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E80: Succeeding As A Millennial Entrepreneur With Steven Van Cohen

January 25, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Steven Van Cohen’s entrepreneurial journey started in 2011 when he turned a $3,000 investment into a $3 million global consulting company. He recently launched his second company, 21Mil, an online platform built to develop millennial professionals. 21Mil is the first ever micro-learning platform built to help young professionals succeed in the workplace.

Quotes To Remember:

“Sometimes, we lose sight of taking a step back and really learning from the older people in the organization and filling in the blanks when and where we can.”

“Learn from others.”

“If you know what you are talking about and you have something to back it up, then people are definitely going to give you the time and day.”

“Millennials do a good job of leveraging the technology and resources that they have access to in order to get things done.”

“Our generation is the most education generation in the history.”

“It’s inevitable that organizations need to start changing the way they do business.”

“The biggest opportunity that led to this success is timing.”

“In order to be successful, you need to align your skills and your passions.”

What You’ll Learn:

Why age is just a number and not a limitation when you are in a business
What are the advantages of being a millenial and how to harness those strengths
How non-millenials get better at working with millennials
How to achieve success as a millennial entrepreneur

Key Links From The Show:

Steven’s Site

Steven’s LinkedIn

Steven’s Email

Recommended Books:

The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer

Built to Change by Christopher G. Worley and Edward E. Lawler III

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

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.

E79: Using Faith To Drive Our Success With Isabel Hundt

January 24, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Isabel Hundt is a certified Vision & Transformation coach, speaker, and author of the book The Power Of Faith-Driven Success where she teaches people how they can live their dreams. She passionately supports young adults create, live, and transform their lives by understanding the scientific and spiritual connections between their heart and their brain and by discovering their unique and magical gifts hidden within.

Quotes To Remember:

“When you are clear with what you want, it is going to happen.”

“You will never do things like everyone else because you have a different purpose.”

“Every time you reached a certain level, you are called to reach another level.”

“Your heart never stops talking to you no matter how hard you try to ignore it.”

“The next level for greater success actually means going deeper within.”

“Faith is success.”

“Your emotions are the most important that are connected to your faith.”

“Trust is the high vibration state you are in.”

“Anything that is happening to you is a reflection of your inside world.”

“If you cannot connect with it emotionally, you will never get there physically.”

What You’ll Learn:

Learn how to stay faithful even in the midst of challenges
How to build upon our faith
How faith connects with success
Getting more inspired to continue putting in the work on our way towards our dreams

Key Links From The Show:

Isabel’s Site

How Your Birth Story Influences Your Success in Life YouTube Video

Recommended Books:

The Power Of Faith-Driven Success by Isabel Hundt

Any book by Dr. Wayne Dyer

Support Breakthrough Success On Patreon

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 Automate Your Content Brand

January 24, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

The more you can automate, the more you can focus on your priorities. Automation can make any area in life easier ranging from money distribution to making sure every task in your business gets done.

For successful content creators who find themselves overwhelmed with all of the work, automation is often the next step. Many people wish to automate some or all of their work, but regardless of how much you want to automate right now, it will create the potential for dramatic improvement.

I say dramatic improvement because your improvement is based on how you use your newfound time.

Here are some ways that you can automate your content brand.

#1: Post In A Cycle

One of the most tedious tasks for most content brands is coming up with the social media content. Instead of curating new ideas every day, search for the evergreen ideas that you can continue posting in a continuous cycle.

I have hundreds of tweets that I put in a queue. These tweets automatically get sent out, and the cycle infinitely continues. I can add more tweets to this cycle when I come out with new content, but I don’t have to search for additional content for a long time.

I originally kept a CSV file containing all of these tweets with their links. After modifying the dates using Command F, I could then upload the CSV file into HootSuite’s bulk uploader and schedule over 100 tweets in just six clicks.

Since then, I started to use ViralTag which puts all of my tweets into a queue. You can set yourself up on ViralTag, never log in again, and your social media posts will continue to get posted in a continuous cycle.

I only log into ViralTag when I want to add new content or temporarily pause the cycle (i.e. I don’t tweet on Christmas Day).

#2: Delegate Your Tasks

The key to automating any business is to delegate your tasks to others. You can’t automate everything. You can’t send an auto response to every email and expect to build healthy relationships.

To determine which tasks you need to delegate, write down a list of the tasks you do. After you write that list, write a second list of all of the tasks you enjoy doing.

Any task on the first list that doesn’t appear on the second list needs to get delegated.

I tend to make at least one new hire per month. That allows me to assess my needs and grow at a gradual pace. Some day, I plan on hiring 5-10 people every month, and that number will expand in proportion to my business’ growth and needs.

#3: Provide Your Freelancers With Rubrics

When you hire a new freelancer, that freelancer will not fully know what to do. This isn’t a knock on freelancers. Imagine you getting hired but receiving vague instructions. I wouldn’t know what to do either.

