Online Course Creators podcast

37:56

David Abrams is the co-founder of Demio, a webinar platform built for marketing. When he was working at a job, he learned about digital marketing, SEO, content, advertising, and managing web design teams. After that, he started an agency business, providing digital marketing services to individual businesses — like building sales and marketing funnels, setting up the automation, etc. Eventually, David got drained working with clients and felt that he was building other people’s businesses, and not his own. He, too, wanted to build his own product — and he and his business partner built a webinar tool — Demio. In this episode, you’re going to discover how to leverage the power of webinars to engage with your audience on a deeper level and hence sell more offers. . Here’s just what one of David’s clients say about him: “David is one of the greatest, if not the greatest person I have ever worked with. His intelligence with the Internet and technology still continues to amaze me. Without David Abrams, Mojo Video Marketing would not have half of their websites, sales funnels, and webinars. He is the real deal and anyone is his looking for graphic design help, website help, SEO help or anything to deal with current marketing, David Abrams is the man to go to.” Taylor Wellman Co-Owner of Financial Potion . In this episode you’ll discover: [01:53] How David became a SaaS co-founder [06:00] Why david decided on building a webinar tool and why being naive helps [08:21] The most common misconception of using webinars to sell courses [11:18] Problems people face when trying to run a successful webinar [12:55] How to optimize your next webinar based on data/feedback [14:49] How to follow up with webinar registrants for more sales [19:58] How Demio compares to Zoom [22:52] 5 steps to a successful webinar [28:11] How to turn a failed webinar into a win [31:38] How to get attendees to pay attention to you during the webinar [33:19] #1 advice for people who want to be successful at selling via webinars . Quote “Just because webinars have been “abused” as an instant sales generating tool… doesn’t always mean it has to be that way.” ~ David Abrams . Transcript Interviewer (Welly Mulia): Welcome to another episode of The BirdSend Academy podcast. This is the show for online course creators who want to build a profitable business by sharing your skills and knowledge. This is your host Welly Mulia, if you are not listening to this on our website, go to academy.birdsend.co/7 to get your show notes. This show is brought to you by BirdSend Email and Marketing Tool; the only email and marketing tool specifically created for online course creators. Get your free forever account at birdsend.co. Today’s guest is David Abrams, David is the co-founder and the CEO of Demio Live Communication platform built to help SaaS companies feel grove through interactive onboarding, education and marketing webinars. David has created, built and sold multiple softwares and is now focused on building the most powerful webinar platform designed for growth, he is an operations geek, team builder, foodie, traveler and philanthropist. In this episode, we are going to cover how to use webinars to sell more of your online courses. David, it’s great to have you here. Interviewee (David Abrams): Thanks for having me everyone, I am really excited to be on the podcast, to share some knowledge with everyone and yes I am excited to be here. Welly Mulia: Cool. So, David you built Demio which is a webinar platform, I know that you were previously an internet marketer which is totally different with Demio, which means you are a SaaS product owner. How did you transition from and being an internet marketer to a SaaS business like Demio? David Abrams: Yeah, I know that’s a great question, and it is kind of a fun journey and I wanted to make sure it is known that I am one of the co-founder of Demio, I do have amazing co-founder who was also in internet marketing as well, so we kind of have the same journey, but really I came into internet marketing like a lot of people, I had a job in marketing and the company I was working for was selling digital products and I really got into the world of digital marketing, just trying to figure out, how could we sell products online? Started learning content marketing, SEO, advertising, started managing graphic design teams and web teams and starting to understand how you can create media channels and sales pages, webinars and all those other things, so I really utilized the job to learn all these different things, and when I branched out on my own to become an internet marketer, I started to launch what I call an agency, but it was really to begin with me selling services online to individual businesses and this was about 7 or 8 years ago, so this was still when there wasn’t as many agencies as there are today. But I went through that and I built up the team, I didn’t love that part of internet marketing which was like the service-based stuff, you would do services and you would be tied to this company. So, I tried to reform the company to be about marketing specific tactics, so it was just like web design development kind of stuff, I started doing marketing funnels before Rustle Brownstein came out with his own book and funnel became the keyword, I was building these campaigns out in infusion soft, and a couple other different platforms that had automations back then, so that was really good, I was doing really well, but I still kind of got drained working with clients, like just feeling like I was just building my own business, I constantly felt like I was in the trenches trying to build other people’s businesses, and all my time was into them, and I really wanted to get into a product where I owned the product, the work that I did grew, but there was also a little bit of fear in me because I was saying goodbye to services which paid all my bills, I had employees, stuff like that. And so, it was kind of a scary transition and you also had this thing where all of a sudden you are bedding everything on yourself, there could be 6 months of no income because you are no longer just doing services for those other people, and it is kind of easy, like an easy way as internet marketer to do services, when you are building your own product, you take a lot more risk, right? So, I started building a couple of small softwares and I built the first one and it was Infusion Soft ad-on, and I built two more, sold them off and then eventually became friends with my co-founder in Tempo, we met up in a mastermind, and we were just kind of helping each other along the way during this kind of process of us building and upgrading our businesses as we went, and we were both using webinars in certain ways, I was helping webinar campaigns being built, utilizing some parts of my business, he was utilizing to sell his digital marketing services and SEO products and stuff like that, and we just found a major hole in the market place. At this point, I kind of had honed my knowledge around how to build teams in the operations and the development side of the things, I had learned from these different agencies and I was able to bring that to his vision and we kind of came together and started this process. About now, almost 4 and half years ago. [thrive_toggles_group”] [thrive_toggles title=”Click to reveal the entire transcript” no=”1/2″] Welly Mulia: Interesting. I know that before the Demio journey, it’s interesting you said you were in the agency business, then Demio. I think somewhere in between or so, there was a certain period of time that you also released products in the internet marketing space, right? David Abrams: Definitely. Welly Mulia: So, you mentioned the Infusion ad-on, and why webinars? You mentioned that there was a major hole. What made you decide to? Because there would always be holes in the industry. Why did you decide on webinars? David Abrams: You kind of asked a couple questions there, so I am going to answer both things. There was many periods where I was doing internet product launch, where I was launching information products, so that was kind of like my first steps into building up that product that I really wanted, like I said, so I started doing that, I partnered with some people that had products and I did the marketing side of things. But really, the way I look at a lot of these things is that I am trying to up-level every time, I am just trying to take another step up, can I learn how to do this? So, I started doing some product launches, making money with that, then we started building software, product launching those and so that was really like the internet marketing products, but when we got to the point that me and my co-founder were kind of coming together, the hole in the market that we saw when ‘go to webinar’ was kind of like the king here for pretty much all of the internet marketers, but it was continually crashing, and there were problems, it wasn’t built for marketing, we were having issues, to build webinar campaigns and I was building funnels for customers, it took couple of days sometimes to put these campaigns out, so we had this vision, this pain point on social media, on forums, people were vocalizing, can someone please do something about this? Can someone please fix this? And we were like, okay, awesome, the marketplace has this pain. Now, the real transparent truth is that when we started down this journey, we were a little naïve at how I guess it would be easy… we thought it would be easy to do this, based on our knowledge about building products, we were like we could build this out, but this was an incredibly difficult product to build and during the process of us building it, things like webinar came up and other competitors started popping up, so what was once kind of a less competitive market place, became more competitive because of technological things like Google Hangouts people built on top of, or the list of web ITC, so there’s still a lot of technical hurdle to get in the webinar space, and I don’t envy anyone who decides to create a webinar company because of how difficult it’s been, but I think that because we were so naïve, it allowed us to go into a journey which was very rocky, it took us 2 years to get our product to market it. Welly Mulia: Okay, cool. So, having been in the webinar space for so long now, what do you think is the one misconception about using webinars to sell courses? David Abrams: That’s a great question. Webinars; a lot of people think of them in the internet marketing terms which is sometimes just purely sales-oriented, slimy, boring, there is an intro for 30 minutes about the person and then it is heavy on the pain point, and it’s just selling your course. So, I think that especially inside the circle of internet marketing, so many people, that’s what they think, when they hear the word webinar, but the truth is, now that we have been doing it for some years, we have seen all of the different industries across the world and how people are using webinars and you have to understand that webinars are one-to-many live communication platform or one-to-many live communication strategy that is vital for businesses, it is the basics of business, it is relationship building, it’s networking, it’s transparency, it’s trust building, it’s credibility building, it’s storytelling, it’s all the powerful things in business and there is a lengthy of used cases, you can used them for lead generation, demand generation, onboarding, training, education, branding, again it could be sales at some lower level, it could be retention, it could be higher level training to keep your SaaS customers longer, right. That might be pay trainings or there might be advanced trainings for users on a monthly basis where you might do a webinar and keep your users longer, because now you are increasing the user-understanding of your product. And I think that the problem is that most people, when they hear webinars, they are looking at it from the short-sided kind of standpoint of, I want to get as many people on here and just drive my revenue up and make a bunch of sales right now, and I see that a lot in internet marketing, and you can abuse strategies, you can abuse tactics, but when you truly understand that there is so much power in having this live communication, you can really build great relationships, build a solid pipeline to carve qualified leads coming out at the other end. So, I think the misconception is just that, just because it has been abused doesn’t mean that they all have to be framed in that perspective. Welly Mulia: Yeah. I agree in this industry that we are in, a lot of people think that webinar is only a tool for making sales. Like you said just now, it’s more than just that, you can actually onboard people, build relationships, have trainings, tutorials and just connect with your audience, so that’s a great one. What do you think is the number one problem people face when it comes to hosting a successful one? David Abrams: I think there is a lot of problems that people face, and I guess you would have to ask, where are they in their business cycle? So, I think like someone just starting out might have a different problem than someone who’s got like 10 million dollars a year business, I think each segment of the market may have different problems. But the number problem that I see people face when they are trying to host a successful webinar is this is their first time with webinar most prevalent is thinking that they are going nail the campaign, whatever the campaign goal is, thinking that they are just going to write this, and they are going to put it up on the registration page, they are going to put an ad out and nail it. The third process here is that webinar is like any part of your marketing, an organic process, it takes time to test them, to optimize them, to see what reactions you get back from your market place, angles that you talking about, the right angles, the solutions that you are talking about, the actual solutions that your market place wants or needs, things that you are talking about, the stories you are telling, are you being engaging enough? Like this is something that you should utilize every day and sometimes maybe weekly, maybe monthly, but this is something that you can use all the time in your business, so why would you just want to do it one-time and be like I am done, one-time we are good, think of it organically, allow yourself to look at the metrics and kind of figure out what to change, but when you go into it, just make sure that you have the mindset for that. Welly Mulia: So, you mentioned about all these different moving parts, the testing, optimizing, maybe the angle is not right, maybe you are not telling the right story that connects with your audience. How do you go about testing and then optimizing your next webinars? How do you test it from the current data that you have? David Abrams: Well, I think it’s two things, I think one, the best part about the webinar is the live communication aspect of it, you can get live feedback from your audience, you can use polls to understand specific things, where are you in your market place? Do you like this? Yes, no… You can get this actual, real-time cues, you can get questions at the end, are there a lot of questions that was not answered? Were there a lot of confusion about what the offer is, if it was a sales webinar? Did people understand the training? Do you need to optimize that? I like a lot of times to stop, and be interactive with my webinars, so I would literally sit there and ask questions throughout and make sure that people aren’t just sitting there, listening, like it’s a video, I want to interact, to be part of it, so I am using polls, I use handouts, I am asking questions, I am stopping, I might do a contest at some point. The other thing is you want to look at your analytics and see where are people dropping off? How many people showed up? Is my hook from my webinar even strong enough to get people to show up? What percentage of this people did show up? And can I look at who that audience is? Are they my target market? Were they the wrong target market? So, those things actually give you data to see… the biggest things you want to pay attention to is your hooks, the big ideas as Tod Brown likes to say, ‘the big idea of your webinar, is it strong enough that it is attracting the right people and the right people enough’? Welly Mulia: And how do you go about… You mentioned just now from the analytics part where you can see who showed up, who didn’t show up, so what do you do with these people… After the webinar, of course you are going to have a follow-up, right? Usually that’s what happens, and are you doing different things with the automations depending on who showed up and who didn’t show up, they get the same message or different message, how does that work? David Abrams: Totally, so I am a big proponent of first of all; simplicity, so if you are coming in for the first time, and you are running your first webinar, don’t get overwhelmed with all these different campaigns, focus on the actual presentation itself, that’s the critical piece, once you have some kind of things going on and you feel good about it, then you can start looking at building those follow-up campaigns. Now, inside of Demio, we give you analytics to see those segments and also hook it up to your CRM, to automatically have this segments go out, so that if you did want to have these email campaigns go out, we would automatically segment them for you and what I typically do for those who do not attend is, I try to get them back to an on-demand replay, then I want to do an on-demand replay so that I can make sure that I can see that they signed up, I can see how long they watched in that on-demand replay in Demio and stuff like that. But you can also take them to a video replay or just a video on a page but it does not have the same experience. For those that don’t attend, typically what I am doing in that campaign is I am trying to just really drive them to that video, I want them to watch, I want them to see it, then I am going to be kind of slowly softly talking about whatever that training was, or if there was an offer for sales, I might be slowly talking about that. For those who attended, what I typically do is I have a goal in my campaign, by this again, I am talking about through the lens of a sales webinar, I am going to have a goal of that campaign being like, if they buy the product, pull them out of this campaign, but if they attended and did not buy, I would… again something about the replay initially, but then what I would do is I would create emails that basically outline all the major objections that people typically have for buying my product and I try to overcome these objections. The best way you can do this is with videos, testimonials, case studies along the way, and I would link them to the offer as I go to through the objection overcome, but the goal here is, for some reasons, these people attended, they had a chance to watch the video, but they haven’t bought yet, and I want to get over any objections they may have, so I am going to try to answer as many of those as possible. Welly Mulia: And regarding the on-demand replay versus the video on a page. What is the difference between that? David Abrams: So, on-demand replay in Demio is basically a webinar where they would sign-up for it again, or you just have like a one-click link, where they click it and they log right into the webinar room, but in this case, it would play inside the Demio, just like it was live, with our on-demand webinars, you can see all the chats coming in, but here you can launch the polls again, you can launch the handouts, you can call their actions, just like you had them in your live webinar, so the experience, even if they didn’t make it, would still be similar, a lot of times, with the video replays, what people do is they just scroll through the video, they just scroll through the content, is there anything I like? They look at the offer and then bounce off the page, so you have a really low kind of engagement on those replays. With on-demands, you can utilize the same power of those actual webinars, by having an on-demand replay, then of course you can see analytics of those on-demand events as well. Welly Mulia: And with the on-demand replay that Demio has, do you have the live chat as well? I mean, the participants can see, but they actually ask questions like typing inside the live chat? David Abrams: They can, a future feature that we are having coming out here very soon is we are going to have the ability with those messages to eventually be able to… this would probably be real soon, but be able to save messages into the timeline so you can save their chat, so you are also going to be able to turn on notifications to get email notifications when those chats are coming in, be able to email reply to them. Eventually, we are also going to have somewhere where you can have a direct reply as those messages do come in, into the chat. But that’s going to be on-demand, now if you have an automated session in Demio, let’s say you sent to people that did not attend, like hey, we are hosting this session 3 more times tomorrow and this is going to be our schedule recordings, pick a time that works for you, you can actually log in to schedule sessions and chat with people that are live in the chat. Welly Mulia: Nowadays Zoom is getting very big; how does that compare? Zoom is initially meetings, but they have an ad-on for webinars as well, I have been on training programs where the whole training session was held on Zoom, so how does that compare with a solution like Demio? How does that compare? Well, I think we have multiple competitors that are bigger competitors, and I think that you have to understand that Demio is not just live communications, I look at Zoom, I look at Go-To Webinar, both of us are just like live communication platforms that were built through the lens of meetings first, and then they were like, okay, let’s add on some other things that we can do with video communication. So, that was the basics behind it, for us, we built Demio through the lens of marketing and sales and they were met, that is the goal of the tool, it just happens that the medium right now is webinars, but we can open that using live communications to do anything, meetings and sales demos, summits, all types of things, but by being at the core marketing and sales and they were met, are functions, are features on how things work, the interactive and engaging tools that we have in analytics, all of those things help you drive more results of whatever you are looking for, and I think that is the key thing and the key differentiator. I think also, our usability, our customer experience, and our attendee experience, we really put a ton of time into building a platform that attendees love to join, it’s in the browser, it’s one click, it’s intuitive, there is no downloads, there is not a lot to figure out, and for presenters, there is nothing you have to learn, you could be a first-time on there or your 50 th , a couple bonds is really easy and beautiful to utilize. Welly Mulia: Awesome. So, are you and your partner programmers? David Abrams: Yeah, one of us, we are both business, marketing and operations founder, so we do have the engineering team has been kind of the saviors of Demio. Welly Mulia: Okay. So, did you use your previous skills as hiring teams? Did you hire and recruit them all by yourself? David Abrams: Exactly. So, that was some of the skill set that I brought to Demio was hiring and hiring is something I have done for many years now, based on the kind of journey that I have had. So, we hired an amazing team, we have an awesome team that we’ve all hired individually, we have created a great culture here at Demio, the remote culture, and it is so awesome to see this team, I am so proud of our team. But I have also helped other SaaS companies hire great people, build their teams and help them build their culture as well, so it is something that I definitely enjoy doing, and I feel that is one of my strong suit, as an operational founder, but it is not easy, hiring is never easy. Welly Mulia: Yeah, definitely. A lot of people that I also talk to, also including myself think that hiring is very hard, because a lot of people are not good at managing people, so that part is definitely challenging. David Abrams: Yeah, it can be. Welly Mulia: So, what do you think is the step to a successful webinar, when I say successful, I mean sales here, because we are focusing on how to get sales using webinars. David Abrams: So, what are the steps that you have to take? Welly Mulia: Yeah, what are the steps that you have to take to make a successful webinar? I know it is a lot to cover, but you can give the gist or the summary of it, so that listeners here can take advantage of your knowledge and experience and they can execute the steps based on what you are going to share. David Abrams: Yeah, there is a lot, and we have like a full course on this, it’s like 50 plus videos that goes through this whole thing at Demio, and it does seem kind of overwhelming when I say it like that, but when I say the key thing that I think is most overlooked is first understanding your customer avatar, truly knowing what the pain points are that your customer in your market place has and the solution that you are providing for them, the bigger the problem that you are trying to solve, the more results your and eyes you would get on the webinar. So, it all starts with that customer avatar, then it really has to do with, again, finding the pain points, understanding what you are going to talk about and how you are going to have that solution laid out, the next thing that really matters is your offer, because you could have the best webinar in the world, but if your offer isn’t well put together, isn’t well-thought out, straight forward, easy to use, and a no-brainer deal, then the whole thing can also come down on the sales webinar, so the next thing would be looking at your offer, what does that look like, does that also help solve the pain point that you are looking at, how can you build in new bonuses or new ad-on or fast action items, how can you reduce the risk, mitigate risk with great guarantees. and not only just money back guarantees , but can you do anything above and beyond for people to really reduce, mitigate that risk, then of course it is laying out the content, and we typically walk you through this, in our courses and stuff like that, then we are really saying that you have to make sure you kind of have the offering, and then you build the content based on the pain point and you are really trying to teach and sell, meaning you are trying to build in these open loops of your solution in the teaching aspects, so it’s not just like, hey, I am going to educate you for 30 minutes and then you just randomly flipped me to sell your product, your job with the content is to open-endedly talk about the problems that they may be facing, how to solve them, but also giving contextual clues that when you get to that pitch it now makes sense to your content, so an example of that would be helping someone, talking about the golf game and this is how to improve your drive by 100 yards… But all the way through, you could be talking about how it is about… the type of club and how you are holding it, or the type of swing you need, and pain points that a lot of times you see people with their stance, and that’s the big thing that people need to understand is 3 mechanisms of the stance that you have to know, you go through those 3, and you say, wow, there are actually 7 different things that you have to pay attention to, and we will get into that later… And then when you get into your solution, stuff like that, you can actually then kind of link it back to that content, after that, you kind of get to your content, then work on that intro, the retention strategies throughout, then you need to think about your registration page and this is one of the biggest ones, you want to make sure you are testing that headline and hook, and you can even do this task before you write your webinar, just to make sure that the content and the major piece of your webinar is the thing that has the highest need in the market place, does your target audience even have any interest in learning about this? I have run polls in Facebook groups, I have run ads, just to see what the interest level is, I have had opt-in forms up, just to see if I can get opt-ins for a specific webinar before we even wrote it, so it is kind of like a minimum viable webinar, just to see like will this really attract people’s interest, that registration page hook, that headline, the bullet points, the copy, all that stuff on the registration page should really be the selling point for your webinar, because that would be where you get the most registrants in, and then of course you need to be able to get them on the webinar by having that webinar be a good training, educational piece that really helps them solve that pain. Again, it is a big process, there is a lot of things but it really all starts with understanding your customer, knowing the pain points, understanding the hook that you are going to use, really making sure that you have a strong offer, creating a presentation, having a registration page setup, obviously then launching the webinar itself, paying attention to your analytics, the feedback you are getting and then eventually you have a really good system laid up. Welly Mulia: You mentioned about a minimum viable webinar page, just to gauge how interested people are in a specific webinar on a particular topic. So, what happens if only a few people sign-up? Do you cancel the webinar? Let’s say less than 10 people sign up, do you cancel the webinar or do you just go ahead? David Abrams: No, I would definitely say it’s where you are in your business. Let’s say you get only 3 of those 10 people to signup, if you are a new business that maybe would be worth your time to test and play with it, it does take energy, it does take time. Again, if you are a little bit far in your business and you don’t have time for that stuff, it may not make economic sense for you to be on that call, so on that point, yes, I may cancel and I may try it again, can I get… my goal is getting 100 registrants, can I do that? And I am going to test the different headlines, the different angles until I can say hey, I know this thing is going to be of interest to people, because if you are only getting 10 people let’s say you are asked a kind of open-ended question, let’s say this was an ad that you were running, and in this ad, you had 100 people visit your page and only 10 registrants, a 10% conversion rate tells you a lot, so that’s totally different if you had 12 people to your registration page and 10 people opted in, it’s a totally different analytics. Welly Mulia: Alright, so let’s use some numbers, let’s say 10% registration rate, would you still go ahead? David Abrams: I would say that’s really low and I would look at changing my hook before I do anything. Welly Mulia: Okay, what would be a good conversion rate of a webinar registration page? David Abrams: Again, depends on your traffic type, these are always tough questions to answer, if you are talking about cold traffic, you know I would probably say between 20% and 40% is a really good opt-in rate there, I have done cold traffic webinars where I had 50% opt-in rates. I have also done webinars and in turning it into a list, we had 75% opt-in rate, you can do that in webinars where you had 50% opt-in rates. There is no exact metric that says, if you hit this, this is the perfect rate that you are looking for, I would say across the board, on average, looking at about 30%. Welly Mulia: Okay. So, let’s say that you cancel your webinar, what are you going to tell the few registrants that you have? Well, you can easily still record training, and make some kind of recorded training video and send it out out to them, you can send them a survey and learn more about why they signed up, utilize this moment to have education for yourself and your business, offer them a call where you can give them 30 minutes of training but you also get to ask them some questions, maybe like a free strategy session, but you want to learn more about where they are in their business, how you could help, what interested them in the webinar. So, it doesn’t have to be like, hey, I am going to cancel this, I am just going to never talk to these people again, use this, these are the people that signed up for something, figure out what it is that really was the reason that they signed up, so maybe you can dialogue messaging better or more efficiently. Welly Mulia: I like that. And just now you mentioned about retention strategy, but we didn’t talk about it in more details, so when you say retention strategy, is it like how do you keep people to stay on the webinar and not just leave? David Abrams: So, I think I mentioned before, retention strategies for the webinar and also retention used case webinars, so the retention strategies are ways to keep your audience engaged, interacting, paying attention, listening to you through your webinar, because what’s the point of getting all these registrants and doing all these work to get them to show up if they are leaving 10 minutes in because you’ve spent the first 10 minutes just talking about yourself. So, you need to think about what are things that you can do to not only have them staying on, but have them actively listening, and I think some of that becomes the storytelling, the script that you have, the open-ended questions, the polls, the interactive features that you use, but it also can be done with attendee incentives, so specific gifts that you may hand out on the webinar at specific times, contests that you may be doing, are people listening? Maybe you say, mid-way through the webinar, I am going to be giving away $100 based on three questions, based on the content, and I would ask you these questions, the first person to answer all three correctly will win $100 and I will PayPal it to you right after this webinar. That’s just an idea of a cash contest, that’s retention strategy. Now, people would be listening and trying to pay attention, listening to content, you could also have a freebie, that’s giveaway at the end of the webinar, you could also… a lot of times I like to offer specific giveaways to the attendees that sit on at the end, so maybe not just a free gift but a discount coupon code, or something extra outside of just the offer and stuff like that. Welly Mulia: If you can only give one advice to people who want to be successful at closing sales in webinar, what would that be? You have obviously covered a lot, but if you can only choose one… David Abrams: Again, I think it’s tough, because so many things are critically important, but I would say patiently test those hooks first and make sure that your webinar is value-driven and not sales and slimy as we talked about in the beginning; the misconceptions, don’t go with that approach, go value-driven and really the hook is about, what value can I create that actually solves something for my market, for my customer persona, what do they actually want to learn, what would help them that my offering and product can match up with? Welly Mulia: Awesome. So if people want to know about what you do in Demio, where can they find you? David Abrams:: You can find Demio at demio.com, we also have dem.il, which is the short that we have, we have free trials at Demio, you can come signup, we also have live chat on our site 24/7, you can grab one of our support staff, you can even ask for me, I jump in there from time to time, I could chat with you, give you strategies and tips, if you want to find me online, I think my Twitter and Instagram is /itsabrams, but most of you find me on Facebook, and some of the SaaS, SaaS growth hacks and the SaaS breakthrough community if you want to have any more of these marketing conversations. Welly Mulia: Cool. Just one final question, you mentioned just now that Demio’s support is 24/7, so how do you handle people doing customer service? How do you hire full-time team like 24/7 all around the world, is that how they work? David Abrams: Yes, we are remote-based, we have people all over, so when we first launched this, there were two things that we knew, one was a customer experience would always be a big part of your business, it would be a great part of your brand, so we always wanted to invest in a great customer experience which for a lot of people is customer support, so there is nothing worse than buying a product and having the worst customer support experience. So, from literally the first year, I myself was at the desk pretty much all day, answering support tickets along with doing everything else, but I was in there answering tickets and we tried to do literally about 5 minutes’ response time to people, making sure that everyone had a great solid experience and were helped. And then one of our support staff, in India actually, still does nightshifts so he has been an absolute warrior, so that’s kind of our nighttime support, but as we grew, we hired to the day that we have what we call our success team, who really focuses on driving great, helpful and informative answers, we go through weekly meetings and review conversations, we try to find ways that we can all improve and help our customers better, it is something that we truly prioritize ourselves on, and if you look at the testimonials of Demio or reviews, almost every one of them somehow mentions the success team because they are always there, we have lightening quick responses and we really take pride in delivering that great customer experience, but yeah that was something we had to build out over the past few years. Welly Mulia: How big is the team now at Demio? David Abrams: So, the team is 11 people. Welly Mulia: Alright David, thank you once again for sharing your experience about webinars, I think it is going to be a great, helpful content for our listeners. David Abrams: No problem, I am really happy to help. Just like I said before, I hope everyone got some good value from this? I hope this was value-driven, thank you so much for having me on the podcast, having me on the show, and I hope everyone has a great day, thanks again. Welly Mulia: If you are not listening to this on our website, go to academy.birdsend.co/7 to get your show notes. This show is brought to you by BirdSend Email and Marketing Tool; the only email and marketing tool specifically created for online course creators. Get your free forever account at birdsend.co. [/thrive_toggles] [/thrive_toggles_group] . David Abrams On 5 Steps To A Successful Webinar Click here for a bigger version of the image (compressed, non-printable) . Highlights We’ve prepared a gist/highlights of the main points in the form a quick-read doc. Plus, you get the the printable, high resolution version of the infographic above. If you’re interested, click the pic below: . [thrive_text_block color=”note” headline=”Expert’s Resource”] David Abrams is the Co-Founder and CEO of Demio – a live communication platform built to help SaaS companies fuel growth through interactive onboarding, education and marketing webinars. David has created, built and sold multiple software and is now focused on building the most powerful webinar platform designed for growth. He is an operations geek, team-builder, foodie, traveler, and philanthropist. Sign up for a free trial of Demio here [/thrive_text_block] The post 5 Steps To A Successful Webinar appeared first on BirdSend Academy .…

