The Business Lounge Podcast with Kimberly Ann Jimenez
Welcome to The Business Lounge Podcast! Each week we'll share proven marketing strategies to help you build an audience of buyers, create impactful content, and grow a profitable business without compromising on your values with your host, Kimberly Ann Jimenez!
Kimberly is an Online Marketing Strategist, Educator, Founder and Thought Leader in the online marketing industry.
Having worked with 33K+ small business owners & entrepreneurs across an array of industries over the past decade, Kimberly and her business partner Chris Harris are obsessed with helping you level up your marketing game, and grow your bottom line.
They co-lead their flagship program, The Business Lounge, which teaches business owners & entrepreneurs like you how to navigate the confusing & often overwhelming world of online marketing and build an unapologetically profitable business on your own terms (and without compromising your faith, your family or your freedom).
Join us at kimberlyannjimenez.com/businesslounge!
The Business Lounge Podcast with Kimberly Ann Jimenez
S6 EP31: 10 Step Breakthrough Guide: Thrive In Your Business Without Breaking The Bank!
Struggling to grow your business? This episode is your roadmap to success. Discover the proven 10-step roadmap to transform your business from stagnant to thriving. From bootstrapping to breaking through revenue barriers, this episode is packed with actionable advice and real-world examples. Don't miss out on this golden opportunity to supercharge your business growth!
Resources Mentioned:
🔗 10-Step Blueprint to Grow Your Business
🎧 How To Use Google Trends for Marketing Research
FREE RESOURCES
📅 Download The FREE Content Calendar Template:
http://thecontentcalendartemplate.com/
📔 Download The FREE Success Path: https://kimberlyannjimenez.com/success-path/
📈 Sign Up for our FREE Profitable Content Class: http://profitabilityclass.com
📽️ Watch our FREE Content Creation Class: https://kimberlyannjimenez.com/content-class/
WORK WITH US:
✨ Join The Business Lounge Waitlist: https://kimberlyannjimenez.com/businesslounge/
➡️ The Content To Customers Workshop REPLAY: http://ContentToCustomers.Co
💻 Sales Funnels Bootcamp Replay: https://kimberlyannjimenez.com/funnels-bootcamp-p/
📌 Work With Kim & Chris 1:1: https://kimberlyannjimenez.com/tblc-waitlist/
✨ Grab The Content Calendar Playbook: https://kimberlyannjimenez.com/content-calendar-playbook/
✨ The Prosper Plan: https://kimberlyannjimenez.com/the-prosper-plan/
Hit us up on Instagram and tell us your biggest takeaway from the show!
✅ Kim: @kimannjimenez
✅ Chris: @heycmh
✅ The Business Lounge: @thebusinessloungeco
Go to ContentToCustomers.co & enter code 'Blueprint' for $90 off your 3-day workshop seat!
Welcome back to the Business Lounge podcast. This is something that people come to us all the time. A challenge they come to us with is stuck in information overload, and I think they're trying to do a lot of things and they don't necessarily have an order of what they should be doing. Now, that's the benefit of having a program like the Business Lounge membership, because we actually have a success path that you can follow. But what I want to give you today is a 10-step blueprint that I would follow. If I were to say okay, chris, right now you're going to go and you're going to start a brand new company from scratch. You don't have any funding to apply to it, so you can't just start throwing money towards ads. You're literally starting from ground zero. Go, what would you do? And so what I've done is I've given you a 10-step outline.
Speaker 2:Whether you're starting from scratch right now or maybe you've been doing some things, this is what I would do and this is what I'd recommend you do, and this is what we do and would do going forward in the future. Welcome to the Business Lounge Podcast, where each week, we unpack the hottest online marketing and business strategies so you can grow your business, increase your bottom line and make a bigger impact. And now here's your host, Kimberly Ann Jimenez.
Speaker 1:What is up guys? My name is Chris and I'm going to give you. This is something that people come to us all the time. A challenge they come to us with is they're kind of, I would say, stuck in information overload, and I think they're trying to do a lot of things and they don't necessarily have an order of what they should be doing. Now. That's the benefit of having a program like the Business Lounge Membership, because we actually have a success path that you can follow, but follow.
Speaker 1:But what I want to give you today is a 10-step blueprint that I would follow if I were to say okay, chris, right now you're going to go and you're going to start a brand new company from scratch. You don't have any funding to apply to it, so you can't just, you know, start throwing money towards ads. You're literally starting from ground zero. Go, what would you do? And so what I've done is I've given you a 10-step outline, whether you're starting from scratch right now or maybe you've been doing some things and maybe it's time to go back. It's time to go back to, maybe, some basics that you've skipped. I often say this but you can't skip the steps, but you can do them faster, you can do them more efficiently. And that's really the essence of like. Every time we've started something new, a new endeavor, a new type of an offer, we go through this exact same process over and over and over again. And so once you have this blueprint and I actually will include this in the show notes below, so you have these steps you can actually copy these over. This is what I would do and this is what I'd recommend you do, and this is what we do and would do going forward in the future.
