Posts Tagged → productivity

The Wealthification Process: I Wish I Knew This 10 Years Ago

Making money is the easy part for most entrepreneurs; it is the stage where work starts to consume your life and you suffer from burnout that is the hard part. If burnout doesn’t get you, the next hurdle is the abundance of external forces trying to derail your success.

The majority of the entrepreneurs that survive through the above–do it on a combination of dumb luck and brute force. A very select few can do it consistently and predictably, launching several businesses in rapid succession while still having a life, raising a family, and building saleable assets.

I am currently being coached one-on-one by one of the successful few; a process that costs thousands of dollars each month. You can do the same, and frankly if you have the money to spare … you absolutely should! Alternatively, you can invest $97 (a one-time payment) in the on-demand distillation of this knowledge in video format.

Wealthification is a 9-part course covering:

  • Assets
  • Structure
  • Strategy
  • Marketing
  • People
  • Systems
  • Action
  • Cash Flow
  • Application

This isn’t some bloated and complicated theoretical guide that is going to take you hours to study. The course is a succinct roadmap that reveals how to build a better business in video format.

Learn More (Free Video & PDF)

Use Video Email to Send Responses to FAQs

Video email doesn’t just build trust and rapport, it makes your message clearer and more memorable, as opposed to plain text communication. This is part of the reason why video is becoming a fundamental component of an online marketing strategy—and if you are sending emails via Outlook or GMail, you are marketing your business online!

In this post, I am going to go over how I use video email to send responses to the questions I get asked most frequently.

Firstly, I use the Logitech C910 webcam because it produces the best picture and sound.

I then fire up the jiveSYSTEMS video email software.

In my mind, I make a quick bullet point draft of what I want to say. I don’t use scripts - in my opinion they reduce the impact of the video. It takes months of training to read from a teleprompter naturally.  Plus, teleprompters are very expensive.  Video email doesn’t warrant that level of production quality either.  This is because speed is one of the advantages we have as small business owners over the large corporations………while they are waiting for their next board meeting, we can pump out informative and timely content.

Example Script Outline

Introduction

  • Joe, it was a pleasure talking to you today (via phone). I know it is always nice to put a face to the name, so here I am.

3-7 Prioritized Bullets

  • Salient points from call:
    • We have unlimited storage and bandwidth;
    • Team and enterprise capabilities;
    • Exit links for call-to-actions.

Call-To-Action

  • Click link to the right to learn more.

Next…

Once I have the outline organized in my mind, I memorize it—a process which takes just a few seconds once you have done it a few times. I use the outline as an anchor and then adlib around each marker.  The outline is merely there as a guide.  The most important part is the opening ‘hook’ that grabs their attention, and the call-to-action, which drives them where I want them to go.

Rinse & Repeat

For the questions I get asked most frequently, I rinse and repeat the above process to record and save video email responses into my jiveSYSTEMS video email account.

Moving forward, when I get asked one of my FAQs, I simply fire off one of my canned video email responses.  The response I receive in reply to the video email is always positive!

We Make It Easy

We make it easy for you to select a video template and dynamically display exit links for your call-to-actions.  I have put a screenshot of our video template below.  We have many stock templates in the system.  You can also create custom templates with your logo and website theme.

Shane MeLaugh: Outsourcing from SEO to Software Development

My good friend Shane MeLaugh has put together an excellent webinar about outsourcing. He is admittedly not an expert, rather an entrepreneur like me and you… who has been outsourcing large portions of his work and software development to 3rd parties (including overseas).

Don’t worry, he is not selling anything… this webinar is what I call “safe-content.” Don’t be a freeloader though… it’s just not polite or respectful. Shane is running a business, just like you and I. So, if you enjoy the video, “Like” this post on Facebook, or “Tweet” about it, using the button on the left-hand side, and make sure to check out Shane’s Blog in the “Learn More About Shane” section below.

Ultimately, Shane is leveraging the law of reciprocity, not crappy fear based marketing tactics like so many online marketers do. This is a process known as paying it forward and it’s how I believe all good marketers do business.

