Tiny offers … what are they? Small, inexpensive products that are supposed to blow up your business. At least that’s what we think people are saying they do: start with a tiny offer, grow your audience exponentially, and make a ton of money. Those people suggest that it’s possible to create a six-figure business on the back of a $29 product; that you can launch with a tiny offer and make the big bucks. But hear us out: while we have a tiny offer (Trello for Business), this only came much later in our business—we didn’t start with it.

We made a tiny offer before tiny offers were a thing, and now people ask us about it all the time since it became the cool thing to do. This is what we’re talking about in this episode. We’re walking you through whether or not a tiny offer makes sense for your business right now. The pros, the cons, the whole shebang. But take note: these are just our opinions and experiences; you might not agree with them. Still, there is always something new to learn. Grab your go-to Strategy Hour drink and let’s go!

Today, we have serial entrepreneur and business coach Christine McAlister back on the show! She is an amazing friend of ours. We love having her on the show and we hope you get some really good nuggets from today. Christine has a unique skill where she gets people to say yes to pretty much anything she puts out there, including coming back on our show all the time! What she is teaching you today is how to pitch yourself and how to be an amazing guest on other peoples’ podcasts, and why this strategy – being interviewed for other peoples’ shows – is one she recommends over actually having your own show.

She is going to walk you through how to use it to network, how to leverage, how to grow your audience and increase sales, and it’s just an all-round good, honest conversation about to-dos and not to-dos! So get out your notebook, jot some of the amazing strategies shared in this episode down, and we cannot wait to see what episodes you land your booty on!

Today on the show we are so excited to have Brit Kolo joining us once again! She is the creator of the Marketing Personality Type Framework to be found at marketingpersonalities.com. Through her framework, Brit has designed a match up system that works to find the best marketing strategies built for you based on your Myers-Briggs personality test! You guys know we love personality tests, so it is not shocking that Brit is back on the show but today, there’s a twist!

In this episode, we are throwing out a lot of what we have been raised to believe in this online marketing world about finding your ideal avatar. Today, we explore how maybe the concept of an ideal avatar is actually not what we should be paying attention to at all! So, be sure to listen to this episode to find out what Brit thinks you should value more than your ideal client or avatar, and how you can best filter marketing strategies that feel comfortable, good, and fun, so you can be super effective!

As of this week, we are officially five months into the launching of the Creative Template Shop and it’s so exciting, still! There are so many different moving parts and really cool aspects behind the scenes that are going on with this product of ours, and what’s more, they have never been a part of the process for other products we have developed! So, we wanted to share an update with all of our people!

We want to share some things we are thinking about developing – new features – and we want to hear from you too! So, we are officially opening our project to the public airwaves for your guys’ feedback and we are talking shop about the really cool things we think are so special about our baby. After today’s show, maybe our shop can become a nice little home for you on the internet as well!

Today on the show our guest is Danny Maloney, CEO of Tailwind, and we are so excited to have him here to talk about what his company has done for online business and how you can utilize it to drive more traffic and sales on your own! It’s important that you know before we even started using Tailwind we were using Pinterest. We had been on Pinterest for five years and had created a ton of content at that time.

Back in the day we hacked it so we could explode on that platform and we had a strategy we shared all over the internet. We wrote a blog post about it, but then, we found Tailwind and were like, “What is this? This is a lifesaver!” So, we are really looking forward to chatting to Danny about the changing landscape of content ranking algorithms and how to increase traffic while driving sales on Instagram and Pinterest using Tailwind!

Okay guys, we finally stopped putting our things off and worked on some marketing strategies we told you we would test out to see what would happen, and they worked! We’re just a little disappointed at ourselves, but also proud at the same time! We knew they would work and so we’re really glad we did them, even after putting them off for an obscene amount of time! We know everyone listening has their own version of, ‘I put this off,’ when it comes to a marketing strategy they have heard about that works.

So, today we’re talking about simple marketing strategies we finally put into practice and proved! The only thing you need to do is spend some time setting these strategies up, putting some things in place to prepare, and then actually doing it! Listen along and hear some of the amazing marketing tricks we tested and proved to be a great success!