Speaker 1:So step number one let's go ahead and jump into it is research is your best friend. Step one is research is your best friend. And what do I mean by that? Let's say you walk into the kitchen and you're like, hey, I'm going to make a new thing that I've never made before, and I'm going to pull out all the things that I think I need and I'm just going to start doing stuff. What are the odds that you would nail it the first time? Maybe you have a lot of experience in the kitchen, so you would have an idea.
Speaker 1:But let's assume this is something brand new and you don't even know the ingredients that go into making this thing. Wouldn't you be like, hey, I wanna research this first, like sure, I could figure it out over time, but it's gonna take a lot longer and I'm gonna make more of a mess and I'm probably not gonna get it right the first time. It's not gonna taste like it should. It's not gonna be the desired outcome that I'm. Why do we assume right, think, don't need to go to school, I'm just going to grab the books and read them at home myself, and sure. But there's reasons. There's method to the madness, right, it's learning what you need to learn. You're not going to give college-level curriculum to a first grader. It doesn't make sense. They're not ready for that. And yet this is what we do. We've taken everything through a fire hose. We're not ready for that.
Speaker 1:So the first thing is is we want to research, and what are we going to research? I just did a couple YouTube videos on this, actually, if you want to check those out on researching your industry, researching your market, using tools like Google Trends, using tools like Ubersuggest, using tools like Google Gemini. We want to know what are people asking about the thing that we're trying to sell. What are people, what are they looking for? If I sell, if I'm aiming to sell some kind of a more natural dog food product. Let's say I want to know what are the questions people have around that Are people asking that?
Speaker 1:And the benefit to today is we have so many tools that are at our, that are free at our disposal, that we just don't use. And it's like can you imagine a marketer in the eighties, the seventies, the sixties, pre-internet, uh, even in the nineties, like they wouldn't have had? It was all guesswork, and so I think sometimes that we don't necessarily see the opportunity. That is a little bit of research, and again, I would encourage you to watch those videos that I just created on our YouTube channel, because I literally show exactly how to do that. You're going to find exactly the questions people are asking, the search terms that they're looking for, and what we can do is is we will know and this happens all the time we'll put up content. People are like like how are you in my brain? And it's like, because we researched it, so you're gonna be able to get way ahead of your market when they're chasing maybe some algorithm opportunities on Instagram or other social media outlets and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:What we wanna do is we wanna research first and then take that to the market so we're not guessing like we're swinging out a pinata. We actually know what people are looking for and then we meet the market with what they're asking. Good marketing is about answering questions, or providing answers to people for the questions that they have to make them feel like they are understood. Once they feel understood, then they come to your website, then they understand you. But we can't make people understand us before they feel understood. Really, really important marketing psychology note there. So that's step number one.
Speaker 1:Step number two success leaves clues, and there's gonna be a part A, part B on this one. Success leaves clues. Invest in your education. That's the item B for that one. So what we wanna do and we talk about this all the time is we're gonna research. In our research, what are we gonna find? We're gonna find some brands. We're gonna see some other people that are doing this well, and we wanna make sure that we're following the clues that have been left. So in that research process you want three to five what we call brand models, right, and those are people in your space. Or you could have two that are maybe not in your space. Let's say you have three people that are in your.
Speaker 1:Going back to our dog food example, three people that sell dog food like big brands in between brands, small startup brands. Be diverse with it and see what they do. Are they present on certain platforms? Are they doing a lot of blogging? Do they put up a lot of YouTube videos? Do they have a big channel? What's the type of content they're putting out? Oh, okay, cool, this video did really well. Or when they posted about this on Instagram, look how much engagement they got right. Where are they spending their time and effort? Because more than likely, it's for a reason and they've spent the time, money and effort to figure that out that now you don't have to do. You can cut that time into a fraction of what they spent, because they've already done that hard, arduous work for you.