And just because a freelancer has been working for you for several months doesn’t mean they fully know your expectations.

To make your expectations and instructions perfectly clear, you need to provide your freelancers with a rubric.

Leave no stones unturned. Make it as clear as possible. For my podcast editor and show notes writer, I provided this rubric for writing the show notes:

In the past, this freelancer would provide me with the show notes, and I would customize them to my standard. My clearly laying out my standard, both of us boosted our productivity.

Feeling inspired, I created a rubric for my Twitter Growth Expert. He was already doing a great job for me, but I felt like we were missing something. I’m improving at communicating with my freelancers, but during those times, I was downright terrible with the communication (it took me a few days just to respond to the simplest requests).

The rubric allowed us to get more clear on my expectations and his work ethic. The end result was more productivity for both of us and more rapid Twitter growth.

These rubrics are more productive for both of us because there’s no question about what needs to get done. My freelancers don’t have to guess anymore, and I don’t have to correct their work anymore. I create a rubric for every freelancer I hire. The rubric that takes me an hour to create will save me several hours every week.

#4: Automating The Inbox

You shouldn’t automate everything that goes in your inbox, but you can get really close. If you frequently find yourself trying to schedule things through email, you’re better off creating an online scheduler using a tool like Acuity.

That way, instead of the back-and-forth “I can do 3 pm this Wednesday. Does that work for you?” you provide your availability and the other person chooses a time and date from your availability that also works for them.

You can take this a step further by hiring a freelancer to respond to most of your emails. Only advance to this step if…

Your inbox is swamped

You have a continuous stream of incoming emails that you need to respond to

If you choose to hire someone, give that person a rubric showing them how to respond to common types of emails. These types of emails depend on what you get in your inbox.

An inbox detox can also solve the problem. In an inbox detox, you unsubscribe to one newsletter every day (except for mine) and then get fewer emails in your inbox.

In Conclusion

Automating your business will open up more time. The way you use that time determine the results you’ll get. While this statement is obvious, it carries more weight since automating your business is an investment.

You invest your money to get your time back. To make the automation worthwhile, you need to make more money from your extra time than you spend to gain that extra time.

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

E78: Accelerating Our Brands With Affiliate Partners With Robert Glazer

January 23, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Robert Glazer is the author of Performance Partnerships, The Checkered Past, Changing Present and Exciting Future of Affiliate Marketing and the founder and Managing Director of Acceleration Partners, an industry-leading affiliate marketing agency. His agency has attracted many high-profile clients including Adidas, Reebok, Gymboree, Target, Modcloth, and many others.

Quotes To Remember:

“Any good affiliate has valuable shelf space.”

“The key difference in a well-run affiliate program is that you have real resources against recruiting.”

“Affiliate marketing is half technology and half people.”

“A lot of people are just afraid of trying.”

What You’ll Learn:

Optimizing offers to make them more attractive
How to find perfect partners in promoting your brand
Learn to engage with partners through the launch process and boost commissions
How to continue conversation with affiliates even when you are not launching new stuff
How to get affiliates involved with an Evergreen promotion?
What makes a successful affiliate program?

Key Links From The Show:

Robert’s Site

Friday Forward

Recommended Books:

Performance Partnerships, The Checkered Past, Changing Present and Exciting Future of Affiliate Marketing by Robert Glazer

Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson

The Top 4 Email List Building Strategies

January 23, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

email list growth

Email list building is one of the most important areas of your brand. You’ll get a dramatically more effective response when you send an email to 10,000 people than when you send a tweet (or any social media post) to 10,000 people.

There are plenty of ways to build an email list. You don’t want to master the wrong strategies, but you also don’t want to rely on one method.

For a very long time, I solely relied on Twitter to grow my email list. My efforts paid off as over 10,000 content creators joined my list, but I knew that to achieve monumental growth, I needed additional email list streams.

We understand the concept of having multiple income streams, but we need to understand just as well the concept of having multiple email list growth streams.

I wrote a blog post earlier containing 50 tactics to grow your email list. While the tactics will help you grow your email list, the best tactics boil down to these four strategies.

#1: Evergreen Your Social Media Promotion

I don’t manually send tweets about my landing pages anymore. I use ViralTag to put all of my tweets in a cycle.

To not make myself too dependent on Twitter, I also created a posting cycle for Pinterest. This posting cycle was a bit more complicated as I have to account for several boards, but it was well worth the effort.

As a side note, I also delegate my social media growth to other freelancers. That way, I can focus on implementing other strategies and creating more content.

#2: Optimize Your Site For Maximum Conversions

optimization

If you get hundreds of thousands of visitors, but you have no method of converting them, then you won’t grow your email list. This email list building strategy is a focus on the visitor’s experience and getting them to subscribe.