We have exciting news! Word on the street is that Emylee is trying something new—gasp! Because, as you may know, she isn’t stuck in her ways at all…But before she shares her news, we have to state upfront that Abagail is going to be fulfilling the role of devil’s advocate on today’s show, poking holes in Emylee’s gutsy decision to switch from Squarespace to Shopify. We’ve been using the former since 2014 and we’ve been incredibly loyal, building our entire business on this site. At one point we considered having the site customized because we thought we were getting too big for the platform, but we ended up proving that Squarespace really can work for large businesses. And we still love Squarespace!

But then Emylee started this whole product-based business venture and it’s been a learning experience par excellence: of course, it is completely different from running a service-based business like Boss Project. So, Emylee called Abagail a few days ago and let her in on the secret: she was rebuilding her website on a new platform—Shopify. Now she’s getting messages from friends saying, “Welcome to the club! You’re doing what every e-commerce person should be doing.” In this episode, Emylee is going to walk you through the reasons for her decision, the features she’s excited about and the ones she misses, who she thinks Squarespace is right for, and more. Be sure to listen in as the two of them hash it out!

Today on the podcast we have Courtney Chaal, the founder of The Rule Breaker’s Club where she teaches women to package and sell with brilliance and offers awesome products, and her work has been featured in Inc., Creative Live, and The Huffpost to name only a few. She is crazy-talented when it comes to messaging specifically, so this interview is right on time. We get that we shouldn’t necessarily be changing our offers or postpone our launches, but how do we talk differently about our services, so that it appeals to people at this moment?

What messaging do we need to tweak to make it relevant, and where is the balance between being empathetic and helpful versus making sales because we’ve got businesses to run? Courtney shares the top tips that she herself is implementing in her business, from getting your mindset right and brainstorming ideas, to asking your audience what they need and putting it all together in a project plan, so strap in and let’s dive in!

On today’s show, we interview Melanie Fountain, a blog and Pinterest strategist who started her virtual assistant business a while ago and has since equipped herself in the area of all things Pinterest. We hopped on a call with her to chat about all the changes 2020 brought to the business landscape, and we were so blown away by her knowledge that we asked her to record an episode of The Strategy Hour with us. She talks about the behind-the-scenes strategies for getting your content discovered and seen by more people. Earlier this year, Pinterest underwent a shift toward different looking content but fortunately, it does not mean you have to go out and make a bunch of new content.

Melanie walks us through their adjusted policies and how you should adjust your approach, how Pinterest can work for product-based businesses, and what it means to be discoverable on the platform, including the ins and outs of hashtags, keywords, and descriptions. We adore Pinterest and have since its inception when it was all about planning dream weddings. In the early days, you saw more lifestyle content than business blogs, so using it for business purposes was still fairly new. But fast forward five years: we’ve been terrible at keeping up with Pinterest, but now they’ve done a major update that is very much applicable to your business. Stay tuned to learn everything about creating the strongest Pinterest profile in 2020!

Today on the show we have Meg Clarke of Clapping Dog Media. She is an SEO strategist who teaches creative small business owners how to grow their organic traffic and rankings so they can make a great impact and reach more people. She is also a sourdough bread baking genius, so you can look forward to several bread references throughout this episode! In Episode 45, we interviewed Meg where she talked about SEO for newbies, but today we’re taking it a step further by addressing intermediate and advanced issues that are more applicable to listeners who are somewhat experienced in this area. A lot has changed since 2017, so she discusses updated SEO practices, stuff you can do to prep your business and brand for launch and what to do if you are pivoting and need to start tackling different topics on your existing website. She also dishes out resources for finding targeting keywords and hidden SEO within your website and shares what she reckons is worth spending time on.