Speaker 1:So we often talk about this and shout out to one of my mentors. Ryan Levesque said you want to find a river of opportunity and said you want to find a river of opportunity. And what we're doing here with research and brand models is we're finding that river of opportunity so that we're not out in the desert trying to find water when the reality is we're probably gonna have to search for a long time to find a drop right? So part two to that is invest in your education, right? So we want to make sure that, as we're doing this research and we're, you know, we're following our brand models, that we're investing in education in some way, shape or form right, meaning courses, memberships you want to make sure that, while you're doing this in tandem, you want to have somebody under a guided eye that knows how to take all this data and help you put it into an action plan, and so that's why I put it as a, as kind of like a subcategory here for step one. Step two is someone. It doesn't have to be us, right? It could be anybody that has done this a lot and say, okay, this is what they said, this is what it means, these are what these people are doing. Here's how we can find the new opportunity. So it's getting the ingredients out on the table, going back to our metaphor and then figuring out okay, cool, here's the pro tips on how to take these ingredients and make this the best possible avenue or the best possible recipe that you could make it Really, really important.
Speaker 1:A lot of people think they have to get to a certain point before they invest in education. We want to do that early. In fact, kim and I both invested in education. I probably personally spent $150,000 plus on my marketing education before I had recouped a single dollar on marketing. It's just real. Before I had recouped a single dollar on marketing, it's just real it was me getting an MBA and hopefully en route to a PhD quote unquote in marketing, so that I knew what the heck I was doing and I was learning along the way. But and I'm not saying you have to spend that kind of money, I'm just telling you what we did but really important, that you're doing this in tandem, right, it's gonna help you cut down the process sizably. They, right, it's going to help you cut down the process sizably. They're going to help you sharpen the ax much faster, to give you another metaphor there.
Speaker 1:Okay, so step one research is your best friend. Step two is success leaves clues. Invest in your education. Boom. Good to go on that. Step three create content buckets based on your research. So, as you're doing this research, you're going to start to notice a little bit of trends.
Speaker 1:People really talk about X, y or Z, right? So an example would be people talk about the symptoms that their pets experience, and that's why they're seeking food. People talk about longevity and how to get their pet to live longer, and that's a big concern. They're asking a lot of questions about that, and then thus I lead them to my solution, which helps resolve symptomatic things that they're experiencing and helps them live longer. They're looking for other reasons. Right, there may be healthy, holistic people themselves, and so they don't want to feed their animal processed food. So there's like a type of person we're going to help find an ICA. So you're going to create these content buckets.
Speaker 1:We have three, so ours are content creation, productivity and business related matters. So, like a once, like what we're doing right now, right, the 10 steps to get your business off the ground running and or out of being stuck. Right, that would be a content bucket for us. Content creation would be like content calendar template, content calendar system. So we have various offers that we meet people, but it ultimately leads them to what we do, which is marketing strategists. We help you with your marketing, but we have various offers that we meet people, but it ultimately leads them to what we do, which is marketing strategists. We help you with your marketing, but we have different ways that we lead people to that. So, as we're creating these buckets, what we're going to find is that we have three different buckets, maybe four. I wouldn't make it more than like probably three to five.
Speaker 1:If you've got ten marketing buckets, that doesn't make a lot of sense, but you'll start to see these subgen that pop up and we want to start creating ideas and you could do this on like a google doc or you could do this on a trello board where you create your buckets and then you start creating and putting these ideas in there as you're doing your research, so that you know the things you should talk about, so that you don't get off kilter and out of your programming and start talking about random things on the internet that don't really relate or tie into your product or relate to your ideal client avatar, which is we always want to stay on message, even if you feel like you're repeating yourself. Trust me, there's a guy that I follow his name's I can't say his last name, dr james de nachi, olio or something like it. Just put dr james, you'll probably find him, because he has millions of followers and you will see how often he repeats the same message and literally his content that he puts out is just text. There's very little video whatsoever. It looks like he typed it on his iPhone and just posted it and it gets an insane amount of engagement. The reason is because he created content buckets based off of research and based off what people are asking, and it's just meeting people where they're at and giving them answers, not just more information. It's meaningful to the people that matter to him and that is the essence of good content marketing, right?
Speaker 1:So we're going to create those content buckets. That's going to keep us on message, and then we're going to make sure that we include some different topics in our content bucket. So, as we're building that out, it's like, oh, we need to mix this up a little bit. We're talking a lot about productivity. Let mix this up a little bit. We're talking a lot about productivity. Let's talk about content creation and content overwhelm and content consistency problems, right? So you just want to make sure that you're hitting every aspect of what they care about, and content books are going to help you do that, right? So we're. Now we're talking about taking what we've researched, what we've seen, and making it actionable and how we're going to present our content to the world and get visibility for our brand right. So that's step three.
