How To Skyrocket Your Productivity With The 50-30-20 Rule

January 29, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Productivity isn’t based on how much you get done or by how busy you are. It’s based on where you direct your time to achieve desirable results.

I’ve done a lot of research to enhance my work ethic. The most profound rule I came across was the 80/20 rule which states that 80% of your results come from 20% of your work. Find that 20%, spend more time addressing that workload, and you multiply your results.

The 50-30-20 rule even rivals 80/20 because it tells you where you need to devote your time. I see this new rule having a dramatic impact on my brand.

Let’s discuss what it is and how you can use it to grow your business.

What Is The 50-30-20 Rule?

We do a variety of activities, and without this rule, it’s tempting to label all activities as important. This rule sets a tiered structure that gives you a better idea of which tasks are worth doing. 50% is the top tier, 30% is the mid-tier, and 20% is the lower tier.

Here’s the breakdown of the rule.

50% of your time goes towards long-term goals that will pay off greatly in 3-5 years. Jeff Bezos thrives in this area. While everyone knows Amazon as the behemoth it is today, Amazon struggled to make a profit for many years. That’s because each time Amazon seemed to be on the verge of making a profit, Bezos would invest all of that profit and then some towards ventures with long-term potential.

These investments made Amazon into what it is now, but in the short-term, these investments frustrated Amazon investors because the stock stood still with small changes when Amazon didn’t make a profit.

30% of your time goes towards goals that will have an impact in the next 1-2 years. They’re not as long-term as the other long-term goals, but these goals are far enough into the future that you’ll reap big rewards from getting them done.

Finally, 20% of your time goes towards goals that have a short-term impact on your business. The impact for these activities will usually last 90 days and significantly diminish (or even completely fade) after those 90 days.

How Do I Apply This Rule

Stating a fancy rule with a string of numbers that add up to 100% is one thing. Actually implementing the rule for your business is completely different.

You need to list all of the tasks that you do for your business and categorize them. Most people spend the majority of their time on short-term goals. That’s why they get a string of short-term results that don’t hold significant long-term value.

Chances are you’ll have a big list of tasks that fits within the lower tier. It’s not bad to address this area of your life, but it’s bad to address it at the cost of long-term rewards.

You don’t need more tasks in the upper tier than you need in the lower tier. You just need to commit 50% of your time towards tasks in the upper tier and only 20% of your time in the bottom tier.

You can have one task in the upper tier and give that task 50% of your attention every day.

Solving The Distribution Problem

It’s common for people to have a distribution problem as they identify their 50-30-20. As mentioned before, many people send the majority of their time in the lower tier. That’s why short-term results are their way of life.

You may find a distribution problem as you list the tasks. You may discover that you’re in the lower tier for 4 hours per day. When you first write down these tasks, most of them will seem like dogma…you HAVE to continue doing them.

You have to schedule your social media posts, communicate with your audience, create content, promote your content, and do a bunch of other things.

Actually, you don’t.

You need to either delegate or remove most of your bottom tier related activities from your life. Discover which of these tasks are the most important to you, and take as much of that work off your shoulders as possible.

Yes, hiring employees is an investment, but it’s well worth it since you’ll get more of your time back.

50-30-20 Can Be Morphed

The upper tier is a minimum while the lower tier is a maximum. If you delegate most of your lower tier, you can change your approach to 60-30-10 so you invest more of your time towards long-term rewards.

Just never increase the time you spend pursuing the other tiers.

When you have your structure down (from now on, I’ll assume it’s a 50-30-20 since that’s what most people start with), you need to time yourself. You’re actually doing to apply 50-30-20 down to the minute.

If you work on your business for 5 hours every day, here’s the breakdown for each day:

Commit 2.5 hours towards upper tier activities
Commit 1.5 hours towards mid-tier activities
Commit 1 hour towards lower tier activities

Set a timer for all three of those tasks. If you work on the computer often, use a tool like Toggl to clearly track how much time you spend addressing each tier. This tool lets you break your time investments down to the minute. All you have to do is have it work in the background of everything else you’re doing.

In Conclusion

The 50-30-20 rule allows you to identify all of your tasks and prioritize which ones are the most important for maximum growth.

Your long-term goals will reap the most rewards, but it’s the short-term wins along the way that make the long-term goals possible.