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How To Side Hustle And Start Your Own Business 42:29

hace 6 years42:29

42:29

Nick Loper’s biggest pet peeve is seeing people live unhappy lives when they have complete control over their futures. He is a TEDx speaker and Chief Side Hustler at Side Hustle Nation, which is a growing community and resource for aspiring and part-time entrepreneurs. Named the best entrepreneurship blog in 2016, the site covers online business, freelancing, E-commerce and dozens of other ways to make money outside of a traditional job. Nick hates the word “deserve”, and he went on cold showers for 500 days in a row. In this episode, you’re going to discover practical tips to side hustle your way into your own business. Here’s just what one of Nick’s clients say about him: . Nick has also been featured in these media outlets: . In this episode you’ll discover: [01:24] Why Nick took cold showers for 500 days in a row [05:02] The most common misconception about side hustling [06:00] Fastest way to get side hustlers get off the ground [07:49] How to find your 1st customer [13:00] How Nick got to where he is right now [18:43] How nick grew his podcast from 1k to 6k in 6 months [20:52] Where Nick gets his income from [26:26] Problems people face when trying to quit their job and start their own business [27:50] How to overcome these problems [35:43] How to approach a stranger (cold person) for a partnership idea [38:55] #1 advice to people who want to quit their job and build a full time business . Quote “It’s difficult to get the traction needed, but if you manage to get past the initial barriers, it’s very worth it.” ~ Nick Loper . Transcript Interviewer (Welly Mulia): Welcome to another episode of The BirdSend Academy podcast. This is the show for online course creators who want to build a profitable business by sharing your skills and knowledge. This is your host Welly Mulia, if you are not listening to this on our website, go to academy.birdsend.co/6 to get your show notes. This show is brought to you by BirdSend Email and Marketing Tool; the only email and marketing tool specifically created for online course creators. Get your free forever account at birdsend.co. Today’s special guest is Nick Loper, Nick is a TEDx speaker and Chief Side-Hustler at sidehustlernation.com, which is a growing community and resource for aspiring and part-time entrepreneurs. Named the best entrepreneurship blog in 2016, the site covers online business, freelancing, E-commerce and dozens of other ways to make money outside of a traditional job. Nick hates the word deserve, and he went on cold showers for 500 days in a row. So, without further ado, let’s welcome Nick to the show. Nick, it’s great to have you here. Interviewee (Nick Loper): Thanks for having me. Welly Mulia: Cool. So, you once took cold showers for 500 days in a row, what’s that about? Nick Loper: No, I recommend it. It was a pretty cool experience, it started with a recording on the Side Hustle show, where the guest was like, oh, you got to try this cold shower thing, and he started it as kind of a fat loss thing, like okay, because I guess there are some thermodynamics airplay, the reason, Michael felt he could eat like 6,000 calories a day, it’s like you are spending some energy swimming in this case, but you are also spending energy keeping your body warm, you are expending calories doing that, so he started doing the cold shower thing as a way to boost his metabolism in a way, and he was like, come on, give it a shot for 30 days, you don’t have anything to lose. I was like, that sounds awful but when I did it, I started to get more coaching clients, I started to get… things started to fall into place in a weird way, it could have been totally pussy though, but you know what, I am going to keep doing this, because I feel better, and I will keep at it, I think that lasted about a year and a half. And nowadays, I kind of end cold, but in the winter that’s a little bit tough, but as we warm up, I’ll get back into it. Welly Mulia: Okay, cool. So, you mentioned that taking this cold showers more than a year in a row is helping you in your business. Why do you think that is psychologically, or maybe mentally and physically as well? Nick Loper: Yeah, the psychological part of it is like, okay, here is something that is uncomfortable, here is something that is challenging but it is not life threatening, you are going to get through it and you yell and little bit, but you are going to feel great when it’s over, and I think that applies to a lot of stuff we work on a day-to-day basis, it’s not always going to be easy, but if you are going to do the work, do the reps, you are going to come out of it and feel better for it. [thrive_toggles_group] [thrive_toggles title=”Click to reveal the entire transcript” no=”1/2″] Welly Mulia: Okay, cool. Physically, does it do anything to your body? Nick Loper: Well, it supposedly it has fat loss benefits, I don’t have a ton of weight to lose, so I don’t know if that was a thing, but you feel good when it’s over, and you feel good, I guess in the moment too, because it is like, I am doing this thing that’s hard… I don’t know. Have you ever done it? Welly Mulia: I just started doing it like the beginning of the month, so it’s like only 10 plus days, but for myself… Nick Loper: That’s a pretty good streak. Welly Mulia: Yeah, I mean for myself it’s pretty good, like you said just now, it feels pretty good, like you are feeling awesome, like this is cool and you are doing something that is uncomfortable… So, it’s been 10 plus days now, but it’s so far so good… Nick Loper: It will wake you up for sure. Welly Mulia: Yeah. So, Nick, the reason I brought you for this episode is because I know that you are big into side hustling and I know you also used to do that, you side hustled your way into a full time business of your own. So, for people listening to this, and I know that there are a lot of people who are trying to get out of job and then starting their own business full-time, so what do you think that is the one misconception about side hustling? Nick Loper: That it’s easy, that everybody should do it, it’s a challenge, it’s not like the cold shower thing, it’s hard to get the traction needed to make a meaningful dent in the quality of your life, it’s worth it, for me, or it was worth it for me and it’s worth it for a lot of other people, because it is really empowering, once you see that income coming in, but it’s usually slower than people would like, and usually harder than people would like and has that been your experience? Welly Mulia: Yeah, that has been my experience as well as other people’s experience, I talked to like people who are running business and they previously had a corporate job. Yeah, definitely. Nick Loper: The pay check is so steady, you clock in, you clock out, you do your thing… probably one of the fastest side hustle started off the ground is similar and that would be just freelancing or consulting, saying here is some skills that I have, and trying to find out people who have some problems that you can solve with those skills, and that can be in person, that could be locally, like a recent guest on the show that was doing a knife sharpening business, we have had people doing cleaning business and I just got off the phone with one of the founder of 1-800 Gut Junk, where they will come, bring a big truck to your driveway and take away all the craps that you don’t want, so it could be a service business like that, which is relatively affordable and quick to start because you don’t need to create a product, you don’t need an audience, you just need to go town and try to find customers and then the next tier, or one common tier after that is like the product-based business, it could be physical products, it could be digital products, but that usually has an inventory cost or a time creation cost on a digital product side. And then, the third common business model that I deal with a lot is an audience business, so this would be a blog, a podcast, I am going to create a content for YouTube and overtime I am going to build up this following and then I have ad income, and sponsorships, and affiliate income and also the flexibility to sell products and services if I want to from there too. So, those are kind of the 3 primary business models that we tend to cover on the Side Hustle show. Welly Mulia: Okay. So, with these 3 methods of generating income, the one you recommend just now is to deliver a service, because that’s easy as you don’t have to create a product. How do you go about finding the audience because when you want to sell a service, you also need to have a targeted audience? Nick Loper: Sure. For me, one of the first businesses that I started, first kind of real business that did any sort of volume was residential painting business, and so the way I found customers was going door to door, you can think of marketing as the challenge of getting in front of your customers in their natural habitat or in terms of the people that they are already doing business with, so for example, a friend of mine does SEO services, and so he has set up strategic partnerships with graphic design services, and some other, maybe accounting offices or something like that, like okay, these types of small business customers are already hiring these other services, but those companies don’t specialize in SEO so they can send referral business his way. Another way for a service business that I thought was pretty cool was a guest on a podcast; Joshua, it was kind of like an offline webinar model where he was doing web and web development and kind of like copywriting, for local businesses too, so he called up the local accounting office where his target customers were already doing business and said, hey, tell you what, I would like to host this 1-hour free workshop during lunch hour in your conference room, you provide the conference room, I’ll provide the sandwiches, I want to come in and talk about the 7 deadly sins of web design, or the 7 common mistakes you are probably making with your website. You invite the customer base, Mr. Accountant, and I’ll come and deliver this presentation, no pitch, no nothing, totally free… And even before he pulls up his PowerPoint, like he is positioned as the expert in the minds of everybody who is attending there, it makes the accountant look good, because he is providing them extra value for free, outside of his normal accounting services and it makes Joshua look like a rock star and by the end of the presentation, no pitch during the presentation, everybody is coming up, giving them their business cards, saying, we need to schedule a meeting, like this is great stuff. Welly Mulia: Just like you said, when you first got started, you were doing the residential services. Can you talk to us more about that? Nick Loper: Yeah, this is my college business; painting houses in the summer. So, I would go out in the evenings, kind of during spring semester, knock on doors, and try and drum up leads and then go back out on the weekends to do estimates and book those jobs for June, July, August… that was actually underneath one of the college painting franchise operations called college works painting in the States and that was like my first taste of working for profits and not wages, and it was crazy stressful, like a bunch of 19 years old with paint sprayers, as you might imagine, anything that can go wrong does go wrong, and it’s on you to clean it up, so it’s kind of successful, but it is also really rewarding to be able to stand back from the side walk by the end of the week and see the transformation that you made on these houses and then look back at the end of the summer and say we did that 20 times, 25 times. Welly Mulia: So, where did you transition after that business? Did you go into some kind of other business? Nick Loper: The next business was a footwear comparison shopping site, and that was kind of the original side hustle of mine after graduation and I kind of started in a similar way, through an internship here in college with this… It was shoe store in Seattle that back in the day had the wild and crazy idea to start putting their inventory online and see if anybody would buy it, and by the time I came on board, the online side of their business had grown tremendously compared to the brick and motor shop, and so that was my first exposure to affiliate marketing, to Google ad words, to SEO, to e-commerce really, and that was really helpful in giving me the idea for the comparison shopping site for shoes, because it is like, I don’t want to do that traffic to one product, if they don’t have the best deal, so I was like, okay, let’s build the database out and sort that by price, bringing everybody’s catalogue and see where you can get this. And as it turned out, a lot of times, people click on different links, trying to find the exact size they were looking for. Welly Mulia: So Nick what was life back then before you became successful like you are now? I know you have talked a little bit about your background with the painting experience, and the shoe experience just now. But can you talk to us through about how you got to where you are right now? Nick Loper: A lot of work and a lot of patience, specifically with Side Hustle Nation brand, you know, I was looking at these numbers with my wife, and I was like, why did I keep this going? Nobody was tuning in at the beginning, but there was just enough traction to make it interesting, the content was really interesting to produce and as you know, hosting a podcast is used to talk to people that you want to, but sometimes charge $1,000 an hour for their consulting, like hey, you want to come on my podcast, they are essentially coaching you for free, so I have learned a lot from my guest in that stand point. But that’s what it was, it was just kind of persistence in trying to build this thing up and it has been a ton of fun, like this is one of the longest projects that I have worked on and continued to do it because it’s still fun, it’s still interesting. There are way more projects that I want to tackle that I know I am never going to have time to do… on one hand that’s frustrating, but I think that’s a good sign, because you know that’s where your creative juices are really firing. Welly Mulia: When did you start Side Hustle Nation? Nick Loper: In early 2013. Coming up on 6 years. Welly Mulia: So, in the beginning days, you said that your podcast was basically little to no one listening? So, how did you get the motivation to keep going, because I know, just like you said, you are talking to your wife and maybe she is also saying, hey, nobody is listening, why do you keep spending time doing this? How did you… I know persistence but what else? There must be something else that keeps you going because when you don’t see any listeners or maybe numbers, nobody is visiting your site, then someone can get down easily. And I think that’s what’s happening to a lot of people in the beginning stages of their career or business. So, what are your tips on getting through, past that first barrier, because that is the hardest thing to do, to move a train. Once you get it going, it gathers momentum and traction. Nick Loper: It’s so true, and I am going to see if I can pull up the download statistics just to show you what I am talking about, like how it was, but at that time, it was going in the right direction, even though the numbers weren’t huge, they were like trending up, which I thought was a good sign and I was getting some engagements, some feedback from listeners. I was at a podcast movement a few years ago and the speaker up on the stage was Cliff Ravenscraft from Podcast Answer Man, and he said some of the common questions that he gets was framed around like… I only get 200 listeners an episode, what am I doing wrong? I only get 200 listeners an episode, how can I grow that? And his advice was, first of all, stop saying only, because 200 people is… if you were up on stage in front of 200 people, you might get nervous, that’s a lot of people to be talking to. And at the time there was only maybe 200 people in the room, and it was a pretty crowded conference, ball room type of setup, so his advice was to try and get engagement in any way you can, you probably have a chance to know these people on a first name basis, through comments on the website, through connections on social media, so trying to do that, figuring out what they want, trying to turn them into advocates for you. I recently talked to Jack from the Survivor podcast, huge podcast, started 10 years ago, driving down the freeway in his car, what he did earlier on was to try and turn his initial listeners into advocates for him and say, hey I am going to give away… he said it was an i-pod back in the day, if you can help me spread the word. So, that was what people ended up doing, they were posting it on forums, instead of posting it on websites and helped him kind of amplify his reach through the people that he already had and I think that’s most content grows especially podcast content because it’s not as easily searchable, it’s like how do you tap into that odd amount? And I think it is by creating something that is compelling, that is worthy of sharing. Welly Mulia: When you first started Side Hustle Nation, was podcast already a part of it or did you eventually start blogging and then podcast came later on? Nick Loper: Yeah, I started the blog and the podcast at the same time, the thing was the blog kind of redirected from an old personal blog of mine, so that wasn’t starting completely from scratch, it was just under a new brand and a renewed focus, and over the years deleted most of that old content just because it was not relevant to the stuff that I was talking about, that was random rants about events, and pictures from our vacation, just a total personal blog. Welly Mulia: Okay, did you manage to build your audience like build an email list of people who are reading your blog back very early in the days? Nick Loper: The email list was kind of slow to grow, and for me, the inflection point was about 14 months into the show, 60 something episodes into the show, and realizing it’s never going to be huge money maker in terms of sponsorships, that seems to be how… Okay, I am going to build this podcast, I am going to make money from ads, like that’s the business model that most people consider. It took me a long time to realize that the show was content marketing, I still don’t have a really great offer for people, but a lot of people would build a podcast to sell their service, to sell their course or something like that, I still don’t really have that, but it was a shift in recognizing that the show was content marketing, and treating it as such, that was really an inflection point for the show and for the site in general. So, 14 months in, I probably had around 1,000 people on the email list, it was not huge, and at that point started creating these episode specific lead magnets that people could download, basically summaries of the episodes, hey, you are out driving, you are walking the dog, you are at the gym, my guest is dropping hopefully some important nuggets and action items and tips, you don’t have a place to take notes, don’t worry we did it for you, you can download all that stuff for free at sidehustlenation.com/… And within 3 months of doing that, I had 3,000 on the list, within 6 months I had 6,000, so it was a huge turning point in starting to do that, in terms of taking an anonymous listener to now somebody that I can reach out to again and again through email. Welly Mulia: Okay, cool. So, what are your income streams right now? Where do they come from? Like you have the blog, the content, podcast, sponsorships, and what are the methods that you make money from all of them? Nick Loper: Okay, now we will get into that in just a second. Now, I did finally pull up the statistics… Welly Mulia: Sure, tell us about it. Nick Loper: So, one year into the show; May 2014, it was around 9,000 downloads for the entire month and it just compounds after that, because a year after that, close to 70,000 so it was a huge growth in that second year, and maybe it hit kind of that tipping point, so 70,000 in 2015, and 2016, it was 107,000, in 2017, in May, it was 195,000. So, it just kind of continues to compound and if you can get through that first year, or 18 months where nobody is tuning in or relatively few people are tuning in and then you start to see the compound effect, and people have the same thing on YouTube where it might take 6 months, a year to get the first thousand subscribers, then it just might take another 6 months to get to 10,000 and then another 6 months to get to 20,000, and then it really, really compounds. Sort of the income streams for me, sponsorship on the podcast, 5 years later has turned into a pretty decent income stream, affiliate offers on the site and occasionally through the email list, and then the third one, that is my own side hustle, experiments and investments and projects, I don’t have the shoe site anymore, but I still have a couple other affiliate sites, this category might include self-publishing, and online courses and playing around on Fiverr and alternative investment strategies, trying to build some cash flow that way. Welly Mulia: What is the biggest source of income for you from all of these models? Nick Loper: Affiliate marketing. Welly Mulia: Okay, cool. Interesting you said just now May 2014, you had about 1,000 downloads and a year later it becomes 70,000? That is a huge growth, what do you think is the factor for that and what did you do between that year that made the huge jump? Nick Loper: Just really focused on the show… So, May 2014 was when I stopped doing the shoe business to focus on the blog and podcast full time, so you start to see a pretty growth curve around that time, I always tend to see a spike around the new year, so from December to January of 2014 to 2015, it was almost double, so there is a lot of new people coming into the fold around that time, and then hopefully I imagine they found it, thought it was cool, shared it with their friends and they kind of snow balled from there. Welly Mulia: Okay. Initially when you were just trying to get traction for your podcast, of course you let your audience know, if you have an email list, of course you mail them out, apart from that, did you do any kind of optimization in iTunes, or these types of channels? Did you have any tips to share? Nick Loper: So, consider iTunes as a search engine and they have kind of cracked down in the past few months of people, like over optimizing their show titles and their author tags, because iTunes rather improved their second grade algorithm, what they have done is just been building shows on their platform, hey, you are spamming your keyword title, you can’t do that. But something to consider, if you are starting a new show, what do you name your show? The Side Hustle Show ranked really well for people searching for side hustle in that search engine, just like there was a presentation form Johnny Dumez and he is like, I am on page 17, if you Google entrepreneurs or something, but if you search iTunes for entrepreneurs, I am like number 2 and of course that’s years ago, and he had to change his name a few times since then. So, consider it as a search engine, the title of your show, the author tag, are the two fields that are crawling, for broad level stuff, not the description, so don’t worry too much about the description, but then the episode titles as well are getting crawled. So, I was on a podcast a couple of years ago, and they did what they supposed to do, hey Nick, thanks so much for joining us, your episode is live today, click here to check it out. And I clicked on the link and what they’ve named this episode is ’36-Nick Loper’ and it is like, this is awful, who cares? Give me some keywords, what am I going to learn if I tune in? What’s this all about? What’s in it for me? And if you can put those keywords, because I occasionally would search for specific people, for specific topics in iTunes or other podcast directories to learn about Instagram marketing, to learn about something else and just download a bunch of episodes under one topic, so if you work that into your episode title, it’s another chance for people to discover you. Welly Mulia: What do you think is the number one problem people face when they are trying to quit their job and start their own business? Nick Loper: Just going through the 2019 Side Hustle Nation member survey result, so I would probably have a better answer for you in the next week or two. But the biggest… I can pull up these stats from 2017, so the big 3 that come up over and over again are, the time to get it done, like if I only had 30 hours in a day, then sure, this would be fantastic, you would be finding the right idea, how do I know this is going to work? How do I validate it? How do I know it is going to work for me? Is it worth the time and energy to invest into it? Because who knows where that leads? And then it’s the growth and marketing part of the puzzle, like once I pick something, how do I get it in front of customers? How do I grow it? How do I scale this thing? Those are kind of the big three that come up over and over again. Welly Mulia: I think that… I ask this question over a lot in these kind of podcast interviews and the usual aspects come up as you said just now, especially with the marketing, not having enough time, as well as is this worth pursuing or not? So, how do you think people can overcome this? Nick Loper: If the idea is worth pursuing? Welly Mulia: You mentioned three just now, so I would like to explore one by one, maybe time first, how can people have more time? Nick Loper: Well, that’s the bad news, you are never going to find more time, you are kind of limited by the 24 hours in a day, laws of physics and all that stuff. But what you can do is, make your… you always have time for your priorities, if you are prioritizing spending time with your kids, going to the gym, sleeping, if you are prioritizing watching TV, Netflix, that’s fine, but be honest with yourself, because I am as guilty as anybody in saying, I don’t have time, and what I have tried to start doing instead, and I am a little bit bad at this is, say I prioritized something else, which sucks to hear as the recipient of that, because my wife is like, how come you didn’t do that? Well, I prioritized something else. How come you didn’t prioritize doing the dishes? But being honest with yourself, where did your time go? Another tool I have found helpful is just doing a legit… like time audit and I am in the midst of doing that again right now, and just start time, stop time, what are you working on, what did you get done during that time? Kind of find… you might be surprised where your time actually goes, and how much time you might find in a day. And I find that I am more productive while I am on the clock, so kind of gamifies it in the moment and that gives me some opportunity to look for things to potentially outsource and delegate and get out of my plate. So, that’s kind of the time thing. On the idea front; the bad news on time is that it’s finite and you are never going to get more hours in a day, the good news on the idea front is that there is no such thing as the perfect idea and so that kind of frees up the realms of possibilities a little bit. And maybe one of the big miss is that you need to come up with these never-before-seen business idea, it’s so innovative that it’s the next Uber or the next Airbnb, or it’s the next billion-dollar unicorn start-up up idea. For side hustlers, that’s fantastic, if that’s what you want to build, but for most people, it’s like look, I want to build a lifestyle business, I want something that supports me, supports my family, gives me the income I need to cover my expenses, to quit my job, to travel, to pay off debts, whatever it is. The good news is, for an idea like that, you are going to look at what else is already out there and say what are they doing? They’ve got customers, they must be doing something right. How would I do it differently? How would I do it better? One of the frameworks that I really love and comes from the tropical NBA podcast, they called it RIP, PIVIT and JAM, which was basically ripping, to have taken someone’s business idea, piving it to a different industry, different protocol, a different spin on it, and then jam is the hustle, doing the work part of it. So, there is that framework for kind of coming up with a business idea. And if you are short on ideas, sidehustlenation.com/ideas is a constantly updated list… there is a more than 100 right now, that can kind of guide you, at least get the creative deuces falling from some things that people are doing and that you may be able to do as well. Do you want me to talk about the growth and the marketing thing? Welly Mulia: Yeah, sure. Nick Loper: So, like we talked about on the marketing front is this challenge of getting in front of customers, and we talked about doing that door-to-door, we talked about doing that through other people’s audiences, we talked about doing that through strategic partnerships, so it really depends on what you are marketing and who you are trying to market it to. As far as marketing, for me, iTunes has been really helpful, Amazon has been really helpful, think of these many search engines, I call them these ‘buy buttons’ platforms where you can kind of be discoverable. YouTube has been a huge one lately, and even more so than Google because it apparently indexes immediately rather than, okay, I am going to hit publish and maybe hopefully in a few months it starts to rank in Google and YouTube, if you get it right, the keywords and targeting the content of the video on those first few views and the engagement metrics, it starts to show up on the first page of YouTube for certain searches. Pinterest has been big for me, as a user-to-content platform, a friend of mine calls Pinterest, Google and YouTube, user-to-content platforms where people are searching for specific solutions to their problems, specific answers to their problems, all those types of platforms, versus Facebook or Twitter which is more of a user-to-user platform, I am going to go check out to see what my friends are up to, what the people I am following are up to, and that’s not to say that you can’t get in front of people on those platforms as well, but it can be a little bit more challenging. Welly Mulia: Did you mention Pinterest as a platform for people who want to search for something? Nick Loper: Yes. Welly Mulia: Okay, did you find… So, you got good results for people? Because I have always thought that Pinterest is a very… there are pictures, pin… So, how would it be? When somebody goes there to search for keyword for example that they are looking for, to solve some of their problems, they go there and then type in the keyword, and then an image pops up, that solves their problems or potentially solves their problems, is that how that works? Nick Loper: Yeah, so image is a front, the image links to an article in most cases, I mean there are some infographics, some pretty pictures and stuff, but in most cases, the image links to an article, so when I was on there, searching the other day for, how to talk to kids, how to make my kid calm down or something like that, and there are a handful of articles that I find on there, clicked them, you can kind of skim through their bullet points and read through these ideas, and then you are on to the next thing. So, in that sense… like in my case, people are searching for ways to make extra money, side hustle ideas, how to start freelancing business, keywords like that, similar to what you type into Google, and it’s another avenue of discovery. Welly Mulia: Interesting. Would you say that people typing into Google, it doesn’t work as well as typing into, in this case Pinterest? Nick Loper: I am not a Pinterest power user myself, but here is my hypothesis. The Google user is trying to solve a problem immediately, that’s like pressing, whereas the Pinterest user is like creating a bunch of different ideas and so you often see on other people’s boards, bedroom decoration ideas, so they’ve got a whole bunch of pins on that specific topic, or cool wedding invites, so they’ve got a whole bunch of pins on that certain topic. They are trying to cast a bit of a wide net and get a bunch of different opinions, whereas in Google, it is like, just tell me the answer, and solve my problem right now. Welly Mulia: Interesting. Earlier you mentioned about partnerships? Can you talk us through how would you approach someone who is cold, like you don’t have a previous relationship with, and trying to partner with them on maybe some ideas or some business? How do you approach people like that? You obviously have their experience, because in your early days I believe you do this kind of partnership people who you haven’t heard of. Nick Loper: You have to figure out a way to not make it cold, you’ve got to figure out a way to be a warm lead, can you get an introduction from a friend, can you be a value first before making your ask? Those have been the pitches that have come my way, one example was… one of my side hustle was a freelance book editing service, and one of the ways that I got client was by adding myself as a preferred vendor to this company that is publishing, so probably your students are asking, where should I go to for editing services? Can you add my name to that list? And because I had a relationship with the guy teaching the course, he was like, sure, I would be happy to do it, you can kind of get a foot in the door some way, somehow to make that a little bit easier, but it could be a win-win, trying to look at another example from what that might look like… Anything that has been effective for you on the partnership front? Welly Mulia: Yeah, what you said just now, introduction is perfect, and referring people, getting introduction from someone you already know, that’s perfect, but a lot of times that doesn’t happened because the person or the business that I am trying to approach in that type of context will know them, but giving value first, for me my experience is it’s a great way to, like you said, get a foot in the door first, and then try and step you way into a relationship, so don’t ask of something very easy for them, just drop that value, and after you have a couple of instruction for the person, then you start into more comfortable relationships, then you can ask for more and then take it from there. That was what my experience was… Okay Nick, I know that there are a lot of things that people need to side hustle their way out of their job, and into their full-time business, but if you can only give one advice to them, what would that be? Nick Loper: Keep your expenses low, because the number that you are really trying to replace is that income to replace your expenses, a lot of people set out to replace a certain level of income, hopefully you are living below your means, the fastest way to get out of that race is to build another income stream to replace those expenses. Welly Mulia: Cool. Regarding this one; keeping our expenses low, I see a lot of people, want to be full-time business owners, they focus on the wrong stuff a lot of times. So, for example, they would want to have a really nice website, maybe a fancy logo, or maybe the think they need to have very nice business cards before actually having a solid idea or maybe even building their audience. So, would you say that building the audience is more important than all these fancy stuff, Nick? Nick Loper: Well, especially starting out, it’s better on the freelance side, you don’t need a website, you don’t need an audience, you just need to find somebody who needs your help and try to make to make a deal with them. I get these massages from people all the time, like I am still working on my logo, waiting on my business card… Like go sell something, you don’t even know if this is going to work yet, it’s frustrating to see. If you must… if that’s going to make the business feel official to you, to feel more legit, then by all means, just do it quick, get it out there and then move on to the next thing, I’ve got business cards in my drawer from businesses from long ago that I never had reasons to pass out business cards, like why did I have them made in the first place? It just didn’t matter. Welly Mulia: Yeah, cool. So Nick, if people want to… how can they find out more about you and this Side Hustle thing? Nick Loper: Sure. So, we mentioned sidehustlenation.com/ideas , that’s a fantastic place to start, no opt-in required over there, and of course we look to have you tune into the Side Hustle show with new part-time business ideas every Thursday. Welly Mulia: Okay, and how can they access the podcast? Nick Loper: Through iTunes, Overcast, Stitcher, whatever your favorite podcast app is, it should be available. Welly Mulia: Okay. So, just search for Side Hustle Nation? Nick Loper: Yeah, search Side Hustle Nation, search Side Hustle show, it’s the one with the green cover. Welly Mulia: Alright. Cool Nick, thank you again for being here today and sharing your experience and skills about Side Hustling… Nick Loper: Yeah. And thanks for having me. Welly Mulia: If you are not listening to this on our website, go to academy.birdsend.co/6 to get your show notes. This show is brought to you by BirdSend Email and Marketing Tool; the only email and marketing tool specifically created for online course creators. Get your free forever account at birdsend.co . [/thrive_toggles] [/thrive_toggles_group] . Nick Loper On The Fastest Way To Get Side Hustlers Get Off The Ground Click here for a bigger version of the image (compressed, non-printable) Highlights We’ve prepared a gist/highlights of the main points in the form a quick-read doc. Plus, you get the the printable, high resolution version of the infographic above. If you’re interested, click the pic below: . [thrive_text_block color=”note” headline=”Expert’s Resource”] Check out Nick’s 99 Side Hustle Business Ideas You Can Start Today (no opt-in required). Also listen to his podcast — The Side Hustle Show . [/thrive_text_block] The post How To Side Hustle And Start Your Own Business appeared first on BirdSend Academy .…

