled digitally, you don’t have to fulfill a physical product. You don’t have any costs of goods sold, you don’t have the cost of DVDs or any of this other stuff. That stuff was all super, super popular back when I first got started, 10, 12 years ago, people had these big DVD courses where they basically shipped you a box of stuff. There were DVDs and workbooks and textbooks and all kinds of crazy stuff in there. And that’s how they taught people.

These big-box courses, I know the very, very first one that I bought was Carleton Sheets, which was a real estate one, a no money down real estate guide. And it was the first time I ever saw an information product. I remember I actually have pictures of it, way, way, way back in the day as I unboxed it. Because it was the first information product that I had ever purchased myself.

Interestingly, and this just came to me, when I was younger, when I was like 10, 12, 15, my dad used to go to these seminars and he used to buy these six cassette products on how to negotiate better, how to sell better. And what he used to do was I had this cassette player that you can record these tapes and he would have me tape them and tape a version for myself. But in taping the version for myself, he knew that I was going to sit there and listen to it.

Oddly enough, I was a teenager and learning how to negotiate and I didn’t even know it because I’m listening to these tapes. It’s kind of an interesting thought. That was like the beginning of my digital product days or my information product days, was way, way back then.

Progressed to about 10 years ago and the very first e-book that I created was an e-book called Client Crusher and it was 20 pages and it was like 10 tips on how to work with clients and how to attract clients and sell clients and everything else. That was my first foray into that which is selling digital products.

Based on that product or based on that e-book, we created a video course for it. The video course turned into the next offer and the next offer and the next offer. Since I’ve launched a lot of stuff online and figuring how to sell digital products themselves has been trial by fire…  We’ve helped hundreds of other companies sell digital products and membership sites and all that other stuff.

Where I start when working with a client is just having them figure out what they are interested in or what they continually get asked. Because if somebody asks you again and again and again, what question do they ask? Because if they ask it, then they know that you have the answer for them or at least they think you have the answer for them. Oftentimes it’s a great way to start the conversation for a digital product and then you just continue building out what that product would look like.

Let’s say you are an accountant and you work on a lot of tax accounting. Obviously, some of the questions that I’m sure you get asked a lot from other business owners or whatever are, how do I save money on my taxes? What can I do to lower my tax liability? Especially this time of year, right? Or maybe not like directly this time of year, but you get it, this year, in particular.

But by and large, people are going to be asking you about tax-related accounting strategies. At the end of the day, you can put together a product for business owners on how to lower their tax burden or whatever. I hope that shuts off. There it goes, it turned off.

But the digital product can take one of several different shapes. Actually, I’m going to flip the screen here. I’m going to share a different screen. I hope this one… Oh, there it is. Okay.

I actually just dropped this e-book last week because I thought that folks needed to read it.  We updated it all. It’s called Funnel Factor. Here’s a link. I’m just going to throw the link up here in the Facebook chat, so you can go ahead and download it there. Just doneforyou.com/resources/funnelfactor.

This report, if you scroll down to the table of contents, we’re just going to look at this piece right here. If we look at what to offer, there’s really a lot of things that you can sell online. Of course, you can sell digital products, physical products, you can sell coaching, consulting. There are so many different things.

But when it comes to information products, there are e-books, there are video courses, there are membership sites and there are audio programs. Your e-book is going to end up being a PDF, kind of like the one you’re looking at here, like this Funnel Factor book. This particular book is 274 pages long, but it doesn’t need to be that long. You can have an e-book that’s 60 pages and charge $27 or $19 or whatever if it’s sold from your website.

The other way you can actually work with an e-book is you can upload it to Kindle or Apple iBooks. You can go to kdp.amazon.com and upload it there. I’m going to share my screen again. I’m going to flip around here.

If we go to this, all right, then we’re going to go to kdp.amazon.com. KTD stands for Kindle Digital Publishing. With Kindle Digital Publishing, you can upload your e-book and it gets added to the Kindle marketplace. You can sell on Kindle.

Kindle Digital Publishing also now does paperbacks. Our paperback, this one, was actually created in, it was CreateSpace. Amazon bought CreateSpace, rolled it up into Kindle Digital Publishing.  Now you can create your e-books through Kindle Digital Publishing. They actually also, Kindle, have a piece of software called Kindle Create, which is software for… did you download to your Mac or your PC?

And it’s very much like Microsoft Word or Apple Pages, but it downloads, and then you can put your book together and format it inside the software and then upload it to Kindle Digital Publishing. It makes a nice seamless transition when you’re uploading, or when you’re going to list your e-book. If you have a report or an e-book that is 80% done or 60% done or 50% done or whatever, you can upload it to Amazon. Then start generating revenue that way.

One of the ways that a lot of people leverage e-books is they include links to their more expensive services.  When somebody downloads your book, they are a buyer, that’s why you see books for 99 cents on Kindle. Because that person, they have a credit card, they pay 99 cents, they value information to a degree. If they opt into anything after that, they’re already a buyer. They’re going to be worth a lot more to your business than not. That’s one way of leveraging e-books in particular. Kindle Creates as a great way of doing e-books.

Way, way back in the day, we used to just export as a PDF and then list it for sale on the website. And then we would include a video sales letter or a sales page that would sell that PDF and you could charge a little bit more. You could charge like 20 bucks or 27 or 37 or even $47 for a PDF with a couple of bonuses, a couple of bonus PDFs. that has worked out nicely.

But e-books now are synonymous with Kindle, they’re synonymous with tablets. You can still get them, you can still sell them on a website, but if you’re going to sell an e-book you want to make sure to key into the platform.

The nice thing about Amazon is, Amazon is the number three search engine in the world. If you have a book about a topic and its keyword loaded correctly and it gets some reviews and all that other kind of Amazon ranking stuff, then your Kindle book, you can get distribution through Amazon’s buyer network, basically. Amazon is a built-in traffic source, it’s a built-in traffic channel for you. It’s a nice way of reaching out to prospects who don’t know who you are yet. That is a bonus.

As far as kicking back into this idea of how to sell digital products, e-books are a great way of getting started. It’s a great way of starting your digital product empire if you will. It’s not the end-all, be-all. You have to sell a shit load of e-books to make any kind of decent money. Oftentimes the book is meant as a way to raise awareness for the rest of the things you do. And the rest of the things you do are largely important when you sell digital products from your website.

I’m going to share my screen again. We’re going to go back to this Funnel Factory book. Video courses, membership sites, audio programs, coaching, those are all some of your higher-end, in terms of how to sell digital products, information products, video courses, membership sites, and audio programs, things that they can capture your knowledge and then be streamed and then be sold as a product, as a package.

And in terms of what to charge, I’ve seen 20-page e-books literally sell for $1,000 and 20-hour video courses sell for $1. Really a lot of times it depends on the value, the perceived value that that material has. A $1,000 e-book is meant less to sell and more importantly to establish perceived value.

Your physical book is a product. Furthermore, you can package your information up into a physical book and sell it. You can sell it on Amazon through something like CreateSpace. You can charge 19.95, you can charge 12 bucks or 14 bucks or 10 bucks or whatever.

The e-book is the digital form of that. If you’re selling it on your own website, it’s going to usually be like $27 to $37. Unless it is meant as a positioning tool, like a tripwire, where you basically establish a buyer lead, and then march them through a sales funnel, in which case your e-book might be $7 or $9 or $4 or whatever. If it’s on Kindle or iBooks, then you’re probably looking between 2.99 and 7.99. Or 2.99 and 9.99 for an e-book.

Audio products are less important now. They’re less mainstream now than they were even four or five years ago. Four or five years ago, you saw a lot of cassettes, a lot of audio products, CD products, because they were low bandwidth. Now, I’m streaming a video right now, everybody expects video when they purchase a digital product, they expect video. Or like an e-book or a worksheet or a workbook or whatever and oftentimes they expect all of it.

They expect having a video, they expect having an e-book, you need to have both modalities to sell for any decent money anymore. $97, $197 or $497 or $1,000 or whatever. You need to have a video. You need to have e-books and workbooks and supporting material. The audio product is a bonus now. What you do is you create the video product and then you export the audio, you pull out the MP3 and then you add it to the lesson as an MP3 file, that somebody can download and listen to on their phone or their iPad or whatever.

I love the audio piece to it, because personally when I’m going through a product and they have audio, I’ll pull them all down to like my mobile phone and then listen to it when I’m mowing the lawn, so it ends up being nice that way. I can get a refresher of the information as I’m doing some work around the house.

But audio products you still see every once in a while. But if you’re going to go to the trouble of making an audio product, just do a video course. And just do a video course or a membership, go through, create the PowerPoint slides, talk to the PowerPoint slides, record yourself on camera kind of like this, get them transcribed so that you can create e-books and stuff out of it.

The video course should be four to six modules. Have one central underlying idea of what it is you want to cover, and then break it down into four to six modules. And if you don’t know what those modules should be, if you have a list of friends or customers or whatever, ask them, if I was to teach this, what would you want to know? Give me a list of questions that you would ask me so that I can put them together in a digital product. And then you can go through it and I’ll give you access to it for free. That’s a nice way of giving the ideas to create it.

The modules, four to six modules, oftentimes you don’t necessarily want to give them all the modules at once. You want to drip the material out. We’re so ADD that oftentimes a course that is a big box of shit, just, boom, like it’s difficult to get through it. You start and then you’re like, wow, I’ve got so much more to do.

Oftentimes, like a lot of our clients, we drip it out week by week. Week one is module one, week two is module two. It will really help when you purchase the product through a payment plan, like a three payment plan or whatever. Then you can drip the material out. The whole course will be released once they are done paying for it.

But even like a full payment at the beginning, we still try to drip the content out with like workbooks and homework and stuff, so that they still consume the course in very bite-size packages. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a ton of information every week. It might just be 20 minutes or 40 minutes or an hour.

We say typically a week’s worth of content should be about an hour. It can be as little as 20 minutes and then cut up into videos or 20 minutes in a workbook. It really just depends on the material and how dense it is and how much people have to think about it and work at it. And is there a time that somebody needs to spend over and above what is in the course? That kind of thing.

Big box courses we talked about, this is very much like a masterclass. When figuring how to sell digital products, a great way to do this is the packaging.

That Masterclass has a lot of video, workbooks, maybe a software element, a coaching element, some sort of a group chat element. They’re pretty hot for any longer commitment course. If the course is four weeks or six weeks or eight weeks or 12 weeks or whatever, then usually it is based on this assisted learning platform, where you have some videos every week, and then there’s some homework every week. And then there’s some sort of group coaching call or office hours or something like that. That tends to work out really nicely from a big box course standpoint.

Now oftentimes these courses sell between $1,000 and $5,000. They typically have a longer prospect journey, a longer ramp-up time. Somebody becomes aware of you. They sign up for a lead magnet, they’re on their email list for a little while, they jump on a webinar. On that webinar, you make the pitch into the course. They purchase the said course, and then they go through it week by week by week. Every week you can think about it as a college university class.

Every week you have your instructional material. You have your book and might just be worksheets. Also, you have your book and you’re going through your book. You are doing the homework and whatever. And then you have like office hours, so think about, that ends up being how these multi-thousand dollar courses, digital products are sold and packaged.

Oftentimes, you can only do so many students. It might be two students or four students or eight or 10 or 12 or whatever. But they’re pretty high touch. So we’ve, for the most part, like one person can handle about 20, 30 students at the same time, which is important from a revenue standpoint. It’s still great revenue. If you have an eight-week class and you have 20 students, who each paid $5,000, then one of the problems is you don’t get paid again until you run that class again. It’s just something to manage and consider.

Now, this video is very much about how to sell digital products. Coaching, consulting we talked about yesterday or we talked about consulting yesterday. Going through and providing advice and providing strategy and stuff to clients is a function of digital products is an upper-end, higher-ticket function of digital products. It should give you a pretty good idea of the way to sell digital products because of how they are packaged.

Now, let’s kick over here into talking about how they are sold and the pages and the assets that you need to have in place, to actually get it done. So we’re going back to this window.

To Sell Digital Products

We talked about Kindle Create. All right, so in selling digital products, so the first thing you need to do, you got to make sure that you have the product. And if you don’t have the product already, that’s okay. You can actually sell the product and then fulfill the product.

What a lot of people end up doing is they sell the product, they shotgun the product, I should say. They jump on a webinar and I’ve done this before, not anymore. I haven’t lately in a really long time, but they jump on a webinar, they invite their list to a webinar, run paid traffic to a webinar, and then on the webinar, they offer a live course. The live course starts in two weeks or three weeks or whatever. And then they pre-sell seats to this live course. Then they do this live course live, so they go through and fulfill the content.

It works. It’s nice. When you can get enough people buying the course, it makes a lot of sense because you get paid to create the course.

One of the downsides to it is you’re creating the course on-demand. A lot of times, I find that this is probably just me and my skill set and the way I operate. But oftentimes I’ll go and I’ll write all the course material. I’ll do the entire course and write all the material in a couple of days’ chunk. I might write like 600 slides in a two or three-day time span.

Also, I usually wait a week or two weeks or a month and come back. I record after I’ve let the idea in the material sink in. Because what ends up happening inevitably is you end up having realizations about the course material. You do something down the road and you’re like, wait, wait. Actually, I had a PowerPoint slide about that and that’s not how I did it or whatever.

The first run-through is great when you have to create the material on demand. The first run-through, everybody’s jazzed, everybody’s excited, whatever. Then you go to resell that material, and you try to sell it the same way you did the first round and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work as well.

Then people go through the course and you’re not creating anything live. You’re just restreaming the stuff from previous streaming.

Whereas if I take my time and deliver in create and fulfill and record the course the way that I do and give it some time and thought, then the experience ends up being a lot better and the material ends up being a lot better and it’s a lot more thought out. Even these videos where I use some blog posts and some stuff I’ve already created, just to help spur ideas. Because I literally don’t have a script. You can probably tell. But all of these are just winging it and responding to questions and feedback and whatever. That ends up, it’s just in creating courses it’s typically just how I do it.

Now, the offer itself, there’s a couple of different ways you can get paid. We talked about the money that you can make. There’s a couple of different ways you can position the offer. You can do a single one-time payment, like a $67 payment or a $97 payment, or a $5,000 payment one time. You can have multiple payments spread out over a term. Three payments over 90 days or two payments over 60 days or whatever.

Back when I first got into digital marketing and how to sell digital products, there was a really popular way to pay, which was two payments of $97 or three payments of $97. You’ll get to save a little bit of money if you paid in one chunk. It’s a way to spread some of the payment out.

From a procedural standpoint, you don’t always collect all that money. You don’t always collect that third payment, but it’s just something to know. Also, you can do monthly payments, like a normal membership, and for as long as your subscriber remains in the program. You don’t want your stuff just hanging out there.

No matter what you do, you’re probably going to have a membership install for this, just to protect your content. You can also do a front-end down payment with smaller monthly payments or you can do free trials with memberships. A 14-day free trial.

I think I talked about it on a previous live stream. I did just see that Visa said if you’re doing a $0 free trial. Then you need to re-email the person seven days before so that you remind them. You notify them of their next billing. If you don’t do that, then you’re in breach of Visa’s program, but the simple way around it is just to charge a dollar. When there’s a free trial the merchant processes a $1 authorization anyway. The $1 payment hits their credit card and then gets taken off. You might as well just keep the dollar.

Now the sales funnel for you to sell digital products, there’s a lot of different versions. We’ve talked about the webinar sales funnel quite a bit on these live streams. Let me just make this a little bigger for you.

The webinar sales funnel itself is the model that you’re probably going to use for anything above $1,000, and then the video sales letter funnel is going be the one that you use for anything under, usually for anything under like $200, and then in the middle is going to end up being like a multi-video launch sequence. Your webinar sales funnel is Facebook traffic into… Facebook traffic we’re targeting email in your free report and then a webinar, an automated webinar. And then it goes to the call to action, then fulfillment.

The video sales letter is going to go, you have your traffic sources, then it goes to the landing page, and then it goes to the video sales letter, and then it bounces through an upsell sequence. The first product might be that $37 e-book, and then the next product might be a $97 digital video course. And then the one after that might be a $297 mastermind offer, a coaching offer, or something.

Each funnel starts with a landing page. This is the landing page that we use. It’s always R control whenever we start something new. And then there’s a sales page with a sales video. The sales video is a video sales letter.

We have since jazzed these up quite a bit and thrown in some B roll and some live-action stuff, just because the video is easier to create anymore. There is a… Siri activated, lovely. Here’s an automated webinar page that we run.

Every sales funnel has these sales assets and the sales assets or the marketing pages, you have your webinar registration page, your lead magnet landing page, or lead magnet confirmation page. From a sales standpoint, you have your sales copy, your sales videos, your webinars, your lead magnets.

