Today on the Strategy Hour Podcast we welcome the wonderful, the magnificent, the powerhouse, Erin Kelly! Erin is here to talk to us about MemberVault, something we are more than excited about. We’ll be hearing about how MemberVault uses gamification as way to boost your business and increase your revenue. Erin will be starting from the very beginning and explaining exactly what MemberVault does and what gamification actually means, so if any of this sounds new and a little daunting, don’t worry because we have you covered!

During our discussion you’ll get everything you need to know about the great service that MemberVault provides and how you might be able to incorporate it into your strategy. By incentivizing, tracking and tagging, MemberVault enables businesses to tailor and curate their communications and offers to their audiences which are proven to increase results. Sound good? We thought so! The most exciting part of it all is how the service actually cuts down on your workload and allows many automated actions to occur.  You will be getting more interaction for less time spent, and if that isn’t the ticket, we do not know what is. So stay tuned as Erin helps us break it all down for your listening pleasure.

Today on the podcast, we welcome our latest internet crush, Chris Davis. Chris is the Director of Education at ActiveCampaign and is an email marketing genius. With everything going on in your business, the truth is, you need to take your email marketing seriously. Chris has helped us so much with kicking our email marketing strategy into high gear. He is an incredible resource, and in this episode, we get deep into discovering information about your customers, as well as some of the basic mindsets you need to be in when you’re starting your email marketing game.

Chris uses a ton of analogies to break this information down in a way that is easily digestible for newcomers and old-timers alike. We discuss how to personalize your emails, the benefit of multiple marketing platforms and get a few key tips for using the ActiveCampaign platform. If you are about to tackle your own email strategy, this episode will really help you to dive in with the right mindset. And if you already have an email marketing strategy set up and sailing, there is information in this episode that will get you to reconsider, adapt and improve it. If you are just stuck or overwhelmed, in any shape or form, about your strategies – this episode is here to help you reset that mentality, help you move forward and get your audience through the door.

Today on the podcast, be prepared to laugh a lot because Allison Marshall is a handful. We had a ton of fun interviewing her, as we go back a while. We met up with her for coffee sometime last year and since then, we have partnered up on a few creative projects and it has been really fun to see her and her business grow as she’s transitioned from a full-time wedding photographer into teaching other creative entrepreneurs how to grow a profitable online business. She is here to share her story and the steps that she took to make all of that happen, so if that’s something that you’re wanting to be doing, then this is the episode for you.

Be sure to listen to how Allison transitioned from wedding photography to online sales. We also talk about the things that actually helped her make it happen, like getting people on her list and attracting the right kind of people. She shares her thoughts and processes on being yourself in your brand and things you can create for an opt-in to get people on your list, and also does a quick brainstorm of all the different tactics that she uses and how she is successful at getting people on her list. You can copy and paste those with some freebies that we’re mentioning today! We had a lot of giggles, a lot of passionate yelling and a really good time. Can’t wait for you to get into this one.

As you may or may not know, we had a Five Days to Launch Challenge earlier this June and we ran it literally just for five days, but we did a lot of promotion leading up to it and we wanted to talk to you today about everything that worked, the things we would've changed, how our engagement went throughout and how it's affected our launch so far. While recording this podcast, we’re literally still in the middle of launching, so can't give you final numbers, but we can tell you what we think it did in the beginning. We’re excited to jump in.

We are going to talk all about the challenges of launching and how to use these challenges to launch better, faster, stronger, awesomer, and smarter. We also dive into how to build more engagement, be more valuable, get more people on your list, and have a damn fun time doing it! So if you are ready to have some fun while making some money, then you better not miss this episode.

Today we are chatting with Sagan Morrow, who is a small business strategist, published author, and blogger at SaganMorrow.com. With nearly a decade of experience as a freelance writer/editor/social media manager, Sagan now teaches struggling solopreneurs how to create their own customized, actionable strategies for starting and building their own successful, profitable home-based businesses, without the overwhelm. Sagan is an intersectional feminist with a degree in Rhetoric. She recently launched the Candid Conversations small business podcast with her business partner to share the behind-the-scenes real, raw stories of entrepreneurship, in an effort to inspire and guide others through the uncertain landscape that is being a small business owner.

Sagan and her now business partner launched their podcast in seven days and today we’re going through the steps of how they made that happen, how they figured out the tech, and how they landed a sponsor. We also go over exactly how they got onto iTunes, what kind of hours they put in, and advice that they have for people who are wanting to launch anything in a small amount of time. So if you are ready to get off the fence and get your ideas out into the real world, then you should definitely tune in to today’s episode!

We are here today to congratulate all of you who just came through on the other side of the glorious hill after finishing our free Five Days to Launch Challenge. In this episode, we are going to do a quick recap of what the heck you all learned in the challenge and maybe try to give you one more boost of energy to keep trucking forward. Plus, we are going to give you an invitation to another free challenge for you to learn even more awesome, amazing things for your business.

We have been so impressed by the community that was able to take an idea that they had, turn it into a product, and get it to market in five days. We are briefly going to go over the steps the participants took, so if you missed the challenge and you want to figure out what the heck they did, definitely stay tuned because you can participate in our next one for sure. We are definitely going to do this again because it was an absolute party and, as you know, we will be here again probably in like a week or so giving you a full recap of the challenge and a behind the scenes look from our end. So if this is something that you guys are wanting to incorporate in your own business, you can just copy and paste what we did because we had a blast!

Today, we are talking about all the frigging mistakes we have ever made and mistakes we see you all making when it comes to launching. So, we are just going to call them for what they are and give you the flip side of what you could be doing to correct or prevent them so you can be way more successful than anyone else you have ever met in your life. Does that sound like a plan?

We are excited to talk to you about all these mistakes so that you can really get in the right mindset. Because a lot of it comes down to mindset, more than anything else. Most of the other problems are technical issues that y’all just need to get with someone and figure out. So get comfy, pull out those notepads, and get ready to pack in some strategy to avoid these pesky mistakes.