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How To Build A High Converting Website 51:43

hace 6 years51:43

51:43

Gill Andrews turns underperforming small business websites into slick lead-generating machines. If your website sucks in doing that, she’ll be very blunt about it and tell you how to fix it. Gill is from Germany, but she speaks 5 languages: English to her husband and clients, Russian to her son, German to her friends, Urdu to her parents-in-law, and Ukrainian to her parents. . In this podcast episode, you’re going to learn how to build a high converting website that converts. . Here’s just what one of Gill’s clients say about her: Gill reviewed my website and made a 30-minute video on how to improve my web design. I followed her advice which helped with the flow and within two days I received my first query through my website. Matthew Drzymala Copywriter, indeliblethink.co.uk . In this episode you’ll discover: [01:18] Is there a benefit to speaking more than 1 language? [04:23] The most common misconception about building a website [05:51] 3 ways to get targeted traffic to your website [11:37] Elements of a high converting website [24:29] How Gill became a website copywriter/consultant [28:24] #1 challenge for online course creators [32:43] When to start pitching to your subscribers [36:15] How to clean your list so that only engaged subscribers are in your list [37:48] How gill gets leads and customers for her business . Quote “Making your website convert is a lot like translating your message into another language”. ~ Gill Andrews . Transcript Welly Mulia (Interviewer): Welcome to another episode of the BirdSend Academy podcast, this is the show for online course creators who want to build a profitable business by sharing your skills and knowledge, this is your host Welly Mulia, if you are not listening to this on our website, go to academy.birdsend.co/5 to get your show notes. This show is brought to you by BirdSend Email and Marketing Tool; the only email and marketing tool specifically created for online course creators. Get your free forever account at birdsend.co. Today’s special guest is Gill Andrews, Gill helps small business owners make sure that their website reflects the true value of their products and services and knock the socks off their prospects. She turns underperforming websites into sleek, lead generating machines and she is direct about that, she wants to work with it, but she will tell you how to fix it, when not reviewing websites, writing a copy or blogging, you will find her running after her son or eating chocolate. Gill, thank you for coming to the show, it is great to have you. Gill Andrews (Interviewee): My pleasure, thank you for having me. Welly Mulia: So, 5 languages… I read on your site that you speak 5 languages? Talk to us about that. Gill Andrews: Just one word; life, I never aimed to learn it, it just happened, I was born in a Russian-speaking family, then we moved to another country and we moved to Germany, actually there is one language I forgot, I used to speak Finnish as well, I used to work as a translator, but I haven’t used the language in 16 years, so I forgot about it and I learned it at the university. So I learned English, I learned Germany, and then because my husband is from Pakistan, I learned it as well, whatever they speak in Pakistan. So, it’s like it just happened, I like languages, it gives me a new perspective every time, once you learn a new language, you start seeing the world a bit different, because people use different words to describe different things, and some things you describe in one language don’t exist in another language, it changes you, it changes your perspective, so that’s fine. And my dream is also to finally get my French up to speed, because I understand a bit of French, I can speak a bit of French, but I never got a chance to really apply it, maybe that’s why it’s rusty and I never got to learn it. But the short answer to your question would be, life happened. Welly Mulia: So, with the addition of French, would it make it 6? Gill Andrews: Yeah, it would be 6. We shouldn’t count French, I am not confident to speak it although I spent a couple of years here and there learning it, but because I can’t apply it anywhere, I don’t have French speaking friends, I went to France, but we didn’t spend much time there for me to apply it. So, maybe one day, I am dreaming, when I am retired, I would just go to France and spend a month there, speaking only French, then I would put ‘I have learnt 6 languages on my LinkedIn bio’ [thrive_toggles_group”] [thrive_toggles title=”Click to reveal the entire transcript” no=”1/2″] Welly Mulia: Cool. So, what is the language that you are most proficient with, is it English? Gill Andrews: Actually my mother tongue is Russia. English and German, they are equal, I speak equal English and German, Ukrainian as well, because I used to live in Ukraine, but I keep forgetting it, I am already on the way to forgetting it, I don’t speak it to my son, I speak Russian to him. And although I speak it all of the time, but not that much. So, the most proficient would be Russian, followed by English and German. Welly Mulia: So, you are a website specialist, you are a conversion specialist, you take ordinary websites and turn them into lead generating websites that get clients leads. Gill Andrews: Yeah. Welly Mulia: So, what do you think is the one misconception about people having a website? Because nowadays everyone wants to have a website. Gill Andrews: I think the biggest misconception is that they think, okay, I’ve built a website and that’s enough, they over-estimate what a website can do for them, or that you need just a website, then it happens. So, first of all, you don’t need just a website, you need a website that is designed for attracting sales and leads, or as we say that is conversion optimized, if you go to a designer who does not understand what it takes, that will convert your prospects, he would build you a pretty website that would be useless. But another thing is, even if you have a perfect website, your journey to earning money through this website is just starting, because you need to attract traffic, and not just random traffic, you post the link on Reddit and people come looking at your website, you need to target a traffic from people who are interested in your offer and ideally who are already in the mindset of buying either your products or your services. So, the biggest misconception is, over-estimation of a website, but I say it is just the beginning of your journey, there is so much work after you actually get that. You thought you spent months, maybe a year building a website, but it is unfortunately just the beginning. Welly Mulia: Interesting. So, you said you need targeted traffic to go to your website… what do you suggest people do to get targeted traffic and not just any kind of traffic? Gill Andrews: I can’t say it in one sentence, it is a complicated thing, but first of all, it starts with knowing your audience, you need to know where do they hang out? How do they use such? Are there specific websites or social media you can reach them? So, it first starts with studying your audience really well. Then there are 3 major ways to drive traffic, it would be when your first search optimizes your website, after some time, and after you put a lot of content in it, and the people who search for particular terms in Google, would come to your website, which is the ideal situation… But sometimes, it is not possible, sometimes your audience either doesn’t know your product exists, or they don’t have time to read blogposts and search for you, so it won’t work for every industry or every niche. But actually, I would say it works for most of the cases, the cons are that you need a lot of time, you need a lot of effort and of course it would cost you money, either your own time or you pay somebody to do that. So, it’s costly and it takes time to work. The second way is social media, which is not as effective, because people on social media, who hang out there, they don’t hang out to buy stuff, they hang out to socialize, to talk to each other, to discover whatever, but not to buy things, so this is also difficult. It also takes time and it is less predictable. And the moment you stop posting, you stop getting traffic, but it’s very good for making connections with your peers, especially if you are a blogger, people you get to know may give you a backlink, a link to your website, or you introduce you to their audience, it also helps your search performance if you do such. And the third way is something that you will get direct results and something that will help you revaluate your website, that you can see whether your website is actually good. Conversion optimized, it is paid traffic, where you pay for Google ads, Facebook ads, but then of course it’s expensive, and the moment you stop doing it, you don’t get any results. I know many small businesses who are doing it on a constant basis, so they are investing some money in pay-per-click campaigns, but they get so much put of it, they sell so much, they get so much contracts, that is worth the money. Usually it’s a combination of 3 of these tactics, I can only speak for myself, I am a consultant, I am my product, I sell knowledge… So for me, search works the most, I don’t have much time to post on social, I concentrate only on two networks, and I use it primarily for building relationships and getting backlinks, although I also gat occasional contracts from there, I don’t use pay-per-click. Why I don’t think it is a good idea for consultants, because for us, our product is less tangible and although when you see a sweater, you can say, made of wool, red color, my size fits, you just order it, there is like little work for a prospect, you can give it back if you don’t like it, but for consultants, people usually need to get you a little bit more, so my sales cycle is longer, than the sales cycle for somebody who… the funnel, the time it takes from the first touchpoints, the first time people heard of me, to hiring me to work for them, it takes longer than somebody buying a sweater. So, if you say, I sell physical goods, pay-per-click can be super useful and profitable. But for consultants or for anything that would take longer than 1 lead page to convince people to work with you, or to buy, probably other means would be more efficient there. This is a long topic, how to drive traffic, I am sure there are paid courses about that, consultants who would do that, so it is really, super complicated. Welly Mulia: So, going back to what you were saying just now with a consultant like yourself, the sales cycle is longer and you typically for yourself don’t do any paid ads. I see some consultants also doing paid ads, but instead of selling via websites, they sell via strategy session. What is your take on that? Gill Andrews: I don’t have any take on that. I am just saying, do what works for you. Before you start doing something, think about if it logically makes sense so you need to have some kind of hypothesis, why you think it would work, and then you try it, because it can even depend from person to person. Not necessarily niche to niche, because your website can have a different flavor, a different impression on people, and even if your friend does absolutely same thing, it can work differently for you two. So, if you think that is a logical reason for that to work, just try it out, this is my suggestion. Because actually, an answer to every question related to website is actually, it depends and test it, this is the answer that is actually valid to any question related to website because every website is different, every niche is different, and the best way to know what works for you is to test it. Welly Mulia: So, what do you think is the main element of a high converting website? For someone who is new, like co-traffic, co-people who haven’t heard of your brand before or never seen you before, they land on your website or landing page. What would you say are the areas that need to be there for them to, at least signup for your email newsletter, or maybe if they land on your sales page, at least click the ‘buy’ button. Gill Andrews: So, you say they have never heard of me… But this is not a qualifier for what kind of quality traffic is that, the question is do they have a general need for what I offer? Or are they coming from Pinterest recipe board, who are these people? Is the first question. So, I first need to know, whom am I writing for? It starts with the stage of awareness. Before you would have thought about, is it male or female, what are their status, what language do they speak, what are their background, quality of education, high school, whatever… So, these are the very basic requirements that you already need to think about before building a page. And then you think about… you have an offer, you offer something, so it’s still same, the question is what do they know about this problems, you already said they don’t know me, they don’t know what I offer, that’s fine, but the question is, are they aware of these problems? Are they actively seeking to solve them? Or do I still need to narrate the exact problems to them? So, these determines that stage of awareness, are they completely unaware, are they problem-aware, are they solution-aware? What are they aware of? And after you determine that, you determine the place, then you determine the spot where they are at right now. Now, you need to build the bridge with your copy to take them to the spot, they need to be to convert. So, basically what they need to know to convert is, what you offer exactly and for that to be relevant to them, so it means you need to use very clear topic, not trying to be clever or whatever, just say in plain words what humans use, by talking to each other, what you offer, for whom? If it is for example, specific population segment like creative women entrepreneurs or CEOs of technical companies, if you have a particular segment, it always helps to name it, so it is immediately relevant to your target audience. Say what benefits people get from your solution or product, how these would help improve their lives, but depending on stage of awareness, you need to talk either more or less, you shouldn’t tell them things they know, you should only indicate that you know them as well, so that people connect with you. But you shouldn’t go on and on about things people are already aware of, for example, they are aware of their problems, if you are marketing to some business owners, you don’t need to tell them about their problems to their website, they know it, they have been using this website for 5 years, just tell them you understand the problems, but then you need to work harder on showing how your solution works, how exactly you solve their problems and why it works. So, coming back, this is the basis of how you would make your decisions, because obviously, not one answer fits it all here. So after you have determined who your target audience is and what their stage of awareness is, you need to say whatever you need to say, you need to think, I need to say this and this, just put it on paper, I need to tell them this… you need to do it clearly, decided, in clear words and short sentences so it is readable, not 5-paragraph long of texts… Then you need the information to be relevant and valuable, not just empty or vague sentences, really specific, naming things, ideally the way your prospects think about your offer. For example, I am writing my newsletter, so it is on my mind… I recently was reviewing a header of a page and somebody had on the page, mindfulness coaching for perfectionist. At first it sounds like something fine, like what’s wrong with that, it’s in clear words, I understand that, but the thing I perfectionist don’t lie in bed thinking at night, oh, I need mindfulness coaching, this is not the words they think about their problems, they don’t use these words, they don’t use these concepts, so you need to talk in a way, so that people can relate. If you are lucky enough when you did your research to use the exact same words your prospects used in their mind to describe their problems, you will establish immediate connections and they would trust you more, because it will feel for them as if you are reading their mind… just yesterday they talked to their spouse about their problems using the same words and today they found your website. Even if they have never heard of you, there would be immediate connection, so it is really important to know your target audience and you know the words they use, for that you can go and read Amazon reviews, you can hang on social, you can go check out other websites of your competitors, to check their testimonials. You need to always ask about testimonials and feedbacks, so that your clients not only send you a quick email, that’s fine, great, send me an invoice, but that they describe their objection and whatever… What you also need to do on your website is address objections, this is very important. I see websites just throwing information at people, here is what I do, here is the ‘buy’ button, but people have a lot of questions, they have a lot of affairs, uncertainties and suggestions, you need to address these questions as well, and not on some separate page, but really in the context, where you are talking about your offer. But this was in the content, running a successful website is bloody complicated, this is just a copy signed. Then you need to make sure your design does not interfere with your message, because your website can be pretty but it can have a slighter, it can have 15 different fonts, and it can cause so much friction, that even the best copy would be rendered irrelevant, because people just won’t be able to see what’s important, they would be so overwhelmed with visual triggers, they will be like my brain is having a seizure, I would have to leave. Literally, even a page, you would say it is a nicely designed page, this is what we would be doing today, a nicely designed page, but once you start reading, there would be so much distraction thee, there is a part that is covering too much of the space, there is a navigation that is so huge and it totally makes the reading uncomfortable and then elements that move, people are generally irritated by anything that moves without their control, so you need to use it very rarely and think about how you use it, so this is another side of it. So, we said copy, it needs to be clear, relevant, valuable and speak directly to your audience, address their objections and name the benefits. The design shouldn’t get in the way. I don’t think a pretty website is a good website. I think a good website is the website that does its job, it can be ugly or whatever, but there are ugly websites that are still doing their jobs, better than the website that was designed yesterday by using the newest technologies, this is not the point. Sure, it shouldn’t be like super horrible in colors or whatever, that on the basic subconscious level, it would gross people out, it shouldn’t be like that, but you shouldn’t overdo it with these flashy things. And the third thing is overall user experience, because reading is one thing, but also people should be able to navigate your website and be able to find things, it is like the structure of the website should be also good, you need to keep in mind, what path my target audience could take from this homepage. If I have a person who is almost convinced, they would take this path, if I have a person who never heard of me before but has this problem, they may take this path. And then you need to see, did you give them the opportunity to follow this path easily, do you have enough call-to-actions on your page, are they on the right place, how does your navigation look like? Is it clear or hard to find about you? Sometimes I see this dropdown menus, where you have about section and three other dropdowns. But actually your main page is more than about, but nobody would click that, because people are used to this being a place holder, so you are losing visitors to your ‘about page’, not to mention that you don’t need three sub-pages for your ‘about’ section, the dropdown should be in the first place, but if you put it there, you should be aware of the fact that a lot of people will skip your about page, so this is another thing, the usability, so copy, design and the usability, which kind of overlaps, is like a combination of both of that plus structure of the website… So, you can see I have been talking for 5 minutes answering all different questions, that’s why there are people like me who help people to do that, because it is super hard to do it on your own, and even when you write all these articles, still you would see things and be like, nobody writes ‘about’, and you will be like, I didn’t know that existed anymore. Welly Mulia: Great stuff Gill. So, what you covered just now is if someone goes to our website where typically nowadays, as small business owners, especially with coaches, consultants, it is usually about their ‘About’ page and the have their services page. What about specific landing pages, so for example sales page, lead capture page? Would you suggest that we lose all the navigation? Because you talked about navigation just now for a general website or a blog. What about the lead capture pages and the sales pages? Gill Andrews: Well, sales pages, lead capture pages, let’s follow the lead capture pages, because sales pages can be seen on the website. All of that that I just said applies, because it is a sub-set of how to make A page work or A website work, just remove everything about navigation, on lead pages they shouldn’t have any navigation to a different page… But again, it is your target audience, they would probably have a narrowed interest because landing page, you are probably driving traffic from a pay-per-click campaign or from a very specific other source, people who click on that link they have a very specific problem, a very specific mindset, right now they are in a very specific mind state, but again this is your time to do it, it is the clarity, value, relevance, a little distraction, addressing objections, these all hold. Everything that I just said, except okay, they have to navigate somewhere… they don’t have to navigate somewhere, but you still have someone who is at this particular spot right now, this particular mindset, with this problem, these objections, and you have this place where you need them to be to convert and your landing page is building a bridge to bring them from place A to B. Welly Mulia: So, typically, you probably thought that this podcast was a little bit weird because typically the first thing the host would do is, tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do, I started with a different direction because I like to do things a little bit differently. So, now is the time I would like to get you to tell a little bit about yourself, how did you become a copywriter and a website consultant? And how all of these came about? Gill Andrews: First of all, I didn’t think this podcast was weird, I would like to address that… it is fine by me, you are the host, so you can ask whatever you want, the order you would like to do things is really up to you. So, how did I become a consultant? It was actually again by accident. I used to work as a software developer, I studied mathematics and computer science, and I worked as a software developer, I was more or less happy, I know there were such things as online business, I just thought, okay, my 9 to 6 job was fine… And then I went on maternity leave because I was pregnant with my son, and I got super bored, and I was like, this is so boring, and I started a blog, not this one, a different one, and I of course wanted it to succeed, I started reading about a lot of things, what makes a website work, and I learned a lot, but I also was like, okay, all of these things, so many of them I already know, from my previous experiences and from my work as a software engineer, because I was also an I.T consultant, we also developed URL and stuff. I was like why is everybody so excited about that? I mean, this is common knowledge to me, and then I was in this community of bloggers and website owners and I started giving them advice and they were like, they liked it and then my friend hired me to help her. And when it was time to think about whether I would be coming back to my job, thankfully in Germany, you get 3 years off for maternity, so I had 3 years to think about it. So, after 2 years, I already started getting paid for that. And then I had to make a decision, whether I would leave it as a kind of hobby on the side, which I thought that I probably won’t be able to maintain because of the family responsibilities, or I just jumped in and say I would ditch my office job and I would try doing this. And because this gives me so much joy and so much fulfilment, because I talk to real people, in my normal job, I used to talk to some bankers and insurance companies, employees who didn’t have their personal stake in the company, it was like huge corporations, and these people were just working their 9 to 6 jobs, they don’t really care about a lot of things. And I also didn’t see the results immediately of my work, so what I do now is much more fulfilling, of course it was hard especially the first two years were hard, I had weeks where I would go on 4-hour sleep, not because I worked so much, but because there were a lot of other things I had to take care of, but I thought it was a better possibility because it gives me balance between family life, between the time I get to spend with my son who is growing up so quickly, and doing things I love, because office job wouldn’t allow me to do that. I was lucky that I didn’t have to earn money right away, because thankfully my husband, he takes care of that. But I had a chance to pursue my passion, and I did that, I was really happy I did that, and after things picked up, this was a great feeling, because you are there for 2 years and you see it start to work out, so it was a good decision. So, this is where I am now. And it may sound unusual to some, but I can tell you, so many people have a similar story where they were on a maternity leave or broke a leg, and it gave them a pause, it paused their past lives and it revalidated something and decided that they don’t want to continue like that. Welly Mulia: 3 years is a very long time for maternity leave in Germany, do you actually get paid? Gill Andrews: We get paid, I think one year it is paid and 2 years extra you can stay at home and your job would be secured for you. But pay leave is only one year. Welly Mulia: What do you think is the number one problem for online course creators? I know that you work a lot with small business owners, and I don’t know if the problems are the same, but based on your experience for online course creators, those who have excelled in training programs and online courses, what do you think their biggest challenge, number one problem is? Gill Andrews: I think their biggest challenge lies not in the website themselves, because their websites are quite typical, concerning courses, it is not that different from consulting. You build the landing page and whatever, but the thing is, to sell people on courses, because there’s so many courses these days, everywhere, so why would people choose you? You need to make a case for yourself. So, I think their biggest problem is that they try to sell directly from the website, or if they have for example a freebie and they get people on their list, they neglect their marketing, and they do email marketing which is not ideal, because it is about nurturing the relationship, I think selling courses, unless you have a name, especially if you are a newbie in selling courses, this is very difficult, because why would people trust your expertise, that’s unfortunately not something you can slap on your website and hope that people would buy. There are a lot of things around it that you have to do, you have to make people notice some other places, trust is a big factor, would it be a good course? So, somehow, you need to make sure people see you somewhere else as well, because I can imagine that not many people would buy it on the spot unless it is like a super course nobody is offering and you have a thousand of page reviews. So, first of all, I would say leaving your website, because we are talking about achieving the final goal, selling your course, for a second, forget about your website, think about your overall process, you have a person who has never heard of you, never heard of your courses, how do you generally sell to them? What is your idea, what are you hoping for? Are you really hoping that they would go on the website, read one or two pages about you and buy your course? This is what you are hoping for? Then my question would be, why do you think it would be the case? Write down those objections they may have, and see, are you addressing those objections? And you may find out that it would extremely difficult to sell to the person who has never heard of you. And then you would need to think about different means, then you would need to think, okay let’s concentrate on getting people on my list, and then I would for one month, show my expertise, and only then I will pitch my course, because they say you first need to get people to know, like and trust you and its super hard to do with just one page or two pages. So, think about it, can you make people know, like and trust you just from your website? If not, you need to think about the different rule of selling. So I would say, because courses are not as tangible as an apple or a sweater that you immediately see the quality and you can safely return it if you don’t like it, and of course cost more than sweater. So, there are a lot of things to consider here. Welly Mulia: Okay, so you talked about possibly capturing their emails and then following up with them , and giving them value so that they know, like and trust you. And were you suggesting that in the first few emails, you don’t actually sell anything to them? Gill Andrews: Yes. Welly Mulia: So, in the few emails, you provide value to them… Based on your experience, what would you say is the… after how many emails would you be open to say I will drop a sales pitch over here? After how many days have they joined your list? Do you have like a guideline for that? When they can start pitching? Gill Andrews: It is not about the days, it is about the engagement, you shouldn’t pitch it to everyone, you should pitch to people who engage with your previous emails, and the number of days, I can’t tell you, you need to see for yourself, how often are you sending emails? If you are sending once a week, and you see that they opened all of them… I don’t know, I would say it depends, after 3 emails it is okay to pitch, but the decision depends on what was in the email. Before that, I would write one of these emails, asking them to do something small, like to share it, or check out a different post, what I do in my emails is like I have texts that provides value, then I say, I have a challenge for you, go to this post of 20 more mistakes people make on the website, and if you don’t find any mistake, you get to ask me a question, and I would answer it for free, but if you find a mistake, you share it on social. You shouldn’t just talk to them, you should try to engage them, and the moment you see that somebody is engaging with your emails, it means they are already moved on the scalar of liking, knowing and trusting you, somewhat closer to trusting you… But it depends also on your personality, I am not comfortable with selling quickly, I would rather write to people for 2 months before I ask them for a commitment, but it again depends on what works for you, what kinds of emails they were, and I also would definitely segment them. So if somebody didn’t open 3 of your last emails and then you send a pitch email, maybe they were on vacation, maybe those emails didn’t seem relevant to them, so it means they did not get anything from that. So, for them, your pitch email would be like the first email if they opened it, so there is no point then, of sending sales email to someone who didn’t engage with the emails. It also means you need to clean your list regularly, which I do every month, I send an activation email, short email without fancy stuff, asking whether everything is fine, and whether they would like to stay on the list. If they don’t respond within 2 weeks, I just delete them… not a lot of people, because some of them are literally disinterested, but some people come back, and then you deepen the connection, you talk to them like you would talk to a friend who haven’t messaged you for a while. So, it’s about also making… there are a lot of things to keep in mind, you need to keep your interaction as close to personal human interaction as possible. Of course it is not ideal, you are writing to so many people as well, and it is difficult to make your email sound personal, but you should try, and you should always think, if it was this person, would I ask at this point, would I say this or that at that point? This would guide you. Also texting also works, you can again segment them, and for one sub-list, you are sending a sales email, after 2 emails, for another sub-list after 4 emails, and you see what works better, this is also a way to know. Welly Mulia: So, you actually said you send monthly email, asking them if they want to continue to stay on the list? Gill Andrews: No, this would be crazy… Every month, I filter out subscribers that haven’t opened any email within 3 months. And to them, I put them in automated sequence, that is called ‘reactivating’, I reactivate subscribers, I remove them from the main list, it means they won’t be getting anymore emails from me regularly, but they would get an email saying, ‘are we still good’, in the sense of, I noticed you haven’t opened any of my emails, I wanted to as if you wanted to stay on my list, you don’t have to reply if you don’t want to stay, in two weeks you will be removed, but if you want to stay, click this shiny button that says ‘yes, I want to stay’. And they click the shiny button and the automated sequence puts them back, they are redirected to an automatic page, that thanks them for staying and they are put back in the list, which also means they will remember your name again, when it pops up, a couple of days, but whoever does not respond gets thrown out, so I know the people who are on my list are more or less interested in what I am talking about. Welly Mulia: Okay, that makes much more sense. So, how do you currently get leads and customers for your business? Gill Andrews: For me, once again, there is no direct way, because as I said, people need to have heard about you a couple of times to warm up to you. So, I get customers from such that come… they literally searched for website review and come on my service page. But I also get enquires from LinkedIn, where I started posting website ‘tip of the day’ series I think last April, and every week I post 2, 3 very focused tips with an image, not it’s like tip 115, so it has been very regular, and I get very good feedbacks, and I got clients from LinkedIn, but I also get clients from my list. Funny story; one of the biggest contracts I got was from reactivated subscribers, the sequence I just described to you, this person… because when I write to them and say… not reactivated but I regularly check my email software and there was some glitch and some people haven’t got an emails in half a year, so I also took all of these people and wrote them an email saying, I am sorry, something went wrong, to make it up to them, they get to ask me questions about their website. And this person wrote me and asked me questions, and I recorded a small video for her, and after that I am now redesigning and rewriting her whole website. So, taking care of subscribers also pays off, just like of course regular subscribers also write to me and say, you can okay, you can you review my homepage, and the funny story, I don’t I have ever sold anything to them, because I literally have nothing to sell so far, except for these reviews or a copywriting, so no course and no book, and it was very rare that I said, okay, contact me if you need something, but they still do, because they follow me on LinkedIn, on Twitter, we have multiple connection points, and sometimes I hit the knob, sometimes they get newsletter which is about the exact same problems they are dealing with. So, it is super important also to know what problems people are struggling with, and when they see an email like that, they contact me and say, okay, I am struggling with exactly same thing, can you help? And I say, yeah. So, it’s different, it is hard to say this is one particular channel, there are 3 channels, search, LinkedIn and my email newsletter. Welly Mulia: Okay, so with your case, do you have… because consultants usually have like a strategy session, maybe 30 minutes, 15 minutes or strictly the first time interaction with you. Gill Andrews: I don’t do free… first time interaction, my free consulting session is my newsletter, there you will learn so much and so many people never hired me, improved their website. I don’t believe in these free consulting sessions because already, I am taking my personal time, it doesn’t make sense to me to be honest, also because I am in such a different time zone, I work a lot with clients from the U.S.A, Canada and Australia. So, we are so apart, it is impossible to find time to talk. Yeah, they can read my blog for free consultation as well, my blogs very detailed and very focused on things that usual blogs don’t write about because it is probably big websites don’t struggle with that or big websites don’t think about things like that. But I write about very specific problems of business owners and if you go through my blog, you will find a lot of things that speak directly to you, to your problems you have now. So, this is my demonstration of expertise. Before I start reviewing a website, of course there is some kind of, get to know your problems situation, where I send out a questionnaire that I combine every time specifically for websites, asking questions, often target audience kind of problem, I of course don’t give any website suggestions without actually having talked to a business owner and learned about their business, but there are no free consultations. Probably it works for someone, but it will not work for me. Also, I am introverted, it would drain a lot of my energy, you need to prepare before the session, you can’t just be doing something and then subscribe and immediately come back. And also around this time, to prepare and to be composed is too much time wasted, I would say. Welly Mulia: Got it. So, what does a day in your life look like? Gill Andrews: Such a nice question… My days are really monotonous. I get woken up by my son who wakes up really early, then I drag myself into the living room/kitchen which is like a big space, I give him food, then I try to doze a bit while he is eating, then I bring him to kindergarten, when I come back, I have breakfast and I start working right away, till 3 o’ clock, having a break for lunch and get up to move a bit when I feel a pain in my back or something, but usually it is like work, work, work… it is either client work or some work on a new blogpost or my own website if I can squeeze it in, because there are weeks I don’t touch my website because I just have so much to do. Then at 3 o’ clock, I go pick up my son, 3:30, we come back, he has snack, we play a bit, till 5 o’ clock, and then thank God for iPad and cartoon, I have one hour before I need to start making dinner, to catch up on emails, to send some invoices, to do some work that doesn’t require my full brain, full attention. Then it is dinner, my husband comes home, we all have dinner, and after that, I bring my son to bed, and I try not to work after that, because this is just way too hard, because I had to do it this week, unfortunately I was on vacation and I had to pick up on things, I worked after 10 pm till 1 am at night, and it was hard. I did not choose freelance as a solo business owner life, I would like a bit more freedom that a fixed job offers you… There are times like that, but I do try to keep it down and not work in the evenings, or at night. And I really would like to bed at 12 latest, it is not always possible. This is how my day is… Sometimes I get to go on a podcast as you can see today, but this is not usually the case, usually it is just desk work, you sit down and types things and design things, and write things, but it’s very boring, my favorite part of that is when I get client feedback, because it is thankfully positive, it really makes my day, and all these pain, all these not sleeping really pays off, and people write there and say, waoh, I have worked with 3 people but nobody understands me like you, this is perfect, we are so impressed. I wouldn’t get it if it were to be anonymous, I probably wouldn’t do it just for the sake of website review, of course it is great to help people, but if you don’t see how you help them, if you don’t see people appreciating it, this is not the same. Welly Mulia: Have you thought about creating your own online course? Gill Andrews: Yeah, I did, I even tried and then I gave up. Welly Mulia: Why? Gill Andrews: Because it was just over me, because the things I would like to share, I noticed there was so much, it was like probably if I wrote it into a book, it would be lie 600 pages, so I was like, okay, I need to start small, because I don’t have any paid offer so far on my website, so I would start with a book, I am currently combining my LinkedIn tips into a book, especially because people ask me for that. Actually they asked me to make a book on LinkedIn, and I am happy to comply, because now I know people are waiting for it, so I already have an audience and this would be a small commitment, because the course I would have the price really high and I don’t want to do that especially for people who have never bought anything from me. And I noticed that I would need help creating a course, probably someone who would digitally combine materials for me, and right now, I just don’t have the time to find this person, I don’t have the time to deal with that, because there are still a lot of client works, so I decided to start with a book, but I absolutely… course is definitely on my mind, but I think it’s at least on year away, because it is really a lot of work, videos, the slides, it just gives me anxiety just thinking about it. But it’s a good idea, I like teaching, and my newsletter teaches, on LinkedIn I teach, even in my website reviews, I teach, because I don’t just say this is wrong, I tell people why it is wrong, so they know if they see the same reason somewhere on their website, they would know this, that they should do it again. And I also tell them how to make it better, and I also give them like a summary of the website reviews, where I summarize the most common problems for the copy as well, and I say, don’t do this next time, do it like that. So, teaching is also something I enjoy, so course, definitely in the cards… Welly Mulia: So, if you can only give one advice to people listening to this, what would you say to them, if they want to build a profitable website? I know you covered a lot of points just now, earlier in the show, but if you only give one advice, what would it be? Gill Andrews: It is hard to give one advice, also the question is, what kind of people are those? Do they already have a website or are they thinking of getting a website? Welly Mulia: Let’s say they already have a website, but it is not converting as well as they like. Gill Andrews: This is very hard, I really have to pass, it is not possible, if I give you any kind of advice, it may be wrong because websites can have problems with conversion for so many reasons. I would say, get a specialist to look at it, who can give you an advice literally. Because I can’t read minds, I can’t read things that I can’t see, it’s impossible, sorry, it’s complicated. If you’ve tried everything you could yourself, get professional advice, because you are not going to make it yourself, sorry. Welly Mulia: Okay, cool. And if you want to get professional advice, definitely contact Gill Andrews, because she is the one who knows everything about website conversion… Gill Andrews: If you need help, there is a link on my website, I created really detailed series, that would describe my process to you in detail, how I work, what you would get from that. It also has a lot of testimonials from business owners, with whom I work, and I update my testimonials, because I get really nice testimonials every time and then I exchange them to what I was currently doing. You will also see a couple of those projects mentioned, from business owners just like you… Welly Mulia: So, where can I find you? Gill Andrews: My website is gillandrews.com, and I hope it is pretty straight forward, just click services and take it from there, whatever you need, copywriting, or a particular reviews , like homepage review, or a whole website review or just a session where I can review something in person in front of you, or you get to ask me questions like you asked me right now, something very specific, like should I do this on my website, or should I do that on my website, if I am thinking about my sales funnel, and what should I do, does it make sense? And stuff like that, so I also offer personal consultations if you think such a website review is not exactly what you need, you can rather ask me specific questions. So, anything you need to help your website convert better, I can help you with it. Welly Mulia: Okay listeners, it is gillandrews.com. Okay, thank you again Gill for sharing your insights into the whole website conversion process, it is really great to have you here, I am sure the listeners are going to find tons of value out of this interview, thank you for coming to the show. Gill Andrews: My pleasure. It was nice talking to you. [/thrive_toggles] [/thrive_toggles_group] . Gill Andrews On Elements Of A High Converting Website Click here for a bigger version of the image (compressed, non-printable) . Highlights We’ve prepared a gist/highlights of the main points in the form a quick-read doc. Plus, you get the the printable, high resolution version of the infographic above. If you’re interested, click the pic below: . [thrive_text_block color=”note” headline=”Expert’s Resource”] The Ultimate Website Content Checklist — use this to fill every page of your website with content your audience will love and turn your website into a business generating machine. Whether it’s your homepage, about page, services page, blog page, blog post, contact page, testimonial page, or FAQ page… this checklist has them all! Click here to get it free (no opt-in required). [/thrive_text_block] The post How To Build A High Converting Website appeared first on BirdSend Academy .…

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How To Achieve The Laptop Lifestyle The “Yaro” Way 55:15

