If you've been keeping up with the last few blog posts, you’ve had the opportunity to make some incredible progress.
You not only identified your #1 goal, but you also dug deep to find out WHY you want it.
And then a couple weeks ago, I shared with you 3 critical mistakes I see people make.
If you joined my list after that, take some time to read those posts. I'll wait 🙂
To recap:
Mistake #1: Not buying the tools that will get you there faster.
Mistake #2: Not making time to do things that don’t have an instant payoff.
Mistake #3: Thinking people will find you through Google.
I started by business in January of 2015 and I made all of those mistakes. I’ve also shared with you how much money I’ve made along the way in these blog post posts:
- https://shannonmattern.com/how-much-money-ive-made-in-the-past-6-months/
- http://ambitionally.com/generate-more-leads/email-list-building/
I focused the month of January 2016 doing what I’m about to share with you, and in February I had my first $5,000 month. Read on to find out how.
So here’s the thing: most people think of their website as just a design. Make it look pretty, make it reflect the brand and it will resonate with and attract the right customers who will buy from you.
They don’t realize that their website as a goldmine of information about who is visiting their site, what they were interested in and where they came from so they can find more people just like them (I show you how to find that out in my Google Analytics course, btw.)
They don’t think of their website as the hub that recycles and give new life to all the content they are creating for social media so they can spend less time creating content and get more mileage out of what they do create.
They don’t think of their website as the means to build their email list so they can build a relationship with people who have expressed interested in what they have to offer. They don’t realize that it is via email where selling takes place, not on their website, because a sale only happens after trust is built.
I’ve said it a million times during the 5 Day Website Challenge and I’ll say it again here: The #1 goal of your website is to build your email list. And you can do that better, faster by getting people to your website, finding out exactly who they are and what they are most interested in, and going out and finding more of them.
But how??
By consistently creating and distributing new content in the right places.
If you’re anything like me, it takes you much more time than 15 minutes to write a blog post. In fact, I’ve spent a couple of days writing this email series! But I’ve discovered a formula that when combined with a couple of amazing tools will help you to create a consistent stream of actionable, share-worthy content for your website that over time will send more and more traffic to your site.
Did you catch that “over time” part? As in, you may not see results from this piece of content today, but imagine that it doesn’t fade into the abyss of the social media timeline or disappear after a few minutes or 24 hours.
Because when you follow the steps I’m about to outline for you, you’ll have a wealth of content working hard for you all over the interwebs – and you'll see how this strategy helped me get to my first $5K month and how it helped me weather some storms that came up after that.
Step #1 – Brainstorm topics
1) Grab a piece of paper or open up your Evernote and write down 5-10 topics you can create content around, and then outline bullet points for each subject:
- How to avoid these five (your industry) mistakes that will (negative consequence)
- Mistake #1 and how to avoid it
- Mistake #2 and how to avoid it
- etc.
- 6 costly/dangerous/etc. misconceptions about (your industry).
- Misconception #1 and why it’s costly
- Misconception #2 and why it’s costly
- etc.
- 7 consequences of (making the wrong choice, waiting to act, etc.)
- Decision #1 and consequences
- Decision #2 and consequences
- etc.
2) Pick up One Woman Shop’s Kickstart Your Content course and MAKE TIME FOR IT. Yep, I'm totally an affiliate.
Step #2 – Get over your fear of being on camera
One of my virtual friends and clients, Chocolate Johnny, says push the “Start Broadcast” or “Record” button. Someone will watch you. Someone will listen. We all have a story – go and tell it!” And he’s SO RIGHT.
I used to be SO NERVOUS to make videos! Talk about trying to make sure everything was perfect and polished, and the number of re-takes I did… what a waste of time! I was trying to be someone I wasn’t. I’m not Chalene Johnson with a hundred years of on-camera experience!
I’m Shannon Mattern, who knows what she’s talking about when it comes to WordPress and online business, who gets nervous being on camera and speaking “in public”, but who knows that video is that fastest way to not only build the know, like and trust factor needed to generate sales, but is the fastest way to create content that I’ll get tons of value out of over time.
And since I work full time outside of WP+BFF I need to be creative and strategic about how to grow, and I just have to get over not liking how my voice sounds or how my mouth moves when I talk, or how I make a clicking sound or say “Okay! So…” before every sentence.
Because guess what? That’s what I look like and do in real life when I’m talking to my husband, or my best friend, or my co-workers, and they all like me and I’ve never given how I look or sound when I talk to them a second thought!
So if you’re weirded out about video, just push through it! You are who you are, and we love you just the way you are.
And do yourself a favor and follow @vickifitch on Periscope. Not only will you quickly see her formula for starting her broadcast, she shares some amazing, actionable tips for growing your business.
Step #3 – Dip your toe into Facebook Live or Periscope
I’m not the first person nor will I be the last to tell you to start live broadcasting. Video is the quickest way to build the know, like and trust factor needed to get people to connect with you online.