Once you set up all the stuff,  you need to get traffic. And there are so many different ways of getting traffic now. There are Facebook Ads, there are Google Ads, those are the two big, or YouTube ads. Those are big like paid traffic sources, and right now, ad prices are dropping huge because everybody’s pulling their advertising dollars. And it’s all based on supply and demand. And inventory shot up, because Messenger, Google, Facebook, they’re all being used like 50% more. After all, everybody’s at home now. It’s a really, really great time to jump into paid traffic if you want to move your business forward.

To learn more about creating funnels to sell digital products, check out the Funnel Formula Course today!

The other way is organic traffic, so search engine optimization, writing blog posts, content marketing, all of those kinds of things. We are going to do a getting traffic live stream probably next week. We’re going to get that thing kicked off.

In the meantime, are there any questions? In the chatbox, go ahead drop any questions. I’m going to figure out what we’re going to be talking about tomorrow. Tomorrow is going to be the same time, 10:00 a.m. Eastern. Tomorrow we are going to be talking about… let’s see, how to promote a B2B product we covered yesterday. I just have a note list of ideas for stuff to talk about. Automated webinars, we talked about that yesterday. Writing emails that convert, marketing… sales webinars. I don’t know, I don’t know. We’re going to figure something out.

If you have any questions at all, go ahead, let me know. Go to doneforyou.com. If you want an action plan, we can get that setup. If you have any questions, there’s a chat box at the bottom of all of the pages on Done For You. We’re going to be launching something really, really exciting in the next couple of days whenever I can actually get a chance to put it together and get it out. Keep an eye on that and I will talk to you soon.

Automate Your Sales Process >> Click Here!

 

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The Best Way To Start Consulting On The Side https://doneforyou.com/consulting-startup-start-a-consulting-business/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=consulting-startup-start-a-consulting-business Wed, 25 Mar 2020 14:00:45 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=10002 Today, we’re going to talk about consulting startups, or how to start a consulting business and grow fast. This livestream will be loosely based on this article: 7 Skills To Become A Business Consultant For a couple of reasons, the first is it is being that so many companies have sent the workforce home that […]

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Today, we’re going to talk about consulting startups, or how to start a consulting business and grow fast.

This livestream will be loosely based on this article: 7 Skills To Become A Business Consultant

For a couple of reasons, the first is it is being that so many companies have sent the workforce home that they’re working remotely, that we are working … It’s interesting because I was joking with my wife, we have been kind of preparing for this for 13 years now because we work from home, so we have gotten used to working from home.

So it’s just kind of something that we do, and everybody else now was working from home. So there are the challenges of working from home, of remote work as the kitchen is right downstairs, there’s the family room is right there. You can go and just do whatever you want unless you have discipline and fortitude and all that other stuff.

But one of the reasons I wanted to talk about consulting startups or becoming a consultant is because right now is a great time to branch out on your own if that is something you’re interested in. So there was actually, we wrote an article a long, long time ago, probably three years ago, Seven Skills to Becoming a Business Consultant. So I’m just going to drop it in the comments here.

For those of you who are over … if you’re on my personal profile then flip over to The Done For You page because that way you can ask some questions there. If you would like to ask questions, which I highly encourage you to, we don’t get much interaction on these things yet, which is fine, whatever, but I still like to know that somebody is watching. So that’s good.

But basically, when it comes to the kind of consulting startup that we’re looking to pull off, there’s a couple of things that you need to kind of take stock of. So there are some assets that you have that you might not necessarily even know that you have. So some of those assets are your experience. The value, kind of the things that you’ve been through, the things that you’ve lived through, the things that you have gone through in your life or in your career, they have value.

So the fact that you navigated the waters on a stormy acquisition deal or the fact that you were able to lead your team of 12 to a product launch in half the time that it normally takes, or you are a programmer who navigated, who facilitated bringing six government databases together into one database and then rolled it out to an entire organization, or whatever. So those are all challenges that you have been able to get past and.

Everybody has those challenges, the thing is kind of taking stock of your inventory and understanding what kind of value that brings. What were the high points in your career? What were some of the things that you were able to do and live through? So that’s always one of the … It serves a dual purpose.

The first is the more you can bring to the table, the more you can charge, the more value you’re going to have for your clients. But it also means every consultant, every coach, they sell themselves to a degree. So the fact is you’re going to have to sell yourself to your clients on a very consistent basis. It’s not just the first time but then every interaction after that, there’s still some amount of selling that goes on. You need to cultivate and nurture that relationship so that they get value at every turn of it.

So what does a consultant do? What does a business consultant do? Very simply, the answer is a business consultant helps its clients. At the end of the day, that’s really what they are there for. Now, coaches and consultants are a little bit different. So the way I look at … or I actually read something a while ago, a coach is going to ask you the questions that will help you arrive at the destination yourself. So a coach is a little bit more like a therapist in that they ask the questions and they pull that thing out of you.

A consultant is going to be the person who researches said thing. They perfect it. They write an instruction manual on it and then they give you that instruction manual and say, “Here, go do it on your own.” So in both situations, you’re leading your client to water, but the tactics are just a little bit different.

I am more of a consultant than a coach. I tend not to ask questions. So I tend to draw on my experience and my knowledge and my skills, and my knowhow and then answer questions before the client even knows they have those questions, AKA Done For You. I mean it’s just I’ve naturally fell into this role based on my own skillset. Whereas a coach, a coach is going to lead you to water through your own realizations. That’s really the primary difference between the two.

What do you need to be a consultant to actually do a consulting startup, a shop, a gig, whatever, what do you need?

What do you need to start consulting business?

1. Website

First of all, you need a website. You need to have somewhere online that says this is what you do, this is what you specialize in. This is what you’re an expert in. These are the kinds of clients that you serve.

Whether it’s software companies or management teams or executives, or you’re a consultant for consultants or whatever. You have to basically plant your stick in the sand and say, “This is what I do.” And that is through a website.

2. Landing Page / Lead Magnet

Then you also need like kind of sales funnels and sales automation and sales processes, and all that other stuff, you need the inbound thing too. You need a landing page, you need a lead magnet. Something that talks about what you do. A six to eight-page report that talks about your skillset or even help gives an aha moment to your prospective client that shows that you are the expert that you say you are.

For example. So let’s say you’ve led a programming team to consolidate six databases into one and roll it out to a company. So your lead magnet is going to be technical in nature. You might talk about SQL and Queries and all that other stuff, and you might talk about the databases or the programming language, or the four things that you did to consolidate these databases so that when a prospect goes through it they read themselves into the story.

They’re like, “Oh, geez. I mean, if he helped them do this then he’s going to be perfect for helping me do my thing.” So that’s where your lead magnet comes in. It also is immediate gratification. So people who download that lead magnet, read that lead magnet, they’re going to be able to just know really, really quickly that you know what the hell you’re talking about. So that’s the idea there.

3. Automated Webinar

You’re also going to need an automated webinar because a consulting startup – business consulting – is a complex sale. It’s also an expensive sale. So it’s not like we’re selling a $37 consulting package. No way. Your consulting startup funnel is going to be, somebody signs up for your webinar, on the webinar you’re going to pitch a strategy session or an action plan call or whatever.

On that strategy session, you are going to sell them into your coaching package. That probably is going to be a proposal. So you’re going to send them out a proposal and then they’re going to be able to check it out, check out the deliverables, the timelines, all of that stuff, and then say yes or no. Then as long as they accept the proposal, then you get paid and you onboard your clients. So that’s kind of the buying cycle of a consultant.

In the meantime, you have marketing automation that’s running in the background. So if they sign up for the webinar but don’t attend or don’t schedule a call, they get emails about that. If they don’t sign up for the webinar they get emails about that, but the emails and the SMS messages and all that stuff really just fire when they’re supposed to fire based on what they do. Then you would split test those pages.

Top Skills of a Business Consultant

Basically, the biggest thing is that you have a trust-based relationship with your client. You’re really supposed to serve your clients in what they need you to serve in. It’s going to be something that you have experience in or else they wouldn’t be doing business with you.

At the same time, you set the parameters around that relationship. If you only want to work from 9:00 to 5:00, then in your proposal or you need to state that you only want to work from 9:00 to 5:00. It’s not you don’t expect that you’re going to be getting an 11 o’clock phone call saying, “Hey come fix this now.” You want to aside from just making sure that your client understands what they’re going to be receiving, you also need to make sure to have your own guidelines communicated in there so that they know what’s going on.

How you make money as a consultant?

How you make money is an interesting thing. There are all kinds of different ways to offer products and services out of your consulting startup. The most common is going to be like a contract-based relationship. Where you sign a six-month or a 12-month deal or a three-month deal, or whatever, and every month you get paid this or there’s like a certain fee for the life of that 12-month contract. Typically that’s all going to be a proposal and then invoiced.

You can do a month-to-month consultant relationship, but a lot of times the consulting startup projects that you take on are going to be project-based, or at least that’s how they’re going to start. They’re going to start with project-based work. So that project is going to have a fee, it’s going to have a dollar sign associated with it, which is fine. Maybe that extends to a recurring monthly relationship and maybe it doesn’t. But at the end of the day, it’s going to be some sort of an invoice thing. That’s how you end up making money.

There are a couple of other ways. I mean you can do a portion of revenue, you can do a portion of the profit. You can do a percentage of new sales on a product line or something like that. You can do an equity relationship too. It really just depends on what you’re looking to get out of it, how many clients you’re looking to take on, how complex the deal is, what you’re doing for the client. But those are just some of the parameters in generating and figuring out how you’re going to make money.

Now people skills are your biggest asset when it comes to a consultant. Even the first couple of folks that I hired for us, I was most worried about how are your email skills, how are your phone skills, how do you communicate with clients? Really at the end of the day, the communication piece is paramount.

I’m a copywriter so I tend to dig into this stuff more than perhaps I should, especially when it’s text-based because I am so deliberate about the words that I choose in everything that I write. It’s watching me write an email to somebody I’m sure is grueling because it’s like, “Where are backspace, backspace?” Unfortunately, it’s just how it works.

In your consulting startup; being personal, being approachable, being able to communicate with your clients and your client’s teams even are going to be some of your biggest assets. One of the biggest things that that you need to do in order to make sure to get right.

Another thing is business consultants are always learning. At the end of the day, business consultants are reading. They are trying to learn more. They are looking for ways that one client can feed another client. Something that one client is doing, move it into a different vertical or from a different client. Then kind of spur the insights here? It’s one of the benefits of working with multiple clients. It’s one of the benefits to your clients when you work in multiple projects or multiple verticals.

I actually was listening to a book called Free PR this morning. The author was talking about bringing your PR staff in-house. It’s a great idea, rather than hiring a PR company because your in-house PR person is going to do better than your PR firm. I totally get and I understand.

Serving and working with a bunch of different clients, I can’t tell you how many realizations that I’ve had. One client is doing something in one space, in one silo, like in one vertical. We move it to another vertical and then all of a sudden this vertical take-off. We move it to another in this vertical. It’s just this cascading effect. If I wouldn’t have learned it over here, I would’ve never applied it here.

In that sense, you’re learning from everything around you and putting it into your consulting startup. You’re learning from books, from courses, from clients, from even going, leaving the office, and just taking a walk around Walmart and seeing what some of the big corporate companies are doing with their ePrint cards or whatever, like their pricing. There are all kinds of different ways that you can leverage technology and leverage what other people are doing to consistently learn and bring it back to your clients. That’s really the goal of it all.

The lens that you look at the world through, that’s unique to you. The questions that you ask are unique to you. The realizations that you have and the experience that you have are unique to you. So you turning around and helping your companies, helping your clients with those realizations is what is going to keep you around and what is going to keep you getting paid. So that’s the benefit of being a consultant right now.

Now saying no to consulting startup work. I mean, saying no is you obviously want to make sure that you’re doing the thing that is the highest and best use of your time, without a doubt. Now, that’s really all I’m going to say there. I mean, if it doesn’t serve you, if it’s not in your wheelhouse in terms of experience if it’s not in your wheelhouse in terms of pricing, don’t do it. Just say no. That’s all.

Let’s see, how to become a business consultant as in starting up. So your business consulting startup can be and should be entirely virtual at first. So you should master the tools that you need to grow online in an inbound based environment, which means you need to master websites, you need a master email marketing, you need to master webinars, even live streams. You need to engage and embrace the technology that will let you reach out to more people and that is especially true right now.

Who knows what’s going to happen after this lockdown lifts, are people going to go back to work? Maybe. Are companies going to just start selling all their office buildings because it worked well enough from a remote standpoint? Maybe. Are all of a sudden environmental regulation going to come down because smog is finally lifting and rivers are cleaning all because we haven’t left their house in a week and a half? Maybe.

There are so many different things that we don’t know yet and that’s the biggest thing. So you mastering these virtual tools right now and using this as an opportunity to get into and understand how business is done virtually is of huge benefit to you and your freedom and your fulfillment and your satisfaction moving forward.

So leverage your website, leverage Zoom, leverage, Skype and Slack and email marketing, and all of those things for your consulting startup. When you’re starting up or in growing your consulting startup, the things that you must do right now because it will let you continue leveraging your business in the future.

Your business can be entirely virtual. It needs to be entirely virtual. Literally, every client that you need is right in your pocket. You can reach every client through your cell phone. So the goal is understanding that there are different ways to engage them. How warm somebody is, is … Engaging a prospect now is about embracing the ad funnel, embracing how people go from being cold to being warm relatively quickly.

So that’s the idea behind ad funnels here. I’m going to pull up … so I’m hoping that this is going to share okay. But what I wanted to do was kind of pull up a little … So I’m going to stop sharing my screen and I’m going to show my entire screen and then I’m hoping that you’re going to be able to see this. So I’m going to pull up just my iPad here. All right. So you should be able to see my screen right now. Then what I can do is I can actually write here. Can you see that? All right, cool.

This is an app that I use called Notability. I love it. But anyway, so we’re just going to leave this stuff. Now as people engage with you, how it works is you have this rolling window or you have cold traffic and then you have warm traffic. How it works is over here you have your social media profiles.

In your consulting startup, these are people who are Facebook, Instagram, whatever. They haven’t necessarily done anything but they’re becoming aware of you. So this is what we call awareness and then the rest of this equation is AIDA. So awareness, interest, desire, and action.

Now, AIDA is something that’s been around forever. So I think it’s 130, 140 years old. I learned about it in Marketing 101, and I thought it was shit at first. Not really, but literally I learned about it and I was like, “Oh this is interesting,” and then quickly forgot about it. Then once I discovered that this is kind of what I do only online, you read it in a textbook and because you read it in a textbook, like in your mind, it doesn’t really apply to how business is done anymore. So I just kind of discounted it.

Then as I start learning how to drive traffic and build sales funnels and everything, I’m like, “Oh my God, that’s what this is. I mean, it’s AIDA.” So your awareness is your social profiles. So you can think of this as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, even your blog. So these are people who are learning about you but they haven’t necessarily done anything just yet.

To learn how to build a sales funnel from scratch, click here!

So the next space over, people who have taken an interest in you. These are people who like your stuff, they share your stuff, they opt-in, so they engage with you on a more deep level than just kind of viewing your stuff. So they here are raising their hand and saying, “Yes, I want more.”

Now, usually, there’s some sort of a buying mechanism or a sales mechanism that pulls them over into this next stage of your consulting startup…  Which is desire. So here there’s usually like … I’m going to pick purple, a VSL, a webinar, VSL for a video sales letter, a webinar or maybe a case study, or an advertorial that increases their desire and gets them to click a CTA, which is a call to action. That call to action is going to be buying something. So pull out your credit card and purchase. Yeah, basically pull out your credit card and purchase.

That’s how you make money from your consulting startup.

Another one here is going to be a sales call. Now, your CTA is going to lead to action. Oops. So the action here, and the action is going to be your order form, so order form, shopping cart, invoice, contract sign. Yeah, whatever that ends up being.

So what happens is they progress from cold to warm and this is how the sales material ends up taking shape. So they have … you start here, you have your social profiles, Facebook, Instagram, whatever. Then they move over into like the piece. They like or share or opt-in. So now they are committed and the interesting piece can be broken down even further.

But then they go through some sort of sales material, sales call, VSL, webinar. There is some piece of copy that transforms the relationship from, “Hey you’re pretty cool here,” to all of a sudden, “I want to do business.” So that’s where this transformative sales copy ends up being. Then here we actually present them with the thing where they take their action, the order form, invoice, contract. Then over here, here we have our fulfillment. Oops, full bill. That is terribly ugly, but you get it. So fulfillment over here.

Now, what we do from an ad standpoint is we’ll start with cold and then we warm them up, and we follow them as they progress through their cycle. So if they visit the blog, if they like us on Facebook, whatever, then they start seeing our cold ads or that would be a little bit warmer ads.

The cold ads go in here, and then here ends up getting some more ads. We get them opted in, which sends them into a sales piece. Then if they drop off, if they don’t buy after watching the webinar, then they come back in from an ad standpoint. We try to pull them into the shopping cart. All of it ends up working together and pulls them through the sales process.