Enjoy the presentation:

Resources Mentioned:

Learn More About Shane:

Shane lives in Zurich, Switzerland. He and I became friends about 4 months ago. I found one of his blogs and really liked the content. I emailed him to connect, stating we were on similar paths and should mastermind together every couple of weeks. Since then, we have come to call each other friends. Shane was sharp, and recognized that I was methodical in the way I built our relationship. He asked me one day, so I wrote a post about it in my notebook, How To Build a Mastermind Network.

Dan Pink – The Surprising Science of Motivation

Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don’t: Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories — and maybe, a way forward.

“There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business doesn’t. Here’s what science knows. One, those 20th century awards, those motivators we think are the natural part of business, do work but only in surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two, those if-then rewards often destory creativity. Three, the secret to high performance isn’t rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive. The drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things because they matter. And here is the best part. Here is the best part. We already know this. The science confirms what we know in our hearts. So if we repair this mismatch between what science knows and what business does,. If we bring our motivation, notions of motivation into the 21st century. If we get past this lazy, dangerous idealogy of carrots and sticks, we can strengthen our businesses, we can solve a lot of those candle problems, and maybe, maybe, maybe, we can change the world. I rest my case.”

-Dan Pink: Author of a trio of provocative, bestselling books on the changing world of work.
Quote taken from “Dan Pink on the Surprising Science of Motivation”

Gamestorming: Free Ways to Generate 100 New Members

This post is a window into how we are leveraging visual thinking to generate and prioritize ideas. This exercise comes right out of the book “Gamestorming” by Dave Gray, the founder of XPLANE, from Page 69. The exercise is called “Post-Up”. The goal is to generate ideas silently by writing them on a sticky note, and then categorize them as a team.

Backstory

Since we started our first major paid marketing campaign, we thought it was fitting to make the topic of today’s Post-Up game “Free Ways to Generate 100 New Members,” a modest target for new members that will keep us focused on ideas that are quick and easy to execute. We decided not to make the goal time-bound because this is the first stage of brainstorming.

We’ve been in business for almost 3 years. Up until now, we have generated all of our members from referrals and a few JV webinars. We have kept our marketing activities to a minimum because we almost imploded after our first co-sponsored webinar about 2 years ago that generated over 300 new members 60 minutes. Since then, we have been building out our internal knowledge base and the infrastructure of the company to ensure we can handle surges of new customers when we switch on the spigot again. I can’t say that we have it all figured out yet, but we do have a solid piece of software and a training program that enables business owners to build trust into their sales process by leveraging video email, and when you have trust you have sales!

For those of you who do not know what we do here at jiveSYSTEMS, here is a snapshot:

We can teach you how to shorten your sales cycle and increase conversions by supplementing text-based emails and autoresponder sequences with video email messages. The jiveSYSTEMS video email software has a rapid-authoring workflow that allows you to record straight from a webcam or flip style camcorder, and also creates mini landing pages with customizable exit links to make the videos actionable. Plus, video emails sent through jiveSYSTEMS can be viewed on PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, and Android devices.

The Exercise

Step 1 – Sit in silence for 10 minutes and write our ideas down on a bunch of sticky notes.
Step 2 – Present our sticky notes to each other and stick them on the board.

Will Franco aka Flywheel posing for his mug shot

Step 3 – Organize the ideas into the categories.

Reed “Propellerhead” LaFerriere giving you the big cheese

Step 4 – Prioritize the ideas.

The final product in less than 30 minutes

Conclusion

Ideas can be generated, organized, and prioritized more efficiently and effectively by leveraging sticky notes, a big whiteboard, and creating a simple game around the process. The result greatly exceed that of a conversation alone. We identified 5 key areas that will have a positive impact on our goal of generating 100 new members. You will notice none involve selling or sales – we don’t believe in that approach. Our goal is to educate business owners about the value proposition of our service so they can make an informed decision, resulting in a low churn rate and a high level of member satisfaction.

P.S.

We use a special Ceramicsteel whiteboard that doesn’t ghost. You can learn more about our whiteboard in the post The Ultimate Whiteboard: Melamine, Porcelain, or Ceramicsteel?