Speaker 1:Step four is we're going to start with a basic iteration of our idea, right, based on our research and based on our content buckets. We're ready to start posting things. We're ready to start creating content for the internet. What's a basic iteration of your idea. A lot of times, we have people come to us and they have three different business ideas and they want to sell this and they want to sell that and they want to you know, offer coaching and they want to sell online courses and they also want to be this, and they also want to sell books and planners and this and that. It's like no, no, no, no, no, you are a team of one. You're going to burn yourself out. Let's focus on, based on that research, what's the one thing that we can sell right now? That is going to be our most seamless path to success, even if that is a basic iteration of what you do. So maybe you want to sell courses, but the current situation calls for you to be more of a service provider, in that you're doing social media management for somebody for the time being right. Or you're offering consultations, coaching, right, whatever that looks like, or you sell one thing Perfect example, right, and you might think well, that sounds so simplistic.
Speaker 1:Why would anybody ever sign up for something like that? Two brands I want to bring to your attention Big brands Amazon. What was Amazon known for? For those that are a little bit older in the room here Books, that's it. There wasn't everything under the sun like Amazon is now where it's delivered to your door in an hour. Kim ordered something yesterday and literally was here within like two hours. It blew my mind. It was crazy how fast he got here.
Speaker 1:That wasn't the business model to start, and a lot of people break their backs trying to be the business they wanna be, not just being the business they can be right now, really, really important. Amazon started with just books. It was something that they found was a low-hanging fruit opportunity based on, my guess, a lot of research that they knew they could do extraordinarily well. That met the market with a huge demand. Perfect, just do that. Then you can expand your offering and hopefully you can seamlessly integrate it, meaning you can start adding the things you envision your brand being long-term. But start with a basic iteration.
Speaker 1:Next, another physical product example, and I can give you others that are not physical products but Bulletproof. You probably immediately think coffee if you've heard of the brand Bulletproof. Dave Asprey started that as a coffee brand. He had dreams and aspirations of selling supplements and all these other things, but knew that every human or you know, coffee is the number one consumed beverage on planet earth, literally, and so he knew there was a huge opportunity if he could differentiate his coffee based on research, what people cared about. There was a subset of people that wanted tested for mold and mycotoxins and you know, chemicals and what have you in their coffee that wanted a higher grade coffee, and so he found that that ICA cared deeply about that and just said I'm going to focus on coffee right now. Then he released MCT oil and the MCT oil went into your coffee so that what your coffee, your caffeine, actually burned at a slower tick, so that it lasted longer. Right. Then they started to expand into other products that their ICA cared about.
Speaker 1:Your business should look very much the same. So what's the thing and we've done this, by the way, you'd be shocked how you can scale to a multi-million dollar business off the back of one offer. It doesn't have to be many things. It can be one thing that's really dialed in, that's based on research, that meets your core ICA, with something they care about, and then you can expand your offering to other things they care about. But your North node is always your people. It's not chasing engagement, it's not chasing new opportunity, it's your people, your people, your people. What does your audience want, what do they care about and what do you have the bandwidth to deliver to them?
Speaker 1:For this current season, when you're still a solopreneur, so that you don't burn yourself out, the key is to get to subsidizing your income and being full-time in your business. I see people staying stuck in no man's land for so long they're working on their business on the side and doing a job nine to five for seven years. You will burn out. So we need to get to replacing our income, or at least getting to the point of reaching a first milestone in our business, that first breakthrough, as quickly as possible, and that's going to be built on the back of a very refined, very basic iteration offer based on the research that we've talked about. To this point, with the help of some coaching like a course or membership, I would say at this point you're almost guaranteed to succeed. It's just a matter of to what degree and at what speed you succeed. Just with what we've covered so far, firmly believe that Okay next, now that we have the idea, we've got our content buckets, we've got our research, we're going through some kind of a program or training Doesn't have to be us, but just somebody.
Speaker 1:I say hiring a coach or going through a program. It's like dating. You just need to find the right person that jives with you. That's it. Just find the right person that understands value alignment with you. You resonate with them. The way they teach. You can really grasp it easily. It makes sense to you. You'll know when you find it. It's like walking into a home that you're like oh my God, this is my house.
Speaker 2:You just know.
Speaker 1:Meeting your person, you just know. That's why I equate it to dating. Okay, step five, and this could technically be step four, but I always say let's get a basic iteration of your idea and start working on that initial offer first. I would probably do that first. Then we're gonna start creating searchable content. Why, why, why, why, why searchable content? We always talk about this all the time. We're probably tired of hearing us talk about it, but everything that we've done in business, everything that we've done successfully in business, was built on the back of a foundation and searchable content. Searchable content is like your salesperson that doesn't sleep and it's like the person that's working without pay and just constantly brings in new eyeballs to what you're doing. Case in point give you an example we have and I've talked about this before our Trello videos on our YouTube channel. You should go check them out. Some of them have almost a million views, could drive probably a $50,000 to $100,000 business or more, just off those Trello videos. Not the full conglomerate of all of our YouTube videos, just the Trello videos could drive a $50,000 to $100,000 business, and most of those videos are years and years old. Some of them are dating back 10 years. Based on research. We have dominated that specific search term. I call Kim the Trello Queen I don't know if she likes it or not, but I do. But those pieces of content, we use them to introduce them to what I talk about before.