hace 6 years55:15

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I’ve been following Yaro for a decade now. Back when I first got started, he was already successful and famous. I remember frequenting his blog (Entrepreneurs-Journey.com) to read his latest posts and content. Eventually I enrolled in his Membership Site Master training program, and have used his teachings to launch my own membership site many years ago. Yaro is the author of the Blog Profits Blueprint and founder of Yaro.blog and podcast. He began blogging over twelve years ago initially for fun, however as his income surpassed $10,000 a month, he decided to go all in and treat his blog as his business. Since then Yaro used his blog to sell over $2 million dollars of his own ebooks, online courses and membership sites, and travels the world living what he calls the “Laptop Lifestyle”. Today Yaro is a mentor to thousands of people, helping them turn their knowledge into a profitable online business using his “Blog Sales Funnel” system. Yaro has a proven track record of results, with his “graduate bloggers” going on to make thousands of dollars – some even millions – in such diverse niches as book design, ADHD counseling, acne treatment, BMX bikes, skiing, cars, sports news, speed reading, real estate, television production and fat loss. In this podcast episode, you’re going to learn how anyone, including you, can achieve the Laptop Lifestyle. Yaro has also been featured in these media outlets: . You’ll discover: [02:07] What is the Laptop Lifestyle and how anyone can achieve it [05:11] The 3 different models on how to make a living [12:00] Should you hire contractors or employees? [19:22] How to hire the right people to your team [28:09] How to start a business even if you have a 9-5 job [34:42] 2 big problems faced by online course creators [39:08] The logical step-by-step action plan one needs to follow to get results (without overwhelm) [44:54] How to sell your course even if you’re not an expert [48:08] 1 advice to people who want to build a successful online course business . Quote “To get results, the very 1st thing one should do is to assess his current situation before taking any kind of action.” ~ Yaro Starak . Transcript Interviewer (Welly Mulia): Welcome to another episode of The BirdSend Academy podcast. This is the show for online course creators who want to build a profitable business by sharing your skills and knowledge. This is your host Welly Mulia, if you are not listening to this on our website, go to academy.birdsend.co/4 to get your show notes. This show is brought to you by BirdSend Email and Marketing Tool; the only email and marketing tool specifically created for online course creators. Get your free forever account at birdsend.co. Today’s guest is Yaro Starak, Yaro is the author of the blog; Profit Blueprint, and founder of yaro.blog. He began over 12 years ago, initially for fun. However, as his income surpassed $10,000 a month, he decided to go all in and treat his blog as his business. Since then Yaro used his blog to sell over 2 million dollars of his own e-book online courses and membership sites and travels the world, living what he calls ‘Laptop Lifestyle’. Today, Yaro is a mentor to thousands of people, helping them turn their knowledge into profitable online business using his blog’s sales funnel system. Yaro has a proven track record of results with his graduate bloggers going on to make thousands of dollars, some even millions in such diverse niche such as book design, ADHD counseling, acne treatment, BMX bikes, skin, cars, sport news, speed reading, real estate, television production, and fat loss. And Yaro, it’s great to have you on the show. Interviewee (Yaro Starak): Thank you, I am happy to be here. Welly Mulia: Okay, cool. I followed you many years ago, back in 2008, so it’s a decade now, and I remember visiting your blog, signing up to your email list and I know that you are big on the idea of the ‘laptop lifestyle’, and can you walk us through what that means? Yaro Starak: Sure, that’s one of my favorite subjects. Like possibly yourself, I grew up at the same time as the internet sort of grew up, and I was very lucky because I did not want a 9 to 5 job, I didn’t know how to avoid a 9 to 5 job other than starting a business, that seemed like the most common way of doing it. But I had no idea what kind of business, and obviously before we had the internet, when you think of business, it could be a restaurant, selling some kind of physical product that you have a factory and you manufacture it, all those sort of things. So, thank God for the internet, because that gave the opportunity for me to explore ideas with websites, I had a car game website, I started a company about Essay Editing, which is sort of my first ‘Laptop Lifestyle’ business, and all of these projects, even as I moved forward and started my blog, my podcast and selling online courses and e-books. And right now with my most current project on email management service called Inbox Done, they are all designed to be what you call or what I call ‘Laptop Lifestyle’ businesses, where they can feel your lifestyle, you can live anywhere on the planet, you certainly don’t have any kind of set schedule… I don’t have an office, cafes around the world are my offices, you are interacting with your team, but they are all remote, my team talk to me on Slack every day, but they are in Australia, in America, I’ve got my project manager in Tonga, so that’s really an amazing thing, and again about the internet, to have this remote team. And obviously, make a living as a bare minimum, I always worked really well, and have financial freedom as well. But the first goal was always that structure of a business that doesn’t just take all your time. And I think that’s really important to point out, because I noticed entrepreneurs would end up working longer than 9 to 5 for certain types of business models, they can be networking 12 hours a day, 14 hours a day, so it is kind of ironic, they end up quitting their job to start working 14 hours a day on their own business, sometimes for less money. So, that was not my goal, I wanted that sort of 4-hour work week, made famous, before I even wrote that book, that was my goal. So everything as I said has been about that, and I am grateful, because ever since, that Essay Editing company sort of started in 2000, some business has given me that lifestyle, so it’s really now, I am going to hit 20 years in another year of living the ‘Laptop Lifestyle’, so it’s been a good ride. [thrive_toggles_group] [thrive_toggles title=”Click to reveal the entire transcript” no=”1/2″] Welly Mulia: I think you are into the lifestyle business obviously with the concept of the ‘Laptop Lifestyle’, I see on your blog, you also have one of the main points that set up the ‘Laptop Lifestyle’. What would you say to people who are on the opposite? Some people who quit their jobs like you said, they are working longer hours, would you say there is anything wrong with that, because some people, like you, they are into the idea of having a lifestyle business, and the other one is like, they want to build this gigantic, big company, and probably someday sell it for a billion dollars, or maybe they don’t want to sell it, but they want to build an office with hundreds of employees. So, what is your take on people who have that kind of idea to start a business? Yaro Starak: Right. We are really talking about three things here. There’s the normal worker, an employee or executive in a company, then you’ve got a lifestyle entrepreneur which I think I am, and you probably are too Welly, and then you’ve got a growth company or a tech-startup, not necessarily tech, but a company like you said, the kind of goal is to have a big exit or just create a massive company with lots of employees and you are the CEO, and the founder, and eventually you probably exit. For me, it is like 9 to 5 employee, I never wanted to do that, I did have some part-time jobs, and I think it’s important to say, there’s nothing wrong with having a job, it suits probably more people on this planet than any other type of employment. I don’t think if the entire planet was all entrepreneurs, we would probably be in trouble, because no-one would be doing the everyday work. And it doesn’t suit most people, most people don’t want to be in control of everything, they want a steady pay check, a role where they can really focus on, and hopefully enjoy and become an expert at, whereas entrepreneurs, we all have to do kind of different things. But I think to answer your question with 2 different types of entrepreneurship, I have wanted to do both, I still get excited about both. I think for me, it was always first, and I think most of the listeners would feel the same, first you have to make enough money to survive, so you don’t even know necessarily what your company would be, you are just going to work at that objective and it could become a lifestyle business if that’s the way it evolves, and if you build a business using a certain type of structure or business model and you make certain decisions as I did, to have a team and to have a kind of business that runs without you or could separate from you as much as possible, but has a steady cash flow, that’s kind of the lifestyle business, the first is maybe the tech-founder startup kind of business where you are going to keep working really long hours, you are going to get an office very likely, you are going to fill it with employees, you are going to make way more revenue, but you are going to spend it all on growth, you probably have investors, not necessarily, but that’s usually the way they do rapid growth. It is definitely not a lifestyle business, because you work really hard, you are very stressed, often those kind of people have a crazy story to tell once they exit, like I would never do that again, they are hopefully wealthy, sadly, the real story is a lot of these project, never make any money, sort of these rare unicorn stories we hear about. But I am fan of both, because I think the big companies, they are the ones that make a dent in the world, the RBNBs, the Ubers, the Googles, of course I am talking tech companies here because I am in the tech field, you are in the tech field, but we should not forget about bowing, making airplanes and all the companies doing whatever it is, medical research, this is the stuff that changes the world. Now, my little essay editing company, my blog and my email management business, none of those are making massive dents in the universe, but they each provided a great service to a select few people. And it can change the lives in a positive way to that little core customer group you have, so it can be just as personally gratifying if not globally impact as a large startup becoming a large company, so I don’t think there is anything wrong with either but you have to get clear, which one you are going after pretty quickly, because there are very different business models, you have to make very different decisions, and I went after the big model for a couple years, with the tech startup and it was terrible, I did not enjoy the prospect of kind of trying to get investor funding at the same time as trying to grow a company, and hiring was so painful, trying to find good people to work for you. So, I much prefer nice lifestyle, laptop lifestyle businesses and that’s all what I preach and teach as well, so that’s my area I want to focus on. Welly Mulia: So, because our audience is mostly online course creators, so people who actually teach and share their knowledge. I remember you mentioned about the startup part, where you are trying to pick investors, I remember reading your blog about that; Cranky ads… Because I have been following you for so long, a decade ago, so I know about the experience that… you also wrote a blogpost about the reasons why you eventually stopped the business. So, I think it is a matter of your personal preference, like you said just now, you have to be very clear which goal you are aiming. And along the way, even if you change course, then it is fine, because sometimes like yourself, you went into the tech company, the company and then you moved back to the lifestyle business. So, we got into lifestyle business and I know that you have been doing this for a very long time as you said, almost 20 years now. So, with regards to hiring team members, you also mentioned that everyone on your team are remote, they are working from different places, all over the world. So, can you tell us, how does that work? Are these people your permanent employees? You pay them salary, or are they independent contractors? Where it is just part-time freelance thing, or some of them are full-time? How does it work? Yaro Starak: So, I have never had a full time employee for any company I have run, we have had founders, I have had partners and obviously worked and I guess considered employees, but from a structure point, we were co-founders. So, contractors have been and still remains the majority of the people I work with. I don’t necessarily think that’s always the smartest path, it just lent itself well to certain type of businesses. For example, for the people listening, no doubt, when you are building a business that sells your education, so, course creator, information marketer, e-book writer, and you are probably doing things like blogging and podcasting on YouTube and social media, there’s going to be certain roles that you will eventually and hopefully quickly, start to fill with other people’s help, you don’t want to be a jack of all trades, wearing all the hats. I did that myself, like possibly almost all the people listening right now, money was very tight when I was getting started with my business, so I attempted to be the person who built the website and did the customer service and did the marketing to find the customers, and did the content creation, did all the tech error, correcting, and on and on. And the end result of that was 7 years of very slow growth, like almost no money for 6 years and finally I started to make some money in the 7 th year, so I started hiring people, starting with the tech person who was a remote hire. So, today I always advice all my coaching clients, hire tech from day one, I would even recommend working a job to save up or provide some income so that you can put away maybe $500 a month towards tech, especially at the start, to build your website, your landing page, set up your email list, unless tech is your thing, which usually is not, because normally a coaching, teaching person, your thing is whatever it is you are good at and you help people with, which doesn’t usually relate to tech, it could be cooking, or fixing a sore back, or losing weight, or whatever it is. So, you want to be spending your time on that activity, creating content, creating product, not setting up the websites and getting lost in code and uploading scripts… So, tech first, and once you start to get some sort of customer base, then customer service, I think email needs to be the first thing, those are the first two things I outsource and straightaway I get those off my plate because they are the two things that suck your time the most, doing your emails and doing your tech setup, so I have people in place, straightaway. I guess the reason why they haven’t become full-time employee is just structurally, my company hasn’t needed that kind of person in those roles, we just function well with contract work. But there are plenty of people who are doing what I do, especially as they grow I guess the next level, they have to get full-time employees, because I guess it makes more sense, they need that consistent doing a 9 to 5 level of work output, growing parts of their business, maybe it’s developing software, maybe it’s constantly working on split testing to grow your traffic or running your ad campaign or writing content every day, that makes sense at certain levels, when people kind of break free from sort of above half a million US dollars a year, that’s when people start looking at full time employees. Under that, it seems to be okay to function entirely with contractors, you can even get up to a million like a 7-figure business, and just have contractors, but most people I know go beyond that, and again, that’s a decision to make as well, because when you hire full-time employees, you have to keep giving them work in other to justify the cost of… nowadays it could be $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 or $90,000 a year depending on what role that they are doing. So, if your company is not consistently bringing in that income, that creates a major stress point for you as an entrepreneur. I know from my point of view too, contractors, it is just more relaxed in terms of my sense of, I got to make payroll, I don’t have to think that way, so I can really kind of hire as I need, with the amount of hours that I have, and not have to worry about giving someone a full work day worth of work. And in fact, as a founder, owner… it means you end up doing a full day’s work too, because you have to coordinate your employees, so that’s kind of against the ethos of the laptop lifestyle stuff for me. But there’s certainly a place and time for employees if you want to go to that next level. Welly Mulia: So, your team members are independent contractors as you said? Does that mean, because you are not giving them full time work, as in, like 40 hours per week, so does that mean that they can also work for someone else? Do you have any kind of checks in place? Yaro Starak: Yes. I think almost all of my people have been working for other people, I don’t really carefully watch what they are doing outside of the work they do for me, but I know for sure… a lot of the people I have worked with, they are kind of entrepreneurial as well, or freelancers at the very least, so maybe they are not hardcore entrepreneurs, but they like being in charge of their own freelance work, so maybe they do have their own company, and I love that, because they can have the flexibility of working as an independent contractor with me, and they have time to grow whatever other business they are working on, or take on other clients as well. And they can decide, how many hours they are going to do each week, who they want to work with, what kind of products they want to work on. With my newer company, Inbox Done, it is a little bit more structured because we take over email accounts for entrepreneurs, basically, or any kind of expert who has a lot of emails, or customer service via email, and that’s a consistent role, they have to check in everyday, it’s not 9 to 5, but we do want them to clear an inbox every day, because that’s very important to get back to people. So, those people have a set timeframe at least in a 24-hour window to go into that work. But for example, one of my contractors lives in Hawaii, so it’s great, because whatever it is, whenever he wants to go surfing, he goes to surf, then he comes blogging, do the email job and whatever it is in the afternoon. So, I think this is maybe why I also like contractors, they have this similar ethos to me, and they want to build a life that’s in their control, not have a boss telling them when to work or what to work on, they decide how many people they work with, what they work on, and how many hours they do, and that’s freedom of a kind, and I think that’s a form of ‘laptop lifestyle’ right away, that’s very attainable. For a lot of people, freelancing is a way to get started, making money. So, I love it, I love being a person who hires freelancers, and I love the fact that we have that kind of ecosystem available nowadays with sites like Upwork, or just the fact that there is the internet and I can hire someone from Tonga, or who has chosen to live in Tonga, and we all run businesses and do what we enjoy. Welly Mulia: Cool. So, how do you find someone to trust? Like what is the process of it, maybe you can share some tips of how you actually recruit these contractors? Yaro Starak: Hiring; yeah. As I mentioned earlier, I hated it, I suck at it, so I attempted to do a lot of it myself for many years, and I relied on… and I still would say that most of the best people I have worked with have come from an existing connection, as opposed to posting a job on Upwork, or back in the day there was Elance and Freelancer, and some of these are still going or even just posting to Facebook sometimes, you can get someone. But usually, the best people come from a peer endorsement, another entrepreneur who currently uses this contractor, or maybe used to hiring and recommending them as well, so that’s being the best way to find people. But, you kind of run out of resources eventually if you just do that. So, what I did. I attempted to grow my company a few years ago, hiring more people, and I just had this run of just getting people who disappeared on me, and it was very frustrating, you probably saw me writing blogposts about it, I know I did that few years ago. And then I realized, I am not going to get better at this, because I don’t want to, and I thought, I am going to hire someone to help me hire, and that’s when I brought on Laura, my project manager, and I spent a bit of time to find here, again, through my friend referral network, in fact, my current tech person, she is friends with Laura and she recommended Laura for the role, and she turned out to be great. So, then I told Laura, your job is to get a hiring system set up, because I want to grow my team, and I am not very good at hiring. And I said what we can do is, there’s a few people who have these systems in place for hiring, that I really admire, I want to kind of take a few of some of these ideas, but apply them, not me. For example, one of the very basic ideas was put together a recruitment page, very much a content page, it basically pitches the idea of working with me. So, we have this for my coaching business, with my online courses and so on, but it is not really as active, because that company isn’t… I am not massively growing that company, but we took the same system, to my InboxDone company too for hiring managers, we used the same principle, and it’s been pretty simple, it is kind of like an ‘About page’ in a lot of ways, where you talk about the history, what you are doing, your vision, and what it is like to work with you, and what you are looking for in terms of a shared vison from a potential contractor, team members, we prefer to call them, and paint a picture that this is an exciting opportunity than kind of a blind emailing comply here, you kind of get what you put out there. So, by putting in the effort to create this nicer application page, we got a better quality person applying to begin with. Second thing we did, again, sort of boring idea, similar to the other online entrepreneurs, was create more of the process of vetting or basically testing before we even talk to them and that just meant creating a much more complex application form where we provide more questions, not just questions, but actually the test of ability within the application form. A great example, right now, if someone wants to apply to become an email manager for InboxDone, we actually have some emails that are kind of like dummy emails to show what kind of emails our clients might get, we ask applicants to write back to these emails as if it was part of their job, and that’s a great way to assess the core skill which is rewriting emails in this with this business. And also, it acts as a deterrent, because if someone is not really into this job, they are not going to bother to go through this long application process and to these emails, test themselves, so it is a filtering mechanism, to get the serious and best people only to apply. And once they get through that testing and application form, then we move on to the actual, let’s do some interviews and have a conversation with you, and see what you are like, we have been talking to you over the internet, and that is a really… I guess a 3-step process to get better people, and that was all developed through Laura and myself, Laura definitely implemented it and we brought it across with InboxDone, Clair my co-founder there has been applying those same principles, and they have become a foundation actually for that business, because hiring for InboxDone is kind of like our core strength, it’s why that business works, because we are doing the job that entrepreneurs don’t like doing, which is hiring and training the person to handle your email, and that’s kind of our secret sauce, that’s why we can do what we do. So, it’s all connected in my case, my coaching business led to that business, and those hiring practices we developed from Laura by borrowing all kinds of ideas and coming up with our own. And I thoroughly recommend them, hiring is the most important job an entrepreneur can do, once you start to get traction, if day one you are trying to get traction, your first subscribers and customers, but you will get to a point where the constraint for growth is growing a team, more than it is needing to get more customers or more audience, and that’s a great place to be, but it’s pretty stressful, especially if you are a one-man or one-woman show, trying to do all that, that’s when hiring becomes the most important role. Welly Mulia: I am just curious, when you were putting up on your website, about what it is like to work with your company, what it is like with Yaro, do you specifically mention that this position is for independent contractors or do you just make it vague like, be on my team? Did you mention any kind of full-time or part-time arrangement? Yaro Starak: I am not sure of the specifics, I have to go back and read, we have created individual entry for every opening of a role. What I do know is that we are bidding upfront with, this is how many hours it is going to be and this is not necessarily going to be consistent if it is not a consistent kind of role. So, expect 10 to 20 hours a week, but there’s no guarantees, you can quit anytime. So, all these statement are inferring to the fact; this is a contractor position, and I suspect they were also emphasizing on… Like I said, I have to go back and read over the copy, but I am pretty sure the word ‘contractor’ would definitely have been mentioned in each of the individual job openings on my blog, but that makes sense, because we are offering a contractor role and dynamic roles that don’t have set hours and they go up and down each week, so it’s just the nature of the position. Welly Mulia: Got is. So Yaro, I didn’t catch this earlier, did you mention you never had a 9 to 5 job before your first business? Yaro Starak: That’s right, I have never had a 9 to 5, I have had part-time normal jobs, like working for other people, but they were never like a full-time employee role, I have never had that kind of job, thank God. Welly Mulia: This is interesting, because most people, when they start a business, most of them are coming from… they already have a job, and they have a family and support, and then they need to have that income with their business first before they are ready