What are your thoughts on the 50-30-20 rule? Do you have any tips for implementing it? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Become A Successful Part-Time Blogger

January 28, 2018 by Marc Guberti 1 Comment

It’s easier to become a successful blogger if you take the full-time route. However, it is also possible to become a successful part-time blogger.

While I see myself as a full-time entrepreneur, I must acknowledge that I am technically part-time since I’m a college student.

When you’re part-time, you don’t has as much time as a full-time blogger to commit towards your blog. That doesn’t necessarily put you at a disadvantage. This lack of time can actually be your greatest asset.

When you don’t have as much time, you get smarter with the time that you have. Mastering efficiency and effectiveness now will result in massive gains when you go from part-time to full-time.

Here are some tactics that will help you become a successful part-time blogger.

Knowledge Acquisition On The Road

The best way to speed your growth is to learn more about blogging and your niche as a whole. However, if you spend too much time acquiring knowledge, you won’t have enough time to write blog posts.

While I find time to read every day, you’ll also find it very effective to listen to podcasts or audiobooks on your daily commutes. Music will provide you with short-lived motivation (if your lucky enough to hear your favorite some on the radio), but listening to a podcast or audiobook will provide you with knowledge that will speed up your success.

To see the impact of this tactic, let’s say your daily commute is 20 minutes one-way. That means you’re on the road for at least 40 minutes every day. That comes to a total of 14,600 minutes (243 hours and 20 minutes) every year.

Finally, let’s say you listen to your audio content at 1.5 speed instead of the regular speed. I wouldn’t recommend making it too fast because you have to absorb the info as you drive, but 1.5 is doable.

That one decision cuts a 30 minute podcast episode down to 20 minutes. A 6 hour audiobook is now just 4 hours, but you’ll learn the same information.

In 14,600 minutes, you can listen to 730 podcast episodes or listen to 60 audiobooks assuming they all average 6 hours per audiobook. If you can listen to audio content at twice the speed without getting distracted, you’ll reap even more gains.

That’s much better than listening to music that only serves a short-term purpose.

Delegation

As a part-time blogger, there are only so many hats you can wear. Marketing, web design, creation, and writing email copy are some of the many hats we can wear as bloggers. It’s easier for full-time bloggers to put on these hats.

Part-time bloggers thrive in a different setting.

Instead of wearing so many hats, they distribute the hats to others. In other words, part-time bloggers delegate many of their tasks. I delegate a wide variety of tasks, and if I didn’t, my blog wouldn’t be where it is today.

All of my freelancers combined work at least 40 hours per week. That number is going to multiply as 2018 continues to take its course. Guess who would have to do all of that work if the freelancers weren’t here to help.

That’s right, me.

And while it’s doable for the summer and breaks, this just isn’t possible during school. Especially since I’m still doing a lot for my content brand already.

Start delegating the time consuming tasks that you don’t want to do. With your newfound time, do something that generates more revenue for your blog. If you can hire a freelancer whose skill and workload helps you generate more revenue than you’re paying that freelancer, that’s a plus.

I have someone else handling my Amazon Book Ads, and I am making a nice profit even after accounting for my monthly fee and ad spend.

But for now, delegate one task whether the primary focus is saving more time or making more money.

Prioritization & Focus

When you delegate various tasks such as social media growth and scheduling your content, you’ll have more time. This is where priority and focus come in.

The way you use your extra time determines that outputs you get within your lifetime.

You need to focus on the priorities that will result in the most traffic, conversions, and sales. Those are your three greatest allies in the blogging world. Getting more traffic means you can convert more people. If you convert more people, you have more people to sell to.

And more sales means more revenue that you can reinvest, use to delegate more tasks, or put it into your nest egg.

80/20 Marketing VS Creation

People are great at creating valuable content. If successful content brands were solely based on creating valuable content, a lot more of us would be very successful.

But content brands don’t just rely on great content. They also rely on even better marketing. Marketing your content makes the difference between your work getting seen and your work not getting seen.

If your blog post doesn’t get seen, it’s not valuable. Even if you wrote thousands of words and did some epic research, your blog post is not valuable unless people see it.

How can a blog post be of value if no one has read it? The definition of value as a whole is dependent on other people reading the content and getting value from it.

With content marketing being so important, we now return to the 80/20 rule. I’ve mentioned this rule a lot through my writing, and chances are you’ve come across it often. Here’s how the 80/20 rule works in this case.

You need to spend 80% of your time marketing your content and only 20% of your time creating the content.