As soon as visitors come on the blog, they are greeted by a welcome mat designed to get more opt-ins for a free offer. Pop-ups, the sidebar, and the blog posts themselves get even more opt-ins.

I use ThriveLeads to optimize my blog for generating more leads. It allows me to utilize all of the capabilities I just mentioned and more. AppSumo is another great option as well.

#3: Create An Affiliate Program

I am an affiliate for Michael Hyatt’s Best Year Ever Course. Michael Hyatt has impacted a lot of people, including some of the top players in various niches. When it came time to promote the course, many affiliates jumped on board.

The result?

In less than two weeks, all of the affiliates combined brought in over 80,000 opt-ins. You read that correctly, and I did not type in an extra zero.

That’s roughly 8,000 new subscribers every DAY. Many people would be very happy if that was their month.

Michael Hyatt was able to do it in one day.

I’m not saying that all affiliate programs lead to these types of results, but they will have a big impact on your business.

I grew my email list by over 25% by hosting the Content Marketing Success Summit and Productivity Virtual Summit. CMSS got me past 10,000 subscribers. When you get a team of people to promote your offers, you can reach out to far more people than you could have ever reached out to on your own.

You can use a service like SamCart to create your own affiliate program. When you recruit affiliates, it’s essential to communicate with them through a custom email list and a Facebook Group Page. These two communication platforms will be more than enough to keep your affiliates on the same page for what to promote and when.

Michael Hyatt’s course promotion was a launch which means there was a beginning date and an end date. In addition to running a launch style product launch, you can also run an evergreen promotion so affiliates can set their social media posts in a continuous cycle and constantly promote your landing pages.

#4: Use Facebook Ads

I recommend trying the other three before you give Facebook ads a try. The reason is that you don’t know how well your landing page converts until it gets enough visibility. You don’t want to use Facebook ads for a landing page that doesn’t convert.

You also don’t want to use Facebook ads for a landing page that converts well for getting opt-ins, but the autoresponder doesn’t bring in any sales. Then you’re losing money in the short-term even though you are growing your email list.

With that said, Facebook ads are the dominant player in the social media space. There are plenty of ways to optimize your Facebook ads, but I’ll give you the basic math you need to run a successful Facebook ad.

You’ll need to pick a Facebook ad that is measured by the cost per conversion. Before you run your Facebook ad, you should know how much a conversion is worth to you.

Let’s say you have a landing page with an effective autoresponder. Based on your past results, you know that the average subscriber spends $5 in the autoresponder. If you can convert subscribers at $2 per conversion with the Facebook ad, you make a $3 profit for each new subscriber you get from the Facebook ad.

These are the ads that become successful. It’s not just about optimizing your ad for Facebook standards, but it’s also about optimizing your autoresponder so Facebook optimization is a worthwhile effort.

To take this strategy a step further, you can focus on promoting a webinar. Webinars tend to convert very well from opt-in and sales generation standpoints. When you have a webinar that converts really well, you can even make it evergreen so you don’t have to continuously perform the same presentation.

In Conclusion

Email list building strategies are all around us. The only ones that will work are the ones that you meaningfully implement. Of all of these strategies, evergreen social media posts is the easiest to implement. It’s an easy one-off task where you occasionally have to look at your posts to see what’s still working.

Optimizing your site for maximum conversions is similar but can involve more time and continuous testing to get better conversion rates.

Creating and growing your own affiliate program is much more involved, especially in the long-term. However, this approach can yield incredible results. With the exception of affiliate program fees and having a team behind him, Michael Hyatt didn’t have to pay a penny to get those 80,000+ subscribers.

You can run a Facebook ad before you start your own affiliate program. But the affiliate program would help you paint a better picture of what cost per conversion would allow you to make a profit.

What are your thoughts on these email list building strategies? Do you have any strategies for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

E77: From 0 To Over 1.4 Million Podcast Episode Downloads With Dave Jackson

January 22, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Dave Jackson is the founder of the School of Podcasting. His podcast about podcasting has over 1.4 million downloads, and that stat is back from 2014. He has helped hundreds of people launch their own podcasts. Dave was as the Director of Podcasting for the New Media Expo, one of the top events in the industry.

Quotes To Remember:

“Figure out who your audience is. Figure out what they want. Figure out why you are getting into podcasting.”

“You can’t improve what you don’t launch.”

“Just by having a podcast, you are already seen as an expert.”

“There is no competition in podcasting.”

“Keep your face in front of them so that eventually they’re gonna look up and see you there.”

“You can start a podcast for about a price of an Xbox.”

“It’s not the gear that people tune in to. It’s the content.”

“You have to learn how to say no.”

“You think you can multitask but in reality, you can’t.”

“40% of Americans have at least listened to a podcast.”

“Sometimes, better means, ‘How can I slow down?'”