Online Genius Podcast

In this episode, I’ve got an interview with my friend Kate Dramis. She is an awesome copywriter for James Wedmore, and I met her through that community. Kate is really good at teaching entrepreneurs how to write great copy and find their message. Many entrepreneurs enjoy writing but hate writing conversion copy. I ask Kate why this is the case and she argues that conversion copy is really easy to write because it has a clear goal. We then discuss the biggest mistake that people make when writing copy, which Kate says stems from the execution. When you’re writing copy, you’re not writing for yourself. It’s never about you. It’s about your audience. Kate and I get to talking about how emails can be built to target a specific mindset, but a sales page must try to speak to everyone. Kate stresses that your sales page does not sell your offer; people should be somewhat sold by the time they land on that page. She then speaks about describing features versus benefits. Shifting beliefs is something that Kate is very

We’re talking about why you need to find your voice in this episode, and why it’s more important than anything else you could be doing when it comes to your business. It’s an important thing that a lot of people don’t quite get right. You need to find your voice for everything you do in your business. If you’re doing it right, your voice comes across in your emails, your content, social media copy, and more. Templates don’t allow you to inject your personal voice, and I’m going to further explain why I don’t like using them. A lot of the time in emails, people sound stiff, boring, and corporate. If it sounds like it could have been written by artificial intelligence, it’s probably not going to connect with people. The email will feel like it isn’t you. Copywriters can be useful, but there’s a few things you need to be aware of with them that I’ll go over in this episode. The most important differentiator is that you are you. I’ve had people come to me who have gotten a particular lesson from me that they’ve h

Today I’m talking about one of my core beliefs. It’s a belief that a lot of people need convincing on, but once you implement it, I can guarantee you are going to see massive, positive change in your business: the concept is becoming a radical giver. I don’t just mean giving to get or giving as a tactic; you must get to the point where the act of giving actually brings you joy.  My first ever launch in 2017 was a big flop; I made one sale which ended up resulting in a refund. I knew something had to change and decided for 2018, I was going to focus on giving and gratitude. I wasn’t doing it for the right reasons at first, but once I decided to just become a crazy giver within my circles, everything started to change. My name was really put out there and my business started to grow like never before. How do you implement radical giving into your business? There are right ways and wrong ways. You have to give without expectations, give your time, give people things of value, and even sometimes send people to yo

Today’s episode is about the importance of swipe files. I will be explaining why you need your own personal swipe file, what to collect in it, and how to use it. For those of you who don’t know, swipe files are collections of saved examples which you might want to use in the future for reference as an inspiration, just like lawyers use go-bys. In marketing, you will have to write emails, webinars, sales pages, and so on. That means you will have to create, but it’ll be very difficult to begin on a blank page without knowing where to start. This is still true even if you know the theoretical rules of writing in marketing. I've personally used a copywriter’s page to get the inspiration for my first sales page. To create a swipe file, you should collect whatever speaks to you since that means it’s effective and worth keeping. Collecting is very simple; it includes things like screenshotting Facebook ads, copying and pasting text from emails, screen grabbing videos, and then saving those in a document for future

I’m getting up on a soapbox in this episode, but it’s a good soapbox so I think you’re going to like it. I’m going to give you permission to simplify and do less. Today’s episode is all about how you can give yourself a marketing detox to make things better and to make you feel better in your business. As an online entrepreneur, you are in a world where you are being bombarded by people telling you to do different things. I’ll let you in on an email I recently sent to my list that was related to this, and though I didn’t feel like it was too great, my audience told me differently. The problem is that so many people are looking at what the seven-figure entrepreneurs are doing and think that they should do the same. These tactics are a mistake, and there’s no secret that will make everything fine in your business once you discover it. Beware of gurus bearing secrets. There are also online entrepreneurs who feel like they need to be active on every social media channel that exists. That’s not a recipe for succes

In this Foundations Friday episode, I’m going to give you a quick piece of advice that you can use to improve so many different things in your business. We’re going to be talking about creating a story journal and why you need one. As you probably know, I believe that storytelling is huge in everything that we do. Your story journal is all about helping you capture the stories that you can use in your business at various times. Stories are the best way to communicate with people because, as humans, we think in stories. They’re very effective not only at getting your message across, but at allowing people to remember your message.A lot of marketers wonder how to come up with stories. All you need to do is have a journal so that when something happens which you could potentially use in your business, you can write it down. You don’t need to write down a whole, detailed story; you just need to catalogue some quick notes and then think how you can deploy the story in your business.After making notes, the next lev