If you spend more time marketing than creating, you’ll eventually get a big boost in traffic. If you prefer to create content, you can develop systems for marketing your content and delegate the marketing to your freelancers. It’s more than possible, but you still need to follow the 80/20 rule.

If you create content for 10 hours each week, you need to assign at least 40 hours per week to your freelancers responsible for marketing your content.

Find Your Full-Time Sprints

Every part-time blogger needs to find certain gaps of time where they have the full-time blogger status. For me, those moments are during holiday breaks and the summer.

During these gaps in time, I’m sprinting hard.

I’ll plan out the sprint a few days in advance. When you have more time to play with, one of two things will happen:

Since you are a part-time blogger who performed under time restrictions, removing the time restriction will result in a decrease in productivity. Now you have more time to use, but you’re taking your time.

With the fire in your belly to permanently reach full-time blogger status, you use your current full-time sprint to accomplish far more than you would have accomplished as a part-time blogger.

Planning out the sprint ahead and utilizing those extra hours each day will make a big difference in the future. The more you care about the planning process, the more successful your full-time sprint will be.

Focus the majority of your time on revenue generating activities because those are the activities that will elevate you to permanent full-time status.

In Conclusion

Regardless of whether you’re just getting started or have been a blogger for a while, you can become a full-time blogger.

If you are not a full-time blogger yet, you’re not correctly investing your time towards blogging.

The moment you change your approach, you will change your results. Part-time bloggers may have less time, but you can create systems and utilize your time more effectively.

It’s not about how many hours we each have in a given day, but rather, how we’re using each hour.

What are your thoughts about becoming a successful part-time blogger? Do you have any tips for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

10 Tactics To Think Of Epic Content Ideas

January 27, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

When you first start creating content, it’s easy to think of epic content ideas. The world is your oyster, and anything you can think of hasn’t been covered.

As you create more content, the ideas become more limited. Over 1,500 blog posts later, I have to make sure I don’t get too repetitive. I don’t see myself writing a “5 Ways To Get More Twitter Followers” type of article for a very long time, if ever again.

It’s easy to think of epic content ideas. It’s difficult to think of new ideas that you haven’t covered and that your audience wants. I can think of a blog post listing 100 blogging tips, but I already did that.

You can take a topic you’ve discussed before and discuss it in a new piece of content. If you chooses this route, you need to do so with a different flavor than before.

Regardless of your approach, these are 10 tactics you can use to think of epic content ideas.

#1: Read Blog Post Headlines

Blog post headlines allow you to discover what a blog post will discuss before reading it. You knew what you were getting from this blog post the moment you read the headline.

For some blog posts, it’s worth reading the entire thing to grab some key points. Hopefully, this is that type of blog post for you.

However, some blog post headlines serve better as idea igniters. If you run out of ideas, you can read blog post headlines in your niche to spark your mind.

I’ll read as many headlines as I need so I can come up with an epic content idea. However, to save time from this activity in the future, I often jot down 10-15 content ideas so I don’t have to perform this same activity every day.

#2: Read Email Subject Lines

This is a similar practice as reading blog post headlines. The main difference is that you read email subject lines continuously without igniting your mind. How many of us go through our inboxes and think, “Wow, there are so many potential content ideas lurking here”?

When I’m in the inbox, I want to respond to important emails and then get out. However, the inbox magic always seems to keep us in our inboxes a little longer than we anticipated.

Instead of completely wasting this time, have a mind that is open to new content ideas. Sometimes, blog post headlines make their way into your inboxes.

I’m subscribed to Medium, and they send amazing emails based on articles I’ve read in the past. One of the articles I received in my inbox was called 16 Things Your Successful Friends Have Given Up by Tim Denning.

Not only did I read the article, but I now have a content idea for the future. I can expand on this concept and write an article like “10 Things Your Unsuccessful Friends Haven’t Given Up” or “5 Things That Hold People Back From Success.”

Similarly to a blog post headline, an email subject line can give you several content ideas if you reword the subject line.

I wrote this blog post towards the end of 2017, so I had an email in my inbox with the subject line “The number one end-of-year practice that transforms my year.” I now have a few options:

“3 End-of-Year Practices That Work At Anytime Of The Year”

“The #1 Beginning-of-Year Practice That Can Transform Your Year”

“The Only Thing You Need To Accomplish Your Resolutions”

It took me a little less than a minute to write all of those ideas. I can follow-up with them at any time I desire, and I got them from my inbox.