Speaker 1:Productivity is one of our content buckets, so we have offers, productivity offers. Maybe that's where you start. Maybe you're finding your market needs a lot of productivity help, so you focus on that and you're putting out a lot of productivity related resources that are all search heavy because your time is limited right now. And when you put up something on social media although I love social media and it is a fantastic nurture tool it lives for what? Maybe 24 hours, and then you got to create new content. And and then you've got to create new content and then you're spending six hours to create the most fancy reel, trying to keep up with the influencers. Then you're back on it again the next day and then guess what happens? You're trying to do all these things. You don't have clarity on who your ICA is. You don't have clarity on what your offer is. You're letting the market kind of hopefully allow you to land at what you need to sell, or hopefully it will lead to your offer somehow because you're being creative and you're getting engagement and likes and blah, blah, blah. And then you find yourself that doesn't work and you're like I don't know what's going on, maybe I'm just not being consistent enough. And then you burn yourself out and then you start following some of these Instagram people. But the core of the problem is this it wasn't built on solid research first, like we talked about, and secondarily, effort. Those are scarce resources. Let's focus on the non-scarce resources. Searchable content if it's optimized well again, this comes back to investing in education will last for years and years and years and years. It's like putting a billboard out on the highway and not having to pay for it and getting every single day people finding that and reading that and seeing that and giving awareness to your brand. Not that you have to go out there every morning and put a new billboard up Really important. So between our blogs and our YouTube channel, we could literally, without ads or without anything else, we could literally just comfortably run a very healthy lifestyle business. That's been the case in every single business.
Speaker 1:My first business was a moving business. If you don't know my story, I'll go and give you a little quick synopsis of it. Starting a moving business was like man, I just need my. I just need to get some visibility. I don't have enough traffic. Traffic is like people coming into your storefront. If you don't have people coming into your store, how many sales do you think you're going to make? Probably not a lot. Maybe you occasionally make a sale on your DM, right, but you really need people to come into your store, and so, with us finding opportunities for people to come into our store, into our website, is the digital equivalence right? I knew I needed to do that in the moving business, right? This is the first business I just created. Every answer, every possible question you could ever have about moving businesses and moving companies and saving money on your move or you know, boxes. You should choose things you should be doing to prepare for your moving day, what to do if you've, whatever you name it.
Speaker 1:I just literally wrote a blog for every single category that I could find, based on my research. Well, guess what Google really liked that I was doing that and they gave me the number one position locally in that geographic area, surpassing companies like Two Men and a Truck within a matter of four months, six months in now keep in mind, this is a startup right. So from that point forward, when I started blogging, that was December of 2011. No, 2012. I'm sorry, december 2012. By March of 2013, I got a $58,000 contract opportunity to work with a furniture manufacturer on an install job. That came directly from those efforts. Now I'm not guaranteeing within four to five months you're going to get a $60,000 opportunity, but that superseded every last dollar we made in a whole previous year and they found our website through those traffic efforts that we did from the searchable content.
Speaker 1:Crazy, because people that are searching for things it's intent-based traffic that's a lot more qualified than people that are just scrolling looking at funny videos on reels and then happen to see that you have something about business coaching or social media marketing. I'm not saying that can't work, but we want to attack the intent-based search traffic first, because those are motivated people and that content lives forever and it gets better over time. That's super important. Then what we're going to do is this Once we have that searchable content, we're going to say cool, we have our content buckets. It's research. We're following brand models for new inspo. We have a basic iteration of our offer, so we know where we're leading people.
Speaker 1:Now let's take the searchable content and we're going to start clipping things from our blog that we can just put on Instagram, little snippets of what we said, a quote from the blog. Maybe you do YouTube, so you're going to clip little. You could clip 10 little clips from your one video and run that on your Instagram reels. Now is it the most ideal? No, you'll have people say it needs to be native to that platform, probably, but eventually, for right now, it needs to be meaningful and if it's shot with an iPhone, I don't care, get it out. It's better to have it done than have nothing done and feel bad because it isn't perfect. So eventually you'll be able to create native content. When you've hired a team, you've hired your tools, you have the resources at your disposal to be able to focus on just creating some native content.
