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5 Easy Hacks That Will Double Your Sales

June 27, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

I’ve spent the past several weeks planning and orchestrating a virtual summit, so it’s been a while since I wrote my last blog post.

In the near future, I will offer a training course that goes deeper into the parts and process. But for now I want to share what I’ve learned about how to increase revenues, which was one of the questions I asked myself continuously as I organized the summit.

After all, a virtual summit is a huge undertaking, so its success was foremost in my mind. By asking myself several key questions throughout the process, particularly how to double my sales, I discovered several hacks that I’d never utilized for my business.

I realized early on that I’d been missing out on some great opportunities: if I had used these sales hacks earlier, I could have made thousands of extra dollars!

#1: One-Click Add-Ons

I’ve seen several marketers use this strategy. Basically you offer a main product and entice customers to pay a little extra for added value.

This is similar to the upselling model at fast-food restaurants when the cashier says, “Hey, you’ve already bought the hamburger. Wouldn’t you like a side of fries to go with it?”

That’s what the one-click add-on does (minus the body fat).

Now, if you’ve been to a virtual summit, or know the marketing behind it, you know that the All-Access Pass is a popular product choice.

Here’s how I incorporated the one-click add-on strategy into my virtual summit – in addition to the All-Access Pass, notice what else I offer on my sales page:

The Blog Post Promotion Blueprint is a mini training course I created for summit attendees who are looking for added value. Not everyone will opt in to the add-on, but just one click takes the order from $97 to $124.

While I am still in the early stages of the summit process (no partners have promoted it yet), the one-click add-on has already increased my summit revenue by 17%!

So even after the Content Marketing Success Summit (CMSS) has ended, I will continue incorporating one-click add-ons into future initiatives.

#2: Thank You Sales Page

I turned my Thank You Page into a Sales Page, and something magical happened – I got more sales! Here’s the background:

Most Thank You pages say something like, “Thank you for subscribing. The free gift will arrive in your inbox soon.” Some Thank You pages suggest a few blog posts to read while you wait for your free gift.

But I decided to go straight for the sale. After thanking people for joining the summit, I lead them to a video and a link to my sales page.

Here’s what the confirmation looks like:

I transition from “Thank You” to “Here’s my product” with “but first…”

You can use the “but first…” transition regardless of what business you are in. “Let me ask you a question” is also a universal transition into a sales pitch.

#3: The Evergreen Deadline

The evergreen deadline is critical to the success of a Thank You Sales Page. It combines a stacked offer with a sense of urgency.

The evergreen deadline creates a stronger sense of urgency than the “Cart Closes at Midnight” email. Here’s why…

When you reach my Thank You Sales Page, you’ll see the previous image in the confirmation I sent, but you’ll also see THIS:

I set a 15-minute timer for the $47 special. If you buy the All-Access Pass within the next 15 minutes, you get it for $47. If you wait, the All-Access Pass price jumps to $97.

This is a great way to increase sales even before your summit begins.

And to further increase the likelihood of action, I include the following for All-Access Pass customers:

Twitter Marketing Domination Course ($197 value)
My Productivity Cheatsheet ($47 value)
Boost Your Productivity NOW Course ($147 value)
A video tutorial on the prep work for this summit ($97 value)
Outsourcing Mastery Course ($97 value)

The total value adds up to $585, not including the All-Access Pass itself, which now seems like a steal.

But why stop there? This next piece is extremely important for the evergreen deadline. If anyone buys the All-Access Pass for just $47, I also throw in a personal audit of their website, which usually costs hundreds of dollars.

This offer doesn’t apply to the $97 All-Access Pass customers, so if you want it, you have to buy the All-Access Pass on the spot.

See how much urgency that creates?

#4: Host A Webinar

I believe that ‘not hosting a webinar earlier’ is Biggest Mistake #2 for most people, which comes right behind ‘not starting an email list earlier.’

I’m hosting webinars for CMSS. Not only because I want to, but also because I told every speaker and affiliate that I’d be hosting one. That’s one way to make yourself accountable 🙂

While this post doesn’t explain how to host a webinar, I’ll point you to two valuable resources:

First, I got to interview Jon Schumacher in Episode 39 of my Breakthrough Success Podcast. He shared a vast amount of knowledge about generating massive profit from webinars.

Second, I recommend Russel Brunson’s Expert Secrets for crafting the perfect webinar. The title of the book suggests a deep dive into becoming an expert (and it definitely delivers), plus he literally provides the PERFECT blueprint for creating a highly profitable webinar.

Right now, you can get Russel’s book for free if you just pay for the shipping.

#5: Get Sponsors

This is more of a double-your-revenue tip, but if you double your sales, you theoretically double your revenues.

I wish I’d spent more time pursuing sponsors for CMSS. I contacted a few sponsors later in the game than I should have, but I still generated a fair amount of revenue.

In my opinion, pursuing sponsors is a very underrated way to make revenue.

With that said, my general method for pursuing sponsors is different from writing sponsored posts or using sketchy tactics. You can and should pursue sponsors for a virtual summit or podcast as well.

Want to see the true potential of getting sponsors? Check out this case study in which Brian Appleton explains how he made over $20,000 from his summit with sponsorships alone.