or brave enough to make the jump on quitting their job and focusing full-time on their business. So, you started entrepreneurship at a very young age of… about 20 years ago. Yaro Starak: I was 18 years old. Welly Mulia: Okay, that’s a very young age. How did you get started on your first business? It was Tarik card you said? Yaro Starak: No, magic the gathering. Welly Mulia: Yeah, I am sorry, I remember that. So, how did you have the idea of starting, as a very young kid, how did you come up with the idea of starting this business? Yaro Starak: You made a good point, I am not a typical case study. Then, all I knew was I didn’t want a job, and I think, perhaps that’s the one thing that maybe led to me starting earlier. It wasn’t like I was a genius, business startup guy, I was successful from day one, I was far from it. But I knew that I had to avoid full-time, job, so I hustled, that’s why I had part-time job here, tried to start selling… To be honest, it wasn’t actually a car game website, my first ever income was just selling stuff on eBay, finding stuff around my house and selling all my old toys, just to see what it was like to generate some revenue, that might sound silly today, because it is so common to sell anything Craigslist, whatever your service is, but back then it was selling on the internet, your stuff, you should have a garage where you sell things, right? So, I was a little bit different, using the internet to get rid of my junk. Then it led to a website, and again, I was just a teenager who liked playing this card game and it made sense to start a magazine on the internet, because I loved the game, I loved the idea of having a magazine, so that led to the magazine website, which led to starting a little online store, my first income was from advertising and it should be noted that the dotcom boom, the first bubble in the late 90s was happening then too, so I was constantly intimidated by Amazon starting up, eBay was starting up, Napster was happening, and then there was the pets.com, example of a company making millions of dollars in capital raising and not actually making a cent online, then it all came crashing down. I saw all that happening, I was very excited about the internet, I wasn’t making a full-time income from any of it, but I was definitely motivated, I lived with my mom for a good number of years so I didn’t have a lot of expenses, and I didn’t have kids or a wife or a family to support or all those things, so I had the luxury of that time. Actually I have a podcast that talks about, for people who might be listening, if you all are in a full-time job, how to make the transition to full-time entrepreneurship, because it is a juggle and it is something you have to really, carefully balance and I have interviewed so many people now and I have heard so many origin stories of people who have jobs and do support families with full-time employment, yet they get up in the morning and find an extra hour in the morning to create content, product or whatever, and they work on weekends, sometimes they use their holidays, just to get everything up and running, then they maybe switch to freelancing instead of having a full-time job, then they can transition… I won’t go into all the details, like I said there is a full podcast if you want to listen to that on my show. But I want to emphasize that it is important to understand that it is possible and I am an exception. Most people do it, when they do have a full-time job, at least some kind of job. I am not the exception in the fact that I did have two part-time jobs, so I was working 15 hours a week, 20 hours a week at my local university, in the helpdesk, providing customer support and service there, and that was my rent money and my food money. So, any kind of money that I made from that company, we were just slowly growing, my goal at the start was to just quit those two jobs, so I had to make enough money for my companies, maybe like $1,500 a month will get my rent and food money, and that was my first goal, so that was the motivation, I can’t tell you where that came from other from the fact that I didn’t want a job and the dotcom bubble was happening around me, so it was a special time in history. Again, like I said, I am thankful I was becoming an adult at the same time that the internet was becoming an adult, and that’s just luck. Welly Mulia: So, you mentioned you were selling advertising space on your first business. Apart from that, are you getting any income from, maybe selling products or affiliate products? Yaro Starak: Yeah, I was selling cards, so it was surprising, e-commerce technically was what I was doing, long before… today we have the [inaudible 32:20] and so many other ways to sell things online, Amazon and so forth, I was doing it old school though, I won cards, and I collected cards as a player of this game and then I started buying cards wholesale, and I literally had playing text files which was listing all of my inventories, and people would send me an email saying, I want to buy this number of this card and this number of this card, I would say, great, I would adjust my inventory playing text file manually, they would send usually money order or a check in a mail, I would get it, I would cash it, it clears, I then pack up those cards, go down to the mail box, the post office and send the cards to them, and that was my online store. So, it’s old school, I made like almost no money, because it’s a very little margin, if I didn’t win tournaments, which meant I won free cards, I wouldn’t have made much profit, it relied on me doing that. But it was a great learning experience, that magic to get a website, even though it was not very profitable, ultimately it was very amazing for the core skill set I grew, and eventually used for every business, and I still use it today, I think about the content creating skills, the tech skills, the marketing skills, the connecting with people skills, I really got in touch with people in the community and eventually one of them bought my whole business, I sold that business. So, it was an amazing learning experience, and a foundation for my blog too, because that’s where my blog content came from eventually. Welly Mulia: I think that’s very interesting and a wise advice, I think a lot of people see things for what they are right now, but sometimes it is just a stepping stone for other bigger things like you said, you learned all these networking skills and content creation skills, so eventually it builds up. So, I think it is a point to see not just what you are doing right now, if it is not working for you, then maybe this is a stepping stone to something bigger like what you did. Yaro Starak: Not maybe, guarantee it is, everything is a test. Welly Mulia: Okay Yaro. So, with tons of experience with creating online training programs, courses, what do you think is the number one problem for online course creators? What is the problem they face? Yaro Starak: I know if you asked me that when I was considering doing a course, I would have said two things; The fact that I didn’t know whether anyone would actually pay me for the information I created, there was just self-doubt, self-belief was just not there. If you have never sold something of your own creation, it’s easy for someone who may be have been writing books their whole life to jump to a course, because it’s not much different, I wouldn’t say easy, but it’s easier. For someone like myself, before I released my first course, I never considered myself an authority, an expert, coach, I was just this kid trying to make websites, make money and then suddenly I am going to teach people how to blog as a way to start a business, so it was a confronting idea, that’s a mindset issue, that is just simply a confidence test that you can push yourself through, and once you get some people kind of giving you that positive feedback you need, telling you, you are good at what you do, I really learn from you, then you start to get the self-belief and that was certainly what happened for me. And the other problem which probably is way more prevalent in reality is, just how do you get customers? That’s every businesses problem, but I think most people who I see, certainly in my history coaching and teaching people, it’s not for lack of their own understanding and their ability to create a course, it’s just, how do I get customers? Because they are not good marketers, they don’t know how to find customers, they don’t know how to convert people from reading content to signing up to an email list, then going into sales page and buying your online course. There is a 4-step process there, the same process everyone uses to sell online courses, give away content, grow a list, offer a product using a sales page or a sales video, and there you go, you sell your course. there are so many little, granular steps to get right, you have to have a traffic source that’s targeted, you have to get the copywriting in your video or your sales page and texts right. Branding, positioning, there are so many sort of soft skills there that you kind of need to push together to make it work, and even before all that, most people just don’t know how to get a subscriber, how to find someone who is interested in what you doing enough to sign up to your email list, step one, so that’s an area where there’s a lot of things to learn, and that’s why people like myself and I think you too, Welly exist, assisting people to get better results from what they do online, whether it is learning the skills of copywriting, content creation, how to write an email campaign, how does that turn into sales of a product, so those are all important things we all have to learn, I went through that, I wasn’t born a writer, I learned blogging, even when I started with my blog, I wasn’t a copywriter, I had to learn copywriting and everything just came down to doing the work to create the product and do marketing, and to get on podcast, talk about what I do, teach people, write articles every day to grow my organic search engine traffic, I talked on stage a little bit, wrote a few reports, started creating my own podcast, producing videos on YouTube, jump unto social media, it was all slow and organic, but it starts to compound, and you start to grow an audience and you release your first product and then you can get some money so you can do more things, and it just grows from there. So, that’s kind of in a nutshell, I do think, first of all, the mindset and the belief that you can help people and second, just developing those marketing skills, the conversion skills to actually sell something… Don’t go and spend 6 months creating a course if you have no audience, because it is great to have a course, but if there is no one there to buy it… All you have done pretty much is create something you can look at, and no one else would ever see, so that’s not what you want. Welly Mulia: Yeah. I fell into that mistake many years ago when I was just getting started, I would spend months and months creating this product, which I thought was awesome and excellent, but when I talked to the market, it turned out they didn’t want it, so I just wasted months of my time, so that’s a really good advice. Now, there are a lot of things like you said just now with marketing and sales part, you have to do all these stuff; email marketing, copywriting, branding… For someone who is new to this, it gets very overwhelming, like you probably heard of the phrase in our industry ‘information overload’ a lot of times… So, what would you say is the structure of steps, like step one, do this, step two, do this, what would you say? Because they just can’t possibly learn all of these things all at once right? So, based on your experience, what would you say is the logical steps one need to take in order to really do what is necessary instead of being, oh, there is just so many things to do, I am just going to put it till later and then later never comes? Yaro Starak: Yeah, that’s probably the most important question, and the hardest to answer unfortunately really. Since everyone comes at this from a different place, so I actually think the answer to this question… I can sit here and rattle off, my 4-step process from creating a successful teaching content, expert-based business, but the truth is, what you really need to do first is assess what you are bringing in to the table, and what you don’t know, because that then guides you to your actual first step. So, it is kind of like a method for a step. You have to assess your resources, what are you capable of producing? What do you bring to the table in terms of audience or connections, relationships, products you can sell now, and then you will need to kind of learn a framework, this is why… I sell a flagship course called blog mastermind, which I have been teaching now for almost 10 years, and one of the things I tell people to do with in course is, when you first signup, go through the whole course, but do it in review mode, don’t do any action step, don’t try and complete the actual activities in the course, just go through everything because it is going to be overwhelming, just like you said, how do I cover all these things that you were talking about, to a degree. I want you to just see the picture, you are trying to paint, from A to Z, even though most of it is just way too overwhelming to try and learn everything at once, but I want you to kind of see the map of the process you are going to work, so you can then place yourself on that map, and then you can make that decision, okay, my next step is actually this, it could just be like, I need to figure out my next topic, I don’t even know what I am trying to do for people, what problem I am trying to solve, if that’s your position on this map, you go, okay, I need to go talk to more people, to learn more about their problems, so you don’t do any online marketing at all, it just comes down to talking to people, it could be talking on Facebook, or something like that, but that could be the step. However, if you are coming at this and you already know your expertise, like I am the best lower back pain expert, I want to start selling my information on this subject, you don’t have to choose your problem, you know what the problem is, so that’s not your first step. Your first step is going, okay, I know the map, again, identifying what I need to do, I need a domain name and a landing page, and a blog, and I need to write my first 10 articles so I can start my presence online, and that’s a different first step, because that’s choosing a domain name, it’s a branding, and naming decision, that’s a completely separate set of skills you have to learn and figure out about, and research to get it done, so it does depend, like if I start today myself, I know, because I don’t have to look at the map, I am very familiar with the map, I still have to determine my problem, to help people solve… I did this very recently with InboxDone, it’s a fairly new company, only less than 2 years old, and it’s like okay, we are going to help people do their email, how are we going to reach them? How are we going to deliver this service, and I knew from my experience, the first thing we had to do is, see if people even want this service, so let’s try and get a test customer and learn everything about the potential future business, helping this test customer, very much like a lean startup methodology. And because I know online marketing, I didn’t have to go and teach myself, what’s a landing page, what’s an email list, all that stuff, I am beyond that on that map, but if you can’t answer that, you’ve got to learn the map, and go all the way back to those first steps. And that helps dealing with information overload, and this is the secret; you don’t do anything else, you ignore all the rest of the map, because that’s how you get overwhelmed, because you are suddenly exposed to advice on copywriting, advice on flip testing, advice on product creation, people telling you that you need to be doing Facebook ads and you need to be doing your YouTube channel and you should be blogging, why don’t you do a webinar and say, okay. It’s too much, and you don’t even know where that fits in the map, but you have to ignore that, and your only decision is, I got to make a domain name, that’s so much clearer and that’s one task, you are going to get it done, so I am a big fan of chunking down and ignoring everything else. Welly Mulia: Okay, great advice. So, with online training programs, online courses, just now you mentioned about one of the problems that people face is about, they are not an expert, they don’t believe in themselves, they don’t believe their skills, knowledge or experience can be sold, what would you say to these people, like they say, I am not an expert at anything, so I don’t have anything of value to give to other people, so how do you actually… what would you say to someone like that? Yaro Starak: Well, if that’s the truth, they don’t really have any kind of knowledge, like there’s the people who are actual beginners, and they shouldn’t be teaching, and there’s the people who do know something, they have lived through something, they have experience to share, they just don’t have self-belief, there is that little voice inside their head saying, I am not an expert, I don’t have a degree qualification, so no one should pay me for this, that’s different, that person needs to understand that, the internet in particular is not about having a qualification, it’s about having results, so if you have lived through an experience of fixing that lower back pain, you can go on the internet and explain what you did to fix it and immediately make an impact on other human beings, you may not call yourself an expert, but that other person who benefitted from your advice would see you as very helpful, because hopefully your advice helped them with their back as well, so that’s the difference, it’s a result. Now, certain fields certainly do require expertise, you can’t go teaching brain surgery without having being through medical training, but if you take away say the medical and the legal profession, most other professions, or not even professions, most other areas where you solve people’s problems do not necessarily need a qualification, like you don’t have to get an NBA to start a business, you don’t have to get an engineering degree to go and build a shed in your backyard and sell those sheds online. Or sell how to make a shed online with information products. So, like I said, it’s all about the results you’ve gotten for yourself, you’ve got for other people, sharing what you know online, that’s what YouTube is all about, I feel like you don’t have to prove this point, go on to YouTube, look at almost all the whole popular channels and ask yourself, how many of those people are official experts with some kind of qualification for what they are talking about on YouTube? Almost none of them, so it is certainly not necessary to succeed. If on the other hand you are a true beginner, maybe you are very young and you have gone to school and you haven’t focused on anything, although most people, early teenagers, they might get into coding or they might get into some kind of science they love, or sport they love. So, often, you can still… I know when I was 18, I did not consider myself an expert and had to go through a bunch of experiences to make me someone of knowledge. That’s why when I started to blog, 7 years later, I started blogging after I was 18, it wasn’t till I was 25, I started the blog, the only reason that blog worked was because I was telling stories from all the things I did, whether they worked or they didn’t work, in the last 7 years, and that for me, the most important advice was to do something. So, for anyone who is in that boat, I would say, go learn and do through experience, that would give you the building blocks for whatever it is you might end up helping people do in the future, but until that happens, you have to go and learn and live and deliver results to yourself and other people first, solve problems basically and then you can potentially teach those solutions in the future. Welly Mulia: So, before you wrap up. If you can only give one advice to people who want to build a successful online course business, what would that be? Yaro Starak: Only one? Again it is hard to know where everyone is coming at this, I do know from my experience, there are two types of people, those who are clear on their problem and what they help people with, and those who are not. So, I would say the one thing to do if you are not clear on what you help people with is, go spend some time with people, and help them to learn about their problem I think there is nothing better you can do than… let’s stick with this back example, go to talk to other people online who complain about their back, see what they are doing, what they have tried and what hasn’t worked, talk to them, it could be some Facebook group, it can be some online [inaudible 49:14] or Reddit, whatever it is, wherever the people talk about bad backs, I am not even sure, read the comments and not the person’s blog. If you do know what your problem is you help people with, and you are excited about creating a course around this area, your one most important thing I would say, is to learn the framework as I mentioned before, of what it takes to sell online, if you are new to this, there is so much free information obviously… I am one person, Welly, you are another who provide resources on learning the system, and to make it very practical, if I was to say the one most important thing to do in the system is actually to grow your email list, I know that would always be the best advice I can give people from a practical stand point, because you can make a lot of mistakes, but if you always have a list that is growing every day, you’ve got an audience that is always paying attention to you, so you can keep trying, you can launch your product and it cannot do well, you can change it, you can ask for feedback, you can interact with people, you can try different product types, different product pricing, and as long as you’ve got that steadily growing audience, it gives you options, you can start a whole new business with that as I have done many times now, some worked and some didn’t. So, it’s an amazing asset, there is no better asset, just by being such an old technology with email, relatively speaking, it is still the most powerful tool we have for marketing and starting businesses. Welly Mulia: So, when you mentioned about the learning framework, you mentioned you have resource for that? Can you tell us where people who are listening to this can learn this framework about what you just said? Yaro Starak: Yeah, I mean, if you are the kind of person who just wants a concise handout document, like a short report, which is also available in audio. You will know this very well Welly, my blog profit blueprint, it’s the most successful teaching resource I have ever released, over 200,000 people have gone through it, and you can find it either at BlogProfitsBlueprint.com or head to my blog; Yaro.blog , or Google ‘Yaro’, I am usually on the first or second page, and you can find the blog of Yaro and the podcast of Yaro, and the blueprint is available there as well. Welly Mulia: Great. To, listeners, I highly recommend to check it out because I have been following Yaro like I said just now for a very long time, and the content he puts out is very solid. I am also one of his students back many years ago, with your membership site mastermind, and till this date, I still follow Yaro, reading his blog, listening to his podcast. So, is there anything else you would like to add Yaro before we end the show? Yaro Starak: I just want to say thanks Welly for being such a long-term reader, I love getting to talk to people who have been there since the really early days, like before cranky ads, membership mastermind, you remember me doing long hair videos, it’s changed a lot since then. I do appreciate your long term attention, and I am so glad to have played a part with your success, even a small part with my course, so just keep up the good work. Welly Mulia: Yeah, sure. So, one more thing before I end. Because you mentioned about the membership step mastermind with your long curly hair back then. I don’t want people to be overtly… sometimes people over think. I remember you deliver lessons just via playing old emails and giving people generic passwords, so every member would have the same password… Yaro Starak: Yeah, you got it, no one knew this, you might have figured that out. Obviously I told people in membership site mastermind, that blog mastermind; my first ever course, it was literally a word press site, with a password protected section, you can even do this by default with word press, but I had my tech person do it, and then I had created one username and one password, and every customer got a welcome, when they joined, they gave them the same username and password, but no one knew, they all thought they had the password and username, but they didn’t… Welly Mulia: Maybe because I am into the technical side, because I have been creating all these softwares, so I probably had an advantage that other people don’t have. So, I think I suspected it was a generic password that everyone shares same password. So, wat I wanted to point out here is that, you don’t necessarily have to over-complicate things especially with tech, if you can start like what Yaro did, having a simple setup, you don’t have to create a username account for every single member, you can just start the simple way and when you get momentum and traction, you can hire people to set up the tech side for you and your system. So, it doesn’t always have to be tech-perfect from day one, that is the message I wanted to get across to you guys. Alright Yaro, thank you again for sharing your experience, I appreciate it, and thank you to the listeners for listening. Yaro Starak: Thanks Welly, good luck everyone. Welly Mulia: If you are not listening to this on our website, go to academy.birdsend.co/4 to get your show notes. This show is brought to you by BirdSend Email and Marketing Tool; the only email and marketing tool specifically created for online course creators. Get your free forever account at birdsend.co. [/thrive_toggles] [/thrive_toggles_group] . Yaro Starak on How To Get Results Without Overwhelm Click here for a bigger version of the image (compressed, non-printable) . Highlights We’ve prepared a gist/highlights of the main points in the form a quick-read doc. Plus, you get the the printable, high resolution version of the infographic above. If you’re interested, click the pic below: . [thrive_text_block color=”note” headline=”Expert’s Resource”] I recommend getting the free trainings by Yaro below: Blog Profits Blueprint – How To Make $10,000 Per Month, ‘Working’ On Your Blog Only 2 Hours Per Day! How To Launch Your Blog, Grow Your Email List Without Buying Ads, And Turn Your Knowledge Into A Real Business [/thrive_text_block] The post How To Achieve The Laptop Lifestyle The “Yaro” Way appeared first on BirdSend Academy .…