Speaker 1:But you'll be shocked how little native content we create right now for social media. Most of it is pulled from our long-form content. We spend most of our time, meaning our core team on the searchable content, because that's what drives our business. We're business owners, not influencers, and so we want to nurture on social media. It's important to us, but what's most important to us is that we're getting people coming into our storefront, aka our website, from YouTube. We're being very specific about how we send them to our website From search traffic, how to get to our website. That lives forever and it performs better over time. We can optimize that. End of rant.
Speaker 1:Okay, step number six is now. We're going to perfect your offer. So we've got a basic iteration of your idea, which means we've put together probably a sales page. We've got all the dots connected. We've got a basic website. When I say basic iteration, that's all involved with that. Right, you may already have that coming into listening to this. So you know I didn't include that as a main talking item. But what we want to do now that we have traffic coming to the site is we want to see what are the numbers looking like man, we're not really doing well on the sales page. Google Analytics says we're sending a thousand people a month to this page, but I'm only getting like two sales. So how can I perfect that? Again, that would come back into play with having the right curriculum. You're going through Training program. Really, really important.
Speaker 1:That's going to come into play here is perfecting that offer and making sure you're capitalizing on current opportunities. That's one of the fastest ways to grow a business is to maximize your current opportunities that you've already created for yourself. So, as we're building our traffic and that can happen fast, by the way, youtube YouTube has been, for us, the number one way for us to start really growing our email list, which is huge. The average ROI on growing your email list is 3800 to 4400%, meaning every $1 you spend to grow your email list, you can expect 38 to $44 in return. That's massive. That comes from building searchable content.
Speaker 1:Getting them in front of the offer is the next step of the process and we want to really perfect that because many times what we have found another case in point would be somebody in our group coaching program. She was at $50,000 a year Within five to six months of us helping perfect her offer and getting her traffic up. She's about to hit six figures, so doubled in less than six months. That's what I mean by saying perfect your offer. So you're really going to look at the numbers you've created, the data you know, the traffic you've created. You want to analyze that and see where can we capitalize and or maximize these opportunities to make more sales. Now we should be rocking and rolling. We should, at this point, be subsidizing our income. We should be able to say I could comfortably leave my job by the end of step six. So just quick recap Research is your best friend.
Speaker 1:Success leaves clues. Invest in education. Create content buckets based on your research. Start with a basic iteration of your idea. Start creating searchable content and then create micro content from that searchable content you've already created. Now we're going to start perfecting our offer once we're starting to see traffic come to our site.
Speaker 1:Step seven hire your tools. Now, people don't know what the heck I mean by that. What that means is is that we need to start focusing on getting you out of being in your business. And most people what they'll do is they will try to carry all the things themselves for a long period of time and then they burn out. And then guess what they do? They go hire a VA and they're so overwhelmed and burned out they just say I need you to handle these things, and they don't even create the proper training for them because they're just exhausted. So we there's a sliding scale. I always say it's we overwhelm through burnout. There's like the sliding scale right. So we start with overworked, then we're overwhelmed, then we're frustrated, but eventually we end up in burnout. And the problem is that burnout just shows up one day. It's not like you oh man, my throat's starting to get sore, I think I'm getting sick. It's like, oh, you wake up one day, I'm burned out. It just shows up right unexpectedly. And so we want to prevent that from happening. But many of us are not yet to the point where we can just start paying money towards VA right Full time salary commitment. You know, even if it's $400 to $800 a month, that's not the most viable. More importantly, when we hire our tools, these are tasks just so you know what this looks like that a human should never do, especially with AI tools.
Speaker 1:Now Example I try to train some of our VAs to help us optimize our YouTube and our blog for a long time. Do you know the level of marketing education that's required? Like I would have to train somebody for like a couple years to know what to look for, somebody for like a couple years to know what to look for. So I upgraded our tool from vidIQ, which is a YouTube tool that helps you kind of do some analysis work for your YouTube channel. I upgraded to some of their AI features. So it gives me content ideas. It helps analyze underperforming videos, titles, thumbnails. I'm gonna do a whole video on it, by the way. It's a really awesome tool, and then same with Ubersuggest. So for $29 a month I can basically do it in a fraction of the time. That actually is going to be more cost effective than hiring a VA Scheduling appointments.
Speaker 1:Let's say you provide consultative services. There's no reason for a VA to go back and forth with somebody or you to find a manual time when you guys can meet. Just use a tool like Calendly, right? So there's all these processes in your business that you want to start getting off of your plate, and hiring a tool to do it Meaning you're just signing up for a tool when I say hire tool means you're just signing up for a tool is going to be the most efficient way to do that. So maybe start spending a couple hundred dollars a month towards tools that you need, building out the infrastructure of what that needs to look like, right? So you're working efficiently and seamlessly.