You might find more success in your inbox because many marketers value their email subject lines more than they value their content headlines. The email subject line, similarly to a content headline, makes the difference between massive engagement and zero engagement.

#3: Listen To Podcasts

Unashamed plug to the Breakthrough Success Podcast 🙂

All joking aside, listening to podcasts (or audiobooks, but in this case, podcasts for your breakthrough), will provide you with a fountain of content ideas.

Audio content provides you with several unique opportunities for content consumption that videos and the written word can’t safely provide:

Walking in the grocery store

Walking your dog

Running (note: I briefly tried this, but it ruined my flow so I stopped)

Driving

When you want to rest and don’t want to look at a book or a computer screen

I write notes for each episode I listen to. As I write more notes, more content ideas flow out of me.

The amount of content ideas you’ll get from each episode depends on the type of podcast you listen to. The better the podcast, the more content ideas you’ll get out of the experience.

#4: Watch Videos

This tactic has a similar vibe as listening to podcast episodes. Many see YouTube as an on-demand platform to escape the hustle and bustle of work. Others use YouTube to learn new skills and implement what they learn.

You can watch your way to more knowledge by watching the right YouTube videos. I prefer to watch videos from a training course as I’m less tempted to drift off when watching a training course. All YouTube has to do is suggest one tempting video that’s off-track, and then I can fall into the wormhole of wasted time.

I recommend enrolling into several courses on Udemy. Several of them are free and won’t distract you from learning unlike YouTube (unless you only watch educational YouTube videos without room for entertainment).

#5: Write Down Ideas

One way to think of epic content ideas is…wait for it…write down ideas.

While this may seem like one of those no-brainer and not necessary to mention type of tactics, this one is important.

Just because you think of an epic content idea doesn’t mean you’ll remember it. With tens of thousands of thoughts going through our heads each day, even the greatest of ideas can get lost in the storm.

Writing down your ideas will prevent you from forgetting them. And when you look at those ideas, two things will happen. #1 is another no-brainer but #2 is where the magic happens.

You’ll remember the idea

Your mind will start to ignite more ideas based on the idea you just remembered

All you have to do is change, remove, or add 1-2 words to a content headline to come up with an entirely new idea.

#6: Consume Your Past Content

Similarly to how looking at past ideas will ignite new ideas, consuming your past content will help you come up with new content ideas.

To finish 2017 strong, I decided to listen to every episode I published on the Breakthrough Success Podcast (a little over 60 at the time). I listened to my podcast with iTunes until my podcast made it on Spotify. Then I got hyped and listened to many of the remaining episodes on Spotify.

Among the many tidbits I got from the episodes, one was that “all successful bloggers are full-time bloggers.”

With that one quote, I can think of several ideas:

How To Become A Full-Time Blogger

How To Work Like A Full-Time Blogger

How To Become A Successful Part-Time Blogger

What You Need To Do As A Part-Time Blogger

Note that I’m using headlines that include part-time and full-time. Including two important words within various headlines will give you more options as you think of epic content ideas.

#7: Read Books

Reading books has a similar theme as some of the previously mentioned tactics. Successful content creators often use books to gather new insights and present their findings in their content.

The best way to see planned out research in action is by…reading books. When you read a book, you’ll often see the author mention another book and a valuable insight from that book. This is planned out research, and while it’s presented in other forms of content, books seem to take this amount of research to the next level.

If you prefer audiobooks, then you’ll still get a lot of value from the experience. The important thing is that you read through as many high-value, niche-related books as possible. You’ll learn a lot and come across many content ideas.

#8: Watch Training Courses

This tactic is worth saying, but I won’t go deep into it. The idea is very similar to other tactics discussed. I recommend you use Udemy and SkillShare to find free courses to get the gist. While I prefer Udemy, others prefer SkillShare.

#9: Hire A Freelancer To Gather Ideas

Here’s where things get different. Most of these tactics have focused on you consuming content and headlines to come up with the ideas.

If you find yourself pressed for time, you can hire a team of freelancers to gather ideas for you. They can even do the outlines so you know where to take the content next. That way, you can spend less time thinking about epic content ideas and more time writing epic content.

Better yet, you can spend more time marketing your brand. Many people are great at creating content, but few of these same people are great marketers. Marketing your content allows your brand to get found and aids you on the way to becoming a full-time content creator.

You can hire freelancers to conduct a variety of tasks beyond idea generation. Just because something’s hard or time consuming doesn’t always mean you specifically have to do it.