Your consulting, your consulting startup companies can be the same way. People are going to warm up to you, then they’re going to opt-in for your email list because of your lead magnet. They are going to register for your webinar. On the webinar, they’re going to be pitched a call to action to then jump on a sales call. Then they’re going to sign a contract. So that’s how the relationship ends up unfolding.

So hopefully you got all that. All right, cool. So let’s see, I’m going to pull this from the stream, and then I’m going to share the screen again. We’re going to go back to our post, Seven Skills You Need to Know. All right, perfect.

What To Offer Your Clients

You might think about offering a daylong business consulting startup package. I have had a lot of friends and clients who basically say, “It’s $10,000 a day, $5,000 a day. You fly me to where you are and I will work with your team. $25,000 a day to help you get your shit straight.”

That has worked out pretty well for a number of people. I haven’t done the travel thing, but we have been paid for days and hours and everything. You might consider a monthly consulting retainer where you do work on the phone with them or virtually, or you have some deliverables that you pull off for them. You can do digital products or memberships that kind of bundle your knowledge into a course, and then offer to consult on an upsell, and then books and eBooks kind of fall into that same model.

If you’re really ambitious, you can do a multi-day event. Obviously not right now because no events are allowed to happen anywhere ever again, but you can do some multi-day events. If they are even still around in six months when this thing lifts, who knows, everything might be Zoom?

Many of our clients are moving their events to Zoom and to other virtual platforms. Yeah, they’ll still work, the live events, but will they work as well? I don’t know. I think we’re training people with this moment to expect digital. The adoption has had to be so quick and so rapid that it’s just we’ve moved them into something else, into something different.

When I got started as a business consultant, I was doing consulting startup work. Then what I found personally was that when I wanted somebody to do something or when I told somebody to do something, they didn’t do it. Then that made me feel like shit because they didn’t do it. They didn’t follow through, they didn’t execute. Get the results that I knew they needed to get because it was their execution.

I started doing it, writing the copy, writing the emails, writing the sales copy, whatever. That led me to create Done For You. So that was kind of the transition that I went through in my business. The goal really is you need to specialize in something.

Specialize in one thing. You don’t want to just be a business consultant, you want to be a sales process business consultant. Also, you want to be an expert in automation, an expert in tech, an expert in business coding, evangelist, superstar, or whatever, an outsourcing business consultant. You want to make sure that whatever it is you’re doing, you specialize in that space.

You want to focus on that thing because then clients are going to be attracted to you like a lightning bolt. They will be. So just specialize in something, and that something needs to match your why. It needs to be something that you are passionate about. It needs to be something you wake up in the morning. You feel like giving the highest and best use of your time to your clients.

When that happens, then you can scale your business to the Moon. You can do so effortlessly and enjoyably. There’s a lot of syllables in those words. At the end of the day, that’s really all there is to it.

This video, of course, is streaming on Facebook and YouTube, so you can watch it anytime. There’s literally an entire masterclass worth of nuggets here. If you have any questions at all, go to doneforyou.com/startsetupanactionplancall. We’ll jump on the phone and walk through the business model, the sales process. All of that stuff and put together an action plan for you to get started.

If you have any questions at all about anything then go to doneforyou.com/gsd. There’s a little from there you can ask the questions.

Automate Your Sales Process >> Click Here!

 

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Quickest Path To Cash https://doneforyou.com/quickest-path-to-cash/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=quickest-path-to-cash Fri, 06 Mar 2020 16:30:25 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=9805 Do you want to make a lot of money online?  Selling your own products and services? Amidst all of the shiny objects and wiz-bang product launches?  Or takeaways and ideas you learned about at the last conference?  Or a sudden bout of inspiration that got you all fired up when you were chatting with a […]

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Do you want to make a lot of money online?  Selling your own products and services? Amidst all of the shiny objects and wiz-bang product launches? 

Or takeaways and ideas you learned about at the last conference? 

Or a sudden bout of inspiration that got you all fired up when you were chatting with a friend?

The answer to focusing on one thing, your thing…  Is by constantly putting everything around you, every opportunity, through the frame of “Quickest Path To Cash.”

You need to ask yourself, “Where is my Quickest Path to Cash?”

One of my college professors taught this way of thinking to me and I use it every day in my business.

We as entrepreneurs have LOTS of ideas.

And since the Internet makes it so easy to start a new project or go off on a different tangent, we spend our lives not making ANY money from the PREVIOUS idea.

Always think: “What Can I Do Right Now That Will Get Me Paid Fastest?”

Sometimes, the answer isn’t necessarily fun or fast.

  • It’s that book that’s 80% done.
  • It’s that widget that has everything created except the box labels.
  • It’s that product that’s already done and just needs an order form added to it.

This isn’t sexy. It’s not push-button riches. That’s not how you make money as a business owner and sustain  it.

You generate revenue by offering something for sale, whether it’s a product or service that you own or something that you sell and can be paid a commission.

Not the idea that came flooding in at 2 AM.

Or the strategy that you learned at the latest meetup.

Or even the thing your friend pitched you on because they thought it was a good idea!

Your QPC is that thing you’ve got that’s already mostly done and ready for you to invest one more ounce of time on so that it can have its day in the sun…

Plain and simple.

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Video Transcript:

Welcome to today's lesson today is bordering on self-help.

I don't really get into teaching coaching a whole lot of like, self-help stuff.

But sometimes you just need to. And what we're going to talk about today is a strategy that I like to call the quickest path to cash or QPC for short.

The quickest path to cash has been something that ever since I was in college, I had a teacher, a professor who taught this to me, basically, you know, you everybody has ideas for business models, products, services.

You know, oftentimes, entrepreneurs get a very serious case of a add. I mean, we get one thing rockin and then we decide we need to go in a different path and this other thing is a great idea and then that doesn't pan out. So we kind of come back to the middle and then we get this other thing going and whatever. So the quickest path to cash is kind of just an idea.

It's a check a mental check that you do with yourself, often, three, four times a day, you know, and what it is, is it basically writes you, it always centers you, depending on where you're doing much working on, you know, in that in basically, as simple as it is, it is asking yourself, is what I'm doing right now going to produce cash the quickest?

Is it my quickest path to cash isn't my quickest path to revenue?

And if the answer is no, too many times in a row, then that means you need to analyze your priorities and readjust and do something different. And, you know, get your head out of your ass, you know, because if you continue down that path for too long, then your revenue dries up.

You know, so I mean Every single one of myself and every one of my friends and every single, every single business owner, I know, this has happened to, you know, so after a while, I mean, you sometimes something turns out to be a great idea, and it's great, and it's a windfall and that's awesome.

And but other times and more often than not, you know, just by asking yourself if this is this my quickest path to cash, it is a way of making sure that you are always you know, moving towards the mountain, moving towards your goals, your big, audacious, you know, 10 x goals, you're moving towards them, and you're always consistent in the actions that you're taking.

Because if you're always moving in the direction of your QPC, you know, then you are in mine, and you're doing the things you need to do. Now, your TPC oftentimes is not sexy.

It's not fun. It's not all of the things that we love to do, it is not those things. Oftentimes your UPC is finishing the book that you have 80% done. It's ordering labels for the bottle, you know, the physical product that you have ordering labels for the bottle, or ordering the boxes or, or finishing the artwork for the box or whatever, you know, lining up fulfillment, the not sexy, not creative, not you know not fun things that engage the part of your brain that you're used to engaging when you're following these other things.

Another example is releasing or growing, you know, sales on a product that has already done or you know, rather than go off and create a new product that is sticking with the one you already have.

And then in turning that into a six-figure product or a six-figure program or seven-figure product or program.

You know, those are the things Those your quickest path to cash. Those are the things that are already done. They're already in your wheelhouse. They're already almost there. You just have to push them over the edge or they are already over the edge.

They just haven't caught fire yet. You know, and you just need to just push them out into the market a little bit more. So, those PPC strategies, just do those checks two or three times a day, is what I'm doing.

Producing cash is what I'm doing the quickest way for me to produce cash. If the answer is yes, then keep fucking doing it. And if the answer's no, then do something different.

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3 Helpful Product Pricing Tips for Coaches and Creators https://doneforyou.com/product-pricing-tips-for-coaches-creators/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=product-pricing-tips-for-coaches-creators Mon, 21 Oct 2019 12:00:24 +0000 http://marketinghackz.com/?p=1593 3 HELPFUL PRODUCT PRICING TIPS - How To Set Prices That'll Rock Your Sales

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Product Pricing Tips for Coaches and Creators: Boost Revenue and Client Satisfaction

In the competitive world of coaching and digital creation, mastering product pricing tips is essential. Setting your prices too low can undervalue your expertise, while setting them too high may deter potential clients. In this guide, I'll share actionable product pricing tips to help you find the perfect balance, ensuring your pricing reflects your value and meets client expectations.

We'll explore how to effectively price your coaching services, set appropriate rates for digital products, and combine both offerings to maximize your revenue. By implementing these product pricing tips, you'll be well-equipped to enhance your profitability and achieve success in your business.

Let's dive in.


1. Tailor Your Coaching Prices to Reflect True Value

Product Pricing Tips

Product pricing tips for coaching services go beyond simply assigning a number to a package. Effective pricing involves understanding the transformation you provide and recognizing the time, effort, and expertise required to deliver it.

Here are a few pricing strategies to help you align value with pricing:

  • Assisted Coaching: Blend a structured program with check-ins. Pricing typically starts at $1,000–$2,500 for a 3-month package.
  • Group Coaching: Run group sessions where you guide multiple clients simultaneously. Charge $1,000–$1,500 per month, offering discounts for longer commitments.
  • One-on-One Coaching: As your premium service, this should be priced accordingly—$2,000–$2,500 per month is standard.

Pro Tip: One of the best product pricing tips for scaling your coaching services is to offer group coaching or hire additional coaches. This allows you to expand your reach and serve more clients without burning out.


2. Pricing Digital Products to Attract and Convert Clients

Product Pricing Tips

When it comes to product pricing tips for digital products, getting it right can make all the difference. Digital products are powerful tools—they’re scalable, profitable, and an excellent way to share your expertise. But their success depends on pricing them to attract and convert clients effectively.

Here’s a breakdown of pricing strategies for digital products:

  • Ebooks: Keep it accessible. Pricing between $27–$37 works well for most niches.
  • Courses: Entry-level courses should be priced around $67–$97. High-value courses delivering financial or transformational outcomes can command $2,500 or more.
  • Membership Sites: Monthly fees typically range from $37 to $97. For premium memberships with exclusive content, pricing can go as high as $497.

The Value Connection
One of the most important product pricing tips is to ensure your pricing reflects the outcome your product delivers. For example, if your course teaches a skill that could help clients earn $10,000 or more, don’t hesitate to price it at $1,000 or higher.


3. Combine Coaching and Digital Products for Maximum Impact

Product Pricing Tips

One of the most effective product pricing tips is to combine coaching services with digital products. This hybrid model allows clients to choose the level of support they need while giving you multiple ways to generate revenue. It’s a win-win that builds your authority and boosts your bottom line.

How It Works

  • Entry Point: Start with a $497 course to attract new clients. This provides an accessible way for them to experience your expertise.
  • Upsell Opportunity: Offer one-on-one coaching at $2,500/month for those ready to invest in deeper, transformational support.

This hybrid approach is one of the smartest pricing strategies out there. It positions you as the go-to expert while giving clients the flexibility to start small and scale up as they see results. Plus, it’s scalable, meaning you can help more people without spreading yourself too thin.


Why These Product Pricing Tips Matter

Product Pricing Tips

Your pricing tells a story... a powerful one. It’s not just about the numbers; it’s about the value, transformation, and confidence your offer represents. The right product pricing tips can completely change how clients perceive your services and ensure your pricing works for you, not against you.

Here’s what using these pricing strategies will do:

  • Reflect your true value in every offer you make.
  • Align your pricing with what clients expect—and are willing to pay.
  • Build a scalable structure that supports your long-term goals.

Now’s the time to revisit your pricing. Look at where you’ve nailed it and where there’s room for growth. Adjust with intention and start owning the incredible value you bring to the table. Your next big success starts with a pricing strategy that works as hard as you do.


FAQs

  1. How do I know if my prices are too high?
    If sales slow down or clients push back, it’s a signal to revisit your pricing. Sometimes, it’s about adding more value to justify the cost. These product pricing tips can help you strike the right balance.
  2. Should I offer discounts for long-term commitments?
    Yes! Discounts for 3- or 6-month packages not only encourage clients to stick around but also create steady revenue streams. Strategic pricing like this aligns with the best pricing strategies for scaling your business.
  3. How can I ensure my pricing reflects value?
    Make the transformation clear. Highlight the outcomes your clients will achieve and the value your service or product delivers. Pricing isn’t just about numbers—it’s about showing clients what they’ll gain.
  4. Can I adjust prices after launching a product?
    Absolutely. Your pricing isn’t set in stone. Use client feedback and performance data to tweak and optimize your pricing over time. Flexibility is one of the most important product pricing tips to keep in mind.
  5. What’s the best platform for hosting digital products?
    Platforms like Kajabi, Teachable, and Thinkific are top choices for hosting courses, memberships, and community-based offerings. Choose one that fits your needs and the value you want to deliver.

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Launch Your Consulting Business Now: Proven Tactics on How to Become a Business Consultant! https://doneforyou.com/7-skills-to-become-a-business-consultant/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=7-skills-to-become-a-business-consultant https://doneforyou.com/7-skills-to-become-a-business-consultant/#comments Fri, 12 Apr 2019 22:36:29 +0000 http://timeslots.org/?p=1716   One question I get asked often is how to become a business consultant…  Specifically, what strategies, tactics, workflows, and skills a consultant needs… Better yet, what are tips for becoming a business consultant so you can start accepting money for your time, products, and programs? So, if you want to be a consultant, this […]

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One question I get asked often is how to become a business consultant...  Specifically, what strategies, tactics, workflows, and skills a consultant needs... Better yet, what are tips for becoming a business consultant so you can start accepting money for your time, products, and programs?

So, if you want to be a consultant, this is your article!

Before we get to that, could you tell me?  Is this your story?

Your chair is squeaking. The office manager told you he would change it three times but has yet to. You get up and walk to the kitchen. You're not hungry, but that's the only room in the office with a great view (besides your boss's).

You want to take a moment to think, but Matt from accounting comes and asks you for some files. He leaves. You get back to your desk and start working. Some coworker drops some files on your desk without saying anything and moves on.

You sigh and look at the motivational poster you have on your PC desktop. You start dreaming about leaving your job and becoming a business consultant...  Working with someone who values your time, opinion, and expertise.

Do you have what it takes to be a freelance consultant or a consultant for a well-known firm? Do you have the skills to work with clients and move the needle in their organization?

Here are seven things that great consultants do for their clients...  And the skills a consultant needs to be successful!

What Does A Business Consultant Do?

Being a highly paid consultant means that you can quickly identify a problem and provide a solution to that problem soon. Maybe it's something you've been through yourself or helped others through - the trick here is having experience. If you don't have experience in the thing you're consulting about - be it health or business or survival - it's going to be a long road for you,

Identifying the problem is mainly a skill developed by connecting the dots, going from one issue to another, and finding out what's wrong or what could be better.

And that brings up a GREAT question many folks write in with...  What does a business consultant do? Or what are the primary skills of a business consultant?

The answer: help your clients.

That's it. It's a lot harder than it sounds, though!

You need to use your experience, education, and wisdom to help them navigate the sometimes murky waters of reality. That could be getting through a business merger or assisting a client in tax savings...

You often learn how to connect the dots through work experience, but your research, study, and passion can help you get there much faster in a startup consulting business.

Want To Be A Consultant? This Is What You Would like.

It's not enough to call yourself a consultant and let that be that. People won't flock to your door because you think they should - they do business with you because you've got a solution to a problem they're experiencing in their life or business.

To be a consultant, you must have a pipeline of people ready and willing to do business with you. You need a pipeline of clients for IT, management, and business consultants.

This, my friend, is more complicated than it may seem...  You might be naturally gifted, and you've worked to build up some relationship capital in your area that you can key in on when starting your own consulting business, but that's different.

More often, people venture into the consulting space because they're leaving a job they don't like, meaning they don't have relationships they can capitalize on.

So, you'll need to make sure your pipeline is set up...

At a minimum, you need:

We can layer in many things on top of this, like Facebook traffic, live videos, A/B testing, content marketing, etc...  But get a good foundation built out first to start cashing in.

Top Skills Of a Business Consultant

As a consultant, you will be your client's best friend, coach, counselor, and advisor. It's a role they pay you for so they can be a better form of themselves. You'll need to distinguish between the accurate information and buzzwords you hear from your client and the educational material you encounter online.

At the heart of the consultant/client relationship is trust. You need to make sure to have their best interest at heart at all times, and that means cutting through a lot of the noise to figure out what they should be doing in their business, what strategies they should be employing, and how to keep them accountable.