Speaker 1:Then step eight is hire a VA. So the things that fall outside of things that you can automate or outsource to a tool. Now we wanna hire a virtual assistant when it makes sense, right. So making sure that you don't compromise too much on what you're paying yourself because we don't wanna hire a VA and not pay ourselves. That doesn't make any sense at all. So until you're to the point where you're paying yourself comfortably, then anything in excess of that we can budget for a VA. That's why I say tools first, because we want to hire the tools to make sure we still protect what we're paying ourselves Super important. Then we'll start to say cool, now I can start hiring a VA to handle things. That, for example, we'll write our blogs on a Google Doc and a VA will style it and put it up on the blog for us. We'll create the video for YouTube, but a VA will edit it and make sure that all that part is done. We'll create the content and then a VA will schedule it and make sure it's posted on social media. These are all viable, really good opportunities where a VA can really help you. Sending out emails for just reminders we're going live today. You know things like that, right, menial tasks that a tool can't handle, but something that a VA the best way to look at is help. Vas are like your helpers.
Speaker 1:A lot of people start with a VA. I don't recommend that. I think you need to get to a point, which is why I said narrow your focus first. Then you hire a VA later, when things are working. The other big point too, as an aside here, I don't want to go too in the trenches. When you hire a VA before you've got your stuff together, you don't present yourself in the best way, and VAs will, and employees in general. If you're not clear, they won't be clear and it's just not a good presentation of you as a leader. So, a lot of this stuff. I would make sure you've got your ducks in a row to some degree and things are somewhat working before you bring somebody in and just add to the confusion and chaos. Really, really important. I've made that mistake.
Speaker 1:Okay, step nine things are working. Do we have budget to hire a coach? Meaning not just. You have probably at this point, exceeded courses and memberships at this point. I would say at this point, you're probably closing in on six figures. If you've done all this to this point, I would say $60,000 minimum at this point, annually. If you've done all this well to this point, very, very, very, very, very possible opportunity here. Now we want to focus on and some of this may take time. Right, you might not be at step nine for like a year, and that's okay. You might not get to step eight for like a year, and that's okay. We're following the blueprint, but knowing that it could right. It's about doing the steps, and as we do it more efficiently, we'll get faster at doing the steps and getting velocity to our results.
Speaker 1:But at some point, at this point, you've got a refined offer taking it to the next level. You need one-on-one help. You could settle for group coaching, but get a coach Again, it doesn't have to be us. If you love us and that's your goal, great, we'd love to work with you. It's what we do, it's what we love to do, it's what we feel like God has called us to do. But you need eyes to help you and knowledge to help you, because now, getting to the next step, you're going to need feedback and wisdom, strategy covering your blind spots. Decisions get more costly. The more money you start making. Opportunity gets more pronounced, the more you get to this point and you may be missing things that are helping you.
Speaker 1:Take things to the next level, I would say getting to six figures is doable for for anybody with the proper courses, memberships, as I mentioned, getting beyond that on your own, without ads which is what I'm talking about next and a coach a lot harder. You're gonna make a lot of mistakes. It's gonna be more painful than it has to be. I'm just just telling you what I would do. I would have hired a coach sooner. In every situation I've been in, I would have hired a coach sooner, for sure, even if that means that I'm not hitting, even if that means that I have to delay paying myself more, meaning I'm paying myself, subsidized my income, but maybe I'm not paying myself.
Speaker 1:What't want to get stuck? This is another no man's land opportunity here. You don't want to get stuck with the basic iteration of the business too early because you're still going to be work. Many people find this. They subsidize their income but they're working three times harder. And then they say, well, why am I doing this? I was making the same amount of money in my job and I didn't have to do all these other things. Maybe you're there right now. Right, so getting to that over that hump, we don't want to stay here too long. This is a very big burnout opportunity situation right here. This is a season of burnout opportunity right here. I've been there, we've been there. It's not fun. You don't want to be there long.
Speaker 1:So hire a coach, last scale with ads. The pros pay for ads, they just do. I know that there's a lot of mental blocks around that. Maybe you're like I don't have no desire to do that. That sounds really hard. I'd rather just give that to somebody else for them to run it or not do it at all. Just, I don't want it. I don't want that life. And that's an argument and we could say cool, we just want a 60 to $80,000 healthy lifestyle business and we're just going to really minimize our cost exposure and this is what I want.
Speaker 1:But if you want to take the next steps, I would say getting to six figures is possible without ads. Taking it beyond that is probably not. If your goal is to have a half million dollar business, you're going to have to hustle your freaking buns off to get to that point. I've seen people make millions without ads. I don't envy them at all. Probably very painful, definitely a very painful process. And guess what? In every situation I'm always watching how long before they're burned out, and usually, within a year or so, I see them usually crying or very distraught about the fact that they're burned out. So it's possible. It's very hard. There's no reason to not run ads if you're at that point you want to take it to the next level. There's no reason not to.