Today’s episode is about something that I heard about last year but wasn’t really comfortable talking about. A year ago, I couldn’t even think about what I’m discussing in this episode. Specifically, I’m talking about stepping into your role as a leader of a team, not as a solopreneur doing everything in your business. There’s a difference between being self-employed and having a business. A lot of people are self-employed, but they basically just own a job. I was like that forever. I had a scalable business, but the reality was that I had to do the work. I’ll tell you about where you should be trying to go if you’re a solopreneur and the plan you need. High-level tasks, like relationship building, might bring in hundreds of thousands in revenue, but as a solopreneur like me, I wasn’t doing them because I was caught up in urgent things that had to be done. That’s what keeps us where we are, so you need to transition out of it. There are some challenges, of course, but I explain how you can overcome them. My t

Today, I’m going to be telling you why you need to hire a virtual assistant. Getting one is something that most of us wait too long to do, including myself. Hiring a VA can change your life because it will allow you to do more of the things you need to be doing in your business. Hiring was an area where I had a huge mental block. Usually when I get an idea I execute it right away, but hiring had always been something that I couldn’t seem to do. I would just find reasons not to. There are some things that happened which trapped me in this mindset, so I’ll tell you what those hang-ups were. You have to think about a VA as less of an expense and more of a way to free up your time. A lot of entrepreneurs don’t think about the emotional benefits of a VA, but when I hired a VA as an executive assistant last November, it actually stopped me from being brought down sometimes. If there’s work that’s going to bring you down, you shouldn’t be doing it. You can have a VA do things that will move your business forward whi

I’m going to talk to you about where you focus and how you’re viewing things in today’s episode. Specifically, I’m talking about the 80/20 rule, otherwise known as the Pareto principle. It’s hard for me to tell you what to stop doing in your business, but I can give you rules and tell you things that are likely the most important for you to be doing. The cool part about the 80/20 rule is that it is fractal. This means that if 20% of your work accounts for 80% of the results, then 20% of that 20% accounts for 80% of that 80%. In other words, 4% of your work is going to count for 64% of your results. If you triple the amount of time that you spend on that 4% work, you can expect a big increase in revenue. I’ll let you know some of the 4% work that I’ve done in my own business and how this type of work can change over time. You should stop worrying about the people who aren’t on your email list, or the ones that don’t respond. When you put all of your focus on serving the 20% of your audience who really care, yo

Today’s topic is pretty darn important, and I hope the way I’m going to describe it will resonate with you because it took me forever to understand it. It’s about how you need to stop focusing on being so efficient and start focusing on being effective. It’s an important distinction, so join me as I explain what those words mean. When I finally got this concept, it helped me to demystify something that my coach had been talking about a lot. He says that if you want to make a bigger impact, do less. That never made sense to me, but it did when I finally understood the concept of being effective instead of efficient. Being efficient is just getting stuff done, but being effective is a measure of how much you’re moving the needle forward in your business. Most of us in the online space are doing a lot of stuff that has zero impact on our business. I’ll tell you the tough question that you need to ask yourself about your business and then give a clear social media example of not being effective. A lot of entrepre

In this show, I’m going to give you permission to stop doing some things. When I talk to some online entrepreneurs, they are often overwhelmed by all the things they feel like they have to be doing. Listen in as I go through the five things that you need to stop doing if you want your business to grow. After, you’ll be able to stop doing the things that don’t matter and start doing the things that do. Much of the overwhelm that entrepreneurs are facing is from this constant noise from gurus that talk about some new program or new tactic. These “ninja tactics” are not what you need to be focusing on, but I’ll tell you what you really need to turn your attention to. Another place you can reduce your overwhelm is in your need to make things perfect. I give you my own examples when I knew things were not perfect, but I also knew they just needed to get out there. There are quite a few downfalls to having a perfection mindset, and I’ll let you know what they are. The final point I mention relates to all the other