The same can be true for clients you're attracting to you. You'll get good clients and bad clients. You want to ensure that you qualify prospective clients well so you don't get stuck in a relationship you hate just because you're being paid. The trick is to learn what qualities and characteristics you should be looking for in clients so you can model your sales and marketing material and reach your exact customer avatar.

You wanted out of a regular 9-to-5 job to get freedom. You don't want to be trapped by clients you don't like working with.

How You Make Money As A Business Consultant

When you're working to become a business consultant, nothing is more accurate than the rule: Time = Money. You'll spend your days working with clients; the last thing you want is for them to take advantage of you. It would be best to be very wary about promising too much and not charging enough.

Here's what I mean - there are 40 hours in a workweek. If you have 20 clients who each demand 2 hours of phone time a week, you're maxed out...  Between switching between calls, thinking about their problems and possible solutions, and working on your prospect pipeline, you only have a little time left.

Now, that's different from the path I'd recommend you take...  You want to lessen the Time = Money Trap by doing bi-weekly calls or creating a course to go along with your consulting, so you're not spending as much time on the phone with them as you would be otherwise. You want to make sure to use your time wisely.

You'll need a flexible schedule. You might need to delegate and outsource work. I want you to know that you'll need to be connected and have clear expectations set up on email, Skype, chat, and the other ways clients will contact you.

A great tool we built to help manage clients and calls is TimeSlots. Your clients can choose when and if they want to talk to you beforehand. Just follow the instructions, and you can select available times and what questions you need them to answer before your call!

 

People Skills Are Your BIGGEST Asset

Even if you're the best analyst in the business community, to become a business consultant who people want to work with, you also need to be a people person. You'll want to work on it from the earliest stage of your consultant career.

... That means you'll need to be helpful and punctual in answering emails. You need to be good on the phone or in person. It would be best to be diligent and disciplined in your work schedule. Clients will only work with you briefly if they're too busy trying to track you down in between your beach-going lifestyle.

At the end of the day, people. Your clients will be paying your bills. They'll be putting your fees on their credit card because the value you provide their business far surpasses the cost of doing business with you.

As a business consultant, you'll probably be on the phone with them, selling them your services...  So, from when they're considering working with you to when they're in the process, your people skills will seal the deal.

And if 'people skills' aren't something you were born with, you'll want to get outside your comfort zone and learn them. It's essential if you want to become a business consultant!

Business Consultants Are Always Learning

Unless you have 40 years in the business, you'll hit roadblocks with your client that you won't know the answer instinctively to...  That's OK. What's important is that you understand how to 'learn' quickly, on the fly, and you can apply what you've learned to your client's business.

Iterative learning is, very simply, knowing that you'll constantly grow and accumulate knowledge over time. As a business consultant, it's your job to help your client implement strategies and tactics and recommend solutions if those don't work.

Sometimes, those solutions are variations of the original strategy. Sometimes, it might be a different strategy altogether. What's important is that you learn along the way and gather enough information to make a better choice next time.

Researching and applying new tactics should be a priority for every business consultant.

If you ignore the latest trends and tactics, after a few years, you'll be that guy who does things using default methods, and you will start to lose clients in favor of a newer breed of consultants.

Saying No

Regarding clients (specifically, your prospect pipeline), you should prioritize understanding what projects you can take and what you should leave for others. This is a matter of self-assessing what you do well, analyzing your schedule, and drawing the line when you have too much to handle.

Learn to prioritize cases and clients. Learn to delegate work to others. If you bite more than you can chew, you'll slowly drift away from your clients and team.

How To Become A Business Consultant (As In Starting Up!)

Becoming a business consultant is about heart, drive, passion, and experience.

I know that might be weird, but here's the truth... Becoming a business consultant is much easier today than 5 or 10 years ago. The most important thing is that you have experience and you have knowledge. We covered that. I'm not talking about attending college and finishing a four-year degree in Business Management... That doesn't prepare you for the real-world challenges you'll see as a business process consultant.

Yes, with a 4-year degree, you have value, but in solving real-world business problems, it'll be easy to help honest businesses thrive because of your expertise.

If you have some experience and tenure in solving real-life business challenges, then becoming a consultant is very simple.

Your Business Consulting Practice Can Be Entirely Virtual

For the most part, you can grow your business consultancy using nothing else but the Internet.

  • You need a website for your business consulting practice
  • You need to grow your audience and platform of people who value and respect your opinion.
  • Having social media profiles (LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram) with regular posting would be best.
  • And it would be best if you had something to sell to your prospects.

Anybody can be an expert in anything. That's one of the things we've learned through social media in the past decade. Every person all over the world has a voice. What they say, though, is what matters.

Every Client You Need Is Already In Your Pocket

Because of content marketing and social media, though, you have a bigger audience in your pocket than the biggest consulting firms did 30 years ago...

You can charge for your services, create your offers, get paid, and handle all your transactions online...  Without a physical presence at all, if you don't want one.

Mind you, that could be a bad thing because it also means that you have lots of competition for people who are also interested in how to be a business consultant! 

How To Set Your Business Consultancy Apart

I think you'll need to set yourself apart. It would be best if you stood alone. It would be best if you were an expert in your niche. You need to attract your potential clients and turn them into raving fans.

To be a successful business consultant:

What To Offer Your Clients

You might think about offering:

  • A day-long business consulting package
  • A monthly consulting retainer where you talk on the phone with them
  • Digital products or memberships that bundle your knowledge into a course
  • Books and ebooks
  • Multi-day events

You have so many options, depending on what you're comfortable providing. I've written an entire book on creating offers for your business.

Coaching vs. Consulting

We built quite a few sales funnels for consultants and coaches. There's a thin line that separates a consultant and a coach. Often, the lines blur.

In one moment, a coach works for their client more as a consultant. The same is true in reverse. A consultant will have moments of coaching their client before putting their business consultant hat back on.

They are the same. A coach and a client need to attract clients, build sales funnels, build an audience and a platform, and get people to buy from you.

The best way to do that is to focus on a specialty. It would be best if you were unique with one thing.

When I Got Started As A Business Consultant...

For us, we do your marketing for our clients. We build sales funnels and do ad management for companies around the world. We also develop and sell software to help companies with their marketing automation.

But it started with just me building sales funnels because it's something I enjoyed doing, and I also had a lot of experience doing it for our products and smaller clients and projects.

Then, about five years ago, I decided we needed to start doing it big time. So, I started hiring a team and putting together unrivaled processes in our industry.

It started with me being the business consultant, deciding that building sales funnels and solving problems for clients was much more gratifying than simply talking about solving them. That's my take on it. You could be very different.

Specialize In SOMETHING

What I will say is you want to focus on a specialty.

  • You don't want to be just a business consultant.
  • You want to be a sales process business consultant.
  • You want to be an outsourcing business consultant.
  • You want to be the programming business consultant

It would be best if you had a focus and a specialty. That will do magic for your business consulting practice, especially from referrals.

Sure, you need elements of a sales funnel. You'll want to have an automated webinar. You'll want to have a sales funnel. You need to have a website. You need to build an email list.

In terms of getting started as a business consultant, you must have a specialty and want to be visible. Create content. Create videos. Be the expert that the world is looking for.

Conclusion

To become a business consultant, you must constantly stay on your toes, learn new strategies and tactics, and ensure your prospect pipeline is always entire.

That way, you can break free of what you're doing and start building a scalable career where you work on stuff you live with people you want to work with.

If you'd like a hand at putting together your prospect pipeline and strategizing the best types of clients to work with, schedule an action plan call with us!

 

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How To Finally Get Rid Of Excuses And Grow Your Business https://doneforyou.com/get-rid-of-excuses-grow-your-business/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=get-rid-of-excuses-grow-your-business Wed, 13 Mar 2019 15:27:24 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=7323 How do you grow your business? Is starting a business enough to make you feel accomplished? We all know that owning a small business can be empowering. Actually, owning a company that you have set up from scratch is more than empowering, it means taking full control of your professional life. While that sounds very […]

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How do you grow your business? Is starting a business enough to make you feel accomplished? We all know that owning a small business can be empowering. Actually, owning a company that you have set up from scratch is more than empowering, it means taking full control of your professional life.

While that sounds very enticing, most of the time getting results can be intimidating. That is the reason why a number of entrepreneurs get stuck in and, in a way, refuse to grow. They seem to occupy their time with routine tasks, like endless paperwork, instead of focusing on activities that will increase their revenue, like market research, competitor observation, acquisition of new accounts, and streamlining of their offering to meet customer needs.

Although your one mission as a business owner is to constantly grow a profitable venture, you may be struggling to find motivation to keep you going through the hardest of times.

But how does that work?

To avoid the struggle of having to go through all that hard work, we find excuses as to why is it that we’re unable to grow a successful business on our own. Even in the light of the most appealing ideas, you will always have to battle the voice deep in your head constantly reminding you all the reasons why you can’t achieve your dream.

Avoid these excuses to grow your business

Eliminate Excuses And Grow Your Business

To help you deal with those unreasonable excuses, here’s a list of typical thought patterns that have prevented you from growing your business. In this article, you will also find recommended ways to move your business from stuck to growing again.

1. The “I’m bad with numbers” excuse

The times when you had to be mathematically savvy to manage a business have passed. Spreadsheets, invoice tools, account management tools will enable you to handle any business issue that requires you to use numbers.

Use a project tracking solution and billing tool to help you create recurring and auto-bill invoices, collect partial payments with just a few mouse clicks.

Work closely with an accountant to make sure you comply with laws and maintain your peace of mind.

2. The “nobody appreciates my silly ideas” excuse

Every startup company, digital or not, needs to have a strong social media following. Prove the world that your solutions and offerings ideas are worth their attention, get real Instagram followers, likes and engagement on all your posts about your services & products or brand.

You should be customer-focused and design a product that truly solves a pressing problem. You shouldn’t just create a solution in your mind; go out there and test it out by offering it to real people. Get their feedback and improve your product or service to a point that your customers will desire to use it.

3. The “I’m bad with words” excuse

Create great content that Google will love

Growing a business requires lots of good content. Writing is tough, no question there, but it definitely doesn’t have to be an excuse for your keeping away from crafting the future in business. If you need to produce sales or marketing material, there are tools, like Grammarly, that will help you find the right words to articulate your thoughts. It will help you keep your grammar correct and your paragraphs neat and tidy.

You may also want to consider hiring a content writer for blog posts and long-form content, like ebooks, or a copywriter for marketing collateral and sales copy.

4. The “I’m a fraud” excuse

Your success belongs to you; don’t let the so-called imposter syndrome make you feel like a fraud.
Imposter syndrome is a fascinating psychological phenomenon where people feel like they are not worthy of their accomplishments. Internally they feel like they don’t deserve success – they feel like a fraud, and they worry that one day somebody will find out that they are not good enough.

Entrepreneurs are among the largest groups of people to struggle with feelings of worth, self-esteem, and achievement.

To eliminate your imposter syndrome, you first need to recognize the signs. Then you need to remind yourself of your successes. Sometimes we forget that we deserve success and everything we have. If you know that you have imposter syndrome tendencies, start a journal to gather success reminders.

5. The “I can’t lose family time” excuse

You might be thinking, I have a family to focus on. A lot of people will use family time as an excuse to stick with a restrictive nine-to-five job that they despise. There is no given rule stating that you must quit quality time with your family if you want to become a successful entrepreneur.

The key is time management – if you manage to focus on essential business tasks that move your company forward, and keep in mind that quality time with your family is more important than long hours spent in front of the TV, then you’ll be able to both grow a successful business and be close to your spouse and kids. For example, you can wake up early and work on your business and save time in the evening and on weekends to spend with your family. Put the kids to bed at night and take care of some minor business issues for a few hours.

6. The “I lack marketing skills” excuse

How Artificial Intelligence Is Revolutionizing Digital Marketing

Educating yourself is a major part of being an entrepreneur. Nobody knows how to be a founder before they start. And nobody knows how to grow their business with marketing before they realize they need to get the word out there.

If you want to grow your business and let go of excuses, you will have to get rid of this thought pattern and get started somewhere. Start with the social network that you feel most comfortable with. Then, add more marketing channels to your strategy. When the time is right, hire a marketing expert or growth hacker to plan out an effective marketing strategy for your small business.

7. The “I hate selling” excuse

Some are born with an intrinsic desire and talent to sell. They do exist- and typically enjoy very successful careers in sales- but these people are few and far between.

And by the way, you can now ‘steal’ our step-by-step process for streamlining sales and converting more leads into customers. Click here to get instant access to our free 5-part video course that will help you craft winning sales funnels without any expertise.

Now, if you’re like most of us, sales pitches, cold calling, meetings, and presentations don’t rank anywhere near the top of your “fun things to do” list. In fact, the idea of a sales presentation may be something that causes you to panic and you want to avoid at all costs.

Why is that? Well, there are a few reasons why you might hate selling.

  • Negative connotations: Selling is equal to lies and deception.
  • Lack of confidence. I will never be good at selling my product.
  • Fear of rejection. People will know I’m selling and they will say ‘no’.

The solution to these fears is to reframe your mindset.

The first key to conquering a fear of sales is changing your mindset. You must stop looking at the old concept of sales as a way to manipulate people start realizing that selling actually helps people find and acquire the solution they need.

By reframing your mindset and getting more comfortable with the idea that your business isn’t to trick the customer into making a purchase decision, you’re liberated to focus on the real value you can provide to meet the customers’ needs.

8. The “I’m not innovative or creative enough” excuse

Creative angles - Content strategy

In the world of the internet and constant innovation, we are all worried that our ideas won’t be unique and interesting enough. However, you don’t really need to be a creative genius to grow a successful business. Certainly, you need to have an eye for aesthetics, and you can cultivate that by attending free or affordable online courses on Udemy.

Next, there are simple tools like Canva that allow you to create professional-looking designs for emails, blogs, and social media without being a designer.

And finally, you can hire a good designer to create your brand and add uniqueness to your marketing voice. Fiverr and Upwork are freelance marketplaces that offer what you need.

9. The “My product is just not good enough.” excuse

If a salesperson does not strongly believe in the worth of the product they are selling then it goes without saying that the sales process cannot be successful. Naturally, there’s the concept that a good salesperson can sell anything, however, we don’t think that success can last for long. If you can’t guarantee the quality of what you are selling, then how can you earn the trust of a prospect and convince them that you hold the solution to their problem?

Customers cannot be deceived really. They will instantly detect a salesperson who doesn’t genuinely believe in their product. What’s more, salespeople who can vouch for a product, require much less motivation to sell it because they are more enthusiastic about it. They are far less likely to find excuses and will do their best to offer their solution to as many customers as possible.

That was the belief of Zig Ziglar, who stated,

If you believe your product or service can fulfill a true need, it’s your moral obligation to sell it.

So, if you find yourself doubting about your product offering, then you most likely need to improve the product that you sell or change your business completely. But before you drop your product and look for something else to sell, make sure you don’t do it just because of a fear of selling.

The post How To Finally Get Rid Of Excuses And Grow Your Business appeared first on Done For You.

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7 Success Tips For Tech Entrepreneurs https://doneforyou.com/success-tips-for-tech-entrepreneurs/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=success-tips-for-tech-entrepreneurs https://doneforyou.com/success-tips-for-tech-entrepreneurs/#comments Mon, 04 Mar 2019 20:42:35 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=7221 No entrepreneur gets involved with business thinking that they’re not going to be successful. That kind of mindset is a guaranteed way to make sure your tech startup never takes off. But simply believing in your own ability to be successful isn’t good enough. You need to be able to anticipate the challenges and obstacles […]

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No entrepreneur gets involved with business thinking that they’re not going to be successful. That kind of mindset is a guaranteed way to make sure your tech startup never takes off. But simply believing in your own ability to be successful isn’t good enough. You need to be able to anticipate the challenges and obstacles of entrepreneurship so you can overcome them and ultimately be successful.

Launching a tech business in this century is a huge perk. You have a wealth of information at your disposal, and publicly available case studies from successful tech entrepreneurs who came right before you. You have the chance to learn from their success– and their mistakes. As you build your startup company, keep the following success tips top of mind to make sure that you are always taking a step toward the goal of building a successful and profitable tech business.

Success Tips For Tech Entrepreneurs

1. Success takes time

The dream of overnight success is just a dream. You always hear about successful entrepreneurs that seem like an overnight success but they’re not. If you’re planning to wake up and be the CEO of the next Google overnight, you will be let down. Remember that it takes time to build anything important.

With commitment, perseverance, and a fantastic idea, your tech company will be successful. But it’s going to take some time, and you’ll need to be patient on those days when you wish you could be the king of startups.

2. Don’t be afraid to fail

If you’re wondering why being afraid of failure is one of the most popular feelings among startup founders, then you may need to take a moment to read up on the adventures of some of the world’s most successful tech company leaders. Household names like Gates and Jobs had their failures, and so will every new founder, including you. True innovation is inconceivable without failure. You won’t enjoy massive success unless you take risks and obviously fail at some point.