I talked myself out of the need to be on Periscope after it started growing in popularity last year – just one more thing to add to the never ending list of places to be, right? Wrong!!
After listening to one of Chalene Johnson’s podcasts on Periscope (if you’re not pumping “Build Your Tribe” into those earbuds every week you are missing out) I discovered how far just 10 minutes a day of Periscoping can go.
Being on live video totally gives me anxiety, but it gets easier with every broadcast, I promise!
Two key things to make sure you’re doing on Periscope even if you’re not broadcasting yet:
One, create a profile with a picture of YOU and make sure you have a link back to your website in it – because it’s clickable in Periscope. So as you follow people and they follow you back, they’ll see your smiling face and hopefully click on that link.
Two, in the Settings, make sure you have “Autosave Broadcasts” turned on.
I don't have any Facebook live tips to share yet because I’m going to start testing out it out this month and see which one I like better… but no matter which platform you choose, when you start broadcasting, here’s how to squeeze every last drop of content juice out of your broadcasts:
Step #4 – Turn your Live Broadcasts into Blog Posts
The first thing I do, recommended by Chalene, is to have my broadcasts transcribed into blog posts. Right now I’ve got my little sister doing this for me – I need the help and she needs some extra cash, it’s a win-win! She tells me it takes her about an hour per broadcast, and mine are less than 15 minutes long. The key here if you’re super strapped for time like me it to HAVE SOMEONE ELSE DO THIS FOR YOU. It’s worth it. Remember, we are talking about content value over time here!
Once my broadcast is finished, I go into my Camera Roll on my iPhone and I save the recording to a Dropbox folder that I share with my sister. I also created a shared notebook in Evernote where she can transcribe the scope.
So she transcribes my Periscope into a blog post, and I usually go into each post after they are done and flesh them out a little bit and clean up all the parts where I rambled or jumped around, and then I publish them.
Then she creates a featured image for my blog and a Pinterest pin in Canva. I've already created 3 or 4 templates that she can re-use so my brand stays consistent (I show you how to to this in my Canva Master Class, btw).
Then she comes up 2 or 3 tweets and Facebook posts from that post and pops them into my MeetEdgar content library with links back to my post. Edgar also grabs all my new blog posts via RSS, but this way I get different compelling tweets linking back to the same content.
And if you use MailChimp's RSS feature to automatically send out new blog posts to your email list, you're getting even more mileage out of that content (I show you how to do that in my MailChimp Master Class, btw.)
So with that 15 minutes of content, I’m covered on my website, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest and my email list. But wait, there’s more!
Upload Periscope Replays to YouTube and Publish Them on Your Website
Another thing I’ve been doing with my Periscopes is uploading the video to YouTube, embedding it on my website using the Periscope title as my blog post title and my hashtags as post categories. Then I post these to Twitter and Facebook. That way I get around Periscope’s “rule” of only saving a video for replay for 24 hours.
Sounds like a lot of work though, right? Nope!! It happens automatically with a plugin called WPScope (yep, I'm totally an affiliate).
Now I’m going to warn you ahead of time, the sales page for this tool is the most sales-y, pushy sales page I’ve seen in a long time, so much so that it almost turned my off from buying it. But it totally works as advertised.
The setup is a little intense because you have to connect it to your Google account, Twitter and Facebook, but they have some great video tutorials right in the plugin.
The only hiccup I encountered was that I had to make an adjustment in my web hosting to have something called IonCube enabled – the plugin gave me an error and since I’m a total nerd I was able to go into Bluehost and enable this myself, but you can totally put a support ticket in with your provider and ask them to enable IonCube.
Now I’m getting more videos on my YouTube Channel so I’m getting in front of more people on YouTube, and I’m creating even more content for my blog that Edgar will push out to Facebook and Twitter.
With Facebook Live, you’d likely have to manually upload those videos to YouTube and manually add them to your website, but still worth doing!!
How these strategies helped me to have my first $5K Month
With all of these strategies in place, I spent the month of January working diligently through the 30 Day List Building Challenge again, and doing a live broadcast almost every single day that was then turned into a blog post and pushed out to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest.
My list grew by 300 subscribers – from 1700 to 2000- that’s 15%! That’s more growth in one month than I had seen in any other month since I started WP+BFF.
So by the end of January, not only did I have 2,000 people interested in DIYing their WordPress site on my email list, I had also spent the winter months developing some online courses – my MailChimp Master Class and my Creating Images with Canva Master Class, plus I still have the BFF Academy and my WP+BFF Done For You website design service.
Everything was coming together… my list-building efforts got people to sign up for the Free 5 Day Website Challenge, which had been teaching and training people 300 new people the basics of WordPress, positioning them to be ready for the more in-depth training I had to offer. Plus I had completed enough Done For You websites that I was starting to get referrals and having consultation phone calls.
Here’s what happened in February:
