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Episode 26: How To Sell On Instagram And Build Your Audience With Jasmine Star

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Jasmine Star is an Instagram expert, public speaker, and business strategist. She goes wherever her camera takes her and uses Instagram to tell stories of her life. The visual storyteller turned her curiosity into creativity, and this creativity budded into a passion. 

She gave up law at UCLA to marry sooner so her mother (suffering from cancer at the time) would live to be there for her wedding. In this episode, Jasmine talks about that surreal experience and how she got through some hard times that she encountered soon after. The bright part about the story is that her mother recovered, and now Jasmine is following her dreams, one photo at a time.

Learn:

—The 3:1 ratio that forms the core of Jasmine’s Instagram strategy

—How to get your Instagram followers to trust you

—How to never run out of Instagram ideas

Links From The Show:

www.jasminestar.com – Jasmine’s Site

http://insta180.com/ – Jasmine’s Instagram course

info@jasminestar.com – Jasmine’s email

How To Invent Your Best Self

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success

I recently learned that February 11th is National Inventor’s Day. To celebrate, I wrote this blog post to discuss how I invented myself into who I am and to help you invent your best self.

We are all inventors. We produce (invent) work that impacts people. It doesn’t matter whether your work impacts a handful of people or the entire planet. Your work impacts people.

But how exactly do you invent your best self? How do you set yourself up for success and produce work that you are very proud of? Let’s dive in.

 

Have The End In Sight

For any big goal I set for myself, I always have the end in sight. I’m always dangling the carrot in front of myself knowing that I won’t reach it in the short-term, but in the end, I’ve got myself a carrot (substitute your favorite food. I’m not a carrot person. I hope I didn’t offend anyone).

For my virtual Content Marketing Success Summit, I’m thinking about game day when I have all of the interviews lined up and have the autoresponder set up. I’m thinking about thousands of people engaging with the presentations within the virtual summit.

The carrot is right in front of my face, and I need it in front of my face. That carrot motivates me to work far harder than I currently am.

To invent your best self, you must be crystal clear on who you aim to reinvent yourself as. Do you want to be a bestselling author? Do you want to make more revenue?

Picture that end result and let that idea of massive success drive you to the finish line.

 

Predict The Checkpoints

As you invent yourself into a better you, it’s tempting to give up. Going from where you are to where you want to be may seem close to impossible. That’s because most people approach reinvention wrong.

They only view the end goal without building their foundation brick by brick. I don’t just snap my fingers and suddenly have a successful summit. However, I set checkpoints to make sure everything goes according to plan.

By mid-February, the design will be complete. Then I contact all potential speakers by the end of February. I get the interviews done in March and April. In May, I write the emails and get partners to promote the summit.

These checkpoints allow me to monitor my progress and allow me to finish the summit at a comfortable pace. Now, these checkpoints are just predictions. I could finish the site design a few days earlier or later. However, I act as if these checkpoints are set timeframes.

When I got started with social media, my ambition was to become a social media rockstar. I set checkpoints for how many followers I need to have within a certain timeframe.

I’ve referenced several times in the past that I set the goal of surpassing 100,000 Twitter followers in five years. I had no idea how to get that many followers, but the checkpoint forced me to take action.

Those five years are up. I ended with a little over 300,000 Twitter followers. Not bad for someone who didn’t know how to get 100,000 Twitter followers upon giving himself that goal.

Don’t be afraid of giving yourself a checkpoint you don’t know how to reach. I had many fearful thoughts when I started my podcast. I didn’t know how to keep it going, how to prepare for an episode, or how to even record the conversation between me and the guest.

I only got committed when I got enough people to say yes to being a guest on my podcast. At that point, I was committed and I set checkpoints so I’d be prepared for the first interview.

 

Overestimate The Workload

For any project I pursue, I always overestimate the workload. If I want to get 50 speakers, I contact 200 potential speakers. Any of those people who say yes get to become a speaker. In this scenario, I may very well interview far more than 50 people.

When I create a training course, I always assume I must pour countless hours into the training course. This changes my work ethic. I understand it’s not a walk-in-the-park, and that makes me work smarter and exert more effort towards what I’m doing.

When you reinvent yourself, overestimate the amount of work it will take for you to reach a certain goal. If you believe writing four blog posts each week will double your blog traffic, raise the estimate higher. You should believe that only daily blog posts will get you that same goal.

Overestimating the workload allows you to do at least one of two things:

Get the same stuff done sooner

Get much better results than you anticipated

Life is a game of inputs and outputs. We have an idea of what inputs lead to what outputs. Two good rules of thumb are to test the inputs to prove or disprove your hypothesis and to put more into the input (as long as it will lead to an output with long-term benefits).