Now, that doesn’t imply that you should become reckless. But taking calculated risks and attempting new things with the possibility of failure hanging over your head is essential. Embrace your failures, look at them as leadership training opportunities and learn from them to build a better business.

3. Education and mentorship can help

As an entrepreneur and startup founder, you have to become a Jack-of-all-trades. While you can’t gain all the skills you’ll need to run a fully-fledged tech business on your own, getting some formal education in areas like marketing, sales, bookkeeping, and business analytics will help. Going back to school is an investment, but you could always opt in for online classes or take continuing education courses to improve the tech or business skills that you need.

Having a mentor who has already been there can also help. They can be a helping hand when you feel like you’re facing a dead end. You can also learn from their way of thinking, e.g. where to focus when you’re just starting out.

4. Delegate and outsource

What about those skills you can’t or don’t want to learn or just don’t have the knack for? Hire someone to do the job! Fill in the gaps of your own expertise with a skilled member of your team or freelancer who has experience and knows how to get the job done. Consider outsourcing functions like online marketing and sales funnel development to agencies that know what they need to do.

Do you have a team already? Then delegate! You have to learn to delegate, you can’t do everything yourself. Entrepreneurs often think that only they are able to do things right and want to lead everything. In the end, this can be a disaster. As a tech company expands and grows, finding specialists for different areas is essential. Lean on people you trust and that you can eventually train to be better than you in a specific area and give them the power to carry out tasks.

5. Reach out to your potential market fast

Content Marketing Trends 2019

Technologies that directly generate ROI are your best bet. While you will be tempted to create a product that you love without thinking if there’s demand for it, you should test your product-market fit first. Create a minimum viable product and go out there to find out if people are buying it. Then you may need to realign your product to match those needs.

For example, while a lot of tech companies could succeed by offering solutions that drive savings, prospective clients get more excited by solutions that make them more money.

6. Don’t be afraid to network

A tech company will never become profitable if nobody knows about it. Leverage the power of connections and relationships through business networking to make sure that as many people as possible know about you and your business. Working with other like-minded individuals can help you get new ideas, motivate you to take action, and allow you to develop important connections that will help grow your tech startup. So dust off your suit and start going to meetups and other gatherings or events for startups.

7. Believe in you

As a tech founder, you are asking people who don’t know you to trust you and your product. Before that happens, you have to believe in yourself. Use the tips in this post to increase your chances for success, and believe that you already have what it takes to grow a successful business.

Lose your fear of failure. Challenge yourself, explore your limits, get out of your comfort zone and finally dare to do things that you always wanted to do. Go off the beaten path, if you feel that that’s what it takes to innovate and succeed. Always remember that each and every successful entrepreneur made many mistakes and eventually learned from them, and that fact made those entrepreneurs better leader and more successful tech business owners.

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9 Reasons Why You Did Not Achieve Your Goals In 2018 https://doneforyou.com/reasons-why-you-did-not-achieve-your-goals-in-2018/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=reasons-why-you-did-not-achieve-your-goals-in-2018 Thu, 17 Jan 2019 17:09:32 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=7009 “Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts”. – Winston Churchill As we bid adieu to 2018 and welcome the New Year, it is time to evaluate what were our accomplishments and where we failed. Self-assessment is crucial for every business owner as it helps us assess […]

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Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts”. – Winston Churchill

As we bid adieu to 2018 and welcome the New Year, it is time to evaluate what were our accomplishments and where we failed. Self-assessment is crucial for every business owner as it helps us assess our strengths and improve on our weaknesses. Unfortunately, not always do we achieve our goals, mostly because we fall short to follow through. Either we set unclear goals, lose direction, or simply give up. However, that is true for all business – we all have failed to achieve our goals at some point in time.

But the problem is when we do not learn from our mistakes. We go on pursuing our business goals in precisely the same way as we have done in the past, committing all the same mistakes, and gearing ourselves up for even more failures in the future. And perhaps that’s why you did not achieve your goals in 2018.

The good news: Businesses need to transform how they go about realizing their goals by planning effectively how to pursue them. Now that you have a track record all littered with disappointments, it’s time for self-retrospection. We have outlined the nine common reasons why you may not have achieved your business goals in 2018. Knowing how to avoid these scenarios will bring you a step forward towards success.

1. Setting unrealistic or undefined goals

Why you did not achieve your goals

One of the biggest reasons why businesses fail to achieve their goals is because the goals are too vague. What’s the point if you have set an objective but your team isn’t sure what you actually want to achieve? For instance, “Our goal is to achieve huge profits in the first quarter.” This is, of course, a goal, but not specific. It does not define how much profit you expect or what steps to take in realizing the goal.

On the other hand, if your goal is too impractical, it tends to be overwhelming. Over time, you will lose focus. The result – you fail to achieve what you envision.

Solution: In 2019, avoid this mistake by setting goals that are realistic and well-defined. Break down a goal into several achievable steps, and you are more likely to complete the same. Make it a point to write down your plans and this will make it easier to accomplish them.

2. Lack of focus

Another reason why you did not achieve your goals in 2018 is due to a lack of consistency. It is difficult to remain laser-focused for a long period of time, especially when interruptions are many. Initially you may feel excited about a goal – say a project – but eventually, you lack the passion for seeing it complete.

Solution: Overcome this behavior by defining your goal properly, and giving it a start and end date. The line of communication should be clear, and effective planning should be in place – what are the top milestones, what problems will it solve, how it will benefit the organization, what budget & resources you need, etc.

3. You did not survey it right

A major reason why most projects fail is that businesses do not have a clear & comprehensive understanding of what their customers want. Any product, service or business objective should be created on the line of what your customers’ expectations are, what are their problem areas, and how you can provide a solution. And if this ‘base’ is not strong, it is quite obvious that achieving your goals would seem far-fetched. This is true for any project.

Solution: A great survey makes a strong foundation for setting a project outline and goals. Valuable customer insights can help in effective targeting & segmentation and can go a long way in determining your objectives, setting a plan, and accomplishing the same. For this, you need to create a great survey first.

Askly is a powerful online survey builder that helps you ask the right questions to gain critical data, generate quality leads, and convert sales. It engages customers in a meaningful way, helping you identify their biggest challenges. With this in mind, you can set clear & achievable goals.

4. You don’t think big

 Do you think small when you set a goal, take up a project or perform your business operations? That might be holding you back from utilizing the opportunities and achieving your objectives.

Solution: In today’s cut-throat competitive business environment, you have to think big and embrace the change to realize your goals. Set bigger goals and make sure the efforts are right in place. Search for new possibilities and harness the potential of advanced technology. Remember: “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

This year, think differently…think bigger & better! Transform the way you manage your business operations. Convertly is a powerful tool that will completely revolutionize the way you used to manage your email list previously. The simple yet automated email marketing software is designed to make creating & marketing your email list a breeze. From sending broadcast messages instantaneously to building triggered, bulk autoresponder sequences, simplify your email marketing and achieve your business goals in 2019.       

5. Not having a deadline

One of the biggest reasons why businesses fail when it comes to goal-setting is neglecting the importance of having a deadline. When business objectives are open-ended and do not specify the time frame within which they are to be accomplished, people tend to lose focus from it. The subject gets into the back foot, often leading to procrastination. Having the thought in mind that “this can be done sometime or the other,” things actually get delayed and are mostly not done.

Solution: It is almost essential to set a specific deadline within which a goal has to be attained. This will help everyone to remain disciplined and focused on achieving it within the time frame.

6. You neglected the power of analytics

Marketing Analytics

Whatever business you are in, unless you are able to monitor your performance and draw powerful analysis from your results, you are nowhere. Often, companies set bigger goals, put their best foot forward, and yet overlook the potential of time-to-time business evaluation. No wonder, they remain a step behind achieving their goals.

Solution: Powerful analytics is pertinent to gather meaningful data that aids in effective decision-making. It is vital to track your performance through every stage of goal realization, ensuring that you are on the right path and capitalizing the opportunities efficiently. Analytics also help in identifying and eliminating the bottlenecks that come in the way of accomplishing your goals.

Digital marketers and website owners may utilize the potential of Statly – advanced analytics software that helps track every visitor moving through your website or sales funnel. It provides real-time analytics data that help track conversions through your sales funnel. The tool allows you to monitor what your visitors are doing on the website, helping you track sales & revenues based on your website behavior.        

7. You failed to act upon your goals

It’s surprising that most businesses know the secret to becoming successful; however, hardly few of them take the necessary steps to accomplish that. There is no point having set realistic & well-defined goals unless you actually act upon them. Making big plans, talking big won’t help unless you work upon it diligently. And this might be one reason why you did not achieve our goals in 2018.

Solution: Set goals and act upon them. Stop procrastinating and stay focused on what you have to accomplish. Only then you can set yourself apart from those who only dream, but do not achieve.

8. Trying to be the jack of all trades

Last year did you spread yourself thin thinking that you can do everything you are good at? If yes, that is one of the biggest mistakes you have made. You had taken up numerous goals in your hand, but your list of accomplishment is zero because you tried to be the jack of all trades. Your resources are limited and tried spreading your wings.

Solution: Well, there is no harm in dreaming big but make sure you are well equipped to achieve the same. Instead of trying to do many things at a time, limit your goals this year and stay focused on achieving them only.

9. You always do things the same way

Do you always do things the same way, year on year? Then it is difficult to see astonishing results. If you did not achieve a goal last year, would it make any difference if you follow the same steps and try to achieve it this year? Working diligently won’t help unless you take a new approach.

Solution: Evaluate what you did last year and how? Identify loopholes in the process. Determine how you can do it differently this year. If Plan A did not succeed in 2018, try implementing Plan B in 2019.

Addressing these failure points in time will enhance your likelihood of achieving your goals. Remember, failure does not merely stop you from reaching your goals; it also affects your thinking, your productivity and perception to go forward.

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The Truth About Making Money With Affiliate Marketing: The Who, How And When https://doneforyou.com/the-truth-about-making-money-with-affiliate-marketing-the-who-how-and-when/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-truth-about-making-money-with-affiliate-marketing-the-who-how-and-when https://doneforyou.com/the-truth-about-making-money-with-affiliate-marketing-the-who-how-and-when/#comments Thu, 13 Dec 2018 12:00:41 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=6886 More and more people are considering working or hustling online. And it’s not a surprise why. Some people have even quit their day jobs to have a full-time online career. The benefits are big, the risk is low, and the time freedom and flexibility are awesome – these are just a few of the various […]

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More and more people are considering working or hustling online. And it’s not a surprise why.

Some people have even quit their day jobs to have a full-time online career. The benefits are big, the risk is low, and the time freedom and flexibility are awesome – these are just a few of the various reasons why working online is all the rage these days.

The internet offers countless business opportunities for earning an income.

Is affiliate marketing the way to go?

Affiliate marketing is one of the best popular strategies for earning money online. This refers to the type of marketing in which an affiliate promotes a certain product or service and earns a commission for each sale successfully made.

Online entrepreneurs, affiliate marketers and online marketers are a new breed of successful business founders who are based solely on the internet to make money.

In this article, we want to touch on affiliate marketing as a great way to start online and generate unlimited income. But, bells and whistles aside, we also want to talk about the reality of affiliate marketing: Who makes money, how long does it take to establish a profitable affiliate marketing business and what are the pitfalls?

Many people prefer this kind of earning opportunity not only due to the fact that it gives them flexibility and enables them to work at their own pace, but also because this is highly worthwhile. Of course, it’s not without difficulties and drawbacks.

Reality check: Is affiliate marketing for everyone?

Affiliate marketing reality

Before you start with affiliate marketing, it’s essential that you know the pros and cons. This way, you can manage your expectations, and get yourself ready for the challenges that you will face. This will help increase your chances for success.

Reality check #1 – Affiliate marketing depends a lot on who you are as a person, your personality and your skills. Do you have what it takes?

If you’re planning to become an affiliate, you cannot detach your personality and character from it. Most of the processes required in an online business have something to do with you, your thoughts and your behavior.

For example, working consistently and have structure in the way you manage your projects are crucial when you don’t have a boss. You need to be self-motivated and be able to make decisions fast. Be your own boss, without compromising productivity and steady income flows.

Also, it is your credibility and reputation. Before people will believe your endorsements and purchase the products you’re recommending, they will decide first if you are a person they can trust.

Apart from your reputation, people will also look at your expertise in the field. How much do you know about the products or services you’re promoting as an affiliate? Are you an expert in this niche? Have you ever tried this product yourself? What were your results or experience from using the product? All these questions will be on the minds of your audience

This renders it important for you to choose products that are related to your interests, passion, hobbies, and expertise. This is an often overlooked secret to success in affiliate marketing. It is important to love what you do, but it’s not only that. Look for the intersection of passion, market demand and skills.

Reality check #2 – You and your aunt and your cousin can become an affiliate marketer but this doesn’t make affiliate marketing suitable for everyone.

Over thinking marketing

Yes, anyone can join any affiliate marketing network or program. As long as you have an internet connection and know basic stuff about the online worlds, then you can potentially work as an affiliate marketer. However, it’s important to realize that this earning opportunity is not ideal for everyone who wants to work online.

This business model is only suitable for people who have certain qualities. To find success, you need to be:

  • Enthusiastic, passionate and self-driven.
  • An expert about a certain niche.
  • Patient and determined to succeed.
  • Willing to invest long hours in working online.
  • Willing to share your personal experiences and ideas with other people.
  • Open to lifelong learning and leaving your preconceptions behind.

If you don’t have all these traits, there’s a good chance that you won’t manage to succeed as an online business owner and affiliate marketer.

Freebie alert: Find out more about our 8 done-for-you email marketing campaigns for affiliates.

Reality check #3 – Affiliate marketing is a business that takes time and hard work, sweat and tears too.

The very first thing that you need to realize about affiliate marketing is that it is a real business. To take it seriously you need to look at it as a business. And just like any business, online or brick-and-mortar, it requires time and effort.

Some people believe that affiliate marketers just sit in front of their laptop and they cash in on some system that works for them automatically. The fact is, an affiliate marketer needs to put in long hours of work every day to build a business, that can then work largely on autopilot. To do that you need to work on the following:

A lot of affiliate marketers don’t give up their corporate jobs immediately; they first work on their online business as a side hustle, and then, when they get it to a point that it generates some steady income, they quit their day job to be full-time online entrepreneurs.

You will soon see that it’s a must to see this as a thing that you need to do hands-on and full-time. If you don’t, you won’t be able to enjoy the level of success that you desire.

Reality check #4 – It takes time to earn really good money from affiliate marketing and to fully replace your day job. Success is a marathon, not a sprint.

The fact is that most affiliates will never make it. They will never make any considerable money, even after months of work.

Do you know the 80/20 rule?

Well, when it comes to affiliate marketing, the 80/20 is more like 95/5.

This means that 95% of affiliates will only generate 5% of the income. On the flip side, it’s the top 5% of affiliate marketers that will feast on 95% of the money being paid out by vendors to affiliates. As we said, it takes hard work to be part of that top 5% of super affiliates.

The steps involved to rise to the top and be part of the super affiliate clan cannot be accomplished in one or two months. You really need to spend at least three to six months to set up your affiliate website, create compelling content, establish yourself as an expert in the niche, build your credibility and a good online brand and so on and so forth. You need to build your brand, marketing processes and start growing your audience before you can see measurable and consistent results.

Reality check #5 – You’ll need to invest in people, technology and marketing if you want to speed up the process of building a successful affiliate business.

By now you should know that affiliate marketing has a lot of benefits. Here are some:

  • Low cost to get started. Most affiliate schemes and partners programs are free to join. Your costs have to do with your referral/marketing methods.
  • You don’t need to create a product or service, or maintain a stock, or even ship anything.
  • Work anytime that suits you and from any place around the world, as long as you have internet access.
  • There is huge passive income potential when you do the right things and have patience.
  • Can be added on to your current home or freelance business to create an additional stream of income. Bloggers, coaches, infopreneurs who already have an audience can capitalize on affiliate opportunities faster.

Now, these are the most important benefits but, although getting started can cost practically nothing, in reality, and if you take this business seriously you’ll need to put money in it upfront.

You’ll need to:

  • design a good brand and marketing collateral,
  • build a functional website,
  • pay for fast hosting,
  • pay for tools like an email marketing automation platform,
  • have some budget for advertising campaigns,
  • consult with a couple of experienced marketers and so on.

Depending on how fast you want to grow, you might need to spend money on copywriting, training, coaching or other services too.

How to move forward

If you’re looking to partner with an experienced team of online marketing experts who have designed, built and optimized high-converting sales funnels and profitable advertising campaigns, we’d be happy to help. At DoneForYou.com we help entrepreneurs, affiliate marketers and agencies to create and grow profitable online ventures. Fill out this form so we can get back to you to discuss your project.