Before we get into the meat of the episode, it’s worth mentioning the incredible strides we have made with our SEO since a few years ago. But, while we’ve done well, we also desperately need maintenance. Our traffic used to be at a low 5 to 10% from Google despite our volume of content, but now over 50% of our traffic comes straight from search. But, as we said, we also need to brush up on our SEO, so we’re just as eager to hear what Meg’s got for us. So, pull your notebook closer and get ready for some fresh SEO strategy!

Today on the show we have Jessica Rasdall, a motivational speaker, bestselling author, public speaking strategist, and host to the Speak to Scale Podcast to talk to us about crafting your story for the virtual stage. Now that we are homebound and communicating with our audiences online, we can do with some help when it comes to showing up as ourselves and helping people rather than just have a self-serving online presence. You’ve heard the vulnerability piece – that you need to be relatable and reveal your “humanness” to your followers, but what is the right amount of sharing?

Jessica walks us through a formula for breaking your story down into three acts so it is most helpful to people - a structure that outlines the before, middle, and after phases of your story. Each of these three phases is important: from hooking the audience and relating to their experiences to showing them how the significant event changed your life and the difficult decisions you have had to make. For Jessica, the most important aspect is the motivation behind sharing your story, and if its primary purpose is not to help your audience in some way, you might want to reconsider. Be sure to tune in to hear the rest!

Before diving into the show we wanted to let our listeners know the date on which this was recorded – March 18th – because we know the world is in a weird place right now. The strategies discussed here are hyper tailored to this moment and things could be totally different by the time you listen! In any case, from our side, we are trying to create a sense of normalcy in our business and within our friends, so we wanted to go ahead with our chat with Meghan Maydel.

The strategies our guest shares today are highly valuable due to their applicability not only in this time of pandemic and crisis but also to other spikes within the world and the industry of advertising in general that could happen in the future. Meghan talks about how advertising doesn’t just have to happen on Facebook and gives a whole bunch of pro tips about other platforms and what using them can look like for you. We will be brainstorming different ways for you to be really effective in your ads today!

Every single month we add thousands and thousands of people to our email list, which sounds bananas because when we started getting to the first 10,000 subscribers, it felt unbelievable. It was a lot! So, we want to give you guys a little bit of a vision of what it looks like to grow your email list at a rapid rate in today’s episode. Several of the concepts we are going to cover could be 100% organic. You do not have to utilize paid strategies at all.

Now, some of these things we definitely have put dollars behind, but some of the concepts without paid dollars are the same! There are more ways to grow your email list than you’re perhaps aware of, and we are going to cover our top five today! We might come up with a few others too though, and just throw them in! So tune in and join us for the ride as we get into the best ways that you can keep those subscribers on the up and up!

Today on the show we have Tony Rulli, the co-founder, and CEO of Intentional Spark, an amazing paid advertising consultancy which we are proud to have the service of! He is the lead strategist for all their paid marketing campaigns which include Facebook ads, AdWords, web re-targeting, Instagram – the whole nine yards! As we said before, he is our ad guy, so Intentional Spark runs all the things behind-the-scenes for us which you, our listeners, see all the time!

In this episode, we are diving in and talking about a bit of the mechanics behind how these platforms function regarding sales and building an audience. We’re breaking down and picking Tony’s marketing brain all about the future of Facebook and Instagram, and what the next hot features are that everybody should be paying attention to. We also dabble into a little bit of conspiracy theories and a short clip of some of our favorite shows. So this is a really good smorgasbord but it’s all things nerding out about marketing and it should be really enjoyable. Tony also shares a freebie at the very end all about how you can start getting set up with your Pixel, and a little bit on how to read an ad report, so definitely make sure you’re listening till the end so you can grab that link!

For those of you that do not know, we used to work directly with clients, Emylee as a photographer, Abagail as a graphic designer and then as a branding and marketing company together! When you work with clients in this way, selling packages and presenting offers there are strategic ways to do this that can improve your results and help you sell for higher price points. 

This is where we started before diving fully into the online education space. In today's show we want to help you get better at this selling process and here's the good news, you don't even need a website to do it! Listen to this episode to get going, growing and making more money and make sure to listen to the end when we drop some info on two great tools we have set up for you and your business!