 

Weekly Reflections

As an inventor, it’s tempting to continue inventing new things without looking at your past inventions. Sometimes I go through my blog posts to see what my audience liked and didn’t like. Analyzing my blog posts allows me to determine what my audience wants more of.

This allows me to invent content, videos, and products that my audience (you at the moment) will love.

Every week, I look at what went right and what went wrong. These weekly reflections allow me to hone my skills and get better at producing better content at a faster pace.

 

Get Mentors

Everyone needs help. Not even Superman went into battles all by himself. He had the Justice League (or Super Friends depending on your preference, but I strongly prefer Justice League as I didn’t go through any of the Super Friends series).

When I have a question, I ask one of my mentors. I don’t pay for their help. I just stop by every once in a while and ask a quick question. I could go the life coach method and hire someone who oversees much of what I do, but for now, I am more than content with how I get my mentors.

Podcasting.

Upon this post’s publication, I’ve published 25 episodes on my Breakthrough Success Podcast. All 25 guests provided my listeners and me with great insights. Imagine how much you would learn if you listened to all of the episodes on EOFire.

That’s what I get to do with my podcast. And I can interview people whose expertise match the expertise I’m looking for. I always pick potential guests who will interest me and arm us with massive insights.

 

In Conclusion

As you continue inventing yourself, your journey will continue to change. Success isn’t a line. It’s a jumbled up path. I’m sure you’ve seen the viral picture that continues attracting attention many years after it got published.

With the right mindset, you’ll invent yourself into the person you wish to become. The fact that you’re even on the journey to reinventing yourself means you’ll learn more about yourself. People who reinvent themselves into something better always make progress.

Your thirst for progress allows you to make progress. The amount of effort you exert determines how much progress you actually make.

How are you reinventing yourself in 2017? How are you accomplishing your big projects? Sound off in the comments section below.

10 Best Email Marketing Services for Small Businesses 

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email-marketing

This is a guest contribution from Stacey Marone

If you still haven’t made email marketing a priority for your small business, you should definitely do that as soon as possible. When your email list grows, your potential for sales also grows. You get a chance to attract loyal users to your website, and they get special offers they can’t resist. It’s a win-win situation.

Some content marketers will tell you that email marketing is outdated. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Take your own email as an example. Do you subscribe to lists from the websites you often visit? Do you like getting special offers from your favorite online bookstore? Of course you do!

Through perfectly-designed and written email messages, you make a quick and easy offer. Moreover, you get a chance to improve the traffic at your website. All you need to do is plan and execute a great email marketing campaign and work on the design and content of the website. If you get those points right, you’ll get more traffic and an improve conversion rate.

Coursera, for example, found a great way to attract its users to improve their activity at the website. They constantly get suggestions of courses they would like. The emails are personalized in accordance to their activity and preferences. Someone who likes history and shows such an activity at the website won’t get irrelevant suggestions for psychology courses. The creators of this email marketing campaign also send updates about the progress of the platform and remind the users they can access their courses from anywhere. This is an example of a good email marketing campaign, which provides a lot of value to the users.

1. screenshot

The question is: how do you get there? How do you plan and design the perfect email marketing campaign? The following 10 tools will help you with that.

 

#1: Constant Contact

This is one of the fastest growing services for email marketing. It is very user-friendly, so it’s the perfect choice for those who are making their first steps with email promotions. The mailing lists are very easy to manage.

The strength is the great choice of templates that are very easy to customize with drag-and-drop actions. You don’t need advanced design skills to use and customize a template in a way that would look appealing to your potential customers. Through Constant Contact, you can send personalized welcome, anniversary, and birthday messages that will make each subscriber feel special.

If you haven’t created an email list, you can easily upload it from Gmail, Outlook, Excel, and other services. From then on, it will grow. The platform will handle the bounces, unsubscribes, and inactive emails so you won’t bother with those details.

 

#2: Zoho Campaigns

This email marketing tool is focused on building last relationships with the subscribers. You can achieve that with the right design, content, and response to the actions of the recipients. The campaign tracking and reporting features of Zoho Campaigns are extremely valuable. You’ll be aware of the way your audience reacts on your messages, so you’ll constantly work on the improvement of your campaign.

You can use a template, but you can also create your own design if you want to be extremely unique. With Campaigns, you can create landing pages for your Facebook audience.

 

#3: ConvertKit

You’ll notice how this service is described the moment you land at its website: email marketing for professional bloggers. Why would a small business need an email marketing tool intended for bloggers? Well, if you have a blog at your website, then ConvertKit can really make your content marketing campaign more effective.