In Conclusion

We all want to double our sales. And once we do, we want to double our sales again (or triple them).

These five hacks will allow you to double your sales and revenue with your existing audience. Once you get these hacks down, you can then focus on generating more traffic.

I got all five of these sales hacks down before I asked anyone to promote my summit. Now that I’ve got the system in place, I’m looking for affiliates to promote my summit. You can become an affiliate for my summit here.

What are your thoughts on these sales hacks? Have any others for us? Sound off with questions or suggestions in the comments section below.

Until next time –

Marc

6 Instagram Hacks to Grow Business in a Month

June 6, 2017 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

This is a guest contribution from Lale Byquist

One of the fastest growing social networks is Instagram. Everyone knows about it and almost everyone uses it.

But: Do we truly know the power of it?

While most people believe that Instagram is a website for sharing private photos only, proficient marketers use it as an effective tool for growing business.

Source

Although most brands know reasons for using Instagram, there are some stats to prove that this social media platform is in a high demand for modern businesses:

700 million monthly active users
Around 1/3 of Instagram users have purchased a product online
By 2017, 70.7% of US brands will use Instagram for business

In other words, if you want to grow a business, you’re in the right place.

Creating an effective marketing strategy that includes running Instagram account takes a lot of work. However, if you know and follow recent trends, you can achieve success faster without wasting time or effort.

Here comes a list of tips that will help you grow a business in a month:

1. Create Business Profiles

Instagram takes care of its users and its team has announced a new tool that allows brands to understand their followers better. Now brands can create business profiles that give an opportunity to analyze insights: impressions, reach, profile views, website and email clicks. It also helps to understand what works best for your audience.

Source

Switch your account to business as it allows you to analyze statistics which means understanding your subscribers’ needs better so that you can get more followers on Instagram by suiting their expectations.

2. Fulfill Contact Info

If you want to increase the number of subscribers, give them reasons for doing it! Obviously, people pay attention to eye-catchy content, but they want to know who you are as well, so fulfilling your contact info is a must: add a description, website, phone number, address, and any other information that can help people learn more about your company.

Moreover, you can increase blog traffic from Instagram which helps to turn followers into customers and, therefore, grow your revenue. The only one thing you need to do is to help followers understand more about your company, its values, and how they can make the most out of using your products/services.

3. Use Paid Ads

When it comes to business promotion, get ready to spend money. You want to deliver your message to the target audience, right? If so, you need to use Instagram to target your posts, and it costs money. Using paid ads has become an important element of any social media marketing, and Instagram rolled out this service to help brands grow their business faster.

Three main benefits of using paid advertising on Instagram:

It has great targeting: choose your audience to reach the right people with your ads.

It grabs fans’ attention: people spend an average 192 seconds on the site after watching Instagram ads.

It pays off: Michael Kors posted one of the first paid ads and it earned 16 times more followers than their unsponsored posts.

Any other proof needed? 75% of Instagram users take action after seeing an advertised post.

Invest in Instagram ads to attract high-quality followers and, therefore, succeed with running your brand profile.

4. Share Up-to-Date Content

Having an Instagram profile isn’t enough to grow your audience. You need to post interesting and unique content daily that gives something valuable to your followers. If you want to expand your audience and cause a buzz with your publications, posting up-to-date content is the biggest helper.

Post Instagram stories: a type of disappearing content that is available for 24 hours and doesn’t appear on a profile. It’s aimed at showing current events that are not so important to be on the main newsfeed.
Share breaking news: modern people crave for urgent information. When you share up-to-date content, you earn trust and loyalty which means attracting new fans to your brand profile as you help to follow the recent trends.

If you post current news, you earn followers’ trust and loyalty. Plus, you attract new people who want to stay up-to-date.

5. Backstage Photos are Booming

Instagram is a social network that puts visual content first. MDG Advertising found out that 67% of online buyers rated high-quality images as an important element to their purchase decision. It means that good visuals matter.

As most brands promote themselves online, and they know the importance of high-quality images, it’s a normal practice to buy stock photos.

It’s harsh, but true: Internet users are sick and tired of artificial content. Stock photos don’t look realistic to cause emotions and, therefore, you can’t convey.

What’s left? If you want to use visuals, create them! Unless you have a great content creation staff, take photos with your gadget! In fact, backstage photos are booming! If people choose your brand, they are interested in your staff and working process that shows them more about your company, its values, and a lifestyle.
Backstage content is exclusive, so sharing it with your followers has an impact on their loyalty as they become a part of a private community.

6. Get Influencers to Promote Your Business

While most marketers try to deliver their messages to the masses, targeting opinion leaders is a key to success.

To begin with, let’s find out who these people are. An opinion leader, or an influencer, is a socially active person who keeps up with the recent trends and news, and this person has won trust and, therefore, he or she gets asked for advice a lot. All in all, it’s a person who has an effect on the decision-making of other people. If influencers speak well of your brand, you’re about to win: a consumer to consumer communication is the primary factor behind 20-50% of all purchasing decisions.

Influencer marketing has become an actionable tactic when it comes to business promotion.

Although it has many benefits, get ready for some pitfalls. For instance, collaboration with opinion leaders is a time-consuming task as you need to pick up credible people who have earned trust and loyalty from their followers who might be your target audience.

