Q & A With Abagail & Emylee: We're Answering Your Burning Questions Live!
Episode 142: Show Notes
We are back for another Q&A with Abagail and Emylee! Sometimes we allow you, our audience, to post up a thread of burning questions in our Facebook Group. These questions could be anything; business or life — literally anything is on the table. We did this a couple of days ago and received a ton of really great questions. We thought we would share them here on the podcast and make it an educational experience for y’all. Hopefully, we get to answer your question on air and give you all a bit of free coaching in today’s episode and even some strategy if you will.
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With all the questions, we cover a big range of topics, including launching new products, knowing when to hire out and advice we wish we had known before starting our business. We also dive into the best strategies for creating challenges and let you know how to get those eyes on your prize! So if you have submitted a question to the group or you are just simply dying to hear the answers to all the many questions, stick around to hear us answer them. Now grab that coffee, get yourself comfy and let the answering games begin!
Favorite Marketing Ideas for Celebrating a New Website
Our first question comes from Jordan. One of her first projects for 2018 is creating and launching a new website. She wants to take advantage of such a huge project by celebrating her new site. For this project, we would want Jordan to concentrate on what her audience wants. We know that sounds a little weird, but this goes for anybody; when you’re launching something new, as much as we want to make it about ourselves, you have to make it about your potential customers and bringing the attention to them. So if you’re celebrating a new site, what can you do to get people exciting and thinking about what you have to offer? For us, a couple things we’ve done in the past are sneak-peaks or creating a countdown atmosphere over on Instagram, blog or email. Each of the days prior to the launch, we will share a new highlight of what is changing about the website. To build up the hype, create a competition or giveaway to entice your audience to share with their friends and engage with the event.
Is It Worth Hiring An SEO Expert?
Sometimes it takes a while to be comfortable to hire someone for something that you can do “good enough” and you’ve gotten yourself pretty far in your business by bootstrapping it and doing it yourself. However, there comes a point where if you are not literally selling packages on SEO, you don’t need to be spending that much time analyzing, tweaking and perfecting the SEO in your business. If SEO’s not the “thing” your business is about, then that’s probably not where your zone of genius is either. You should be able to show up for your clients and customers in the way they need you instead of you wearing yet another hat in your business. Overall, consider this; if it isn’t in your wheelhouse, is your time better spent somewhere else? We have done this multiple times in our own business. Even though we CAN do the job, sometimes it’s good to hire someone else just for the sake of productivity.
Launching A Product More or Less Frequently?
In our case, the short answer was that launching less during a year worked out better for us. Last year, we launched about 24 times, whereas this year we will only be launching five times and making about double the money. There are two main strategies for launching; either you do fewer launches that reach out to a higher number of people or do more launches without having to worry about reaching as many people all at once. Both approaches work; you just need to spend your time perfecting what works best for you and your audience. So the more times you can try it, the more times you can tweak. If you’re launching more often, it is much more likely that you are going to burn out the people on your list. They are going to get tired of it real fast and that’s the point we were getting to. So you are going to need a new churn of people to continue launching that often, getting new eyeballs on your content in order to get those conversions. That means more subscribers more quickly and the best way to get that today is by running Facebook ads.
Is Your Business Horoscope Making a Comeback? And Advice for New Business Owners?
The short answer for this is; yes and no. Yes, it still exists and you can still get your hands on it but the only way you do that is by enrolling in the Strategy Academy. We did that because we launched it on its own as a live workshop for its first time and it went well. People loved it. They signed up, they came and it went great. But what we found is that people don’t realize the power and the amazingness of that program until they A) go through it and B) couple it with other strategies that we teach them in other parts of the Strategy Academy. We wanted it to be used to its full potential, so it is only available inside the Strategy Academy.
When it comes to the advice we wish we had known when we first started our business, there are a few key strategies. First, we wish we would have known that pivoting to an education-only company from a service-based business would, in fact, be more profitable, more rewarding and more fun. We were really scared to make the change and very hesitant to let clients go. Another piece of advice we wish we had known is that we would make a ton of progress, reach some major goals and meet incredible people along the way without the help of anyone “internet famous”. Our biggest priority did NOT have to be meeting new people and getting into their inner circle to propel the business forward.
Doing A Launch that Leads to an Evergreen Service
There is definitely a strategy for doing a launch that leads to the generation of sales for your services. In our opinion, we wish more people treated it like that! So many service-based people are living client-to-client, always stressing about filling the dead space between clients. While this may be what brings in money, it is not the strategy that is growing your business. If you’re constantly hustling to get clients, it’s never going to come simply to you. Instead, a great way to grow your services is to do a challenge for finding your brand voice. Host a free challenge to teach your ideal audience the tactics on how to find something that is the perfect step zero they need to accomplish before working with you. Ask yourself this question; “What is the thing I wish my clients already knew before working with me?” Then teach it to them for FREE! Ultimately, the goal for any service-based business is to be booked out so that that is no longer your main focus.
Creating a Limited-Time Challenge
The biggest fear for anyone hosting their first webinar or their first challenge is that no one will show up. We are asking people to come and creating hype, but what happens when no one comes? Our answer is, “So what?!” Here’s the thing, you never have any guarantee that anyone will show up. Even if 2,000 people sign up for something, it does not mean anyone is actually going to make it. But you know what? You do it anyway. All the content you create online can be repurposed somewhere else in your business so it’s never a waste. In the online digital world, you can take and reuse your content however you want! As far as getting more eyeballs on it, you have to really focus on getting your people to share it with others. Email your current list, get them excited, tell them what’s coming and ask them to opt-in to the challenge. Then once they’re interested, send them a follow-up email that asks them to share the challenge with others, making it super easy for them to invite friends and share on social media.
Evaluating Your Revenue Streams
When it comes to revenue streams, if a specific stream contributes to 20% or more of your revenue, it would be a tough one to give up unless you know that you could focus on one of your other revenue streams and really emphasize it to make up the difference. If you hate the specific product or service coupled with a revenue stream, consider whether or not there is a way for you to step out and bring someone in to help manage or run it in your place. You need to determine if you hate offering it or if you simply dislike doing it. Those are two completely different questions. For us, there was an income stream that contributed to 90% of our total income and we absolutely hated. So we cut it. We weren’t happy. We knew we didn’t want to grow a business that way so we went cold turkey and cut it. Now, did we lose some income and have to take a drastic pay cut aka not make money for two months? Yes, absolutely. But that was a sacrifice we were willing to make because we 100% knew that our other income stream had the potential to be a lot bigger. So you could do either, but the most important thing is that you have a strategic plan to pull it off.
Quote This
Do not spend another day of your life doing something that doesn’t fulfill you. Period.
Highlights
Find out what our favorite marketing strategies are for launching a new website. [0:03:07.1]
Understanding whether is it worth hiring an SEO expert even if you can do it yourself. [0:05:34.1]
Determining the launch strategy that is best suited for your specific business goals. [0:08:19.1]
How to get access to Your Business Horoscope course and a piece of advice we wish we would have known. [0:14:33.1]
Learning how to do a launch that leads to an evergreen service and booking up your calendar. [0:20:31.1]
Creating a limited-time challenge and getting people in the door. [0:24:23.1]
The best challenge ideas for product-based business. [0:32:59.1]
Evaluating your revenue streams and implementing the right strategy for your business. [0:39:34.1]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Launching a website, Hiring an SEO expert, Choosing a launch strategy, Your Business Horoscope, Advice for new entrepreneurs, Booking up your calendar, Limited-time challenges, Evaluating revenue streams