#10: Create A Survey

Hiring a freelancer to gather ideas is one way to remove this task from your workload. While hiring a freelancer for this task serves its benefits, you can also ask your audience for ideas.

The best way to ask your audience for ideas is through a survey. If enough people in your audience take the survey, you can then make conclusions about what type of content they want more of.

While you’ll get some ideas right out of the gate, this feedback will let you know where to direct your idea igniting mind. If your audience wants Facebook advice, you know that you need to focus on thinking of Facebook ideas instead of thinking of Pinterest ideas.

You can create a survey through Survey Monkey or Google Forms.

In Conclusion

Thinking of epic content ideas is no small feat. The extra time you take to think of an incredible content idea will result in better content. That better content will attract more people to your brand and ensure your existing audience wants more of your content.

What were your thoughts on these tactics for generating more content ideas? Do you have any tactics for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

E81: Crafting An Elevator Pitch That Amazes Everyone With John Livesay

January 26, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

John Livesay is a top sales expert and funding strategist with over 20 years of experience. He hosts The Successful Pitch podcast with investors from around the world and is the Pitch Mentor at startfast.net, the number 1 accelerator in Upstate New York. John gives startups the pitching secrets to become irresistible to investors.

Quotes To Remember:

“People have to trust you, like you and know you before they buy from you.”

“There’s really 3 unspoken questions that everybody has whenever they hear you pitch anything.”

“The best step to being more confident is to be prepared.”

“Practice, so you have something to say.”

“The key to success is confidence and the key to confidence is preparation.”

“Tell your clients to be a human, not a robot.”

“Make it conversational and don’t think of it as an invitation for a monologue.”

“The best way to keep a conversation going it to create an open loop.”

“Never reject yourself.”

What You’ll Learn:

What to say in your elevator pitch
How to tailor your elevator pitch to different people
How to be confident when you’re speaking and sharing your elevator pitch
The difference between face-to-face pitching vs. online pitching
How to continue a conversation beyond the first interaction

Key Links From The Show:

Recommended Books:

The Successful Pitch by John Livesay

Dealstorming by Tim Sanders

Disrupt You! by Jay Samit

How to Be a Power Connector by Judy Robinett

Support Breakthrough Success On Patreon

Please consider supporting Breakthrough Success on Patreon. I publish five episodes per week which I carefully prepare for, and I choose to not run ads in my podcast to enhance the listener experience.

I offer my patrons various perks, and even a donation as small as $1/mo would make a big difference for growing and maintaining Breakthrough Success.

You can support Breakthrough Success by going here.

How To Profit From Your Free Content

January 26, 2018 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Have you ever wondered why people spend so much time creating and publishing free content? There are people like Neil Patel who manage to write 4,294 free blog posts. With each of those blog posts averaging 1,000 words (modest estimate for Neil), that’s over 4 million words of content.

That’s like reading through several copies of Tim Ferriss books.

And that doesn’t even include editing your content like a pro.

I myself have written over 2,000 blog posts, created hundreds of YouTube videos, and close to 100 episodes on the Breakthrough Success Podcast.

Why bother? Why not invest that time towards generating revenue?

Creating free content is a long-term game that will result in more revenue than most of the other strategies. Even with a coaching business, you are limited by the number of hours that you can take on clients in a given day.

In this free piece of content, you’ll learn how you can profit from the free content you create for your audience.

Send People To Your Email List

Free content does a magnificent job at sending people to your email list. At the end of all of my blog posts, I invite visitors to subscribe to receive a free offer.

Lately, I’ve included opt-in boxes in the middle of my content. With this strategy, I effectively turn all of my blog posts into landing pages. Small differences in site wide conversion (i.e. from 3% site wide conversion to 4% site wide conversion) will make a big difference in how much your email list grows in the weeks and months that follow.

I don’t only promote my opt-ins in my blog posts. On my blog’s sidebar, I give readers the option to click on my free offer and get it in exchange for joining my email list.

On my podcast, I mention a link at the beginning of the show where readers can go to buy one of my products or get a free offer.

With all of your content, you must be laser-focused on turning as many of your visitors into subscribers as possible. Boosting email subscribers is essential to profiting from your free content.

Optimize Your Autoresponder

The autoresponder contains all of the emails your new subscribers receive when they join your email list. Autoresponders can cover a few days or a few months depending on how deep you want to go.

This is different from the welcome email which would thank the person for subscribing and provide that person with the promised free offer.