Once you’ve established good contact with an opinion leader who can promote your business, you’re one step closer to success.

How to collaborate with influencers? Tell them more about your product or service and name reasons for using it (how it can solve someone’s problems).

Give them a sample. To promote your product, they need to be sure that it works well.

Be beneficial to them: you need to pay for this recommendation or give your product for free.

For example, if you run a fashion business, send your item to an influencer and ask to tag your company so that other people can contact you fast.

Source

Every opinion leader has an already existing audience that pays much attention to things, products, and services he or she promotes. Thus, it’s your chance to reach potential followers fast. Give it a try to measure the effectiveness of the results.

The Sum Up

Whatever happens, always put your customers first. Let’s draw an analogy: running a business profile on Instagram is like delivering a speech as you have to do your audience’s analysis to suits their needs. If you show what your product can do for them and how they can make the most out of using it, it’s more likely they will stay with you.

Every business owner dreams of making a business profitable. If you’ve decided to use Instagram as a marketing tool, try to use all tips and hacks to grow your business. All the above-mentioned hacks can help to achieve better results in a month only.

Bonus Takeaways

Interact with your followers and potential fans: like and comment on their content

Include a CTA in your posts: make your followers discuss the topic and involve other people

Use popular hashtags and geolocation to attract potential followers

Run contests to boost followers’ engagement

Add links to Instagram account on other networks

Although running an Instagram business profile is a long-term marketing strategy for growing your business, there are some tips for skyrocketing results in a month. Do you know other hacks that help to grow the business fast?

About the Author

Lale Byquist is a media communications student who runs PrsentationSkills.me website. She is fond of the digital marketing, so Lale studies a lot about it, and social media marketing especially. Feel free to contact her on Twitter or Facebook.

7 Simple As Pie Email List Building Tips For Beginners

May 27, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Email list building is the most important activity you can do for your business. Your email list is truly your most valuable asset because people engage with emails far more often than social media posts.

In fact, if you have the same number of followers and email subscribers, you can count on anywhere from 3-10 times as many people seeing your email broadcasts than your social media posts.

The difference in click-through rates is even more dramatic. The average click-through rate for email is 3.57%, whereas Facebook and Twitter average click-through rates of 0.07% and 0.03%, respectively.

That’s right. Email gets 51-119 times more clicks depending on whether you use Twitter or Facebook. This isn’t to say social media is bad, in fact, you should be using social media to help you build your lists.

Remember, you own the traffic on your email lists. As for the traffic you don’t own, you’ll want as much of it as possible to join your email lists.

To help you, I’m providing seven simple-as-pie tips that you can implement to bring you email list building to the next level:

#1: Set Up An Email Server

Before you can even think of email list building, you’ll need to have an email server. And not one of those built-in WordPress servers that delivers your latest blog post to people’s inboxes.

Why? Because these services don’t allow you to communicate effectively with your audience.

Instead, consider servers like ConvertKit, iContact, and Aweber. Personally, I prefer ConvertKit because of its detailed auto responders, and its ability to seamlessly move people from one auto responder to another based on which actions they take (or don’t take). I wrote a more detailed post on ConvertKit here.

When you start using your server to send emails, focus on these two things:

Open rates
Click-through rates

Email marketers focus on other things too, but these two metrics matter most because, in the end, you want more people to open your emails, and more of the people who do open your emails to click on the links.

Besides, what’s the point of email list building if you don’t have an engaged list? By focusing on optimizing your open and click-through rates, you’ll end up with a more engaged email list.

#2: Create An Irresistible Free Offer

The irresistible free offer is the reason most people end up on your email list. Most people don’t subscribe to your email list to get more emails in their inbox. People get enough emails already!

The real reason they subscribe is to consume free content. My most successful free offer to date is an eBook containing 27 different tactics you can use to get more retweets.

You’ll want to be sure your free offer meets the needs of your niche and what you’re selling. When people subscribe and receive my free eBook, for example, they’re automatically sent an auto responder that provides additional value (as well as promotes my Twitter and social media-related products).

My irresistible offer leads qualified subscribers through a sales funnel that introduces my products based on a set of pre-qualifications — the products for which they’ve already expressed an interest — which keeps my messages relevant and on point.

Once you’ve decided on your irresistible free offer (video series, report, white paper, eBook, etc.), you need make sure it looks great. Design matters more than you think. We all judge a book by its cover (don’t deny it), and we also judge the value of a free offer by the way it’s presented.

For example, if all else is equal (including content), which book would you rather read?

A friend of mine was nice enough to create a new version of this eBook cover. And as a result, more people sign up simply because it looks better. You can even pay someone just $5 on Fiverr to come up with a good design. Just take a look at the logo for my upcoming summit:

I’ve made it my screensaver and I think it looks great! Just remember, the way your free offer looks is often more important than the free offer itself.

The title of your free offer is also important for building your email list. Choose a catchy yet simple title that communicates clearly what your free offer provides. If you have to choose between being catchy and being clear, always choose clarity.

As my friend Tom Corson-Knowles says, “Even a worthless book with a good title will sell more copies than a book full of useful information with a bad title.”

I write 10 possible titles for my free offer and then choose the one I like most.