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How To Use Emails To Get More Clients & Customers 56:38

hace 6 years56:38

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Ian Brodie specializes in email marketing to help consultants and coaches attract and win more clients and become seen as authorities in their field. He’s been named as one of the “Top 50 Global Thought Leaders in Marketing and Sales” by Top Sales World magazine, and one of the “Top 25 Global Influencers in Sales and Sales Management” by OpenView Labs. His #1 Amazon bestselling book, Email Persuasion, teaches business owners and professionals how to captivate and engage their audience, build authority and generate more sales with email marketing. Ian first got started as a consultant by accident — inspired by a magician. Want to learn the story of how got started? Make sure to listen to [34:00] of the podcast. In this episode, you’re going to learn how to leverage the power of emails to get more clients and customers. Here’s just what one of Ian’s clients say about him: . Ian has also been featured in these media outlets: . In this episode you’ll discover: [00:25] The most common misconception about email marketing [04:55] How to pick the correct email marketing style [10:07] How to get people to buy even when your email sucks [16:47] How to build a 5-year monster email sequence without pulling your hair out [18:30] How to combine sequence and broadcast emails to engage with your subscribers [23:47] The 2 types of course sales [35:43] How Ian got started with email marketing and wrote his bestselling book Email Persuasion [39:30] The #1 roadblock for online course creators [43:12] How to talk to your target audience even when you don’t have a customer [45:09] How to know your course idea sucks [50:13] Ian’s #1 advice to build a successful online course business . Quote “You always have a 2nd chance with emails. You can always send more emails tomorrow, next day, next week, next month, etc. It’s okay to make mistakes with emails, because you can get it better over time.” ~ Ian Brodie . Transcript Interviewer (Welly Mulia): Welcome to another episode of the BirdSend Academy Podcast. This is the show for online course creators who want to build a profitable business by sharing your skills and knowledge. This is your host, Welly Mulia. If you are not listening to this on our website. Go to academy.birdsend.co/3 to get the show notes. This show is brought to you by BirdSend Email Marketing tool, the only Email Marketing tool specifically created for online course creators. Get your free forever account at birdsend.co. Today’s special guest is Ian Brodie. Ian works with consultants and coaches to help them attract and win more clients and become seen as authorities in their field. He has been names as one of the top 50 global top leaders in marketing and sales by top sales magazine. And one of the top 25 global influencers in sales and sales management by OpenView Labs. His number one Amazon’s best-selling book email persuasion, teaches business owners and professionals how to captivate and engage their audience, build authority and generally more sales with email marketing. Ian, thank you for showing up to the podcast, it’s great to have you. Interviewee (Ian Brodie): It’s an absolute pleasure to be here. Welly Mulia: Awesome. I know that you are a fan of email marketing, you even have a book called email persuasion, about this topic of email marketing, so what do you think is the one common misconception about the topic; Email Marketing? Ian Brodie: There are obviously lots of misconceptions as I am sure you know, but the one that I see time and time again, I’d say it’s the people thinking of email marketing in terms of ‘one size fits all’, and I think that comes down from 2 perspectives, one is they think or hope I guess that there is one best way of doing email marketing, so they will hear from one guy that you need to be broadcasting their list, a short, entertaining email every single day, they will try that and they can’t quite get that to work, and then they hear no, really you need to use auto-responders and popup sequences, so they will try that for a bit and then they will hear from another guy that oh, when people sign up, you need to use gain logic, and they will try that. At the end, there is just a complete mismatch, they never get good at any one way of doing email. But the truth is that there are lots of different ways that people use emails successfully, and really kind of trying to find the one holy grail of the one best way of doing email that works for everyone is best to find one that you can do, where you can write those emails with a particular style, with a particular frequency, that you enjoy doing email like that, that kind of fits with your personality and the nature of your business. So, for example if you are emailing people who work in corporates, because the daily use of emails that they get from colleagues and bosses, etcetera which is different to an entrepreneur, and the email frequencies may need to be different. For example, you need to fit it with your particular clients, and then just get good at that particular style of email. It’s being like I guess if you play tennis. In tennis, some people do kind of serve in volley, some people play from the baseline, some people are very aggressive, some people play more defensive, and all of those different styles could work for successful players at the very top level with different styles and different styles with different types of playing better, but nobody succeeds in tennis by trying to master all the different styles, and then mix and match them and try one for a bit and switch over to another, you’ve got to pick one that you are playing that works for you, and then do that and learn how to do that really well. So, I would say one perspective on this ‘one size fits all’ is stop obsessing about the perfect way of email and taking more and more different courses and switching the way you do email to that one way, just find the way that works for you and then, go deep on that one way and get really good at doing that one way. But I think the other way of that ‘one size fits all’ is do recognize that when you are thinking of your customers, your clients, your email subscribers, you ideally want to be segmenting those as well. So, one type of email, one particular email is not going to work for all of your subscribers, so sending the same thing to everyone is probably not the best thing to do, some people are more engaged than others, some people are more interested in some topics, if you’ve got any breaks in your business at all, some people would be more interested in some of the things you have to say than the others. So, you want to try and find ways of moving people down paths where they get more of the emails they want and less of the emails they don’t want. Even simple stuff like if you do want to promote any course on a particular topic, sending an email, kind of talking about that topic and giving them a really great tip, or some kind of indoor, free report on that topic, but then noticing who has clicked that topic, tagging them to say that they are interested in that particular topic. And then when you are following up and wanting to send more emails out that topic, you know you can send more frequently to those people, and less frequently to those people who aren’t interested in the topic. Usually, what people do is they get somewhere in the middle, they go for an average, because they are sending the same thing to everyone. And the downside for that is, for example when they are not sending enough emails to the people really interested in the topic, but they are sending too many emails to people who aren’t interested in the topic, and you are trying to segment, so you send more to the people interested and fewer to the people who aren’t. That’s just one way of segmenting, but not trying to do the same emails for everyone is generally a really good idea. [thrive_toggles_group] [thrive_toggles title=”Click to reveal the entire transcript” no=”1/2″] Welly Mulia: Awesome. I think it is very interesting that you mentioned about the segmenting thing, and also the earlier one where you said about, there is no perfect way or magic perfect way of writing emails, sending out emails, it just depends on your personality, your business types. How can one, especially for someone who is new to this, or if you are just getting started… How can one know the style for him to write their emails, because he doesn’t have any experience before that, and you mentioned just now that it’s good to find your own style, your own writing type, and then stick to that, and become really good at it? But how does one know which style to pick? Ian Brodie: That’s a really insightful question. I think inevitably, there is going to be a process of trial and error in there. I don’t think you can expect to get it perfect on day one, but the good news is, nobody is expecting you to get it perfect on day one, you just have to do something that is kind of okay, and gets better and better overtime, I think it’s a bit like the traditional learning of painting, for example, you would copy the old masters… especially, I think in Japan, for years, you would copy the techniques and the models of the masters and then once you learn that, then you would branch out and try your own techniques. So, I think what I would do is, if I was starting out was, I would subscribe to a lot of emails of people, either people in my own field, or people in other fields as well, and just read them and see which types of emails really clicked for me. Now, you’ve got to realize that you are not your client, so what clicks for you isn’t necessarily going to click with your client, but there is an element to which it is going to work for you as well as your clients, because if you don’t like a particular style of writing an email, you don’t enjoy it, and you are not good at it, you are not just going to do it, and you are not going to build any skills in it. So, subscribe to a whole bunch of emails, see what style of email gets you the most engaged and gets you the most interested, you have the most fun with. So when I first got into emails, I personally enjoyed reading emails that were a bit longer, that were a bit more involved, that had a story to them, that could be continued multiple emails, where I could follow them overtime, they were a bit lighthearted, a bit fun, but had some really good content in them, they always had something really useful, they were just pure entertainment, there are some very successful email list for example, who would get quite angry in their emails and have a rant about things, or complain about things, and that’s a very successful style. But when I was subscribing to these emails, I just didn’t enjoy reading them, it didn’t click for me, so I quickly unsubscribed, and therefore when I started developing my own style, I was basing it first on the types of emails I enjoyed receiving, and learning from them, and kind of looking at them and saying, what are they actually doing here? When I first signed up, what kind of email did I get? What were they trying to do in that email? Were they trying to build a relationship with me? Were they trying to really impress me? Were they trying to give me something valuable really quickly? And then the following emails, just look a little bit behind and trying to think of what they were trying to do. So I think the thing to do is before you suddenly launch your own emails, subscribe to other people’s and just see the styles you like. And then obviously without copying the same emails, try and get the principles behind the email and try to adopt a similar style, and then what you will find is, the more and more you write, the better your writing gets, and the more you get into the groove, and the more it becomes your own. To be perfectly frank, and I am sure you say this would be true for you, my first emails that I sent out were not very good because no one is really good on day one, it is fantasy to think you would be really good on day one, but you have to do it because unless you do that emails or those emails on day one, you are never going to do good emails on day 101. Welly Mulia: Right, I think that’s a very good thing to say, because in anything, not just emails, you are not going to be good at it on day one. So, it’s like for example, if you think back, when we were kids, we were trying to ride a bicycle, and it just doesn’t happen overnight, you fall down, you get back up, you try to ride again, you get back up again, and overtime you get better. So, with any skills, it’s going to take time to get good at the skill. So, I think that’s a very important point I think that you mentioned. Ian Brodie: Absolutely. I would just like to add there, I think email is a medium where that kind of learning as you go along, is particularly helpful, and one of the nice things about email is, because it’s a drip, drip, drip overtime, it means you’re not reliant on every single email being perfect. So if you imagine you are trying to sell something with a sales page on a website or a single sale, on a website. If everything is reliant on that single sales letter being perfect or single sales video, then that video has to be great, and that other sales page has to be great, otherwise you are going to get no, or very few sales. But with email, you are not doing it in only one goal, you are doing it drip, drip, drip overtime. So, you can send an email and another email, and one of those emails could be awful, it doesn’t really matter because there is another one coming in the next day that could be good and could really click for them. So, it’s easy to make mistakes with email… Obviously if it is really bad, you are going to offend people and they are going to unsubscribe and you don’t get a second chance. But by and large, people don’t and you are always getting a second chance with the email because there is another email coming the next day or 2 days or 5 days later or whenever. Welly Mulia: Alright. And the best thing is that email is almost free, I say almost because you still have to pay for the software to send out the emails, but it’s very minimal compared to the returns that you get, and also compared to other mediums, for example you said the TV, radio, it just costs so much, it’s so much affordable for emails. And just like you mentioned about drip, for listeners on this show, they might not be familiar with the term drip, drip, drip. So, what does drip mean? Ian Brodie: All I mean there, and it can mean it in two senses, one is if you have an automation or an auto-responder that is pre-programed to send out a sequence emails overtime, I guess that’s the kind of ultimate drip that you pre-program things, and there is the logical sequence to emails, you proofread through. I am going to send this and send this… And again, that’s one of the nice things about email, is that in a sales letter, you have to cover absolutely everything that the person would need to believe or see or think, to be convinced to buy, but with an email you don’t have to get that all into one email, you can embed those little messages across emails overtime, so you are taking the one thing you need to do, and spreading it out overtime, so you are dripping it out as it were. But I think when I am talking about dripping there, I just mean that it’s not only one group, that there is always another email, always another day, and so any message you want to get out, you’ve got multiple attempts, you can get the same message out in different ways, overtime. You can split up a message and get it out, through multiple emails, and that means you get multiple bits of the apple or the cherry, and also means you get to read those messages multiple times because you got multiple emails, you can get a big message, you can split it up to be more digestible for people as well, because again, the emails are coming out overtime. Welly Mulia: Okay. When you say overtime, does that mean that you use the software to make it go out automatically? Or do we have to tell everyone to send emails overtime for the next 14 days? Do you actually go into the computer and login to our accounts and the emails every day for the next 14 days? Ian Brodie: You could do that, but by and large I would recommend pre-programming it, and then in an auto-responder or an automation, whatever the software calls it. I think there are some people who recommend broadcasting to your email list every day and doing everything fresh, and that means you are able to react to events in the world and things like that, and that’s one way of doing it, and that’s perfectly fine. Infact, it could be a very good way of doing it. My experience is, with the type of people that I worked with, they are not spending every single day on marketing, they are not dedicated to doing marketing, they are working with clients, most of the people I work with, consultants for example or coaches, so 80% of that time, they are working with clients, so they only have let’s say 1 day a week to do their marketing which would include emails. So they are not going to be able to sit down and write, it’s not going to be easy for them to sit down and write an email every day and keep that going, it’s easier for them to take out a day and write a predefined sequence of emails and set that up, so once people sign up, they get the predefined sequence of emails and then in a year, in 2 years, in 5 years’ time, the same sequence of emails is going out to people than having to write another one all the time. It also means everyone gets your best emails as well. I certainly found this, that I have… And I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this, but when people sign up for my emails, the sequence they go on to do is probably about 5 years long, because I have little, short sequences obviously, which is the most recommended thing, but what I have done for over 5 years is just written an email a week, kind of longer email, a more personal email, and what I realized fairly soon was, all of those, nobody is super human, we all have a limited range of good ideas, so over 5 years, I am not saying that I have gone out of ideas, but what I am saying is, some of my very best emails, I wrote 5 years ago, or I wrote 3 years ago, or I wrote two years ago. And if I was only ever to broadcast my emails and not put them in an automation where everyone got it from the start, it would mean that if someone joined today, they would not get my very best email that I sent out 3 years ago, that I got a fantastic reaction from people who said this was super helpful for them. So, by using automation, by using auto-responders, it also means not only does it take the workload away, but it also means everyone gets to see your best emails, it also means if you want to get into it, you can tweak those emails overtime, you can split test different emails to see which ones work best, and replace one with another, and you can act based on the feedback and go and update the emails. So I personally like to pre-program the emails and have them going out in a sequence. Welly Mulia: 5 years is a really long sequence, so do you mean… Ian Brodie: Yeah, honestly I wish I had said that, it’s not something I would recommend, it’s just that I would send out once a week, kind of like a broadcast to my list, rather than making it a broadcast, I just add it on the end of a long auto-responder. So, each of the emails is evergreen, so during the week, or if someone shows an interest in something, they might be going on to much other sequence that might last a week or 2 weeks. But if you join my list today, after going on an initial sequence which I change every now and then, you stop getting my regular best tips on how to win clients or approach, and there are a lot of those emails, because they have been doing this for a long time, and those emails are good. Now, a lot of the time, if I don’t like anything, then I would take it out of the sequence, but that’s basically my very best emails that people going into the list of, and there’s about 5 years’ worth of them. Welly Mulia: Okay, cool… Ian Brodie: And I just want to stress, I am not saying write 5 years’ worth of emails, my 5 years’ worth of emails happened over 5 years, I have been writing emails for longer than 5 years, but I started out this sequence 5 years ago or so, so I happen to have it. All I am saying is, always think about re-using, so when you write sequences, people can go through it time and time again, even if you are sending a weekly broadcast newsletter, if it’s evergreen, think about how you can reuse those emails so that new people who join your list can get the benefit of that great email you send out. Welly Mulia: Yeah, that’s a great strategy. So, when you send these auto-responder emails, or as you call ‘Drip Emails’, and when you do the broadcast emails which is fresh, do you also broadcast to new subscribers who are also going through your automated sequence or how does that work? Ian Brodie: It’s a mix. So, what I would do is, I have an initial sequence, so when people first join my email list, there’s a specific sequence of emails they get that’s usually focused on obviously giving people great value or the reason that they signed up. So, if I offer a led magnet on a particular topic, they will get a series of follow-up email that are related to that topic, that gives them more information and more value related to that topic. But they are also designed to promote the product, related to that topic as well. So, when people are in the initial sequence, they are tagged or not tagged, so they don’t get the broadcast, so I won’t interrupt that initial sequence because it’s a set pre-program sequence where I have filtered through, if someone has signed up had for emails on a lead magnet, about how to become a seen authority in your field, I have a follow up email sequence that goes with the lead magnet, that gives more information about how to become an authority and leads up to a promotion for my program on becoming seen as an authority, and I don’t want random broadcasts interrupting that, that would seem out of sequence, I have thought through, both how do I add value to people, but also what the people actually need to have going on in their heads to be ready to buy this thing, and I have programmed my emails to do that, to feed them the right information they need to be comfortable buying, to show them the value of being an authority, to show there are different ways of doing it, that I have successfully helped people become authorities and I have woven that into valuable emails and I don’t want to say, hey I am doing a webinar on some completely different topic next week, and confuse them and make them think what’s going on. So, I use within my email system, kind of tagging, that basically blocks them off from getting the broadcast, until they finish the end of that sequence, now when they finish the end of that sequence, they go into this 5-year thing, and I will give you a caveat to that later. But basically, in theory, they go to this 5-year thing, and those emails are interruptible, those emails are just once a week, it’s kind of like my best client winning tips that they are going to get once a week, and broadcasting to the people who are on to that big sequence, that’s absolutely fine because the emails that they are getting once a week, they kind of build on each other, but they are not reliant on being close together and not been interrupted, they are gently promoting my ongoing membership program usually, rather than walking up to a bigger program or something specific, so I assuming I don’t promote anything at all, I am more about just helping people, so it’s okay to interrupt those with broadcast. Now, the caveat I would give is sometimes if you are doing a product launch for example, I would pause the weekly big sequence and just do a series of emails related to a product launch, and because that then becomes the priority, and then when the product launching is finished, let’s say it was taking 2 weeks, I would restart people where they were on the longer sequence. Welly Mulia: Cool. Ian Brodie: That’s probably a little bit of complicated method, but then again I did write a book on email marketing, so I think I should be able to things more communicated. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend everyone gets that complicated, what I like that’s simple is the start of where you are focusing on promoting a particular product, trying not to interrupt that with broadcast, because it would put people off, you want people following that one path, you could if you want to do more promotional sequences after that, so I happen to have one, I used to have two… you could run 3 or 4, promoting specific products in a chain, you try not to interrupt those with broadcast. But then, if you have moved to a point where people haven’t bought any of those, or they have bought them and moved on, then you can interrupt it with broadcast. Welly Mulia: You mentioned that when a new subscriber joins on board for specifically lead magnet, you are going to have this sequence of email sent to them, leading up, with each email you are providing value, and then you are trying to sell in your case the authority? Ian Brodie: Yeah, that’s one of the lead magnets and one of the programs here. Welly Mulia: Okay, so let’s take that as an example. So, when you promote them to your product or service; the authority, is there like an evergreen promotion? Because I see a lot of course creators online taking programs, a lot of them use the open and close cart, so it is only available 2 or 3 times a year. Is it like that or is your lead magnet leading to put out offer, which is an evergreen, which is open all year round? Ian Brodie: I do both. So, as it happens, the authority program is an open-closed thing, so it’s only open actually once a year. So, what will happen is, the first time I promote it, and at certain times leading up to when I want to promote that, I will make the lead magnet available to people, so that would either be promoting the lead magnet more generally on social etcetera, or re-offering the lead magnet to people on my existing list who maybe haven’t heard it before, or even if they have heard it, they want it again, because a year has passed. So, that’s a closed one it only lasts for a certain period of time. But, when that one is not running, then I have my more general lead magnet that promotes my membership program, and I have occasionally used the same thing to promote a smaller course that is like, here in the digital market terminology is a trip wire course leading to the membership program as a kind of upsell, and that’s what I have as the lead magnet and the initial sequence for most of the year, and that’s another green program. So that’s kind of like 10 months, 11 months to a year, that’s running evergreen, and then one month of the year, switching the authorities which is the once a year thing. Welly Mulia: Cool. When you said just now you, for the authority offer which is a close thing, you mentioned if you are not closing orders, then you are not going to run the lead magnet, when you say not running the lead magnet, do you mean like you pull it down from your website? Or it is still there, but you just don’t actively promote it? Ian Brodie: Yeah, it’s more of that. Sometimes I would have it on the homepage of my website, and I might actively promote it through social, through advertising or email optimized system. But when it is not running, I would have a different lead magnet on the homepage, obviously won’t need run ads for it. We will still be there, people can still find it, people can still sign up for it, but what happens is, they get the same kind of value emails, it gets them ready, but at the end, it tells them the program is not running, but if they submit an application for the program, it will put them in the wait list for when the program is running again. Welly Mulia: Got it. We have talked quite a lot about emails, and this was probably a weird start for you Ian, because usually with podcast interviews, the order is usually tell me a little bit about yourself and your background, I like to do things a little bit differently, so stick to the main topic which is, this is email marketing for online course creators, and especially you are an email marketing expert, so I focused on that email thing first. So now, tell us about, what projects are you working on these days? Ian Brodie: So, a couple of things. I suppose three in reality, one is I relaunched the authority program for its annual theme fairly recently, so I am enrolling new clients, new customers into that, that’s doing what it is doing, people are going through the email sequences, people are making applications, I am reviewing applications, and if needed, we are getting on the phone, and having a quick chat about their application and whether it would be a good fit for the program? So, that’s one thing… Second thing is I have an ongoing membership program which is more generally about marketing and sales, getting more clients for consultant, for service, businesses like that. I am not being ongoing means two things, one is I have things I do every month, so I do a webinar every month for those guys, we’ve got a Q and A webinar coming up tomorrow that I am doing. I am constantly updating the content in there, some content of course is evergreen, but some contents need updating. For example, probably in the last 6 months, content marketing in LinkedIn has gotten quite big, they have changed the algorithm, it is increasingly easy to get in front of your target audience on LinkedIn much more so than it was in the past, so I have just updated the LinkedIn module to have that kind of stuff in it. So, I am constantly enrolling new members into there and producing new content for that. And in the background, I am working on little mini course to use as a kind of trip wire course… But then, if people buy that, then the upsell, the continuity would be to the membership program. So, we use the word trip wire to mean something that has incredible value, that people find immensely useful, so useful that they want to buy something else from you. So, that’s just the industry terminology for you. So, I am working on that in the background. And then the third thing is I also do the kind of marketing stuff for my wife’s business, she does online summits and a kind of web TV show every week for people who work in the early years, people that work in nurseries and things like that. Welly Mulia: Cool, so your wife must be very lucky to have you as a digital and marketing expert to help her out. Ian Brodie: Well, you know how it is with husband and wife, she is never going to admit that… Welly Mulia: Yeah. Sometimes if you get too close, the partner might take you for granted and not really take it seriously, is that sometimes how it works? Ian Brodie: The interesting thing is Kafy has gotten really quite good at this stuff, my background has been in marketing for 20 or more years, I used to do it in a bigger corp then, but gradually came down to doing it for small business and with coaches, like my background. But Kafy’s background was in early years’ education and nothing to do with marketing, but she has really picked it up very rapidly, the use of online summit has been a huge… and that was her initiative and that has been a kind of huge wing, for her in terms of building an email list, really fast from scratch in just a couple years. And I hear on the phone every now and then, talking to people, because her sector is not very marketing oriented, so there are a lot of experts in that field who just don’t have email lists, very small social media presences, and so she is kind of advising them, she is interviewing them for a TV or for a summit, and then afterwards they are talking, she say, we are sending people to your website, you are going to have an email signup form, and give them something for free, and follow-up with emails, because that’s the only way you are going to build a relationship with them actually, makes some money. So, it’s interesting to hear her kind of preaching the gospel of email marketing too. Welly Mulia: Awesome. So Ian, tell us how… that’s a part of where we would like to ask you to tell a little bit about yourself, specifically how everything started, especially with working with clients, with using this channel to build a relationship, and then engaging them and then of course, ultimately making your sales. So, how did all of these happen? Ian Brodie: In many ways, it is quite a long story, but I will try and be brief, I had a 6 or 7-year career in the industry, in high tech doing R and D, and then my company sponsored me to do an NBA degree, with the goal to make me a better manager… They sent me on that, and I basically fell in love with marketing strategy when I went on the program. The first marketing lecture I went in, and I just thought wow! this is just a complete… and I was attending as an R and D randy guy, and I said this is just so interesting and so fun, this is what I want to do. So, after the NBA I kind of quit the corporate life and went off to work for a consulting firm, that was back in 1994, that’s was the first big career change for me, and that was very different, because instead of being in a kind of fixed career where you did the same thing again and again, and got better at it. With consulting, you are just in a new problem almost on a weekly basis, new clients, new problems, lots of learning going all the time, even if you are using your expertise, you are always learning, so I did that for a number of years. I eventually was working as the director of kind of a medium sized consulting firm, and I just wasn’t able to do the things that I wanted to do, and when it came to online, I had a really funny experience where a friend of mine who is a professional magician based in London, he actually phoned me up while I was at work and said, Ian go to Google and type magician, and I typed magician into Google, and he was number one in the world. So, this was back in the day before many people knew anything about SEO. And my friend is a good magician but he is not only exactly David Copperfield or anyone well known, so to see him top of Google, I was astounded and it was basically because he was the first magician who actually got a grip on SEO, and he made it to the top. And I asked him, what’s that doing for you? He said, well normally as a magician works in parties, restaurants, etcetera, all my business has always come from word of mouth, the only way people would hire a magician traditionally is word of mouth, there is no way you can advertise, but word of mouth is what work, but I now get close to 80% of my bookings from Google, people finding me through my website. And I said, you know what? If that can work for a magician, it can work for a consultant and the reason I quit to setup my own business was that the firm I was working for, even though I was the director and had some influence, did not push hard enough down the online route, so I decided to set up my own business. Initially I was going to work and deliver work locally, but market online, and that worked. But then I found that I could deliver work online, through online courses through using, go to webinars or eventually Zoom and Skype to do coaching and I started to work with people online. And suddenly that geographic restrictions were lifted, I could have online courses that people would buy and I didn’t have to travel, and I didn’t have to have clients who would be so much physically closely, that just kind of changed the world for me and then suddenly I could get more niche, I could focus on just the consultants and coaches I love working with, and do that globally. So, that’s kind of how I got into it, it was by accident, by that friend of mine saying hey, and Google magician and that really got the wheels turning and me thinking, look at the possibilities of this. Welly Mulia: Awesome story. So, obviously you know a lot of things about digital marketing and sales funnels but why is it that you choose to write a book on email marketing? Ian Brodie: It was another one of those things. I am sure when you interview people, you find that a lot of things kind of happen by accident, or various things coming together. So, it was a couple of things, one is I begun to develop a reputation for email marketing, so I found that when I first set up my own business, I started blogging, because I just had things that I wanted to say that wasn’t necessarily a particular great goal or I wasn’t thinking blogging would make me rich, I just thought there are things in my field about Marketing and Sales for Consultants that I would like to say that I don’t think anyone is saying, So, I was writing quite a lot, and then that blogging naturally turned into… obviously if you do any reading around… and a particular friend of mine at the time said, hey, you should try that email marketing thing, I resisted for about a year that no, email is really old fashioned, I don’t want to do that, and eventually I was persuaded, and then all of a sudden, the sale started increasing through the emails. But because I was writing a lot, I guess I got reasonably good at it, and people were beginning to email back to me and started saying, do you teach this, and yeah, I could join your program and learn about marketing generally, but what I really want to know about is the email stuff. So, at the time I created a little online course for email marketing that people could take, and a kind of free email sequence and stuff like that. And then about that time, I was approached by a lady who taught people how to write books, and her concept was like a book camp, where you go for a weekend, but you do it via a webinar, and you write a book, at least you break the back of it, and you get most of it done in a weekend, and I thought that was also really good, because my people, consultants are the sort of people where book is good marketing for them, but it is really difficult to write a book, especially a good one. So, if you got a course that helps to do that, great! But I can’t promote something that I know doesn’t work, I can’t jointly promote it and tell them it’s great, if I don’t know it doesn’t work. So, I tell you what, I go to your website and I buy a course, don’t give me a discount or anything, I just want to buy it like a normal customer, I will buy a course, I will come on your next program, and then I will try and write a book myself and she said that’s great, what do you want to write a book about and I said I don’t really know, tell you what, she had said to me, that she wanted to promote my email expertise, said why don’t I write about email marketing, because then when we talk about things, you can mention I have written a book on email marketing, and that gives me some credibility with your audience who I am going to do the webinar for about the email marketing. So, it kind of came about through that. That makes two factors, one is, I was getting very good at it, people asking me how I did it, and secondly, the opportunity came up to write a book, and I needed a topic and that just seemed like the right one to do. And indeed as it turned out, the methodology worked, I did the book camp through weekend, it was US time and I was in the UK, so my weekends were studying late and working really late into the night, I didn’t see my family for 3 days essentially. But by the end of that 3 days, I had the draft of the book on audio, a day or two later, I had the transcription, and then after some editing and stuff like that, I had my book. Welly Mulia: Awesome. So having been in this industry for so long, and you have created your own training programs, online courses, so you have a lot of experience in this area, what do you think is the number one problem people face when trying to create their online courses or online training programs? Ian Brodie: I think it’s fairly simple, and I don’t think it’s a message that’s heard often enough. I think that the number one problem is just not finding the right products for the right market. People like us who teach marketing, we are forever telling people that marketing is the answer, you have to review it, you got to market, you have to do this, you have to do that, and then people would tell a particular type of marketing. But if you have got a great product that a market is really hungry for, you can do okay with pretty mediocre marketing, you can start out with no marketing, someone has got to know about it, but Okay Marketing is enough. On the other hand, if you’ve got a course that nobody wants, the audience doesn’t value, it doesn’t matter how brilliant your marketing is, you are not going to get anywhere. So, getting a product that people actually wants is absolutely crucial, so the more time you can invest in that, in getting it right initially through talking, not just service, service is great, but actually talking to potential customers and finding out what their really big problems are. So, knowing that your course would help them with that is really vital. But it is also about opening up, because there are some problems that people won’t buy courses for, for example if it is a problem for them, but maybe it is not one of their top 2 or 3 problems, I call that being close to the jugular… It has to be one of those problems or they won’t buy a course on it. Or it could be that it’s a problem that they have, you see as an expert that they’ve got a really big problem, but they don’t know that they’ve got the problem. And if they don’t know that they’ve got the problem, online, it is really difficult to sell that, if you are talking to them face-to-face, talk to them about it and let them see it, but online they are not even going to read any of your content if they don’t know they’ve got a problem in that area. Or maybe they don’t want to get it at all, maybe they just want someone to come and fix it for them, so you have to think in that angle, what do they actually want for a solution? And also the type of person… I have a lot of my clients work with large corporates and sometimes what they do is, they say I don’t want to do this consulting, training anymore, it is too much hard work, I want to make an online course, and they are trying to just take what they are training people on, and turn that into an online course. But one of the problems with that is if you are training employees in an organization, typically employees expect their own employer to pay for their training, and typically online courses are bought by people themselves, so in a way online courses are mainly bought by kind of entrepreneurs, people who are in businesses, people who want to make a change in career, people doing something for themselves, because they got to get their credit card out and pay. If you are an employed person and you are skilled, you are thinking about learning, if you are a middle manager in a corporate and you know you have to improve your leadership skills, chances are you are going to go to your employer to say, I need a course on leadership, or your employer would talk to you about it, and you’d expect them to buy it, which means that probably we are going to try and use the same course for everyone in the company, and it has to go through the procurement process and all. It is unlikely that they will just give you $500 to good and buy what you want online. So, you’ve got to understand the audience, who buys online courses, and you’ve got to pick a topic that really is important to them, that they are willing to pay money to get the outcome they are looking for. Welly Mulia: So, talking to customers is one of the ways that you mentioned that we can get to know our market well enough. What happens if someone does not have any customer yet, who do they talk to? Ian Brodie: Well, talk to anyone you can in that market place, I find that you have to knock on a few doors, not everyone will say yes, but many people are quite generous with their time, if you are genuinely asking for advice. And you can couch it as a kind of interview, you can couch this as a research project, you generally have to do the research though, you try and say, I am doing a research into this and really you are just using it to sell to them, that’s not going to work, but if you are genuinely researching a market, a number of people will say yes and will give you information. And you can do it on a [inaudible 45:11] you can have chats with people, I just moved into this new field, I’ve got some ideas, can I just bounce some ideas off you, find out more about what’s really important to people in your situation or people in your position etcetera. Grab a coffee with the, do it over the telephone, that all works to give you a kind of qualitative information. You can then follow that up with a survey where you reach out, and then you might go to groups on Facebook or even LinkedIn or LinkedIn groups are awful, you can find groups of people you can go to survey with, and get data through that, you can even pay for it, paid advertising, you can do a survey if you are really serious. And then it comes to moving to pilot board, get people to pay for something before you build it, it is another good approach to finding whether that market exists. But start by talking to people, one of the things LinkedIn is really good for is to see who know that knows other people. So, if you do a search for people in your market, if you can identify them with LinkedIn search criteria, and then just see who your common contacts are, and look for an introduction, and ask them to introduce you too, because you would like to do some research about that market. And one of the things that is worth noting is if you try that, if you try and find people to talk to and you cannot find anyone in the market who would speak to you and give you feedback on what would work as a product, the chances are, you just don’t know enough about that market and you are not well-enough connected to make it a success, I will try and find another market. Because if you don’t know anyone in the market to speak to, how are you ever going to come up with the product, a course that they are going to value? How are you going to kick start your marketing and get feedback on that course and stuff like that? So, if you can’t, if you really struggle to do it, it’s a tough message, but if you can’t find anyone to talk to about it, it’s a good sign that this is not going to work for you and you need to find another way you can. But there are ways of doing things, when I first set up my own business, you remember I was working locally, and I was using online marketing, but I was working locally. Because I was working locally, where I live in the UK; Manchester, and it’s not a big enough place, there are loads of consulting firms or coaching firms that I can go and do training for, or work for, that would have enough more to pay me… But there were loads of law firms, because law first tend to be bigger, so both, law firms tend not to work with anyone who is not a lawyer… Or oh, you haven’t spent 10 years as a lawyer, you can’t possibly advise us on marketing, but you have openings marketing, all law firms have openings in marketing, I am good at it… Yeah, but you are not a lawyer, you don’t understand this. But what I did was I did interviews, so I created this thing I call “Business Development North West”, because it’s the North West of England, interviewed in 2008, Business Development North West, 2008, I went out and I started with just friends of friend and just through local networking, I met 2 or 3 lawyers and I asked people if they knew a lawyer I could interview. Eventually I interviewed 20 partners in law firms, and did quite a structured interview for about an hour about business development best practices, and I got loads of feedback from them. By the end of that interview, when I had the results, all of a sudden, I had gone from them not wanting to talk to me about marketing to really wanting to talk to me, because no one they knew, had that much a cross-sectional knowledge of what best practice was for business development for lawyers. And you can do the same when you are thinking of coming up with a course, because you can do a research thing like that and use your research to report as a lead magnet for example. So, not only it tells you what needs to be in the course, but it also gives you a lead magnet, that publish research, that people are interested in that topic and that candidates for the course would really value. So, as I said, you can actually do it really formally and have a chat over coffee if that’s quicker, or if you want to go into a kind of big style, and you decide that this is your future, then if that would get you to places that you couldn’t otherwise. Maybe I was a little flipping before where I said if you don’t know anyone, just give up, if you are in that state, considering doing it seriously with a research project, because that opens doors, there is a big difference between phoning someone you don’t know, or emailing someone you don’t know, where you say, I have kind of come to talk to you about you buying something from me, and saying, I am doing a research project about Best Practices, Leadership and Technology Firms and I would like to interview you for that research project, and I would publish it and I would give you special assess to the results. Would you like to take part? And there is a good chance that they will say yes to that, even when you are doing it relatively cold. So pretty much, a third of the people that I interviewed were cold, once I interviewed someone cold, I said, who else would you recommend I speak to? And then they would introduce me to other people who I could do the interviews with, and just by doing that you have certainly built a bit of a contact base, you’ve got loads of useful information that would help you with the course, and you’ve got a great lead magnet. So that research thing is a good strategy as well. It does take investment, but if you are new to marketing, it is a really good type of investment to make. Welly Mulia: I think that’s a very smart strategy to go for. So, before we wrap up… Ian Brodie: I just wanted to say I completely agree, it really worked for me back then, and I have seen it work for others where it enables you to break into the market and become seen as an expert really quickly, even if you’ve got no background in that market. You have to know what you are talking about, you have to have good knowledge to the subject, but it allows you to break into a different market and build up your knowledge really quickly and be seen as an expert, because you’ve got something they haven’t got, even if they have spent 20 years in that business, they have not talked to 20 different people about it in the same that you have for 30 or 10 or whatever, they just don’t have the data you have, which makes it really attractive to them to come to you. Welly Mulia: Cool. So, last question. If you can only give one advice to people who want to build a successful online course business, what would it be? Ian Brodie: I am going to say it step-by-step and keep it simple. So start up by choosing a small course, don’t try and make a $2,000 course where you have to invest so much in video and whatever to make a really high level course, and promotion has to be huge, etcetera… Do something small and iterate, so do something that we were talking about, go and talk to people, find out what they really and find out what is vital, what they are willing to pay for, then follow that up with a survey to confirm that there is a bigger need and then do a pilot of it consider a paid pilot. So, before you start creating all the material, do an outline of what is going to come out of your analysis as to what the topics would be on the course and just go back to some people of the people you’ve spoken to and say, look, thanks for doing that, as a result, I have come up with this course, for the first people on here, I am going to do it for half the price as a way of saying thank you for taking part of my study, etcetera… And it’s a pilot, first time, I will work intensively with you as we develop the course, sign up here and pay here. Do that before you actually… You have to know you can’t develop a material, you can’t sell it and seal and deliver. So, you have to know you can do it, and you have to tell them what it is going to be. But if people sign up, and this was what my wife did for her very first course, was she wasn’t 100% convinced people would signup, so she was looking for… I think she set the limit on 22 course number because it was her lucky number, so for the pilot, limit of 22, and in 3 days 25 had signed up and we not fast enough closing the cart because then they sneaked in, and it was like, alright, I know it’s going to happen, and nothing gives you confidence like sales. And then she went up to develop the course, delivered it to the pilot members, they gave great testimonials, we added a few things to it and the feedback, and then we went to launching it more widely to a full list and stuff like that. But a little pilot first is a good kind, and part of that iteration strategy, starts small and build. Welly Mulia: Awesome. How do people get to get in touch with you Ian if they want to know about what you do, your work, and your training programs, where do they find you? Ian Brodie: As ever, connect with me on social media, I am quite on LinkedIn these days, but the easiest thing is to come to my website and it is www.ianbrodie.com , and I run the homepage there, depending on the time here, or at all times the thing that I think I have that gives the most value to people is about doing marketing that doesn’t take all your time and it doesn’t require you to be a professional sales person, marketing for real people to work with, operation to run, how can you do that in at most a day, so I thought of a 30-minute marketing plan because of the stuff in the plan, you should be able to do it in 30 minutes a day and get an effective marketing system up and running, and I got to think of a 30-minute marketing checklist which basically takes you through all of the things you need to have that system up and running, so if you got to www.ianbrodie.com/checklist , you will be able to sign up for and download that checklist, that is probably if you want the most value from me quickly, that’s the probably the best place to go. Welly Mulia: Cool. I just want to make sure that for people listening, you might want to take this down, ianbrodie.com. Correct? Ian Brodie: Yes, and forward slash checklist and you can buy my book on Amazon, I get like a fraction of a penny for each sale. Welly Mulia: The book is called “Email Persuasion” … Ian Brodie: Email Persuasion, is a few years old now, but usually you can just search for Email Marketing, it will pop up, it has the most 5-star reviews on Amazon of any book on email marketing, so it’s fairly easy to find. Welly Mulia: Awesome. Alright Ian, thank you for sharing so much in this podcast, I think the listeners are going to like it, and they are going to find so much value in this, thank you again for your time. Ian Brodie: My pleasure. Welly Mulia: Alright, thank you guys for listening. If you are not listening to this on our website, go to academy.birdsend.co/3 to get the show notes. This show is brought to you by Bird Send Email Marketing Tool; the only email marketing tool specifically created for online course creators, get your free forever account at birdsend.co. [/thrive_toggles] [/thrive_toggles_group] . Ian Brodie On Selling Online Courses Click here for a bigger version of the image (compressed, non-printable) Highlights We’ve prepared a gist/highlights of the main points in the form a quick-read doc. Plus, you get the the printable, high resolution version of the infographic above. If you’re interested, click the pic below: . [thrive_text_block color=”note” headline=”Expert’s Resource”] I recommend getting your free marketing checklist below. The 30 minute marketing checklist — How to build a steady flow of leads and clients with just 30 minutes of marketing each day – and without needing to become a pushy salesperson, SEO expert, technical geek or professional content creator. [/thrive_text_block] The post How To Use Emails To Get More Clients & Customers appeared first on BirdSend Academy .…

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How To Keep Moving Forward In Uncertainty 39:22