Most email marketing solutions including ones like ConvertKit and iContact allow you to create an autoresponder for new subscribers.

Successful autoresponders strengthen the relationship between you and your new subscriber before making a pitch.

A common but effective tactic is to include a picture of yourself in the first email and describe the context. I use a picture of myself in a mountain trail where I sort of got lost but enjoyed all of the sights of that run.

Knowing more about you will make your new subscribers more interested in the products you’ll offer later on.

I prefer to write this email, offer three free pieces of content related to my product, and then send 3 emails about the product. If a new subscriber buys the product through your autoresponder, you can ascend them to a higher priced product.

If a new subscriber doesn’t buy the product, you can continue sending them free value and occasionally offer them other products.

Leverage Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of my top sources of income. You can find proven products in your niche and promote them knowing you’ll make the commission you deserve.

I tend to promote an affiliate product to my email list at least once per month. Daily emails gives me plenty of opportunities to promote affiliate products and share my free content.

You can also make money on your blog directly through affiliate marketing. You can promote an affiliate offer similarly to how you would promote a landing page.

To take things to the next level, anytime you mention a tool you use, make sure you use your affiliate link.

When I mention ViralTag, I use my affiliate link (just like I’m doing right now). This is a tool that I frequently recommend anyway. Adding an affiliate link into the mix allows me to make commissions based on the products and services I would have recommended anyway.

Ideally, you get visitors onto your email list and leverage affiliate marketing to your email list, but you can also leverage your free content to drive affiliate sales. The same principles apply to promoting your own product.

In Conclusion

Creating free content allows you to drive visibility to your brand. That visibility should result in more subscribers and sales. I use the word should because the way you optimize your website determine what results you’ll get.

As you optimize your site or quickly affirm to yourself that your site is optimized, remember this…

You are never finished with optimizing your site. To this day, I’m looking for ways to increase my conversion rates. Even when I hit my conversion rate goal, I’ll set a new goal for myself and boost conversions even more.

Plus, there are so many parts of the journey that you can optimize. You can optimize the landing page, the autoresponder messages to ensure more clicks, the sales page, and more.

Creating free content is the first step. Optimizing your website is the next step, but it should be taken immediately when you take your content brand seriously.

What are your thoughts on creating free content? Do you have any tips for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Promote Your Brand During Industry Events

January 25, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

To succeed in business, you need to constantly perform at your best. The better you promote yourself, and the more people you connect with, the more your brand will grow. We’re good at promoting ourselves online. Use social media, grow an email list, and interact with people. Promoting your brand during an industry event is completely different.

Industry events are different because of their structure. You have a limited time window to learn from speakers and connect with attendees. Within your limited time, you need to build relationships that will continue after the event.

Promoting your business is much easier if you are the speaker at a industry event. As an attendee, it’s more difficult.

Regardless of whether you are a speaker or an attendee, the insights in this article will give you a leg up at the next industry event you attend.

Determine Your Objectives

Determining your objectives revolves around this question:

What do I want to get out of this event (other than learning from speakers)?

Do you want to recruit more affiliates for your upcoming launch? Do you want more clients? Are you looking for a coach? These are some of the questions you need to ask yourself as you ponder the primary question.

Without determining your objectives, none of the other tactics in this article will carry any weight. Determining your objectives is the first step to achieving them.

Meet Up With The Right People

When you walk into an industry event, you’ll be walking within a sea of people. Not all of these people are equally important for your objectives. Some people are more enthusiastic than others to hire a coach. Some people are downright negative, and you need to get out of those conversations as quickly as possible.

The event’s structure will make it easier or more difficult to meet up with the right people. If an industry event has many presentations, you can attend the presentations where more of your potential clients will be.

Let’s say you coach people on launching and scaling a successful podcast. You can either go to the presentation about podcasting or the presentation about Twitter.

Go to the presentation about podcasting, connect with people before it starts, and then connect with more people after the presentation.

If presentations are not segmented in this fashion, arrive earlier than usual and talk with the other early birds. The early birds are usually some of the most determined attendees at the event.

Even if these people aren’t the right people for your coaching, affiliate program, or anything else, chances are they know a good fit.

Talk With The Speakers

If you go to an industry event, you owe it to yourself to talk with the speakers. Getting on these individual’s radars will open the door to more opportunities in the future.