#3: Create A Landing Page

Once you have the free offer in place, it’s time to create a landing page. A landing page is a page on your blog with a one or more CTAs (calls to action) and a form that asks users to enter an email address and possibly some other information (when you ask for less information, more people will actually fill out your form).

I personally use Optimize Press to create my landing pages. Optimize Press is a tool for WordPress.org users that lets you create landing pages, sales pages, membership sites, training courses, and just about anything else you can imagine.

If you don’t use this version of WordPress, you can still create a landing page. In fact, you don’t even need to have your own blog or website to create a landing page. You can simply create a self-hosted landing page on LeadPages or UpViral (they’ll host it for you so you don’t need to buy a domain name).

While it’s better to connect your landing page to a blog where you provide free, high-value content, you can technically go the self-hosted route that LeadPages, UpViral and others offer. The one problem with self-hosted landing pages is that people may not trust it as much since the URL doesn’t tell them who’s providing the free information.

When people don’t know who is getting their email address, for example, they are more hesitant about providing it. It’s often a good idea to say that you won’t share it with anyone!

Now that you know the basics, you’re probably wondering how to get people to subscribe via your landing page. There are two basic ways to do this. And understanding these two basic ideas will help you know what to look for to ensure effective email list building.

Increase the amount of traffic to the landing page
Optimize your landing page’s conversion rate

If two landing pages each have a 10% conversion rate, the landing page with 100 daily visitors will get more conversions than the landing page with 50 daily visitors.

But if the landing page with 50 daily visitors bumps up to a 30% conversion rate, that landing page now converts 15 visitors per day, whereas the other landing page with 100 daily visitors and a 10% conversion rate will convert 10 visitors per day. So even though one landing page gets half as many visitors, it’s still getting more conversions.

Ideally, you will increase traffic as well as your conversion rates. However, if you want to double your results, my advice is to focus on your conversion rates. Psychologically, it feels more doable to go from a 10% conversion rate to a 20% conversion rate than going from 100 daily visitors to 200 daily visitors. Are you still with me?

By focussing on conversions, you’ll only need a 10% increase. With a traffic-based goal, on the other hand, you’ll need an increase of 100 visitors.

#4: Share Your Landing Page On Social Media

Ah yes, here’s where social media joins the email list building mix. You can’t just create a landing page and expect people to visit it. You get those visitors by promoting your landing page, and social media is a powerful tool that lets you do just that.

The easiest way to promote your landing page is to use your bio. While most people link to their blog or website in their bios, why not link to the one page you want your visitors to see more than any other piece of content? I always link to my landing page in my bio.

Once you make this simple change, your email list building efforts will pick up momentum. You can then build on that momentum by promoting your landing page several times a day. But keep in mind that frequency will vary according to the social network.

On Twitter, for example, I promote one of my landing pages every hour. But on Facebook and Pinterest, I promote my landing page only once per day. And on Instagram, I let my bio do most of the talking.

Most social networks also give you the option to pin a post to the top of your profile. I use this feature with Twitter to keep one of my tweets immortal. While most tweets have a lifespan of 20 minutes, this one tweet continues to work wonders.

But I also noticed that as I shared my landing pages on more social networks, I fell into a time crunch. Sure, I was working on my email list building, but I wasn’t seeing the results I wanted from the rest of my business.

Why? Because I didn’t have as much time to communicate with my email list or create new products for them.

Once I realized the problem, I knew I needed to find a way out. So I began outsourcing more and more of my tasks. I delegated social media growth activities, image creation, and editing of my blog posts and podcasts, just to name a few. This decision opened up countless hours of my time and allowed me to pursue new opportunities.

#5: Profit From Your Autoresponder

What’s the point of email list building if you’re not making revenue? Your email costs go up but you won’t be able to pay for them.

To avoid this problem, you need to rely on your auto responders. An auto responder is made up of a series of emails people get after subscribing to your blog. You can set up your auto responders to email your list every few days, weeks, or even months.

Within each of these auto responders, you should be promoting a product. And if people buy one product, you’ll need to direct them to another auto responder that promotes a more expensive product. I refer to these as connective auto responders, since one auto responder leads right to the next.

This transition from one to the next only takes place when subscribers perform a desired action (i.e. buy a product). The more connective auto responders you have, the more revenue you can make.

Within each of your auto responders, tell stories! In my very first auto responder I share a picture of myself and explain the context behind it, which makes me more relatable, and my customers more attainable.

Plus, virtually every email service lets you check your auto responder stats. You’ll want to check the engagement from your overall auto responders as well as individual messages. That way, you can see what is and isn’t working. Then, based on the analysis, you can make changes.

Not bad, but can it be better? No matter how great my engagement, I always try to improve it.

#6: Get In The Growth Cycle

The growth cycle is the never-ending period of time in which you continue growing without boundaries. The basic set-up is that you pay for your traffic and make more money per conversion than you spend on each conversion.

For instance, if you’re spending $1 per conversion, but earning $2 per conversion, you should continue on that path until the end of time (or until/if these rates fall out of your favor).

But this also means you need to continuously monitor your ads. If an ad performs well, for example, use it as a model for future ads. But if your ad struggles to convert, change the copy, picture, or something else… but only change one thing at a time (A/B test) so you can better determine which variable is working or not working.

