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3 Strategies To Get Out Of Your Inbox Faster

May 13, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

inbox

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

Filed Under: Emailing, growth hacking, productivity, Uncategorized Tagged With: business tips and tricks, email, productivity, tips and tricks

Episode 39: Using Webinars To Generate A Massive Profit With Jon Schumacher

May 10, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Wondering how to make a big profit from webinars…regardless of the size of your email list? This podcast episode will shed the light to those questions.

 

For this episode, I got to interview Jon Schumacher. Jon is a Webinar specialist and webinar consultant. He is the founder of Webinar Mastery Academy, and was the co-host of the Webinar Mastery Summit.

 

After creating thousands of webinars and videos, he’s learned the nuances of hosting a webinar that brings in revenue. 

 

“It’s not what’s happening at the webinar, it’s what happens after the webinar.” —Jon Schumacher

 

Learn

—The “3 P’s” of webinar traffic, 

—How to attract potential customers to your webinars.

—How to provide an evergreen webinar that continues generating consistent revenue months later

 

Key Links from the Show

Webinar Jam — a valuable tool for hosting your own webinars

Ever Webinar – an advanced tool for hosting evergreen webinars

Jon’s site

Jon’s Webinar Academy

 

3 Recommended Books

The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday

Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got by Jay Abraham

80/20 Sales And Marketing by Perry Marshall

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Episode 38: How To Grow A 7-Figure Podcast With John Lee Dumas

May 3, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

If you get into a conversation about starting your own podcast, it won’t take long before JLD gets mentioned. John Lee Dumas, otherwise known by his cool nickname, is one of the most successful podcasters on the planet.

He regularly brings in six figures from his podcast…every month!

And he took some time to share his secrets. We talked about growing your podcast to a seven figure revenue generator. He talks about pitching to sponsors and sprinkling call-to-actions throughout his episodes. 

We also talk about productivity, which is one of John’s strong suits. To publish 1 episode every day and grow your business at the same time requires a legendary amount of productivity, and JLD unloaded with tidbits that anyone can use.

For instance, on the day I interviewed him, I was podcast #16 of 20 who would interview him that day. This is based on his batching concept where he chooses 1 day to cluster up all 20 podcast interviews he does each month. He also uses this approach to record 30 episodes (1 month’s worth of content) by choosing two days to conduct all of the interviews. Basically, John has a bias towards action.

“You need to have a bias towards action…..do things that scare you.” —John Lee Dumas

 

Learn:

—How to grow your podcast to a seven figure empire

—How to be more productive than you’ve ever been before

—How to pitch your podcast to sponsors

—How to incorporate CTAs in your episodes

 

Key Links from the Show:

EOFire.com – John’s Podcast

 

Recommended Books:

The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson

The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy

The Chimp Paradox by Dr. Steve Peters

Filed Under: Uncategorized

5 Ways To Land More Guests On Your Podcast

April 22, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

 

podcastHello 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

Filed Under: Podcast, podcasts, Uncategorized Tagged With: podcast, podcast guests, podcasting tips

Episode 37: Embracing The Go-Giver Mindset With Bob Burg

April 19, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

The Go-Giver reveals the unconventional secrets to success that are all based on five special laws. Interested in learning more? That’s what this episode is all about!

For Episode 37, Bob Burg was nice enough to stop by and talk about his book The Go-Giver. Bob has sold over 500,000 copies of his book Go-Giver which provides valuable insights on how to become successful by following the unconventional method of giving. He’s spoken in front of audiences ranging from 50 to 16,000 attendees and has shared the stage with today’s thought leaders, Olympic athletes, and a former U.S. President. 

We discuss which types of goals you should be setting so you increase your impact which in turn increases your revenue. If you live by a dog eat dog mindset, this episode will give you the mental shift you need to dramatically improve your results. The reality is that mindset will only get you so far. The Go-Giver mindset combined with knowing the five special laws will allow you to go beyond your greatest expectations. 

 “Selling is discovering what the other person needs, wants, or desires, and helping them to get it.” —Bob Burg

“Don’t make money your target. Your target is serving others. Money is simply the reward for hitting the target.” —Bob Burg

 

Learn:

—The Go-Giver mindset that is critical to your success

—How to make more money by focusing more on serving your audience

—How to produce more value faster

—How to impact as many lives as possible

 

Key Links:

thegogiver.com—Bob’s site. Listen to his podcast!

 

Books:

The Science Of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles

How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie

The Secret Of Selling Anything by Harry Browne

The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer

The Go-Giver by Bob Burg & John David Mann

Filed Under: Uncategorized

How To Write Your Blog Posts 10X Faster

April 18, 2017 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

 

blog postsHello 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

Filed Under: Blogging, Tips and Tricks, Uncategorized, Video Tagged With: blogging, tips and tricks, transcription, video

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I am a content marketer and personal finance writer who produces content for individuals, small businesses, and corporations. My content will help drive engagement and sales to your business. I have produced content for several publications, including…

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