I don’t really know how to describe today’s episode. It’s like a Seinfeld episode, where it’s about one thing but it’s really about something else. The specific thing we’re talking about is why you shouldn’t feel like you need to buy a journal just because everybody else is doing it. Even if you do use a journal, you should still listen today because it goes much deeper than that. My wife had to tell me to stop buying journals and planners at one point because I had so many. There was a predictable routine whenever I bought planners, so I share this with you – it’s the reason why I don’t buy them anymore. Part of the reason I kept feeling the need to try new planners is because everybody in the online space is talking about how they plan their day. Quite honestly, you can be a successful seven-figure business owner without using a planner at all. You need to have plans, but there is no one-size-fits-all solution. There are some people that just aren’t wired to use a daily planner, and I think it’s even more p

This episode really hits home because we’re going to talk about how to pitch yourself to podcasts the right way (in other words, the Certified BADA$$ way). Even if you’re not interested in doing podcasts, the same principles will apply any time you’re pitching yourself. I got inspired to talk about this because the other day I received a few podcast pitches at the same time, and one of them was so laughably bad that I was amused by it. I’m going to share that email with you and talk about the many reasons why it won’t lead to being a guest on my podcast or any other one. This is just the beginning of the bad pitches I’ve gotten. There are a few key concepts that you need to be thinking about when pitching yourself. The first is something that I always preach, and after laying that framework I go into some more aspects that your approach to this should include. My team and I have a process we go through when we’re looking for a podcast I can appear on, and it’s longer than you might think. I bring you through

In one of my swift-kick-in-the-ass episodes, I’m addressing something that I see a lot in the online space. There are a lot of online entrepreneurs that get upset or annoyed when they face a problem. Today, I’m asking you to shift your mindset. Instead of being annoyed by problems, you need to embrace them. This can shift everything in your business. If there weren’t problems in the way of your business, there’s no way that you could even have a business. Somebody else would have already built your business if there were no challenges along the way. I’ll discuss the number one characteristic that successful business owners have – it’s not about having the best idea or being the most charismatic. Your customers are only customers because they’re facing a problem. For me, I need to embrace that my customers have problems, and it wouldn’t make sense if I embraced that but thought that I shouldn’t have any in my own business. We end up attracting people who are like us to our business, so embracing the concept th

This is one of my favorite topics. It’s something I’ve talked about a lot, and it sets me apart from most of the other entrepreneurs in the space. What I’m talking about is my “non-launch launch” method. It really drove my business forward last year, and I want to share it so you can see if it will work for your business too. One of my launches in January 2019 didn’t go as well as I’d hoped, so I brought up my problem at a mastermind and gained some input from my peers. They suggested I just send out a simple email instead of relaunching, and I did that over the following months to great success. I’ll share with you one of the ways some people inadvertently put a giant impediment in front of them and how you can avoid it. A non-launch launch is not right for everyone. Just one reason I mention in this episode is that you’ve got to have a warm audience already. If you don’t, who would you be sending your emails to? It’s important to be continually cultivating your audience. People act like I’m against launchin

What is hands down the number one tip I can give you for promotional emails and how to think about emails during a launch? Send another email. In this episode, I am going to be explaining the importance of understanding your audience and why you should always send that extra email. You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: https://bit.ly/30Peqb6 

Today I'm going to be sharing two of the best things you can use to find a more engaged audience: segmenting and scrubbing your list. While this may not seem like the most exciting task, it is something that will move your business into overdrive. So in this episode, I will be taking you through how to do it. You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: https://bit.ly/2sTdo1k

Too often, people look at unsubscribes as a bad thing. But I'm here to tell you that if you’re not getting people unsubscribing from your email, you’re most likely doing something wrong. Whether you’re not emailing them enough or you’re simply not marketing correctly, I will explain why you should be celebrating unsubscribes, not fearing them. You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: https://bit.ly/2TFe2dR

When I was trying to choose my first guest for the newly re-branded podcast, I couldn’t help but think of Tarzan Kay. A copywriter turned launch strategist, Tarzan helps people create awesome businesses. I have learned a lot from her over the years, and I know you will learn a ton from her today, as well. You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: https://bit.ly/2tZw7Zy 

What are the rules around emails when it comes to the legal side of things? In this Foundations Friday, I am going to be answering this question and more as I delve into the legal standards put in place regarding email marketing. You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: https://bit.ly/2tTq5cU