To conclude, if you were looking for the truth about affiliate marketing, this article was your reality check. All the factors that we discussed are necessary for you to build a successful affiliate business. Although there’s no definite blueprint to success, time and constant effort are key. So, affiliate marketing isn’t the path for you if you’re dreaming of quick riches and no work.

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5 Ways To Convert SaaS Free Trial Users Into Paying Customers https://doneforyou.com/convert-saas-free-trial-users-into-paying-customers/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=convert-saas-free-trial-users-into-paying-customers https://doneforyou.com/convert-saas-free-trial-users-into-paying-customers/#comments Tue, 18 Sep 2018 09:36:49 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=4996 For most businesses, it is not a big task to get freemium subscribers (free users). However, the task of converting free subscribers into paying ones can be a mountain to climb. Most Software As A Service (SaaS) providers are unable to convert more than 20% of their free users to paying customers. On average, most […]

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For most businesses, it is not a big task to get freemium subscribers (free users). However, the task of converting free subscribers into paying ones can be a mountain to climb.

Most Software As A Service (SaaS) providers are unable to convert more than 20% of their free users to paying customers. On average, most companies only convert 20 to 30 percent of the free users to paying ones. However, with the right strategies, you can get a SaaS conversion rate of up to 80% of all the free users. See this list of typical SaaS conversion benchmarks and compare your SaaS conversion rate against industry standards.

When thinking of how to convert SaaS free trials into customers, you should have the main problems at the back of your mind. For most customers, the problem is usually starting to pay for something they are used to having free of charge. It is, therefore, important to think of ways of making it seem less of a burden.

How To Convert SaaS Free Trial Users Into Paying Customers

Here are the top 5 ways used to convert free trial users into paying customers.

1. Offer premium promotions

While you may not be able to provide a free trial for a long period, you can give your customers promotional offers that will attract them to paying for the product.

For example, Spotify offers its customers up to 90% off on the first three months subscription. For most customers, paying $0.99 per month is not a big deal as compared to paying $9.99. Such offers work in two ways; first, they help you know the customers who are truly interested in your product.

After the promotional months, you can follow up on such customers with retargeting email campaigns to get them to keep on using the product. Secondly, it is a strategy that is used to get your customers used to your product. Once the customer is used to your product, they will be unable to continue doing their work without your software. In the end, they are forced to subscribe to premium options at the set price.

Download our done-for-you flash sale email sequence which you can plug into your autoresponder to boost your next sales campaign fast.

2. Use impact messaging

Free trial to paid

There is a difference between optimizing your message and creating an impact message. It is important for your customers to know exactly what they are getting into before they start their journey.

The mistake most marketers do is to market the software as “free”. In this case, you will get enough traffic but no conversion. Your message should be displayed clearly on your landing page. Let the potential customer know how long the free trial period is and how much the cost will be after the trial.

There are many companies that have been forced to remove the words “free” from their website. For example, SumoMe changed its marketing message from “Free tools to grow your business” to “Tools to grow your business-Try for free”. This clearly indicates that the free option is a trial version and not the full product.

3. Collect payment information upfront

This may seem unorthodox to some people but is the best way of separating the chaff from the grains. There is no need to get very many people to sign up yet they are not interested in buying the product.

Collecting payment information upfront lets those who wish to continue paying for the product to sign up. This does not mean that they do not get to enjoy the free trial period. The customers simply set the payment information and billing dates in place when they start the free trial. Once the free trial period is done, they can either cancel their subscription or move on to the premium version.

4. Make the transition process easy

Sales funnel bottlenecks

It is a fact that getting people to pay for a service they are used to for free is a big task. Therefore, you need to make the process easier by removing any obstacles in the way. You need to ask yourself what would be the biggest problem that anyone would face when they want to upgrade to premium. Get rid of such obstacles that the process can be seamless.

One of the ways of ensuring the process is simple is providing multiple checkout options. Ensure that those who wish to pay can pay in as many ways as possible. Other options include providing offers that make the package too attractive. Provide effective support systems and different payment packages so that the customer can choose the best-suited option.

5. Implement email drip campaigns

Drip email marketing

Most people forget that they will need to start paying for the service at the end of the trial period. As we all know, ambushing anyone to give you money for any reason does not work.

To ensure that your customers keep the need to pay for the service at the back of their mind, you need to find ways of reminding them. One of the best ways is to use drip email campaigns. Such emails are constant reminders to the customer that the trial period is running out.

You need to start with a welcome or a thank you message as soon as the customer signs up for the trial period. Throughout the course of time, keep them engaged with follow up emails. You can use this opportunity to showcase your brand as a leader in service delivery.

You can also use the follow-up emails to give the users some tips. Send them the deadline reminder just a few days to the end of the free trial period.

Grab this free re-engagement email sequence and start re-activating your idle subscribers fast.

Keep converting more

It is always an uphill task to convert SaaS trial users into customers. However, with a few tricks here and there, you can convert up to 80 percent of all trial customers.

The key factors to consider in SaaS onboarding include…

  • the messaging,
  • follow up,
  • payment methods and
  • purchase obstacles among others.

You need to entice your potential customers to want to purchase your services.

Whichever way you chose to go, make sure you make your product very attractive. Trial periods are meant to showcase the benefits of your product.

Make sure the customer is at the point when he/she needs your product the most before you start asking for money. You should also divide payment into options that are easily payable. Create offers for first-time subscribers to motivate them.

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Win More Customers: How To Make Your Business Stand Out From The Competition https://doneforyou.com/win-customers-stand-out-from-competition/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=win-customers-stand-out-from-competition https://doneforyou.com/win-customers-stand-out-from-competition/#comments Tue, 19 Jun 2018 09:58:04 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=4224 So, you want to win more customers. But did you know that more than 50% of all new businesses don’t even make it past the 5-year mark? And out of these, only a little more than 30% go beyond the 10-year mark. This raises some serious questions if you have just started your business. What are the […]

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So, you want to win more customers. But did you know that more than 50% of all new businesses don’t even make it past the 5-year mark? And out of these, only a little more than 30% go beyond the 10-year mark.

This raises some serious questions if you have just started your business. What are the challenges that a growing business faces? Why are they not able to make it past these challenges? Why do businesses fail?

There are virtually countless reasons that explain a business failing. But the biggest one of them all is the inability to differentiate itself from the already existing names in the market.

In simpler words, businesses that fail to stand out from the crowd fail to make it in the long  run. Now, this raises another question: How can a business stand out from the rest of the crowd?

And, this is what we are going to talk about in this post.

So, let us begin!

Stand out from the competition

1. Service before self

“The secret to success is to treat all customers as if your world revolves around them.”

This is an age-old adage and is true to the core.

The biggest and the most successful brands in the world have always been the ones that make their customer feel special. The best example of this can be seen in the form of Apple.

Apple is one of the most innovative companies in the world, and their biggest strength is their service. They win more customers by making them feel unique and valued, and this has been the major reason that the company has been going strong for all these years.

These words from Jeff Bezos sum this point up fairly well: “The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call – and doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.”

2. Develop a niche

The worst thing you can do as a business is to promote yourself as a jack-of-all-trades. As the saying goes, “by trying to serve everyone, you are actually serving none.”

Therefore, in order to stand out from the crowd as a business, you need to develop a specific niche first and then try to make customers from that niche happy.

If you are good at something specific, that something should be the center of attention rather than blindly following what your competitors are doing. That’s the way to win more customers.

Interested in learning more about how you should go about choosing the perfect niche? Check out a post that we wrote a while ago but is still valid and shows you exactly what you need to do to find your niche. It will give you specific niche ideas that you can focus on right now to start winning customers fast.

3. Focus on what the customers want

Customer service is the seed that grows into customer loyalty. And, the best way to sow this seed is to figure out what the customer is expecting to get from your business.

No, we are not talking about just good customer service. We are talking beyond that.

This is where buyer persona building comes into the picture. Develop personas that will help you to identify how the customer is going to react to what you are selling in the market.

The trend has been going strong in the market, with many large as well as small-scale businesses being able to benefit from this in the current competitive market scenario.

Read this article about creating your ideal customer avatar and try Scriptly, a great online app that can help you define your ideal customer profile in a jiffy. Scripty has a lot of invaluable features, but with regards to buyer personas, it gives you a step-by-step wizard that helps create the ideal customer avatars in minutes not hours. Click here for a free trial!

Make your business Stand out from the competition

4. Market it right

The right marketing strategies can be your biggest asset in the game if you want to stand out from the competition and win more customers.

Take a look at the biggest names in the business. No matter what field you choose, the most successful businesses have their own unique marketing gimmick that helps people identify the brand.

From selecting the right brand ambassador or mentor to establishing an emotional connection by getting involved with a noble cause, you need to market your business in a way that people can easily identify it.

As they say in the world of marketing today, “it’s not what you upload, it’s the strategy with which you upload that matters.”

Focus on what goes out that represents your business and people will start to easily get attracted to it.

Looking to make an impact with your email marketing efforts? Try the one simple formula that will help you engage with your leads and convert them into buyers fast!

5. Be social, be quirky, be awesome!

Social media is the name of the game for businesses to stand out from the crowd in today’s time. If you can make an impact on social media, you can expect to get an explosion in your online presence, and easily have your business become a phenomenon.

However, in order to achieve this, you need to invest a lot of efforts.

From creating engaging posts to being witty and quirky enough to make the customers laugh with your online wit, you have to be able to do it all.

Not just this – you must have a strong team of customer support advocates who can instantly take care of any customer comments, reviews and similar things that they post about your business on social media.

Remember, the name itself says it all – SOCIAL – you must become social for people to know your business.

Are you doing it?

Conclusion

Now, this list comprises the top 5 things that you as a business need to do in order to win more customers and stand out from the crowd.

Remember, things have changed quite a lot from what they used to be. As a matter of fact, in today’s ever-changing marketing environment you need to keep innovating with your marketing strategies if you want to survive, forget about thriving in the field.

Therefore, employing whatever it takes to provide the best customer experience, along with making your online presence felt, is what it’s going to take to stand out from the crowd.

The only question that’s left to answer here is – are you willing to do it? If yes, then the sky is the limit for you.

Are you looking to try out some new marketing strategies to entice customers? Check out this done-for-you template now!

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Profit-Making Technologies You Can’t Ignore As A Business https://doneforyou.com/profit-making-technologies/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=profit-making-technologies https://doneforyou.com/profit-making-technologies/#comments Mon, 07 May 2018 11:25:07 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=3832 If you had to set up a business about 10 years ago, you’d have to choose a busy location, obtain licenses and permits, lay down cash equivalent to an amount you’d be able to retire with, and then wait for customers to come in. That’s not the case now. Today is the best time to […]

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If you had to set up a business about 10 years ago, you’d have to choose a busy location, obtain licenses and permits, lay down cash equivalent to an amount you’d be able to retire with, and then wait for customers to come in.

That’s not the case now. Today is the best time to be in business (unless you want to focus on an offline retail business).

Have an idea? Launch a website!

Need to validate an idea and check whether your market really needs what you have to provide? Spend $50 on Google or Facebook ad campaigns and you can find out.

Ready to start serving customers? Switch that digital marketing engine on and let it do its magic.

We know it’s easier said than done effectively. To make digital marketing work in your favor, here are some technologies available today that you should be using for your business.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Profit-Making Technologies

No, artificial intelligence and machine learning are not about esoteric topics like Big Data. Also, these aren’t just for the biggies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook.

One look at Product Hunt and you’ll see that there are many startups today providing you with the tools, applications, and everything else you need to make good use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning.

With Google AdWords and Facebook Ads, for instance, both the advertising platforms have artificial intelligence and machine learning incorporated into their advertising system to help identify the objectives of your campaign, to enable you to find the exact audience you seek, to help you focus on the right advertising metrics, and more.

Google officially launched RankBrain™ to make technology rank websites along with its existing algorithm.

You don’t have to become a scientist; you just have to acknowledge that good things are happening while you work hard to launch your campaigns.

Exit Intent, Geo-targeting, and Referral Detection

How To Use Slide-Ins And Pop-Ups (And Still Play Nice)

Think lead generation and you can’t help but think of pop-ups and slide-ins. Usage of these are much debated in marketing circles, there are absolutely a few things you shouldn’t ever do such as confirmshaming.

Yet, popups just work.

What’s even better than regular popups and slide-ins, you ask?

It’s called exit intent technology.

Popups are deployed when visitors to your website are about to leave your site. Further, other intelligent technologies are also used to help detect where your visitors come from and change the messaging accordingly.

Or there’s referral detection where systems detect the exact site that referred this visitor to your website and then messages are changed to reflect that.

Modern-day tools that help you create popups, slide-ins, on-click popups, full-page gating come with these technologies enabled. You just have to start using them and learn to use these tools better.

Retargeting

retargeting - remarketing for conversion rate optimization

Nothing can make a difference to your paid campaigns as well as retargeting can. Do it right and you’ll surprise your competition with your lowest possible spending to get maximum results. Retargeting, despite being so effective, is rarely used. If and when it’s used, it’s never used up to its full potential.

With retargeting, you are targeting those who already visited your website (or landing pages or those who watched a video or maybe those who attended an online/offline event) with hyper-targeting campaigns specific to these visitors. These result in higher conversions at much lower costs.

Retargeting is now getting better. You now have access to cross-platform retargeting, device-specific retargeting, email retargeting, and so much more.

Marketing Automation

marketing automation

It’s been a while since marketing automation has been around. While most marketers and businesses are taking to it in a big way, we haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible. Marketing automation incorporates various technologies to make it possible to automate or at least semi-automate various marketing workflows for your business.

Got a new lead? Automatic emails can be sent out, or a complete customer onboarding sequence can be launched to nurture leads.

Shopping cart abandoned? A completely automated series of emails can go out there to nudge the potential customer who didn’t finish the transaction.

Need to send reminders to let users know that they need to upgrade and that their free trial is over? Marketing automation comes to the rescue.

Marketing Stack and Smart Integrations

As a business investing in digital marketing, you are likely to work with a marketing stack (a set of marketing tools) that works for your business. Arriving at the best marketing stack is trial and error anyway.

Let’s just assume that you do have a set of marketing tools to work with.

You’d then need a way to make all these various tools work together (and also with the completely independent and third-party entities such as Facebook and Google, for instance).

Here are a few (but varying) kinds of integrations you’ll need, for instance:

Facebook Lead Ads → CRM + Email Service Provider
Regular paid traffic sources → landing pages → Email Service Provider → CRM
Organic traffic → landing pages → Email Service Provider → CRM
Popups, Opt-in forms, Slide-ins → Email Service Provider → CRM

Each of these entities work different. Your email service provider and CRM will be central to complete marketing stack but you’ll have to figure out a way to connect them all together and make it work.

What do you think of technology making its way into your everyday marketing efforts? Which of these technologies have you already embraced?

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How the Right Service Business Model Can Elevate Your Business to 6 Figures https://doneforyou.com/service-business-models/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=service-business-models https://doneforyou.com/service-business-models/#comments Thu, 01 Mar 2018 13:54:54 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=2938 You already know the revenue opportunity when you grow a service business. Output in the US service sector is projected to increase 5.4 percent annually to nearly $2.3 trillion, up from about $1.2 trillion in 2008. There is no faster way to start making money today than providing services. A service business model describes how […]

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You already know the revenue opportunity when you grow a service business. Output in the US service sector is projected to increase 5.4 percent annually to nearly $2.3 trillion, up from about $1.2 trillion in 2008. There is no faster way to start making money today than providing services.

A service business model describes how you create and deliver value to your clients by offering a service for your target audience. A service business can provide any B2C or B2B service, from wedding photography to large software development projects.

In this article, we will focus on what types of revenue or income models you can use in your service business to help grow your revenue to six figures and beyond.

Five service business models

There are five service business models:

  1. The hourly model – get paid by the hour
  2. The retainer model – offer packages of hours
  3. The monthly model – receive a monthly fee
  4. The performance model – your rate depends on the results
  5. The project model – work per project or deliverable

Service business models

Sometimes, a service business operates under just one revenue model, and sometimes, it offers a mixture of different options. Choosing the right service business model can make or break your path to success.

But before discussing how to choose the suitable service business model, let’s briefly describe each of these models. A significant difference among all of them is how revenue is generated. So, let’s break it down.

1. The hourly business model

The hourly model is pretty self-explanatory. Your income is generated when you charge clients an hourly rate for your service. Many service businesses charge their clients by the hour when there’s a low monthly work volume.

The hourly business model is not easy to scale without increasing your fixed costs. On top of that, it’s possible that you will reach capacity soon. For instance, if you are a health coach, there’s a limit to the number of clients you can serve each week. If you have a consulting business, you’d need to hire an additional consultant as your business grows.

Another problem with the hourly rate is that you must track the hours worked before you bill your client. But sometimes, the client might expect to pay less or be unable to see how time-consuming a task is.