If you change more than one thing at a time, the image and the copy, for instance, and your ad continues to get the same results, you won’t have the full picture. As far as you know, the new picture could have doubled your results while the new copy could have halved your results. Thus, the final result is that nothing has changed.

#7: Give Yourself A Public Challenge

A public challenge for a big goal is intimidating because you can’t back out. But you don’t win by staying comfortable. You win by burning your boats so success or public failure (ugh!) are your only options.

Give yourself a public challenge for your email list. By the end of the year, for example, I want to see 100,000 email subscribers. That’s what I told my audience anyway, and I’m telling you (and everyone else) again in order to keep myself accountable.

Share these public goals in a YouTube video or blog post. So EVERYONE will see it, not just a few friends.

In Conclusion

EVERY marketer’s biggest regret is not having built an email list sooner. That fact alone should encourage you to jumpstart your email list building efforts (if you haven’t done so already).

Do at least one thing today that will help you to get at least one additional subscriber tomorrow. If you start with a one-subscriber goal per day, and follow this method for 100 days (1 subscriber on Day 1, 2 subscribers on Day 2, etc.), you’ll end up with 5,050 subscribers in 100 days with small, incremental gains.

That’s an average of 50.5 subscribers per day!

Power question: What can you do today to get more subscribers tomorrow?

Now Here’s What I Want From You

What are your thoughts on finding a target audience? Which insight in this blog post did you find especially useful? Have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

Leave a comment now. I read them all 🙂

And if you know anyone else who needs this burst of insight, please be sure you pass it on.

[Tweet “7 Simple As Pie Email List Building Tips For Beginners http://wp.me/p2UPop-29Q”]

If you’re new here, join the mailing list using the form below. You’ll get a ton of free content just like this.

Until next time,

Marc

*image credit: Pixabay.com

3 Strategies To Get Out Of Your Inbox Faster

May 13, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

A lot of people suffer from inbox paralysis. This happens when they receive so many emails — and believe they must respond to each one — that overwhelm takes over and leaves them inert. Sound familiar?

Even when you do respond to your emails, you probably end up stuck in your inbox for long periods of time. Email is basically invading our lives. To think about the impact of the inbox, consider these statistics:

2.4 million emails are sent every day.
The average person receives nearly 121 emails each day.
50% of Americans check their inbox while in bed.

It’s easy to feel as if we’re chained to our inbox (much like our mobile phones). In reality, the inbox is a double-edged sword. Some people can focus on potential opportunities and good email content, while others complain, “Oh, this is such a time suck!”

To avoid inbox paralysis, you need to become conscious of how you use your inbox. At the same time, you’ll want to make sure you’re capitalizing on the opportunities presented therein. This means taking control of the situation and making sure you are getting the best possible results from the time you spend in your inbox.

One of the dangers lurking in your inbox is the notification. The red icon, or circle, that appears every time you get a new message. You must avoid being tempted by that! How? The following strategies will help you make sure that you are using your inbox more strategically.

The first strategy is called ‘Zero Inbox’ day

This is the strategy I use. Every Monday, I go through all of my emails and respond to every one. This means I’m responding to dozens of emails. And on some Mondays, I’ve responded to over a hundred emails!

Bur rather than scatter this out throughout the week, I prefer get it all done on one day so that I have another six days to address other areas of my business.

If you do a little here and a little there, you’ll end up losing focus and inbox paralysis kicks in. And it takes time to reposition that focus on the projects that you’re supposed to be working on.

So I choose one day to blow through all of the emails and get them done so I don’t have to worry about them for the next six days. Sure, there are lots of emails piling up during the week, but I only respond to the critical emails.

When I was planning my virtual summit, for example, I responded to every potential speaker or any speakers who had questions. I’m very particular about which emails I respond to during my six-day hiatus. But on Mondays, I respond to every single email that is addressed to me.

The second strategy is to shorten your responses

Basically, there are two things that control how long you stay in your inbox: the amount of emails addressed to you, and how long your responses are to each one of them.

If it takes you a minute to respond to 60 emails, averaging one minute per email, you’ll be in your inbox for an hour. But if it only takes you 30 seconds, on average, to respond to an email, and you’re responding to the same 60, you’re only in your inbox for 30 minutes. That is a big difference, and it all comes from writing shorter responses.

My rule of thumb for writing an email response is to keep it no longer than five sentences. Most often, it’s one to three sentences. I’m very quick with it. I have an automatic signature so I don’t have to reenter the same details over and over and over again.

And instead of writing, “Hello Name,” and hitting the enter button twice, I’ll sometimes just include the person’s name on the same line as the message. This basically allows me to write shorter responses, which in turn allows me to address more emails within a shorter period of time.

The people who are really busy and seem like they are getting hundreds, or even thousands, of emails every day, have the shortest responses.

That is very intentional because they have a whole bunch of people to get back to, and they also have projects they want to pursue.

Don’t be afraid to make your email responses a little shorter. Don’t be afraid of coming off as curt or anything like that. It’s just part of the nature of communicating with as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, so that you can free up time for the rest of your business. You can be short and still be polite.