This tool is different from all others on this list because it focuses around content. You’ll be sending automated emails that invite the readers to read more at your website. When people want to get tips and solutions (and they do), that’s exactly what you need to deliver.

 

2. screenshot

 

#4: GetResponse

This is a tool that not only helps you deliver great messages to your target audience, but also educates you on proper email marketing. The emails will look great on any device; and guess what: you don’t need any design skills to achieve that. The HTML code editor is suitable for people who have some skills, but you can always use a template if you don’t belong in that category. GetResponse also gives you over 1,000 free iStock images to use in your designs.

You will get access to webinars that teach you how to boost the conversion rates. In addition, you’ll get tools that help you build great landing pages that lead to conversions.

 

#5: Campaign Monitor

This is a complete email marketing and automation tool that allows you to address each recipient personally with the messages. That’s an important effect to achieve. With Campaign Monitor, a high level of personalization is possible because the tool allows you to use important data from any third-party apps, such as Salesforce and Shopify.

The fact that you can control the time of sending email messages is also important. The last thing you want is wake up the recipients from other time zones with notifications in the middle of the night.

The design of your emails will be great with Campaign Monitor. The drag-and-drop builder works perfectly well.

 

#6: SendinBlue

This platform supports more-or-less the same features that all other tools on this list provide. Its advantage, however, is in the SMS marketing tools, which you can combine with your emailing campaign. You can reach the relevant audience with messages triggered by their interactions with your business.

You will get personalized email and phone support by the SendinBlue team, so you can always find solutions to the issues you face during the campaign. The free plan is another huge advantage. ALthough it gives you only 9,000 emails per month and not many other features that are available with the paid plans, that’s still more than enough for the beginning.

You can try the free plan and see where it takes you. As your campaign grows, you can get a Micro, Bronze, or Silver membership. Advanced users can make progress to Gold, Platinum, Diamond, or Atomic membership.

 

#7: AWeber

From all email marketing tools on this list, this one is probably the easiest one to use. It’s perfect for a small business that wants to get attention through an emailing campaign. With AWeber, you can rest assured that the messages will end up in the inboxes of your subscribers. They won’t be lost in the spam folders.

The templates look great and are pretty easy to use. You can design appealing messages in a matter of minutes.

Small business owners love AWeber because of the rock-solid support system. When you’re dealing with an email marketing campaign for the first time, it’s important to get tips from someone who understands your struggles.

 

#8: MailChimp

If you’re looking for the most popular email marketing platform that most people use, this is the one. It’s strength is individuality. It enables you to design unique email messages that convey the character of your brand. In an email marketing campaign, personality is an extremely important feature to keep in mind.

3. screenshot

The features of MailChimp are great for small businesses, but they will remain relevant when your company grows, so you won’t have to look for another tool that meets your marketing campaign’s growing needs. You can connect your store with MailChimp’s ecommerce integration. This feature enables you to connect the email marketing with the conversion process in a seamless manner.

 

#9: Infusionsoft

The moment you land at the website of this tool, you’ll notice its strength: design. The platform provides solutions for sales and marketing automation that are exclusively designed for small businesses. These are the things you’ll get with Infusionsoft: improved conversion rates, more leads, sales process management, master ecommerce experience, and automation of tasks that are holding you back.

As you can see, this is much more than an email marketing tool; it’s a solution that takes care of multiple aspects of your small business. Still, the plans are relatively affordable regarding all features you get.

 

#10: ActiveCampaign

This is a classic email marketing tool. It helps you design beautiful campaigns through templates, so you can send newsletters with no effort. You can automate your marketing channels when you import personal and behavioral data about the contacts.

The platform supports free image hosting, so you won’t bother looking for free images all over the web. You can easily find a suitable image to fit into the design of the free template. The good thing about the templates is that they help you create a mobile-friendly design.

 

Added Recommendation: Engage Bay

Engage Bay is a powerful, affordable, all-in-one marketing solution for SMBs. The company presents itself as a more affordable version of HubSpot which provides capabilities for email marketing, marketing automation, CRM & sales, and the Help Desk

 

 

In Conclusion

The success of a small business is practically dependent upon the online reputation it builds. For the sale of building a great online reputation, social media platforms are not enough. You have to find a way to communicate with your audience and send your personalized message directly to the potential customers. Email marketing is the perfect solution. Make your choice from the tools above, and you’ll be on your way to a successful email marketing campaign.