Also, the speed of completing tasks depends, among other factors, on the service provider’s experience levels. So, a junior designer might need three hours to design one log concept, while an expert designer can do it in less than an hour. In most cases, the hourly rate will reflect your experience levels.

Pros (+)

  • Flexibility
  • Applicable to most service businesses
  • Popular
  • The best way for a new client to get to know you

Cons (-)

  • Difficult to scale
  • It would be best if you tracked the time
  • Sometimes, you need to demonstrate the value
  • You work first and get paid after

Death by the hour?

Do you feel that you finally need to break free from the chains of the hourly rate? Let us eliminate guesswork and help you create digital products from your existing services, automate your lead generation, and set up a proven system for growing your revenue 24/7 on autopilot.

Click here to schedule a free strategy call!

2. The retainer model

The retainer model involves signing a contract for a certain number of hours. When the hours run out, you bill your client for another package of hours. When a client hires you on retainer, it’s like topping up their account with credits.

The retainer model, similar to the hourly model, can work for nearly any service provider who charges an hourly rate and provides an ongoing service.

A significant difference between the two models is that with the hourly model, you invoice the client after you’ve done the work, while with the retainer model, you get paid in advance for a package of hours.

The retainer model is time-bound instead of value-based. You get paid for the time you devote to your client. It’s also limited because there are only so many hours a day.

As with the hourly model, you need to track billable hours and display the result of your work. But it’s better than the hourly model because you have already sold part of your total work capacity, so you can now focus on acquiring clients to fill up your schedule.

Pros (+)

  • Applicable to most service businesses
  • Predictable income (to a certain degree)
  • A good option for ongoing services
  • Better value than the hourly pricing

Cons (-)

  • Limited scalability
  • Like with the hourly model, you need to track time and
  • Need to demonstrate the value, sometimes

3. The monthly model

Business model for agencies

The monthly model involves charging clients a monthly rate for ongoing work. Accountants or SEO experts frequently work every month. This income formula is best when repeatable tasks need to be done every month, e.g., creating backlinks and doing on-page SEO for a particular keyword.

Service businesses, like career coaches or consultants or practically any kind of service provider, can help clients for a monthly fee when a relatively large volume of work is repeated.

The monthly model is a good model for most service businesses. The benefits are that both the freelancer and the client know exactly what to expect regarding invoice value and deliverables. It also helps the client get into a habit mode and get used to paying you monthly.

Now, the monthly model can be one of the best options for your business because it allows you to estimate your monthly income as accurately as possible. It’s like having paying subscribers. With that in mind, it’s easier to manage your cash flow and strategize what you need to do to grow your service business even faster. In other words, the monthly model creates a safety net for you. You know that no matter what, you’ll be paid at least an X amount.

The monthly model is also perfect for companies that sell software and services. For example, a design and development company might work with clients for website updates and offer them a monthly subscription to a server or an email marketing platform.

Pros (+)

  • Suitable for any service provider, basically
  • Best for ongoing work
  • Best for steady streams of income
  • Builds up trust and a sense of security
  • Can work together with other service business models

Cons (-)

  • There are not any top-of-mind arguments against it

4. The performance-based revenue model

The performance model involves agreeing with your client on a specific fee structure or percentage according to the results you get. So, you either bill them based on a scale of dollar fees or commission percentages.

Suppose you’re a PPC advertiser running Facebook ads for a client. With the performance model, your compensation will vary depending on the revenue you generate for your client through those ads.

The performance model can be used by lead generation experts, SEO professionals, debt collectors, and direct sales businesses.

The performance model can be tricky, and you must be careful if you want to work on a commission instead of charging a flat or an hourly rate for your service. With this model, the freelancer takes some risk for several reasons.

First, you need to wait for results—and results take time. So, you write sales copy for a landing page, and your fees are calculated as a percentage of sales. But the sales cycle for that particular company might be three months.

Second, you do not control other factors that affect the results. Using the same example, the revenue generated from a sales page depends on several factors. One major factor is the level of incoming traffic. So, if your client runs short on budget, they could pause paid advertising channels. This will result in you receiving much lower compensation—unless, of course, you’re an insurance or real estate agent or an affiliate marketer, in which case you’re doing direct sales.

Third, your client business might not be optimized for results in other areas unrelated to your service. For example, the landing page designer might not have done good work, or the page’s loading speed might be deficient.

To combat the risk in the performance model, you can also charge an upfront flat fee on top of any royalties you earn. Now, you can cover your costs and eliminate the risk of not being paid at all. If the results are good, you will make a significant profit, probably larger than with the other business models.

You might want to pursue that route if you’re just getting started and want to make your service accessible to people who cannot afford a high flat fee. You’ll also want to pursue this model if you’re sure you can consistently meet your goals. However, remember that the performance model is probably the riskiest of the five service business models.

Pros (+)

  • It can yield much, much more than the other models
  • You can mitigate the risk if you receive an upfront fee
  • It is best for expert service providers who know they can hit the results

Cons (-)

  • It takes time to bear fruit
  • You’re not in control of other forces that might affect the results
  • You might not be aware of the client’s business situation
  • Risk not to get paid at all

Are you a service provider?

At DFY, we have solved the exponential business growth puzzle for dozens of coaches, authors, consultants, web designers, agencies, speakers, affiliate marketers, and other service businesses.

We can help you create digital goods from your existing services, promote those products, automate your lead generation, and set up a proven system for growing your revenue 24/7 on autopilot.

Click here to schedule a free strategy call!

5. The project-based model

With the project model, you estimate the hours needed beforehand but bill the client for the whole project. Usually, businesses that work on a project basis get a portion of the total fee in advance and then bill the client per milestone or with the end deliverable when the project is complete.

The project model works great when you can define the scope of a job before it starts and estimate the number of billable hours it would take to complete.

If you can bundle your services together, as an architect, construction company, or website developer would, then the project model can work for your business.

The project model can also refer to per-piece work. For example, a copywriter might be paid per article delivered.

With the project model, you can generate more revenue by combining services into a premium package. Also, working on a project allows you to offer an upsell to your client more easily than when charging by the hour.

This revenue model for service businesses also allows you to schedule your time better and organize your resources. If you’re working by the hour instead, a client might need something on short notice and expect you to adjust your schedule accordingly to deliver their urgent task.

On the other hand, there’s always the risk of underestimating the amount of work involved. If this happens, you’ll work more hours and be paid less than your service is worth. The monthly model may be a much safer alternative if you don’t want to risk being in that spot.

Pros (+)

  • Suitable for premium services that you can package together
  • Can create a higher revenue compared to the hourly model
  • You can get part of the payment in advance
  • Better allocation of resources

Cons (-)

  • It is easy to underestimate the workload
  • Big projects can stall

How to choose the perfect business model

Choosing a suitable service business model can pave the way to a six-figure business.

There’s no one-size-fits-all business model. So, how do you choose which one is the best fit for you, your team, and your customers? Which service business model will increase your bottom line faster?

Well, it depends. It depends on how you want to work with your clients and what type of work you do. It also depends on how risk-averse you are and how much you trust that your client has reasonable processes and systems.

Finally, it depends on your business’s stage. Are you just starting out, or are you an established business?

For example, if you’re a new freelancer, you might want to try the hourly model to gain experience and more easily reach potential clients.

On the other hand, if you’re an experienced service provider who works on a project basis, you might want to consider creating monthly packages for ongoing support, updates, or coaching. Not all of your clients will need those monthly services, but some will, and this way, you can increase your monthly income more easily than if you went out there seeking new clients.

It’s important to know your clients’ needs well to create complete packages of services that work best for them and your business.

Each model has certain benefits and risks. Consider these when structuring your pricing plans.

All these service business models can work standalone or combined for almost all industries and anyone who provides service to clients who want to outsource part of their ongoing work.

*

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MVPs: 7 Fundamental Components Of New Product Development https://doneforyou.com/mvps-components-to-new-product-development/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=mvps-components-to-new-product-development https://doneforyou.com/mvps-components-to-new-product-development/#comments Fri, 02 Feb 2018 16:12:35 +0000 http://businessinsiders.org/?p=1540 Have you ever heard the term ‘MVP’ as it refers to product development?  MVP stands for ‘Minimum Viable Product’ and relates to new product development, including digital products, software and lean startups that are launched quickly. Here’s the official definition of MVP: The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team […]

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Have you ever heard the term ‘MVP’ as it refers to product development?  MVP stands for ‘Minimum Viable Product’ and relates to new product development, including digital products, software and lean startups that are launched quickly.

Here’s the official definition of MVP:

The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” The definition’s use of the words maximum and minimum means it is decidedly not formulaic.  (Wikipedia)

The main advantage is that with an MVP, you take your new product to market as early as possible, instead of investing a lot of time, money and resources in making it perfect before it goes live.

Each of our DFY software solutions were built folloing a MVP product launch model and a lot of our clients employ it day after day.  What we do is build a working framework early, add beta testers through through either personal referral or paid traffic, and started adding features and fixing bugs that are uncovered.

The key is to solve your perfect customers most troubling problem right away, and then let them tell you what they want from there…  Something that we cover expansively in our Create book. and Create Mini-Course.

For example, we built TimeSlots because we needed a piece of software that would allow folks to pick a time on our calendar, collect contact details, and ask them a few questions… All inside one tool so we didn’t have to worry about the drop-off between the calendar and the survey.  That was it, so that’s where we started our new product development.

That was years ago now…  Since then, we’ve added a ton of other features that our users requested, including Paypal integration for call scheduling, two-way Google Calendar sync’ing, that ability to add a ‘buffer’ in between appointments…  And plenty more.

Right now, there are 264,000 available TimeSlots that our users have open for are scheduling…  Pretty crazy, right?

That was all from releasing an MVP, a Minimum Viable Product, and letting folks tell us what features they want us to add.

With that, let’s take a look at how some other companies work through new product development.

Start With The End In Mind

The single biggest thing about launching an MVP product is to have the ‘end in mind’ when you get started.  In other words, work backwards.

Take that initial problem that you’re looking to solve, and put it front and center.  Build your entire product or service around it.  You’ll find that it’ll be MUCH easier when you’re ready to go to market!

You’ll be able to describe exactly what your product does quickly, without a whole lot of education or hassle getting in the way.

In fact, Amazon has an interesting twist.  They start with an internal press release, where they write up that ‘launch’ release and use that as a basis for the whole project, from beginning to end!

Don’t Wait

Waiting and NOT doing something has a cost to it…  You lose time.  You give competitors a chance to gain ground.  Rules can change.  Ad platforms can shift.

I’ve been online for a long time and six months is a lifetime in terms of how dramatically business models can change, and with it your new product development.  One minute the hotspot is free, organic traffic.  Then everyone seems to be focusing on affiliate traffic.  Then, for whatever reason, it shits to paid traffic.  At the end of the day, launching your MVP is about doing what will work for you, right now, at this moment and focusing on ONLY that.

After you come to the conclusion that your idea is a good one, go full steam ahead.  Don’t lose focus.  Make sure that every bit of your working day is devoted to building and growing that one, Minimum Viable Product.

Christopher Janz has an interesting take on ‘How Fast Is Fast Enough.’  He says:

“Growth (a.k.a. traction) is the most important factor that attracts VCs and drives valuations in private financing rounds.”

No matter whether you’re starting a consulting business, building an app, or launching a marketplace; growth can only happen if you take action.

Perfection Is Overrated

Your MVP won’t be perfect.  Not by a long shot.  There will be bugs, glitches, misspellings, and a LOT of things could be better.

It will take WAY more time to make it perfect than it will to launch and tweak things later.  In fact, I’ve found that oftentimes people use the “It’s not perfect yet” line of thinking to mask the fact that they aren’t personally ready to go to market.

It’s an excuse.

They’d rather wait than hit the market with their new product, no matter how much they’ve invested already.  Maybe it’s risk.  Maybe it’s fear of failure.  Maybe it’s none of the above and they’re being a perfectionist.

The bottom line is that if you don’t launch anything and there’s no way for people to pay you for your product, your service, your software or whatever…  You will still be in the exact same place you are right now until you make up your mind to change.

As a testament to that, I found this article about ‘simple drawings‘ that can engage readers FAR more than professionally designed ones…  And secondly?  The ads that have the highest click-thru rate in paid traffic…  They typically have a handwritten font as the headline, like this.

Efficiency Is Everything

You know me – I’m a big fan of procedures and systems.  I think it’s the best way to convey the linear relationship that is business.  Traffic comes in through your sales funnel.  You get leads, sales and customers.  Everyone’s happy.

No where is efficiency more important than with your MVP product.  Why have a team of writers when you can do it yourself?  Why hire both a designer and a programmer when you can mock up the design you’re looking for and hand it off?

Don’t get caught up in going through courses and learning everything there is to know when most of it doesn’t actually matter for what you’re doing!  Just find one person with the skills to get it done for you

As an interesting aside, there’s actually this idea on parking.  Apparently, the first parking spot you see when you pull into a parking lot is the most efficient.

In business, it’s pretty much the same.  The simplest path of action is usually the most profitable, when you dedicate yourself to it!

Study The Losers

When we only study successes, this sample can only give advice from a limited perspective. We can learn from people who have failed as well and avoid a similar outcome. [Lifehacker]

It’s easy to see who’s doing well in a market in terms of new product development.  Most often, they’re covered by media outlets, you see their advertising all over the place, and your friends are sharing their stuff online.

The losers though?  They’re a little bit more difficult to track down.

If you don’t see any competitors in a market, it’s most likely because the business model was broken and the failed businesses couldn’t find enough interest to make their idea sustainable.

For the well funded startups, TechCrunch will cover them in their deadpool.  For those without funding or investment, they just go away.

After all, every business is made up of winning and losing campaigns!  The best businesses are the ones that overcome those setbacks and figure out how to change their strategy and grow in a different direction, like Slack.  Or coming out with an entirely new product, like Pinterest.

Prioritize

How do you prioritize when everything seems like it’s urgent?  A priority?

The first thing you want to do is make sure that your marketing is dialed in, at least for your initial campaign.  That’s where you’re going to spend a good deal of time.

If you aren’t able to sell your product or service, how do you hope to be sustainable?

Once you figure out the marketing end, it’s time to go to work supporting your customers, asking for feedback, and making your offer as good as possible.

Implement what your users want (within reason) and keep growing the marketing side!

If doing videos isn’t a crucial piece of your marketing strategy – don’t do them!  If getting bloggers to review your software isn’t required to get new customers – don’t pursue it!  If a course doesn’t seem like a great fit for teaching you exactly how to keep scaling your business – don’t buy it!

At the end of the day, everything is going to seem like it’s a priority.  It’s important for you to understand what truly is and what truly isn’t.

Get Your First Customer As Fast As Possible

The last, and most important piece of this MVP and new product development puzzle, is to get your first customer as fast as humanly possible.  Before you get your first customer, what you have is an idea that you’ve worked really hard on.

After you get your first customer though, it’s game on!

Once you get your first customer, then it’s time to get the second.  And the third.  And the fourth.  From there, automate the process, drive traffic and start scaling it!  That’s where we come in her at Done For You between our managed services and software apps.

I will tell you, the priority for your business is to make your product or service work with paid traffic, through Facebook or banner ads or blog posts.  Deliver value to your prospects and turn those prospects into sales…

 

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Finding The Perfect Niche https://doneforyou.com/perfect-niche/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=perfect-niche https://doneforyou.com/perfect-niche/#comments Fri, 08 Dec 2017 19:49:11 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=1151 If you’re like most rising “digital entrepreneurs,” when you start online, there seems to be opportunity everywhere. There are hundreds of thousands of affiliate products you can promote. You can create your own digital products. You can license other people’s products. The blessing (and the curse) of doing business online is that there’s very little […]

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If you’re like most rising “digital entrepreneurs,” when you start online, there seems to be opportunity everywhere.

There are hundreds of thousands of affiliate products you can promote. You can create your own digital products. You can license other people’s products.

The blessing (and the curse) of doing business online is that there’s very little risk to get started, so you’re largely left to your own devices when it comes to choosing a profitable path to go down!

That’s why we put together the Product Creation Mini-Course here…  It’ll help you brainstorm and build a product that you can start selling online :0)

Click here to get started >>

Today, I want to point you to 5 of the biggest, most profitable niches online, and then break them down into subcategories (that also represent relatively huge markets).

You can publish content in these markets, promote affiliate products, or sell your own digital products and services.

With that, let’s get started…

The Macro Markets

To put it simply, a ‘Macro-Market’ represents a billion dollar industry, made up of a bunch of ‘Micro-Markets.’

The Micro-Markets are specialized verticals within the bigger market, and serve to help us define what type of products we need to be creating or promoting…

The idea is that someone who wants to ‘get their ex back’ is most likely not the same person who ‘needs to get a date,’ despite being underneath the ‘Relationship’ category!

In other cases, a person who wants the ‘make money online’ is probably also in the ‘home-based business’ category…

So, it’s worthwhile to consider where your prospects are, and what problems you’ll be solving for them, before putting together your business model!