This is how some of my best friendships with top players in my industry get formed. I watched people like Seth Godin, Mike Michalowicz, and Ramon Ray deliver awesome presentations multiple times. I interacted with all three of these marketing legends multiple times.

You only get that level of interaction and friendship by continuing to show up and interacting with the speakers. If you want to take this specific tactic to the next level, you can follow a speaker around to multiple locations.

Just make sure you can go up to the speaker and say what you were able to implement from the previous speech.

Influencers appreciate it when you consume their content and pay attention to their brands. They love it when they hear people say, “This is what you taught me…and this is how I applied it to my business.”

Make A Profit From The Event

Have you ever wondered why people are willing to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a single ticket at an industry event? Most people view these events as opportunities to learn from the leaders and interact with them.

Savvy marketers view these industry events as a way to make more money. The moment I graduate college, I’m going to more events like Social Media Marketing World regardless of whether I am a speaker or an attendee.

Tickets cost anywhere from a several hundred to over $1,000 depending on when you get them. At an event like this, I would build relationships with people and hope at least one attendee becomes a client.

The lowest I charge for any of my services is $497/mo with a 6-month commitment. That’s $2,982 in six months—way more than the price of a Social Media Marketing World ticket.

And that’s if I just get one client for my lowest-priced service.

But an event like Social Media Marketing World attracts thousands of social media marketers, so if I only got one client from SMMW, I definitely did something wrong.

Practice Your Pitches Beforehand

The second worst time to start practicing is on the day of the event. The worst scenario is to not practice at all.

If you can’t effectively communicate with attendees, you won’t achieve your objectives. No matter how great your product is, you won’t get affiliates if you don’t effectively communicate.

I advise practicing every day for moments like this. Getting in front of the mirror helps some people, but I don’t see the need. As long as you continue practicing your pitch, you’ll give a better pitch when you need to.

Start with practicing your various elevator pitches. Various elevator pitches?

One person would be a great guest on your podcast. Another person would be a great client. Each person gets a different pitch.

You don’t tell the potential guest about your coaching services. You don’t focus your conversation with the potential client about your podcast.

As an added bonus, you can practice the pitch with someone. Make your pitch, and have your partner control the rest of the conversation.

How will you react when your partner says, “This works”, “This isn’t for me right now”, or something similar?

How will you handle questions like “What’s the price?” and “What’s your podcast all about?”

Don’t just get a partner who listens to your elevator pitch. Ask that partner to get actively involved and ask questions as if this wasn’t a rehearsal.

The Post-Event

This is where the magic happens. You’ve gone back-and-forth between sessions, attendees, and speakers. Understand that everyone else at the industry event followed that same schedule.

A day after the event, everyone begins to play catch up mode. People respond to emails, address backlogged tasks, and do everything else that they missed.

But during this time, many people are catching up with their inboxes. You need to get into the attendees’ and speakers’ inboxes during this time.

Continue the conversation you were having before. This email will be different depending on who you were talking to. You may decide to send a potential client a link to schedule a free 30 minute call. You may provide a speaker with a link to schedule a time to appear on your podcast.

For people you want to know better but don’t have a call-to-action for, you can simply email them and mention the following:

How great the event was (great practice for any post-event email)

How much you enjoyed meeting the person and/or learning from them

To help you with this process, write some notes on the back of every business card you receive. Write what you and the other person just discussed and some points you can bring up during the post-event conversation.

What were the topics you discussed? Did anything personal come up from either side? Did this person have a kid, upcoming birthday, or anything else? Who’s their role model? You won’t know the answers to all of the questions like these. Knowing the answer to a single one will allow you to write a more personalized email.

In Conclusion

Why would I write a blog post about industry events when I rarely attend them? The answer is that I set a goal to attend a few industry events in 2018. I’m going after the more high-ticket industry events where I know I can positively impact attendees.

I’m going where more of my targeted audience goes. But these aren’t just people in my targeted audience. These are people who care… a lot.

If you’re willing to spend hundreds or even a little over $1,000 on a single ticket, and that doesn’t include traveling expenses for people who live in different countries, you know this is a serious crowd.

They’re super successful already or willing to put in as much effort as possible to become super successful.

You don’t just spend that much money for a single ticket and plan out your travel just to be wishy washy during the event.

Seriously committed people attend these types of events, and you should too. My school schedule makes it more difficult to attend a variety of these events, but I’ll tell you this…

I’ll be at Podcast Movement 2018.

What are your thoughts on attending industry events? Do you have any tips for making the most of these events? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.