MDW – Million Dollar Weekend
We’re getting to the end of the Million Dollar Weekend blog posts. Today, we’re looking at Chapter 7: Email is for Profit: Use Email to Make a F*&King Ton of Money and Chapter 8: The Growth Machine: My Battle-Tested Growth Playbook
- Insights #1: Your Email List is Power. Email is the king and queen of communicating with customers because it allows you to own the distribution and the communication with your customers – and not be at the mercy of another platform’s fickle algorithm.
- Insight #2: The Number One regret of most entrepreneurs is, “I wish I started my email list sooner.” Email marketing need to be your (new) best friend.
- Insight #3: A healthy email list has a 20 percent open rate. Make that your target.
- Insight #4: How can you get your first subscribers? Your audience needs somewhere to go to actually join your email list. Simple way to do this? Build a landing page, which is a simple web page with an image, a few words, and a box where people can input their email address to get future updates. Your landing page needs to communicate a value proposition and provide a way to capture emails.
- Insight #5: Getting Your First 100 Email Subscribers.
- 0-10 subscribers: The Dream Ten – These are the people who know you and care about you.
- 11-50 subscribers: Lazy Marketing – Create a landing page and make sure to put your landing page address in your email signature and your biography on social media.
- 50-100 subscribers: Post in Your Places. Post in the places where you’re most active. Use targeted referrals to grow your list.
- Insight #6: Create Lead Magnets. Lead magnets things you create that get people interested in you and what you have to offer. Some examples include:
- A checklist that can be used to do something.
- A template to help determine an outcome.
- An advanced guide that provides further details of something you do.
- A unique book that provides substantial value but is offered for free.
- A video to help explain something.
- Insight #7: Three-step progression of emails to funnel people to have more experiences with you. Set up autoresponder – a tool that automatically sends out an email or sequence of emails to specific groups of people in response to specific behaviors) to send out the following:
- Welcome email.
- Connection email.
- Content email.
- Insight #8: A major thing to realize is one-by-one marketing. This is personally engaging with each new subscriber. EVERY SINGLE PERSON MATTERS, especially at the beginning!
- Insight #9: The Law of 100. Whatever you put yourself to, do it 100 times before you every think of stopping. Lean in and commit to 100 reps. (Think of this as doing reps and practicing as opposed to failing or succeeding). This changes your mindset and makes it much easier to sustain forward motion when things get tough. Set up a system that helps you get your 100 reps done without thinking about the results. Just focus in that first 100. For the first 100, it’s about your doing it, rather than anyone else liking it. Once you get to 100, you can then decide whether to continue it or give it up. Examples:
- If you want to start a YouTube channel, publish 100 videos.
- If you’re doing a newsletter, write 100 emails.
- If you’re starting a new hobby, practice for 100 days.
- If you’re creating a new business, directly pitch to 100 customers.
- Insight #10: Set a single hyper-focused goal. To start/grow your business, choose a goal. Be specific. One of the most common mistakes I see from entrepreneurs when they set goals is they say they want “more.” More revenue, more traffic, more downloads. But how much and by when?
- Insight #11: Create your Marketing Experiment List. Based on your goal, ask yourself, “if you could use only two marketing activities, what would they be? Make your best guess of what might work. Examples:
- Personal Network
- Referrals
- Sales to specific companies/groups
- Wholesale selling
- Marketplaces (like eBay).
- Giveaways
- Facebook Ads
- Google Advertising
- Other Social Media Ads
- Content Marketing
- Cold Outreach
- Target Market Blogs
- Influencer Marketing
- PR (Public Relations)
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Collaborations
Challenges
- Challenge #1: Build your landing page. Find a way to build a landing page for free. (Examples can be found here: https://unbounce.com/landing-page-examples/best-landing-page-examples/ and https://instapage.com/blog/landing-page-examples/)
- Challenge #2: Update email signature and social media biographies. Put your landing page address in your email signature and your social media bios.
- Challenge #3: Create a Lead Magnet. Use content from a post or create something new. Don’t spend more than two hours on your first iteration. Start small – you can always make it bigger in time.
- Challenge #4: Set up an autoresponder.
- Challenge #5: The Law of 100. Commit to doing 100 emails, posts, or whatever action will move you to your goals.
- Challenge #6: Who’s your Customer? Describe to me who your ideal customer is. The more specific, the better. Think about their age, gender, location, and anything else that makes them unique.
- Challenge #7: Where are your Customers? List at least five places your customers are and how many sales in thirty days you think you can get from them.