The third strategy is to hire an assistant

You should take this step when you’re getting hundreds of emails every day that require your attention. The assistant can go through the emails that follow a certain rubric. For example, answer all emails that say, “Please be a guest on my podcast.”

It’ll be a different person with a different audience and different podcast link. But the assistant can go through all of them and answer based on your preset recommendations for how to proceed. A good assistant will determine whether or not the gig is a good fit and/or which emails need your personal attention.

You can also ask the assistant to address common questions, send out thank you notes, or answer others who have written to thank you. Still, I would proceed with caution when hiring an assistant. Personally, I respond to thank-you messages myself. The idea of someone using my email address to respond on my behalf makes me a bit uncomfortable. But it’s done all the time.

If you do use an assistant, be sure they respond to your audience the right way. I suggest monitoring the person for the first week. My own rule is to micromanage for three to seven days only, just until I’m sure that my assistant or freelancer is competent.

Analyzing every little thing that your freelancer does, or micromanaging everyone on your team, makes hiring them to free up your time pointless.

Make yourself available for questions and clarifications the first week. Once you’re confident in their skills, step back and let them do their thing. They can always reach out to you with questions. But you needn’t bother analyzing every single email they send on your behalf.

To save even more time, you can take it a step further and hire a manager who oversees your freelancers.

These are three strategies for spending less time in your inbox.

I hope you enjoyed them. If you know someone who might benefit from these tips, please share this post.

Do you have your own tips to share? If so, please leave a comment. I read them all (and sometimes I end up turning them into a video or blog post).

If you are new to this blog, welcome! Sign up for more content like this using the form below 🙂

But what I’d really like from you is to dream big, achieve greatness, and unlock your potential today.

Until next time,

-Marc

*image credit: Pixabay.com

5 Ways To Land More Guests On Your Podcast

April 22, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Hello everyone, I’m teenager entrepreneur Marc Guberti. In this post I’m going to share with you five different methods you can use to get more guests on your podcast.

But before I get into that, I want to talk to those of you who haven’t yet started a podcast, but are thinking about it, and tell you why podcasts are so valuable.

One of my favorite things about podcasting is that I get free mentors.

Rather than pay for an expensive consultation session, you can interview someone, ask questions that are also your audience’s questions, and get the answers as well as more insight about your niche. So I find that really valuable.

You also get to build relationships with, as you scale your podcast, some of the most influential and successful people on the planet.

That is no understatement at all. Basically with a podcast, and you being able to interview all of these people, you are going to reach more people with your podcast. If you really scale this up, you could even have a chat with one of your role models.

Some people are able to land that interview on their very first episode. I would not recommend doing that because you’re going to feel a lot of pressure interviewing your role model. While that’s also just the nature of the game, I recommend conducting some interviews before you ask your role model if he or she is available for a podcast interview.

Finally, exponential authority.

I mean, I don’t know if you’ve seen other people with podcasts do this, but they’ll say stuff like, “I’ve had guests like so-and-so and this person and that person.” That gives you more authority by association. So if you associate yourself with authority figures in your podcast, you’ll increase your own authority as well.

So now that you know why podcasts are awesome, I’m going to talk to you about methods, beginning with the ‘contact me’ page.

This page works both ways: your ‘contact me’ page and your guest’s ‘contact me’ page. In the beginning, your contact me page is going to do little to nothing unless you already have a big audience.

So what you want to do on your guest’s ‘contact me’ page is tell them about your podcast and your past guests, if you have any; if you don’t, focus more on what your podcast is about. You should be doing this either way, but you should have a stronger focus on what your podcast is about if you still haven’t had any guests.

You want to make this a really short email, less than five sentences, because some of these people are very busy and they only have a few seconds to decide if this is the right opportunity for them. The ‘contact me’ page seems to be a universal page on most blogs. You can usually find it easily at the top of the blog. If you cannot find it, go into the search engine on that person’s blog and search for the words ‘contact me’ or ‘contact us’. You can also go to the very bottom of a blog to look for the contact me option.

As you continue to get more guests and you continue to build your authority, some people are going to contact you directly and ask if they can be on your show. Some of your fans may also suggest people who could be on your show. So in the beginning, you’re doing a lot of work by contacting people, but eventually people are going to be contacting you asking to be on your show, or giving you ideas of who could appear on your next episode.

The second way to get more guests from your podcast is to use Twitter.

I absolutely love using Twitter for the purpose of getting more guests on my podcast episodes. I find people in my niche who I want to engage with and then ask them via Twitter if they would like to appear on my podcast. The great thing about Twitter is that it’s just 140 characters; sometimes I’ll find myself sending two tweets to the same person to get my point across, but that’s still less than 280 characters, and people usually engage with their followers on Twitter.

Responsive users are looking to see who has mentioned them, so they will see your tweet request. And a lot of them will engage with that tweet. I mean, some people might say, “Unfortunately I can’t do it.” But other people will say, “Great. Where do we start?” Another thing I do is include my email address within these tweets.

Why? Because you can’t easily continue a conversation like this on Twitter. Once you have the person’s attention, you’ll now want it to go beyond 140 characters. You’ll want to send them your scheduling link, which you definitely want to keep private or else you’re going to get a lot of people that you don’t want to interview filling up your calendar.