How to Leverage Executive Summaries to Learn More in Less Time

Learning more in less time: all you have to do is decrease the noise and increase the signal.  You can improve the signal to noise ratio in many areas of your life.  This is done by setting up amplifiers and creating filters.

Filter provided by summaries:
Filter books before buying them – Executive summaries the perfect way to filter books before buying them.  They will save you time and money!

Amplifier provided by summaries:
Increase comprehension and retention – We learn in layers and an executive summaries help your mind prepare for each chapter and the entire book, and they also help crystallize the information when used for post chapter review.

Background

I am not a fast reader, but I still make the time and invest about 15 hours every week to further my understanding of business and marketing.Since I was about seventeen years old, I have averaged about two books per week. On a side note, my reading speed and comprehension has started to increase, now that I schedule time to improve it. I supplement the books I read for videos and DVDs, when possible and appropriate, to increase my comprehension and retention of the information.

Going to the library is time prohibitive and therefore cost prohibitive for me, due to the hourly rate I assign to my activities. I also tried using a runner to pick-up books for the local library, but quickly found that the new releases and many of the esoteric works I was after were not available or currently out of stock. Buying lots of books was my only option until I discovered how to leverage executive summaries.

Discovery

Here is what I discovered: executive summaries can be leveraged to improve the process. The end result, I can learn more in less time, and save alittle bit of money as well.

It takes me about twenty minutes to read an executive summary. This means I can read forty-five executive summaries in the time it takes me to read two books. I do not read forty-five summaries per week though, not even close. I use them as a filter, and then make the decision on whether to listen to the audio summary and/or buy the book.  This method of reading the summary as a successor to the blurb puts an additional filter between the blurb and the book. The blurb is still useful, but it becomes one of two decision making factors. I can choose to delve deeper into those books which seem interesting, even if they have totally rubbish blurbs; it happens! The executive summaries can also be leveraged on the backend as well, as the basis from which to build notes to improve comprehension and retention. After all, it’s not how fast you can read but how much you can retain and then apply.

Research

Not all executive summary services are created equal. I know this because I have tested several executive summary services. I compared them to each other and choose summaries of books I had already studied. While the framework of the summaries was constant, the quality of them was not.

  • Some services missed key points and concepts that I felt were key.
  • The amount of summaries in their library, type of summaries, and the number of new ones that are created each week is another area where the services could be differentiated easily.
  • The number of summaries in their library and number produced each month was also a major decision making factor after quality.
  • Another area that I used to differentiate the services was value added services (e.g. audio summary, eReader file, and more).
    • Most offered service’s like these, but the quality of the audio presentation both in presentation and fidelity varied, provider to provider; for some the audio summaries felt like a complete after thought.

After completing my research, I purchased a subscription to GetAbstract whose tagline is fittingly ‘compressed knowledge’. I also called and chatted w/ one of GetAbstract’s founders.  It may interest you to know that, one of the main reasons they started the company is to make business knowledge more accessible around the world aka for people who don’t speak English or America which ever you prefer.  This is a noble goal that reminds me of just how lucky those of us that live in America are.

In my opinion, GetAbstract is hands down the best quality executive summary service.  They produce 50 new summaries of the best business books each month, and have over 6000 summaries in their library.

We have since entered into an affiliate relationship with GetAbstract and are in the process of adding a banner to the jiveSYSTEMS Blog.  Currently, they are 1 of only 3 businesses we recommend.  Infusionsoft and Web Video University being the other 2.

Free Executive Summaries

You can acquire 2 complimentary executive summaries from GetAbstract by visiting their homepage.

I also negotiated to be able to offer you a three summary packet to help you quantify the value proposition of their service.

In addition, I handpicked 3 of their best summaries!  The summaries are entitled:

  • Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High;
  • Email Marketing by the Numbers;
  • and The Customer Rules.

You can download them here.

I hope this post contributes to you building a system that will help you learn more in less time. If you have a strategy for learning more in less time, please feel free to share it in the comment section below. Also, I will gladly answer any questions you may have about this post; if you have a question, you can leave it in the comment section below as well.