 

About Stacey

stacey marone

Stacey Marone is a freelance writer for essays.scholaradvisor.com and a social media marketer working part-time on contract for a large consultancy firm in the US. She creates magnetic content optimized for search. In her free time she also does volunteer work and organizes some activities for children. You can follow her on Twitter.

Episode 25: Publishing Your First Bestselling Book With Chandler Bolt

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Chandler Bolt is the CEO of Self-Publishing School and 5-time bestselling author. He believes that there’s a book inside of everyone, and Chandler teaches you how to find that book within so you can start writing. 

In this episode, Chandler reveals how you can identify your first book topic and turn it into a bestseller. He goes over keyword optimization, content creation, and the other parts of writing an epic book that sells. 

Chandler has been teaching authors how to write bestselling books for several years. He’s taught people like Lise Cartwright who I interviewed on Episode 10 of the podcast. Within six months of following Chandler’s advice, she went from unpublished author to making $3-$4K per month from her books. 

In this episode, I ask Chandler why Lise Cartwright became successful under his program and why it has a high success rate. For people interested in receiving free training from Chandler, you can start watching the free video series he set up for you.

 

Watch Chandler’s free video series 

 

Don’t put this video series or episode off for next time. Chandler’s insights have literally changed the way I view self-publishing and success in general. More importantly, Chandler’s advice has allowed me to get better results from my self-publishing efforts and expand my brand. 

Don’t think you’re too busy to write a book. Chandler published his first book as a sophomore in college. He then proceeded to drop out and make a 7-figure income by writing bestselling books and teaching people how to do the same.

 

Links from show:

http://self-publishingschool.com/book-idea-sells-3-things-must-check-write-book/ —Chandler’s post on finding profitable book ideas

http://self-publishingschool.com/how-to-publish-a-book/ —Chandler’s post on how to publish a book

Published: The Proven Path From Blank Page To Published Author – Chandler’s Latest book. We talk about it in the interview

https://www.rev.com/ – Transcription service

Dragon Dictation – Transcription service

Ryan Holiday’s Thought Catalog Article – An article I reference in this episode

4 Ways To Use Social Media To Understand Your Customers

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customers, social media

Have you ever bought something simply because someone you know recommended it? I’m sure you have. But while this behavior might seem trivial on the surface, underneath lies one of the greatest truths about social media marketing, and marketing in general.

We often rely on our friends to get product recommendations. After all, we know and trust our friends. More importantly, they know us. If you’re an avid reader, for example, your friends won’t likely recommend a good baseball glove. Rather, they’ll recommend a good book.

Having said that, one way to describe marketing is product recommendation. Even when we are trying to sell a product, we are, in essence, recommending it. Some messages are crafted better than others but, in the end, we don’t actually sell products. We recommend them. It’s the customer who takes action.

Part of making a great recommendation is to know your customers as well as you know your friends. It’s easy to recommend something to a lifelong friend. Imagine if it was just as easy to make recommendations for your potential customers. Now imagine if your potential customers responded the same way as your friends.

That’s possible, but only when you learn as much as you can about your customer. And social media can help you extract the information you need. Once you learn more about your customers through social media, you’ll get more sales and generate more revenue.

Let’s get started!

#1: See What Your Customers Share

You can learn A LOT about a person just by what they share on social media. For instance, I share blog posts about productivity, digital marketing, and blogging. Whether you believe I’m an expert on those subjects or not, you know right away that I care about those topics.

I’m interested in getting more traffic from my digital marketing efforts. I want to boost my productivity. And I want to write killer blog posts. And no matter how much I improve my skills, I’ll always want to do better.

Take a look at what your customers are sharing on social media. They share the products they like using, the articles and information they find interesting, and they often share how they feel about certain people and issues.

If a majority of my Twitter followers started sharing Pinterest-related articles, my next training course would be about Pinterest. See what I mean? When you know people already want something, offer them relevant solutions and your product recommendations will carry more weight.

#2: Read Their Bios

A bio can say a lot about a person. For instance, here’s my 160 character bio on Twitter:

customers, social media

Based on my tweets, you know that I care about social media marketing, blogging, and digital marketing (note: I don’t say that I’m passionate about them because people don’t always share what they’re passionate about, but they always share what they care about).

Looking at my bio, you also know I’m a runner, dog lover, and Red Sox fan. Do you offer a DVD workout routine that helps me cut 10 seconds off my mile within 30 days? If so, I’m all ears. And if you recommend something that will make my dog love me even more, you have my attention.

If you have some epic Red Sox memorabilia, I’m listening to you. I will not listen to anyone who offers Yankees memorabilia (unless it has something to do with Derek Jeter or Mariano Rivera). Likewise, if you’re selling a cat bowl, you will lose my attention immediately.