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Taylor Pearson is author of the Amazon bestselling book — The End of Jobs. Entrepreneur Magazine called it one of The 7 Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read. He is also the founder of GetApprenticeship, where he helps startups connect with A+ talents. His work has been featured in dozens of media outlets including NBC, Inc, Entrepreneur, Coindesk, Ribbonfarm and The Financial Times. Taylor’s forte is in personal productivity, mindset, and business operations. In this episode, you’re going to learn how to keep moving forward even in uncertain times. Here’s just what one of Taylor’s clients say about him: The proof is in the pudding. He had his hands on the controls when the company grew 527% in 18 months. If you’re lucky enough to be able to hire him, do so. Dan Andrews Co-Founder, Tropical MBA Taylor has also been features in these media outlets: . In this episode you’ll learn: [01:34] The most common misconception about productivity [03:34] How to find your courage [05:27] How Taylor came to write the end of jobs [10:27] Why Taylor wrote the book even though there are already other books out there on the same topic [12:44] What life was like for Taylor before he was successful as he is now [19:09] How to dare quit your job and start your own business [22:56] The #1 Problem for people who can’t reach their goals [26:14] The paradox of hard decisions and how to make one anyway even when in times of uncertainty [29:10] How to boost your efficiency and productivity [34:26] The #1 advice for people who want to build a successful business . Quote “Use courage and wisdom over complex endless planning to make things happen.” ~ Taylor Pearson . Transcript Interviewer (Welly Mulia): Welcome to another episode of the BirdSend Academy podcast, this is the show for online course creators who want to build a profitable business by sharing your skills and knowledge. This is your host Welly Mulia, if you are not listening to this on our website, go to academy.birdsend.co/2 to get your show notes. Today’s special guest is Taylor Pearson, and Taylor is an entrepreneur and author of the Amazon best-selling books called ‘The End of Jobs’. Entrepreneurial magazine called it one of the best 7 books every entrepreneur should read. His work has been featured in dozens of media outlets including NBC, Inked, Entrepreneur Coindesk, Ribbon Farm and the Financial times. A former Brazilian, super bowl champion, Taylor lives in Austin, Texas. Taylor, thank you for coming to the show and it’s great to have you here. Interviewee (Taylor Pearson): I am excited to be here, and thanks for having me. Welly Mulia: Cool. I know you are big on mindset and productivity; so can you tell us what you think is the most common misconception about that topic; productivity? Taylor Pearson: Yeah, there is a quote I like from an author… and the line is, ‘use courage and wisdom to make money, not labor’, and I remember hearing it for the very first time, I thought about it for a couple of years, and some of my observation with a lot of productivity hacks, like how are we going to hack this? How are we going to build this hack? And ultimately, what I started to see for myself and for other people was that, the ultimate productivity hacks so to speak was basically courage, the example I always give is, when I was in high school, I had a crush on a girl, and like many people in high school, what you would do is, I would go and I would talk to her friends, and she liked me and I would to try to read whether or not she liked me… I spent months doing this. And the courageous thing to do which would have been much more productive is I should just walk up to her and say, hi, I think you are cool and I would like to go to the movies with you, whatever… and it would have taken two minutes, and that would have been more productive than the hours I spent trying to figure it out. So, I think that in my mind is sort of the big misconception with productivity, that ultimately boils down to how can I be more efficient just getting these tasks done and hacking them together as opposed to how can I be more courageous in what I am actually choosing to work on. Welly Mulia: Okay, cool. So, wisdom and courage? Taylor Pearson: That’s right. Welly Mulia: Right. So, not a lot of people have that, I mean a lot of people that I know of usually doubt their believes and they seem to not have the courage, of whatever it is in their life, like you mentioned, opportunity to go for a date, or maybe in business itself as well. So, how do you go find the wisdom and courage that people need? Taylor Pearson: I am not sure there is an easy answer. I think in terms of courage, one of the rule of thumbs that I come back to is from a book called ‘The War of Art’ by Steven Pressfield, which is a wonderful book, and in the book, he creates this idea that he calls ‘the resistance’, the resistance, sort of his name for that voice in the back of your head that goes, you are not good enough, or that other person is better than you, or you can’t lose weight on your diet, you’ll never lose weight, or you can’t succeed at this new product at work, you are not good enough, and you sort of get a name for this thing called the resistance, and I think everyone one at some given point in their lives can sort of feel where the resistance is, it’s what they are putting off doing. So, I think for me, what being courageous often looks like is, trying to figure out, where is that resistance, what’s the thing that I am sort of resisting doing because it’s scary, it’s like going out and talking to the girl or the boy and saying, I like you, do you want to go to the movies with me? I think, thinking about that idea of resistance and where that is in my life, and trying to lean into that as opposed to going around it or avoiding it, is often sort of where the courage comes from. Welly Mulia: Okay, cool. I know that you have this best-selling book, ‘The End of Jobs’, that’s how I got to know you initially. I know you’ve sold tens of thousands of copies and translated it into almost a dozen languages. So, can you walk us through what the book is about? [thrive_toggles_group”] [thrive_toggles title=”Click to reveal the entire transcript” no=”1/2″] Taylor Pearson: Sure. So, the book really started… I worked for 2 years for an e-commerce startup, and I was originally from Memphis, Tennessee, which is sort of in the Western United States. I wouldn’t say I grew up in a very entrepreneurial world, none of my family was particularly an entrepreneur, I didn’t have friends, dad or mom that were business owners, and so sort of the whole idea of being an entrepreneur was kind of foreign to me, and I ended up working for the e-commerce company, and the founders of that company had sort of a big network of entrepreneurs, people running startups and small businesses, and I got to know them and they were running, for the most part, internet-based businesses, software companies, online media, publishing companies, e-commerce companies, things like that. And one of the things I sort of realized was that something pretty substantial had changed, relatively recently, part of what the internet made possible is that it sort of changed the dynamics of what entrepreneurship was and how it worked. So, one thing that happened was, you heard what I called, there is a book called the long tail, they credit all these new niches, industries, if you go on Amazon, you can buy laundry detergents for moms whose child have [inaudible 07:00] it is like very niche products, they just don’t work in sort of a physical retail based world, if you are stacking a Walmart in Mississippi or whatever, you need to be able to move a certain volume in that geographically enclose world. So, the other example I gave is, a woman who sells tarot cards, packs and how to do tarot cards, and it is hard to imagine most cities in the world having enough people that live within say 5 miles that you could open a tarot card shop, but someway on the internet, that works, and millions of other businesses like that works. So, there is sort of this big ‘blue ocean’ of this fast space of market potential that was just kind of untapped. And the other thing that was different about these internet businesses was, they were just pretty cheap to start, going back to if you were to open a store on Main street or wherever in your local city, you will have a lot of startup cost, for example, McDonald is a franchise restaurant, so they sell licenses to franchise to people, if you want to build and start a McDonalds, it is going to cost about 2 to 3 million dollars, that’s a lot of money, and if you can’t put up million to 3 million dollars to start a business, but most internet-based businesses are much less expensive. If you are a software developer, all you really need is a laptop to start writing codes. If you want to start up an e-commerce company, the cost would come down dramatically, it used to be, say like the mid-2000, the company I worked for, we were the first companies that I know of that could do production runs in China for less than $100,000, usually we had $500,000 or a million dollars, like starting a McDonald’s franchise to get started, and now manufacturing technology has got better, voice technology, I have been able to talk to somebody on Skype as opposed to faxing back and forth. Product diagram has gotten much better, and you can start an e-commerce company now for a few thousand dollars as opposed to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousand dollars. So, all of a sudden you have… there is a much lower cost entry, and in this huge, sort of untapped market… To me, what the book is about is the idea that all of a sudden has changed risk forward formula for entrepreneurship, that you don’t necessarily need to invest much money upfront, but you still have market potentials. So, the book is really sort of exploring that, and then talking about specific strategies that people can use to step into that world. Welly Mulia: Okay, cool. So, what gave you the idea… you talked to us about how you noticed that with the internet, long tail and everything, business becomes super cheaper to build, especially online businesses where you can have a laptop and internet connection, maybe a phone, you can run a business. There are already topics talking about that at the time, I think you wrote a book, if I am not mistaken, you published the book in about 2015, is that correct? Taylor Pearson: Yeah, that’s right. Welly Mulia: So, I mean, there are already books about this topic, how you can build online businesses. What made you want to write a book about it? Taylor Pearson: I think the list in my mind, I was sort of unsatisfied about the existing books, they didn’t explain why, I wanted to understand, think one of the things I saw, working with a company as well as being with other people that were in that network was, I think a lot of the entrepreneurship books, it’s not a bad thing to say, let’s do that, it’s just sort of inspirational or very tactical like this is how you setup email marketing funnel and this is how you do optimization, those kind of stuff, and I think they were helpful, and had their place, I think what was compelling to me, personally was this idea that it was sort of a mispriced asset if you will that people were just having this idea of what the opportunity was there, and it was a better opportunity that most people understood. So, I think sort of what was different about my book was a bit of, starting with the very macro perspective, looking at the economy, the bigger economy, and what that looks like, what that meant and why that was happening and then drawing from that down into okay, start why these things are happening, and how can you as an individual take advantage of that? Welly Mulia: So, talk to us, what was your life before the book? You are a best-selling author now, and you work with people one-on-one, you coach people to have business startups and I also noticed that you have this portal, the way you connect people who are looking for jobs, like internships with startups who are looking to hire kind of like interns, correct? Taylor Pearson: Yeah, that’s right. Welly Mulia: So, now that you have your credentials right now. Talk to us, what was your life before all of this happened? Taylor Pearson: Sure. As I mentioned, I grew up in [inaudible 13:18] I played football in college… like a premier school, third division school in Birmingham, Alabama and I studied History. I graduated around the time of the global financial crises in 2008, 2009, and as you can imagine, there were not a lot of people that were hiring History majors out of a no-name college in Birmingham, Alabama in 2008/2009. I was sort of exploring other options, I worked for about a year as a medical interpreter, I had a minor in Spanish, I spoke pretty good Spanish, so I did a freelance medical interpreting, then I got a job teaching English in Sao Paulo, Brazil, so I moved to Sao Paulo, I was living there and working there in an English school. I started listening to podcasts, I would teach classes in the morning, mostly teaching adults, I teach sort of before work and after work some kids. I teach from like 6 am to 9 am, and then I have classes from maybe 3 pm to 7pm in the afternoon. And in the middle of the day, I sort of listened to all these internet business podcasts, people talking about what is going on in my business, and how it worked, and at the time I wanted to travel, I wanted to live outside the US, and so starting an online business seemed like a pretty interesting way to do that. So I started teaching myself Search Engine Optimization, I built a handful of sites that were basically ads supported sites, about different types of kitchen remodeling, I was selling ads, where you can just enter Google’s code on your website and then you get paid for everyone that clicks on your ads. And I got a job offer from a marketing agency. I moved back to take that job, mostly because I wanted to learn more, I felt I could learn a lot faster working with the company and I could sort of do things on my own. I worked for that company for about a year, I got another job with e-commerce company, I mentioned to you, I worked with them for a couple years, and at that point, I felt like I had learned quite a lot, I had gotten to meet quite a lot of people, my network was a lot bigger as a result of working for those companies and just understanding about my business, how it worked, what to do, it had grown a lot, so at that point I felt a little bit of confidence to go out on my own and start doing freelancing. I was in marketing freelancing, mostly SEO marketing is my background, and during that first year that I was working for myself, I wrote ‘The End of the Jobs’ as a side project where I wake up for about an hour, earlier in the morning and I would just work on it for about an hour in the morning, and do my regular job for the rest of the day. And then it came out in 2015 as you mentioned, I did much better than I expected, I hoped if it would sell a thousand copies I would be happy and I was fortunate to end up selling a lot more than that, and it has opened up a lot of cool, new opportunities for me. Welly Mulia: So, how did the next phase, after ‘End of Jobs’? What was the website where you connect the intern and people who are looking for interns? Taylor Pearson: It’s called ‘Get Apprenticeship’, one of the ideas I talked about on ‘The End of Job’ is just this notion of apprenticeship, so when most people think of apprenticeship, it’s lesser in Europe, more so in the US, you think of the blacksmith in the middle ages, sort of this ancient thing, but the idea is you relatively simple, you come and you get a job, working for someone, they teach you their trade for a number of years, you learn trade internship and you startup on your own and do it. So, that was the pattern I saw both as myself and what a lot of other people who had been successful in online businesses, they had either formally or informally form of apprenticeship, they spent a few years working with someone, it was more to teach them some of the trade. So, the website you mentioned; ‘Get Apprenticeship’ is basically a matchmaking service trying to connect people looking for apprentice positions with internet-based businesses and startups that are looking to hire. Welly Mulia: So, these interns, are they getting paid? Or is there like, I am working for free in exchange for experience? Taylor Pearson: Yeah, they are jobs, you get paid. Welly Mulia: Okay. Taylor Pearson: They are entry level jobs. Welly Mulia: Okay, and then as the owner of the platform ‘Get Apprenticeship’, you would get a fee from the companies? Taylor Pearson: That’s right. So, we charge a fee, a listing fee to advertise, and then we also have a matchmaking service where companies can pay us, to not just post their job posts, but we will promote it to our database and to some other external sites and will help them filter candidates and screen candidates for them. Welly Mulia: Okay. So, just like when you were mentioning that you were working, and then after that you were freelancing. What gave you the courage to quit your job and then start freelancing? Were you doing it kind of part-time before you actually quit and then you got to a point where you already have your clients, and then you quit your job? How does that work? Taylor Pearson: Part of the reason the job ended was, the company I was working for was in the process of being sold and I sort of knew the job was going away, at least it was going to change dramatically. So, I think that was certainly part of it, as I mentioned, as a result of working for that company, I had been pretty actively sort of building my network, I had started a personal blog, which I still operate, but at the time, mostly talking about marketing and case studies and how to build a reputation within my personal network as being someone that knew what they were doing and someone who had experience and people wanted to work with. When I left the position, the first few clients were people that I knew, that trusted me, that I felt like I could start with pretty quickly, and also, I had some money saved up and I just sort of said, I am going to try this, and if it doesn’t work, by the time I burn through this much money, I’ll just go get another job, and I felt at that point pretty confident that if I wanted to get another job doing the same thing I was doing, I could find another job. Welly Mulia: Okay, cool. The reason why I asked is because a lot of listeners are in the position that… this podcast show is for online course creators, and not all of them are into this full-time, some are even starting new and a lot of them already have their day jobs, so with your courage, you have the confidence to know that you have a few clients that you can take with you, if not then, you have these abilities that you can just go out to look for another job so that’s the reason why I asked you because I want to inspire all the other listeners who are still having a day job and maybe they are trying to start this online course business, then they can start part-time, and then transition from there, so that’s why I asked you the question. Taylor Pearson: The example I always often give, I talked about in the book, I call it ‘Stair Stepping’. I think what’s different about all of these online businesses, like online courses, is you can get started, you can start it part-time, you can start it relatively and extensively. If you want to setup an online course and even if you only get 5 students in your first year, and you are just doing it on Saturday mornings or whatever, that’s something you can do, it’s not like you are sort of opening a piece of real estate where you are paying $3,000 a month to have the store and it really has to work. So, I think it’s a lot more feasible to start small and build up. At least for me, I was fairly active as a blogger, and for about 2 years, and that was my side gig, I would work on that on the weekends, in between my jobs and that sort of gave me a platform, for someone to book, to get clients after I ended up leaving. Welly Mulia: So, what do you think is the number one problem for people who cannot seem to reach their goals? Taylor Pearson: Yeah it’s a good question. I think these things depend on the individual, I think some of the common issues I see is like a lack of definition, often the goal is vaguely defined, one of my rule of thumb is, can you bring this goal down into task? Of course, it can be done in an hour or less, and get it more defined and say, okay, I want to start a successful business, okay, can we unpack that into 1-hour task and then quit thinking about how do we just get those tasks done, so I think a lot of times it gets nebulous and it seems like a big thing and people are slow to get started, so unpacking it defining it more clearly and breaking it down makes a big difference. And I think the other thing for me is what I call ‘Speed of Implementation” that a lot of people that I see that are successful, as entrepreneurs, freelancers, are very quick at sort of going from, I have an idea, to I have launched this idea in the world. I am a big Twitter user and in some way, Twitter is kind of a cool example of that, I am thinking of something, walking into the gym on Tuesday and I can open my phone and I can put it on Twitter and then I can implement and get that thought out into the world pretty quickly. So, I think that’s another big component I see that is sort of a common thing. Welly Mulia: So, speed of implementation, interesting. And you mentioned you can put your thoughts into Twitter. So, you ask people about your idea on Twitter or you just phrase it as a question or are you just posting your thoughts to get feedback? Taylor Pearson: Just posting thoughts, I think it’s an example, I think what happens to a lot of people and certainly still happens to me, that I try to work on is, coming back to this sort of idea, like you have an idea, I don’t know if it is going to be good, I don’t know if it is going to work, I don’t know how it is going to go, and you spend 2 hours thinking about this thing, that you probably could have actually done in like 15 minutes. So just doing the thing, and then figuring out later if it works. In most cases, it’s a lot better if you are dealing with… especially if you are running a nuclear power plant, sure you can’t do that, but if you are running a software company or you are building an online course or you are tweeting, I have got a lot of dumb tweets that I have done over the years and it doesn’t really matter, and no one cares, they sort of disappear into the heat of Twitter or whatever. But sort of building that muscle, of going to implement quickly, I think cumulatively ends up making a pretty big difference. Welly Mulia: And then, your first point about the lack of definition, which is being vague, you mentioned about breaking down into specific tasks that you have to do. A lot of people, especially online businesses, they have a lot of things in their minds as you probably have heard about information overload. So, they read this blog post or they attend this webinar, or they listen to this podcast, and everyone is saying different conflicting things. So, how can one know how to break the task down into a specific task? I mean, which is the best way to go, because different experts give different advice. So, how do you know which one to follow to define that, okay, I have to do this and this to reach my goals. What is your take on that? Taylor Pearson: I think generally, there are sort of paradox of hard decisions, I have been thinking about this lately, and I think decisions are hard a lot of times, because the different choices are indistinguishable tasks, so if you think about this, you have one amazing job offer and 2 bad offers, it not that difficult of a decision, you just take the one amazing job offer. If you have 3 amazing job offers, it becomes like a really difficult, agonizing decision, because they all look amazing. So I think a lot of times, you read this course, read this blogpost, you watch this webinar, you go to this podcast and they all three seem like reasonably good ideas, either one is a reasonably good ideas and it doesn’t matter which one you implement because they all work about the same. Or two, you still don’t have enough knowledge about it yet, to figure out which is the best way. And I think, the best way to get that knowledge is only to pick one of them, and do them even if it’s not the right thing, and then you can look back and letting go, now that I have done this; I learned X, Y and Z didn’t work, and A, B and C did, maybe I should do more of A, B and C and less of X, Y and Z. Welly Mulia: Cool, I like that. Because many times we cannot see too far into the future, it’s always good to have long term goals, but a lot of times, when it comes to doing things, just like you said, pick one and then it would lead to other things that we previously didn’t think about, and previously thought it was impossible, but after doing these things then things get clearer, I like that. What is your advice for people who want to boost their efficiency and productivity? Since this is a business podcast, so in terms of their business, how can one boost their efficiency and productivity so that they get the most things done, in a lesser amount of time? Taylor Pearson: Sure. I think we talked a little bit about courage and resistance, and the idea of allaying resistance. I will speak a little bit about the idea of wisdom, or what you might call work smarter and not harder, it is often one of the phrases that gets tossed around. I guess one technique that I have found helpful and I have talked to a lot of people about, and it seems to be genuinely helpful, it’s what I call ‘Time Blocking’ or ‘Time Chunking’. So, there is an essay from a writer I like, Paul Graham, he calls it ‘Makers and Managers Schedules”. So, maker schedule, this is someone, it could be an artist painting a piece of art, it could be a developer writing a piece of code, it could someone building an online course, it could be someone writing a blogpost, you typically need sort of these big uninterrupted blocks of time, like 2, 3 or 4 hours, to just sit down and work on the thing. And managerial work, taking meetings, entering e-mails, program and every 30-minute block or an hour block, instead of switching between things. And sort of the idea here is, there is a task switching course, if you go from working on your detergent business, to doing accounting for some other business, sort of like a load up of mental ram if what is going on, you can exchange, you can sort of group like projects together, into blocks at a time, I think that’s much better, I think what that looks like for most people is, looking at your day, and breaking it up into blocks of time, there is 9 am to noon, and you take a break for lunch, then there is 1 pm to 4 pm, and you go for a walk and then there is 5 pm to 7pm, or something like that. And figuring out like, how can I sort of group and chunk things together. Welly Mulia: Okay. So, maker is where you have to spend the time to do a lot of creative tasks like you said. What is the manager? Taylor Pearson: The manager is, if you think of what does a middle manager role do in most large companies right there, at meetings, they are entering a lot of emails, they are doing these sort of smaller tasks, you can answer email for 30 minutes, you can open an email, pick the first message and start going, if you wanted to write a bigger sort of creative project, you want to write a code, you want to write a blogpost, you want to outline your course, it’s hard to do that in like 15 minutes or 30 minutes chunks, because you truly have to think about it, load up all the mental ram, and so you end up getting a lot less done, but if you say, a 3-hour block dedicated as opposed to six 30-minute blocks, where you are just trying to do just little pieces at a time, so figuring out what those big maker tasks are, and blocking out bigger times for those, and then fitting the manager work, into the cracks. The kind of metaphor I think about it, imagine you have a jar sitting on a table, and next to the jar, you’ve got a bowl of sand and a bowl of pebbles, and a bowl of rocks. So, if you start with putting the sand in, it involves all the little tiny things and then you out the pebbles in, there is not enough room left in the jar for the rocks. But if you start with the rocks, the big things, and you put them in the jar first, then you put the pebbles in, the pebbles will fall around the rocks into the empty space, and then you put the sand in, the sand falls around the pebbles into the empty space. And you will be able to fit everything into the jar. Welly Mulia: Alright, that’s very smart, and I like that analogy. So, the sand is basically those little, unimportant things that need to be done in the business, that are not that important, but you need to get it done in other to have the business to continue, right? Taylor Pearson: That’s right. Welly Mulia: Okay, cool. So, basically when you say separate your time into chunks and then you spend for example 3 hours on a maker stuff, and does that mean that within these 3 hours you don’t get interrupted, because you know, now, everyone is ADD, and then they keep checking their phones, or maybe go to social media to check if someone has liked their post. So, are you saying that if we block out say, 3 hours to write this article, then don’t do anything else? Taylor Pearson: That’s right. Welly Mulia: Okay, cool. So, if you can only give one advice to people who want to build a successful business, what would that be? Taylor Pearson: I guess the thing I wish somebody told me was, pick something you want to spend at least a few years of your life working on. Most businesses, they atimes don’t come after 1 year, 2 years, 3 years they come after, 5 years or 7 years or 10 years. So, thinking about what’s something you care enough about, something you could see yourself spending 3, 5, 7, 10, 15 or 20 years on. It’s a good sort of rule that most businesses don’t do well at first, sort of a very slow start, and then the returns come along the line, you want to make it is something that you care enough about to stick with for a long time. Welly Mulia: Okay, cool. One more question about your answer to that question. So, someone sticks around for 10 years, 20 years or whatever length of time, it’s a long time, how can they see that this is something that… they are passionate about the subject, but how can they see that this would be something that’s profitable financial-wise because running a business, you need money to sustain the business. What would you say about that? Taylor Pearson: Yes, I think there’s other criteria you would want to apply, I think that’s often the most overlooked one, which is why I brought it up. But certainly if you get 6 months into the business, I think it’s clear that no one wants your product, you may run an online course about how to use saline eye drops and no one really wants to learn about how you use saline eye drops, then obviously you are going to have to rethink that. Most people think about that, is this going to work, will people buy this thing? And I think offering discounts, do I care enough about this thing to stay focused on it for a decade? Welly Mulia: Alright, cool. Last question. Mindset and Tactics; which one do you think plays a bigger role in the success of one’s business? Taylor Pearson: I think they feed off each other. Often going back to solve the idea of speed of implementation, implementing the tactics quickly, even without knowing where it is going to go, or exactly how it is going to plan out, sort of the self-fulfilling prophecy, it can just end up working out, a certain type of serendipity or persistence. So, I think the common misconception between them is, I’ll just fix my mindset first and I will go do the thing, I think more frequently, what happens is you just say, I am going to just start doing the thing even though I don’t have that much confidence in myself, I am not sure if it is any good, I am not sure if anyone will like it, and then just able to build confidence overtime. Welly Mulia: Okay, cool. So Taylor, if listeners want to get to know, how can they get in touch with you? Taylor Pearson: My website is taylorpearson.me, you can go there, I have a newsletter if you want to sign up and the easiest way to reach me is on Twitter, I am on Twitter; @taylorpearsonme. Welly Mulia: Alright, cool. So, thank you again Taylor for sharing your experience and skills, I am sure this is very good advice for the listeners out there. Taylor Pearson: Yeah, thank you for having me, and thank you everyone for listening, I really appreciate it. Welly Mulia: If you are not listening to this on our website, go to academy.birdsend.co/2 to get your show notes. [/thrive_toggles] [/thrive_toggles_group] . Taylor Pearson On Productivity Click here for a bigger version of the image (compressed, non-printable) Highlights We’ve prepared a gist/highlights of the main points in the form a quick-read doc. Plus, you get the the printable, high resolution version of the infographic above. If you’re interested, click the pic below: . [thrive_text_block color=”note” headline=”Expert’s Resource”] Taylor’s website — I recommend subscribing to his newsletter. Taylor’s book — The End of Job The Effective Entrepreneur Masterclass — Choose, Plan & Accomplish Your Most Important Goal in 90 Days –> I’ve personally taken this course and recommend it! Coaching & Consulting — Taylor has helped clients triple their business, publish bestselling books, launch new product lines and improve their decision-making skills. Get him on your team! [/thrive_text_block] The post How To Keep Moving Forward In Uncertainty appeared first on BirdSend Academy .…

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How a former pizza delivery man earned $96,250 from a single email selling info products/online courses 51:24

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