5 Macro Markets

Online, there are 5 big, major markets. In these big markets, you’ll find everything from lower end ebooks being sold, all the way up to physical products and 5-figure coaching and consulting deals…

  • Business and Marketing
  • Health and Fitness
  • Relationship and Dating
  • Survival and Preparedness
  • Self Help

NOTE: Survival hasn’t always been on this list. In recent years, and with huge cable channels jumping on board with reality TV shows dedicated to preparedness, it’s growing by leaps and bounds!

Now, let’s dig into each niche a little bit:

Business and Marketing

The business niche is and remains one of the most active and profitable markets on the planet, largely because there are so many different ways to go with it!

You can sell services, consulting, done for you programs, information products, courses, events… You name it.

Here are some of the largest verticals in the business space:

Make Money Online (MMO)

The make money online space is where most internet professionals start out… They see a course that’ll teach them how to be rich with the few clicks of a button, talking about some ‘hack’ or ‘loophole’ in Google that’ll solve all of their financial problems.

These courses do well. They make a lot of money. They also attract a ‘certain’ type of buyer and typically sell for less than $100.

Internet marketing (IM) or Business Development

I think of the Internet marketing niche as the older, wiser brother of MMO. The majority of people who start in the MMO space will graduate to the IM market quickly after, because they’re invested in the process of creating an Internet business, and need more specific information about Facebook, digital products, etc.

This IM market includes things like sales copy, paid traffic, free traffic, digital products, conversion strategies, blogging, social media, etc.

Sales and Leadership

The sales and leadership space caters to more established business owners, who have something to sell or have teams to run.

Oftentimes, this is the most profitable space of them all, because the rewards are much higher! A change in leadership style or tweaks in sales scripting or sales calls can equal six and seven figures a year in additional revenue.

Local marketing

Local marketing is just exactly like it sounds – helping local businesses market better online. This is where you take your skills as an Internet marketing or professional, and sell them to other local businesses who need your help!

Home-based business

A subtle tweak of the MMO space, is that of home-based businesses. Most people dream of working from home, and get into lots of different things to do that… They might bring their corporate job into their house. They might sign up for survey offers, or work as a ‘secret shopper.’

The home-based business crowd isn’t necessarily looking for an internet or affiliate product fueled profit stream – they are looking for a different way to make money that seems legitimate, like drop ship products or selling on Amazon.

Health And Fitness

There are very few niches bigger than health and fitness, and for good reason… So many people in this world need advice, help and information associated with health!

Not to mention, it’s an ongoing problem. Not all diets work for all people! So, you have some mega products like P90X or Insanity, and some that are quite bit smaller but still make lots of money!

Losing weight and burning fat

Products and services offered to help customers lose weight will always be around, and they’ll always sell well. Entire billion dollar industries are comprised in this one segment – supplements, training, workouts, gym memberships, video courses, ebooks, coaching.. The list goes on and on.

Workout programs

Surprisingly enough, workout programs aren’t necessarily part of the ‘weight loss’ niche, like you might think. Sure, working out does play a roll in burning fat, but there are lots of workouts that help customers do lots of different things – adding muscle, increasing strength, elevating endurance – to name a few.

Meal plans and recipe books

An additional part of the health and fitness space that deserves mention is meal plans and recipes created to serve a specific market. For instance, low-carb diets, gluten free meals, high protein recipes…

Getting toned or shredded

There are basically two types of people when it comes to losing weight, the folks who need to get rid of quite a few pounds and the people who just need to lose the last ten!

The diets, workout plans, and routines that each different type of person uses are quite different, so it only makes sense that these two groups of customers would be treated differently…

Powerlifting

An additional area of health and fitness is the powerlifting, or ‘bulking up’ segment. In fact, there’s an entire industry dedicated to helping people PUT ON weight and muscle! Again, these types of customers are going to need something different than what we talked about above.

Relationship & Dating

Relationships and dating advice is huge online, for a few reasons. Firstly, online dating is absolutely huge because people have busy schedules. Secondly, the majority of people are selfconcious and interacting on a keyboard is less threatening.

The same goes for ‘learning’ about dating… It’s easier to buy an ebook or a course and learn online than it is to seek help from a friend.

Reconnecting with your partner

With busy lives and incredibly high divorce rates, not to mention the temptations brought on by sites like Facebook, marriages are crumbling. Oftentimes, at least one of those partners are invested in saving the marriage, and turn to books and training to help them do just that.

Getting your ex back

Most relationships end in a breakup, for better or worse. Sometimes, if one side of the relationship still feels for the other side, they might make attempts to get that person back. There is an entire market online dedicated to arming that individual with strategies, tips, tactics, text messages and everything else associated with getting back together with ex’s!

Getting a date

Some people grow up without the confidence to go out and strike up a conversation with a girl or a guy… The ‘gettiing a date’ industry spans the gamut of one night flings, to geeky guys who ‘want the girl,’ to finding the perfect partner!

Committed Relationships

One of my good friends actually identified a trend, interestingly enough, about moving from a ‘relationship to a proposal’ that’s proven lucrative. The idea is to teach women how to get a guy to commit, while making him think it’s his idea! This can be spun lots of different ways, but is worth a mention in the dating industry.

Survival & Prepper

Whether you fear government collapse and massive epidemics or not, it’s worth noting that the survival niche is one of the quickest growing niches online.

There are lots of ways to cut up this space, but it’s always interesting when a market is 100% invested in ‘buying and holding’ goods!

Food storage

Did you know that there were food items that would store on a shelf for 25+ years? Yeah, me neither until I got into this market. The market for this kind of stuff is growing by leaps and bounds, all to stock up bunkers full of food!

Survival tactics (like hand to hand combat)

In a pandemic or government collapse, you’re going to need to know how to protect yourself and your family. This is a fear-based play, but there are guys making a lot of money in this market…

Living off the grid

How exactly would you live in a world without electricity and running water? Well, these courses and guides show you how, and in some cases help you build the resources to help you get there! Like solar power and water filtration…

Water purification

A necessity of post-apocalyptic survival is water. Reports, video courses and physical products are all being sold on purifying water and using it to live off of!

Self Help

What ‘niche’ report would be complete without a self-help section? You’ve seen it online, I’m sure. There’s an entire industry dedicated to improving one’s mindset, minimizing limiting beliefs and the power of visualization…

Law of attraction

All the good things you want in life, you ‘attract.’ Believe me? Well, there’s an entire market dedicated to teaching that fundamental principle, and it’s making a lot of people a lot of money!

Mindset shifts

How do you react to success? To failure? To jealousy? When it comes to the way you think and your mindset, there are products catering solely to shifting your focus towards the advantages of every situation…

Negative beliefs

Supremely negative people have a hard time living life, and these types of products aim to help them shift their belief system to that of a more accepting, nurturing variety.

Changes in outlook or demeanor

How we see things has everything to do with our feelings toward it… Whether that be an event, the way we were treated, what was said to us, etc. These types of self-help products help change the way we think about situations, and put more of a positive light on them…

What do we recommend?

That is a very tough question…

The correct answer is the niche that makes you a lot of money and you can be proud of the work you do AND love your life while doing it…  I can tell you from first-hand experience that dedicating years of your life barking up the wrong tree sucks…

I’m a big believer in monetizing your passions.  Do something that you don’t consider to be work, even though others might.  Build products.  Create a coaching program.  Write a piece of software.  If you’ve solved something other people are struggling with, there’s good money to be made there!

The whole first part of my book, Create: Transform What You Know Into How You Get Paid, is dedicated to figuring out what you should do and how it’ll line up with prospective buyers.

At the end of the day, do something you love and don’t do it for free!

SaveSave

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The Ultimate Guide to Selling Digital Products: Master Your Sales Funnel https://doneforyou.com/launch-sell-digital-products-guide/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=launch-sell-digital-products-guide https://doneforyou.com/launch-sell-digital-products-guide/#comments Mon, 04 Dec 2017 16:46:56 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=1107   Creating and selling digital products can be challenging, but not if you’ve got the proper digital product sales funnel! This post will serve as your roadmap through our Done With You Accelerator! You don’t have an email list to mail to and get a quick hit in revenue…  You don’t have affiliates you can […]

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Get Done For You Courses & Marketing! Click Here >>

 

Creating and selling digital products can be challenging, but not if you've got the proper digital product sales funnel!

This post will serve as your roadmap through our Done With You Accelerator!

You don't have an email list to mail to and get a quick hit in revenue…  You don't have affiliates you can call to mail your offer out…  Nor do you usually have any data that will help you determine that your thing will sell.

If you've been in your space for a while or creating a product because you found a solution to a problem you faced, you've got a much better chance of knowing it's viable, but you still have to get the sales funnel structure right.

I'll walk you through the basics of setting up and selling digital products in this mini-tutorial. You might already be halfway down this list, and that's awesome…  Good for you!

After working with hundreds of clients and launching hundreds of offers into the marketplace, this is our process for getting it done…

Step 1: The Product

The first step to selling anything online is to figure out what you should be selling. Sometimes, that's gut instinct. Sometimes, you see a need in the market that you know needs to be filled. Other times, you see a way to put your unique spin on something to make it more effective or solve a related challenge.

You need to ask yourself, "How can I best help my customers solve a problem in their lives…" Is that through a digital product, a service-related offer, or a consulting experience?

The other question you need to ask yourself is, "How do I want my business

There are plenty of things you can sell and various formats you can package them in.

You can put together the following:

  • eBooks delivered as a PDF or through a Kindle/iBooks
  • Video Courses fulfilled on your website or through a Learning Management System (LMS)
  • Audio Courses fulfilled on your website or through an LMS
  • Digital newsletter delivered regularly through email
  • Membership is where members receive access to any of the formats mentioned above

Step 2: The Offer

And you'll need to create the product, too :0)

Unfortunately, most people new to building a business online think that once their product is complete, they're all done…  When really, they're just getting started. The next step is selling digital products online (or offline!)

Next, you need to figure out your "offer." In simpler terms, you present an offer for acceptance or rejection.

You might offer your membership for $67 a month, your ebook for $37, or your "assisted coaching program," which gives members access to a digital course for $1,500 a month.

Your offer is where you can get creative. You can do the following:

  • Single, one-time payment
  • Multiple payments spread out over a payment plan
  • Monthly payments for as long as your subscriber remains in your program
  • Front-end downpayment with smaller monthly payments as they remain a member
  • Free trials with memberships after so many days or weeks

There are lots of ways you can make your offer…  You might want to bake that into your request if you wish to subscription revenue. If you'd rather have upfront cash, that's fine, too.

Step 3: The Sales Funnel

When selling digital products online, you will need a sales funnel.

A sales funnel isn't a standalone page that gets an email optin… That's called a landing page.

It is also not a standalone page with some sales copy asking for the sale—that's a sales page.

A "sales funnel" is a series of pages, sales copy, and email copy that quickly moves a prospect through the buying process and automates as much of it as possible.

Your sales funnel needs to be built for your offer. We discuss this extensively in the Convert book.

If it's a higher ticket, you'll need a webinar. You can get away with a sales video if it's the lower ticket. In both cases, you will want to have a lead magnet set up to get people converted into your email list so you can market to them in the future.

Here's an example layout of our Webinar Sales Funnel:

And here's the design of our Video Sales Letter Funnel:

Each funnel starts with a landing page giving away a free 'something' like a report or ebook.

Then, there's either a sales page with a sales video:

Or, a webinar registration page:

And, each of those sales pieces is backed up by some solid email marketing automation…

Your conversions will be better if you ask for the sale earlier. If you wait too long, your prospects won't be as engaged as they should be…

So, we create done-for-you sales funnels with our clients that capitalize on buyers ready to take action immediately AND buyers who still need some warming up!

That way, you get the fast revenue you need to re-invest in growing your business while also growing a tribe and loyal base of customers that will buy from you for months and years…

Step 4: Getting Traffic

Now, there are lots of ways to get traffic…  You can write blog posts, wait for Google to index the content, and hopefully rank you somewhere favorable.

You can try to wrangle affiliates to mail for you, but you need to put up with their schedules and suffer a lot of rejection if you don't have a personal relationship with them.

You can write press releases or sit on forums answering questions and hopefully directing enough people back to your site to make a dent.

Our favorite way of getting traffic is to pay for it! This is from a guy who used to say he was allergic to paid traffic and lived for SEO'ing websites…

Now, there are many places where you can get traffic, but only a few will make sense for your offer. You can get traffic from:

  • Facebook - the one most people start with because it's generally easy to set up
  • Google Adwords is arguably one of the best sources of traffic on YouTube, but it is more challenging to figure out.
  • YouTube Ads - solid when you're using video in your marketing
  • Pinterest - very niche-specific but low cost when you use it correctly
  • Native ads - works well with offers embedded in blog posts and advertorials

Also, we're happy to dive in and take a look at what the best traffic source is for you and your offer if you set up a free Action Plan call with us here:

Schedule An Action Plan >>

 

Wrapping Up

Selling digital products is an excellent way of starting and growing a business online. The cost of fulfillment is almost non-existent. You don't need a physical location or inventory. However, you need to solve a real problem in the world and also make sure that your target market knows you exist...

Building an online business isn't a "Build it, and they will come kind of thing...

If you don't figure out how to grow your brand awareness and put people on your sales video or webinar, it will be an uphill battle no matter how much work you've put into the product.

If you'd like to jump on the phone and chat about your product, traffic sources, or sales process, please click here to set up a call with us!

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The Truth About Easy https://doneforyou.com/the-truth-about-easy/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-truth-about-easy Thu, 21 May 2015 21:20:37 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=6606 To get the sale, you need to get the lead To get the lead, you need to get the conversion To get the conversion, you need to get the traffic To get the traffic, you need to put up the ad To put up the ad, you need to write the copy To write the […]

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To get the sale, you need to get the lead

To get the lead, you need to get the conversion

To get the conversion, you need to get the traffic

To get the traffic, you need to put up the ad

To put up the ad, you need to write the copy

To write the copy, you need to have the hook

To have the hook, you need to have the product

To have the product, you need to solve a problem.

To solve a problem, you need to know your market.

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The Road To Success https://doneforyou.com/the-road-to-success/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-road-to-success Mon, 26 May 2014 21:17:04 +0000 http://doneforyoucom.wpenginepowered.com/?p=6603 There are two types of people in this world. Producers and consumers. We, as business people, are both; producers and consumers. We produce content. Videos. Courses. Products. Ebooks. Manufactured good. We take an IDEA and turn it into a reality. And that’s the magical part. We dream something up, put it to paper, and create […]

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There are two types of people in this world.

Producers and consumers.

We, as business people, are both; producers and consumers.

We produce content. Videos. Courses. Products. Ebooks. Manufactured good.

We take an IDEA and turn it into a reality.

And that’s the magical part. We dream something up, put it to paper, and create something out of it. Something that can be sold. Something that will help others.

Every once in a while, a ‘producer’ will create something so rare, so unique, that it’ll be a viral hit. They’re vision will hit the market at the right time and be adopted by the masses.

Think GoPro. iPad. Facebook. Pinterest. Instagram.

More often though, the road to success is quite a bit longer.

Having a Great Product Is Not Enough

It’s not enough that we have a great product or that it serves people and fixes their problems. It’s not enough that our product is offered at a fair and decent price.

Nor is it enough that we think that everyone in the world should buy our product.

You see, a product on it’s own rarely scales.

You might sell one copy. Maybe two. And that’s if your friends and family decide to help you out.

More likely, you won’t sell anything.

You will have put all the hard work into producing or creating something, only to fall short when the rubber meets the road.

When it’s time to actually start selling it.

And that’s where most people stop.

The Key To Success Is Failing Fast

They tried. They hoped that it’d work, but it didn’t. They put months and months into bringing something to market and had no success.

No results.

That’s the unfortunate reality for most producers. Most entrepreneurs. They try and fail – and then give up.

There are a very select few who don’t.

They don’t care how many times they fail.

Or how many ideas fall short.

They are going to ‘win’ come hell or high water.

Those are the folks who succeed – the ones who know that survival in business is based on the idea that it takes multiple efforts.

Multiple products.

Multiple ideas.

Your Product Doesn’t Matter

And really, in the overall scheme of things, the product is what matter least of all!

You can take a shitty product and put great marketing behind it, and make millions. You just need to understand who you’re buyers are and what problem they’re trying to solve!

If you know that, you can sell anything.

And it all starts with a simple process… Engagement.

It doesn’t matter if you’re buying traffic or working with free traffic, you need to get engagement from your prospects.

That might be an optin to your list, a video view, or a clickthrough to an affiliate product. Once you get engagement, you can start to split test and scale your product.

It all starts with mini-successes and starting with something that works! It doesn’t have to be a sale, but it does have to be something.

So tell me, what challenges are you having when it comes to selling online?

The post The Road To Success appeared first on Done For You.

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