Doing this type of homework lets you discover what to recommend, and what not to recommend, to your customers. Depending on what you offer, and the information you provide in your bio, you can offer something that appeals to multiple interests.

If you recommend a Red Sox dog costume, you’ve won my heart. Envisioning my dog in a Red Sox outfit satisfies my love for dogs and my desire to watch the Red Sox win another World Series (and then another one. That cycle of desire will continue forever).

#3: Look At Who Your Customers Follow

Almost every social network lets you to discover who your customers are following. From a marketing perspective, we aren’t concerned about every individual a customer follows. We are more concerned with patterns.

Are your customers following accounts that post inspirational quotes? Are they following social media influencers? Understanding these common patterns will allow you to identify which recommendations will resonate strongest with your customers.

Now I’m going to share a trick to ensure your audience will become more receptive to your recommendations. Let’s say I want an audience consisting of people who follow other social media influencers.

These people were interested in social media marketing before I discovered them. Following them, and getting them to follow me back, will result in more individuals who will see my recommendations and potentially take action.

#4: See How Your Audience Engage With Your Content

If you follow an influencer’s followers, you are more likely to grow an audience. Combine that with the above-mentioned tips and you’ll grow a targeted audience.

But even when you have a targeted audience, you won’t FULLY understand what they want. If your audience is interested in social media, for instance, you may not know which social network they use most. But there are two ways to figure this out:

  • Conduct a survey and ask your audience to fill it out (keep in mind this method works better with an email list).
  • Examine how your audience engages with your social media content.

A few years ago, I noticed that my Twitter and blogging-related content received the most retweets. That’s why my first training courses were about Twitter and blogging.

Then I saw increased engagement for my productivity and social media-related blog posts (social media in general, not specific networks).

Therefore, I created more training courses about productivity and social media. The more often you share content on social media, the more data you’ll have to play with. Having more data to play with always allows you to make more accurate conclusions.

In Conclusion

Speaking of conclusions, you’ve reached the near-end of this blog post. Understanding your customers allows you to provide products and services that your customers will buy before you even say a word.

So far, social media is the most revolutionary marketing tool of the 21st century. While we’ve learned many methods of social media marketing, we still have much to learn. The evolving trends in social media marketing will be very exciting.

Regardless of how marketing evolves, the emphasis will always revolve around knowing your customer. By knowing your customer like you know a friend, you can make recommendations that result in happy customers and more revenue that you can use to expand your business.

What are your thoughts on using social media to learn more about your customers? Have any tips for us? Sound off in the comments section below.

Episode 24: Embracing The Audiobook Revolution With Richard Rieman

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Richard Rieman used his experience as an NBC broadcaster to narrate audiobooks as an Audible Approved Narrator. In this episode of Breakthrough Success, we talk about the Audiobook Revolution that’s taking over the consumer space.

Richard discusses how to narrate an audiobook and get your audiobook published in the ACX marketplace. He also shares some insights on how to rank your audiobooks higher on Amazon. 

Richard believes that the biggest challenge of any small business is finding the clients. He addresses this challenge by promoting his services online, and get this, attends one networking event every week. He says that attending and speaking at these events seals him most of the clients he gets.

This one search I conducted reveals the massive advantage audiobooks gives you. I searched “social media marketing” on the Amazon Kindle store and got a total of 6,429 books. The first few pages are filled with books with 100+ reviews.

Audiobooks presents a very different story. On Audible (Amazon’s website for audiobooks), I searched the same keyword phrase and got a total of 105 results. Very few of these books have 100+ reviews let alone 50+ reviews. Audiobook reading is also increasing, and with fewer audiobooks available than eBooks, the audiobook revolution makes sense.

To capitalize on this audiobook revolution, listen to the interview I had with Richard Rieman. I just learned about this revolution a few weeks ago. Richard has been living this audiobook revolution for quite a while now. 

If you want more episodes like this one, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Stitcher: 

marcguberti.com/itunes

marcguberti.com/stitcher

 

Key Links from the Show:

http://www.acx.com/ – Amazon’s Audiobook Creation Exchange

https://www.amazon.com/Authors-Guide-AudioBook-Creation/dp/0997100206 – Richard’s Book

www.meetup.com – Meet different people in industries

https://voatlanta.me/ – Voiceover Atlanta

www.audiobookreviewer.com – Audiobook promotion and review site

www.audiobookboom.com – Audiobook promotion and review site

www.audiobookrevolution.com – Richard’s website

richard@audiobookrevolution.com – Richard’s email