Even if you don’t have a scheduling calendar, you don’t want to be talking about, “Oh, let’s do it at this time, this date,” on Twitter. That’s why I provide my email address within the tweets that I send to these people. As a bonus, if you are a verified user, you can filter and see all of the verified users who are following you. If you have a lot of verified users following you, you can go through them and see which ones you really want to have on your podcast, and then contact them.

The reason I like this method is because in order to be verified you’ve likely done something really cool. Maybe you have an incredible story, or expertise. These are the types of people you want as guests on your podcast. So that’s how you use Twitter in order to get more people on your podcast. It doesn’t matter if you have hundreds of thousands of followers or just a few hundred followers, you can use this method to get more people on your podcast.

The third way to get more guests on your podcast is through referral.

After you interview someone, ask that person if he or she can recommend anyone who would be a great guest for your podcast. This allows you to leverage your guests to build relationships that you couldn’t have built on your own. Some people are inaccessible to you but not the person you interviewed; that person can make the introduction.

This is an underrated method. It may not be the method that will get you the majority of your guests, but you can get a few really cool guests by asking every one of your guests, “Who would you like to see on my podcast? Who can you introduce me to?” The main rule I follow is to build as many relationships as possible. I like to follow the approach in which you build one meaningful relationship every single day.

So I build a lot of relationships without expecting anything in return. But sure enough, I get many things in return. I mean, I don’t go into the relationship with expectations. But I often engage with a new contact only to find that same person lending a hand a few months down the line, perhaps by saying, “I know this person who would be great for your podcast,” or, “I know someone who is looking for people to interview for his podcast.” So you never know what opportunities will open up when you start to build relationships; try to build one meaningful relationship a day and expect nothing in return.

The fourth way to get more guests for your podcast is to read books about your niche.

When you read books about your niche, it helps you build knowledge about your niche. That’s one of the most common reasons people say, “Read books.” But there are more benefits to reading books, especially when it comes to having your own podcast. What I’ve noticed is a lot of authors like to mention other authors and other people’s works within their own books. It’s a pattern I see a lot.

So with this pattern in mind, you can come across more people who would make for great guests on your episodes. Even if you can’t get the main author, you can go through that author’s book, see which books and authors he or she recommends, and then contact those individuals to see if they would like to be on your podcast. Plus, reading a book written by a guest on your podcast will greatly strengthen the interview.

What I like to do when I’m interviewing someone (and have read their book in advance) is underline key points found within their book. By doing that, I am able to bring up key points when I first contact them about being a guest, as well as formulate better questions once they agree to be a guest on my podcast. I don’t have to reread the book, I just focus on the important points I’ve already underlined.

If you get really good at reading books you could get through 10 books a month, and read as many books as possible from authors who have books on pre-order. You can say, “I have this podcast, I’d love to interview you about your upcoming book.” Some of them will send you a copy or a few chapters to help you formulate questions to make the interview better.

Authors with books on pre-order are the easiest people to get on your podcast because they are looking for more exposure at this specific moment of time. What these authors try to do is get a bunch of podcast interviews, or a bunch of guest posting opportunities all within less than four weeks from the time the book actually launches.

Getting high authority authors when they are in this pre-order stage will allow you to get more people later on because, as mentioned before, authority by association means you will be associated with some of these really successful authors (who you had contacted back when their books were on pre-order).

The final way to get more guests on your podcast, is to contact more people.

I mean, it sounds really simple. Contact more people, get more of them to say yes. But you need to contact more people in order to multiply your results. If you want to get more people on your podcast as guests, then instead of contacting five people, contact 10 people. By contacting twice as many people, in theory, you get twice as many guests for your podcast.

I like to make this a daily habit. I’ll contact at least three people a day for either a podcast appearance or a summit experience. This daily habit keeps me in check and makes it easier for me to contact different people and get interviews with them. So, with this habit, I contact over 1000 people in any given year. And if I get 33% of those people to say yes, I’ll have enough podcast material for an entire year. And if I do a weekly, rather than daily, podcast, I’ll have nearly 300 extra interviews that can be organized into summits.

I personally recommend not having too long of a queue. Let’s say you get 20 interviews for your podcast and you do an episode every week; that is unfair to guest number 20. So at that point you would increase the frequency in which you publish new episodes. It will challenge you to reach out to more people. It will challenge you to learn more about your niche. And it is such a fun experience!

In my experience, though, scheduling can get really annoying – things like suggesting different times and dates. I stopped doing that and started using Acuity. Acuity lets you set up a calendar and people can simply choose which times and dates work for them, which also work for you.

This makes it easier for you to contact more people because you don’t have to go back and forth with scheduling technicalities. Instead of going through all that hassle, you can just send them a link to your Acuity calendar, and that makes it easier for you and easier for the guest to schedule an interview.

Do you have any tips for landing podcast interviews? Will you try any of the tips mentioned in this post? Reach out in the comment section below.

If you’re new to this blog, please subscribe with the form below to receive more content like this. And don’t forget to pass on this post if you know someone who may benefit from it.

Until next time,

-Marc

*image credit: Pixabay

How To Write Your Blog Posts 10X Faster

April 18, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Hello everyone, I’m teenage entrepreneur Marc Guberti. Today I’m going to talk to you about how to write your blog posts 10 times faster.