- Challenge #8: What marketing strategies can I double down on? Decided on the marketing strategies that produce sales and which strategies to kill.
- Challenge #9: Make your Customers Happy. Ask one customer: “What is one thing I can do today that will make you twice as happy with me/us?”
- Challenge #10: TLDR (Too Long, Didn’t Read) for Growth
- What is your one goal for this year?
- Who exactly is your customer and where can you find them?
- What is the one marketing activity you can double down on?
- How can you delight your first 100 customers?
- If you had to double your business with no money in thirty days, what would you do?
Bill’s Results/Insights
- Challenge #1: I haven’t set up a landing page; typically, I just send people to my “Dream Dean” web site. After reading and doing the challenges in Million Dollar Weekend, I may create a landing page for this work.
- Challenge #2: I have listed my website in to signature file. I have also linked my blog posting to Facebook and LinkedIn, I think…
- Challenge #3: I have Lead Magnet tools coming out of my behind! Actually, every tool I create could be a lead magnet. I did create a document (about 12 pages) that I’ve sent to several people to introduce them to purpose and meaning work, which has served as a lead magnet lately. I also created a new self-assessment, “Snapshot of My Life,” which could also serve as a lead magnet.
- Challenge #4: I haven’t set up an autoresponder because I still send out general emails to my email list and personalized emails to those who respond. I will start sending out personalized emails to potential collaborators interested in integrating purpose and meaning on their campuses.
- Challenge #5: I’m in the process of deciding how I want to proceed with Life Design Catalyst work, whether to continue blogging on a regular basis, start a YouTube channel, or both. It will be my project for June.
- Challenge #6: If it’s based on the participants in my trainings and workshops, my ideal customer is a female, between the ages of 25 and 55, has at least a Bachelor’s degree, works in some type of student success or student service position in higher education, has some type of life coaching practice, or both, and has a strong desire (and maybe even an obsession) to help their constituents (probably students) figure out what to do in life – with the hopes of acquiring additional tools and resources to help in this process.
- Challenge #7: Here are a few places where I plan to find my customers:
- First Year Experience Listserv
- Academic Coaching (NACADA) Listserv
- Advisor Professional Development (NACADA) Listserv
- Specific Institutions that have some type of “Purpose Center”
- Challenge #8: My main marketing strategy will be through personal emails.
- Challenge #9: One customer question: “Show me how can I access, then use, your materials.”
- Challenge #10: TLDR for Growth
- What is your one goal for this year? To contact at least one school a week to start a conversation about a potential collaboration to offer purpose and meaning resources to their students (focus on higher education).
- Who exactly is your customer and where can you find them? Will start with general emails to academic advisors (NACADA) and first-year experience people (FYE) to introduce myself and share my short purpose guide.
- What is the one marketing activity you can double down on? Email.
- How can you delight your first 100 customers? Providing them my purpose guide, which has a general overview of purpose and meaning The Catalyst Way, as well as six activities to help explore purpose and meaning for themselves and those they serve.
- If you had to double your business with no money in thirty days, what would you do? Increase my number of contacts from one per week to two or three a week.
- Insight: I’ve created an email list that includes the most recent participants who’ve attended Life Design Catalyst trainings and workshops, as well as individuals I’ve connected with through word-of-mouth. As of this writing, I have 250 people on my email list and 321 people that subscribe to my blog.
Joanne’s Results/Insights
- Wow! The power of the ask now turned into the power of the email! This chapter alone convinced me to start a newsletter and build an email list.
- Ironically he talks about how you can build your subscribers by giving away a small piece of free content. Gosh, how many times have I personally been willing to give my email to download an article or matrix.
- I have started to create my free freebie called “The first three things to do before picking your what’s next.” I will use this as my future hook for subscribers. I learned about an auto-emailer which I never heard of before but no arguments to have a computer send an email right after folks subscribe so I hook them at the right moment. In my email ask my readers what they want to learn so that I can know what my audience wants.
- Maybe he read my mind but he told me I couldn’t quit before doing something 100 times. So no rest for the weary. I might be tired but I’ll be successful!
- So the best question out of all he offers is this: “If you HAD to double your business with no money in thirty days, what would you do?” I would offer a free 30min workshop to 40 schools with the suggestion of a discounted follow up workshop. I’d start increasing my YouTube interviews to 5 a month and get folks to subscribe to my newsletter. Look…I’m talking about a newsletter too!
- If I work backwards from my goal I know I will have a clear focus.