Let’s start with the dilemma: the length of time it takes you to write your blog posts.

Even if you’re producing great content for your blog, you can’t help but think about the time you spend writing — time that’s taking you away from other opportunities.

If you spend all of your time writing blog posts, for instance, you may be missing out on opportunities to actually promote your posts. Publishing, but not promoting, great content will only keep your blog a well kept secret. This is the dilemma many bloggers find themselves in.

Now I’m going to tell you how to get out of that dilemma by sharing my own story. I started my blogging career writing long blog posts. I had heard about a method in which one writes at least 2,000 blog posts in order to get ranked number one on Google. So I wrote a lot of long blog posts, which took me hours at a time.

I would write and publish a long post. People would engage with it. And I would often enjoy a lot of social media shares. But inevitably, I would not have much time for the rest of my business. I would not have time to work on an important project like a virtual summit. I would not have time to schedule podcast episodes, or to interview people for them.

So yeah, I wrote long blog posts, and they received more engagement, but they literally prevented me from moving forward in any other area of my business.

It was actually my interest in hosting a virtual summit that made me realize something had to change. I’m still in the planning and preparation phase of this summit, which will be a content marketing success summit.

In order to make this summit a success, I needed more time for planning, contacting potential speakers, and many other related tasks. But my self-imposed blogging requirement got in the way and created a conflict.

I was worried about becoming so focused on the summit project that I would neglect my audience by not providing consistent value. And I knew that by neglecting my audience, I risked losing it by the time I was ready to launch my summit. So I changed my approach.

Let’s say 30% of my time was spent writing blog posts (which is a conservative estimate), with another 40% of my time going toward the summit, and 10% going toward miscellaneous tasks.

I adopted a strategy that would allow me to cut that 30% down to 5%. That’s right, rather than spending 30% of my time, or three hours a day, writing blog posts, I wanted to spend 5%, or 30 minutes a day, to achieve the same result. Doing this meant writing faster, but it also meant opening the door to new opportunities.

You could even take this a step further by outsourcing that 5%, which would give you even more time to pursue other opportunities. At this point you’re probably wondering, “Okay, that’s great. I just need to write my blog posts faster, but how?How do I do it?”

One way to increase your blog writing time is to rely on transcriptions

In fact, this very blog post was first a video, which was transcribed with Rev. The company charges $1 per minute for transcriptions. So not only do I have this video, which I’ve put on YouTube, I also have a blog post on the same material that people can read through and engage with. I get to feed two birds with one stone here.

The reason I switched from writing all of my blog posts to using Rev transcriptions is because I’d heard about the service from people who had found themselves in a similar situation.

Several people I’d interviewed for my podcast episodes like Kim Garst and Ray Edwards told me, “You’ve got to try Rev and you’ve got to try this approach.” They’d recommended this approach because no matter how fast you are at writing content, you will always speak faster than you can possibly write.

This is basically the analogy of writing versus speaking. Even the world’s fastest writer cannot compete with his or her ability to speak (unless they’re writing 200 words per minute). The average for most people is 38 to 40 words per minute. The average speaking rate is 150 words per minute. That is a huge difference, and you also circumvent writer’s block.

The other thing about writing is that you’ll sometimes stop to think about what you’re going to say; when you’re speaking you have less time to pause and think. Most of that is pretty rapid fire. There are a few pauses, sure, but nothing compared to the pauses that take place while writing content.

These pauses can last five minutes or more, especially if you’re experiencing writer’s block, but most people don’t have to worry about speaker’s block. I may pause for five seconds, but that’s really about it. And I consider it a pause, not speaker’s block.

You can also use this strategy to “write” and publish your own book very quickly while providing value.

Not only do you speak much faster than you type, you’re also not going to be second guessing as much about the content; it just comes out naturally.

Writing, on the other hand, gives you lots of opportunities to second guess, rework sentences, etc., all things that take up more of your time.

Once you have the transcription, all you need to do is a little polishing — editing, breaking up paragraphs and some revising to make the post more readable. With a video like this one, you can also incorporate pictures. That’s more important for the blog post than the video because in the video you have a lot of dialog that keeps the action moving. People often skim blog posts so images are a nice way to break things up. It’s easier to skim a blog post than a video, and images help support important points within your blog post.

Another important thing is to add links to your post when necessary. For example, you can edit the transcription to mention an influencer and to link to that influencer so you can do influencer marketing and say, “Hey, I mentioned you on my latest blog post. It would be treat if you could read it and share it.” Obviously a little better wording than that, but you get the idea.

Once you do a video like this one, send it to Rev and then polish it.

You have a blog post that you completed much faster than you would have if you went through the traditional route of writing the content yourself.

You can even outsource this stage of polishing your blog posts so you literally just do the video, send it to Rev, send the transcription to someone else, and that’s it. Really it’s just coming up with the video. That’s all you have to do. Then all of a sudden, you have an epic blog post that your visitors will be eager to read through and share.

What do you think about transcription services like Rev? Let us know in the comments. If you are a new visitor to my blog, subscribe using the form below to receive more content just like this. And if you have a question, please leave it in the comments.

Signing off, what I want you to do is dream big, achieve greatness, and unlock your potential today.

-Marc

*image credit: Pixabay