Speaker 1:These platforms are more dialed in. Once you have the knowledge of your people, an offer that's really perfected, a coach that's helped you take us to the next level, hopefully a marketing coach that can help you navigate your ads so that you can, you know, cut to the chase a lot faster. We have we have actually this week we have a couple of clients that are running ads and they're getting costs that they can't believe. They're getting $1 leads, we're getting 50 cent leads. It's a viable path, guys, and I would say, now more than ever, the, the AI addition to these ad platforms have are only going to and have made it that much easier and or that much more efficient in terms of your cost and the results for that cost. More importantly, the influencer game, the content creator game, has led people to not do it. They're focused on an algorithm chasing and dancing and pointing and stuff like that, and the influencer game, the content creator game has led people to not do it. They're focused on an algorithm chasing and dancing and pointing and stuff like that, and I'm not hating on that, although it probably sounds like it. It has meant that there are less people in the auction block for ads and, as a result, we're getting costs we haven't seen in years for ads.
Speaker 1:Lastly, on the ads, note the immersion of X, x, formerly twitter uh, and what they've done has really forced platforms like meta, meaning facebook, instagram threads I guess if you can really call that a viable platform at this point. They've had to cut back a lot on some of the restrictions and and you know the account bans that they were handing out, uh, because there's competition and it's at the level of the playing field. It's bans that they were handing out because there's competition and it's leveled the playing field. It's made them get a lot more user-friendly, so to speak. It is their main revenue source. Still, I think the paid verification is becoming a very popular. They should have been doing it years ago.
Speaker 1:In my opinion, we are seeing like business plus verification, meaning you pay like 120 bucks a month and then you'll get precedence or you'll get priority in the algorithms. I expect that. I would expect that if I were you too probably something you want to add or consider it's viable, but there's still nothing that's going to get you the exposure per cost that you'll get with ads. And the good thing is is that face ads that work on Facebook will typically work on YouTube, meaning Google. So if you're building out on YouTube, that's going to work for you as well there.
Speaker 1:But absolutely you can take an offer, and we've done this. Take an offer that we have qualified, went to a coach, a marketing coach, to help us and we sold that offer 30,000 times, built a whole membership on the back of a single offer. It was a $9 offer. Literally, we sold it 30,000 times on the back end of that offer. We gave a trial to the membership and we grew the membership to 10,000 people. I mean literally. That can happen. So proof in the pudding here proof of the pudding, I think, is the actual, proper, proper vernacular but literally what I just described to you is exactly how we've seen that play out and exactly how we've seen that work. If you don't care for ads, fine, just know that you're limiting your upside and you're limiting the revenue capture that you could possibly achieve and your hustle game is going to have to be that much harder. So that is what it is, but it's an optional step 10.
Speaker 1:So, just as a quick recap, we're going to research our market Again. If you want to look at aspects of how we've done that, you can go to some of the recent YouTube videos that I've done Research, research, research. We could do insight surveys with our audience. We teach you how to do it in the business lounge membership, but we want to make sure we know what people are searching for, we know the questions they're asking and we know we can find out what our opportunity is. Next, we're going to look at other brand models. We're going to develop our three to five brand models, because success leaves clues, and we're going to invest in our education. We're going to sign up for a course. We're going to sign up for a membership. We're going to accomplish Period. End of story. You want that guidance and you want that as a resource, very, very important.
Speaker 1:Step three is create content buckets based on the research that you've done. You want to keep yourself in line and stay on topic, even if it feels like you're repeating yourself. Step four is start with a basic iteration of your idea. So we want to make sure we're not trying to build out the entire product suite. We want to focus on being what Amazon was. Which. Where can we win right now and win big Right now? What is our books? What are we meaning? Amazon, wise right? What's our book opportunity? What's the low hanging fruit opportunity that we can serve in a meaningful way? It may just mean one of your offers, even though you want to do all of the offers, but we're going to have a roadmap to build into selling all the things we want, but sell the thing that we can sell most seamlessly right now.
Speaker 1:Step five is create searchable content. Let's create rivers of opportunity. Let's create traffic flow to our site and then from that we're going to splinter that off and create micro content, just repurposing long form content into micro content to cut down on your social media posting game by probably a factor of 90%. I mean unbelievable how much time you can cut out of your social media game and still be effective, probably more effective. Step six we're going to perfect our offer. So we're going to make sure, based off of these traffic sources, how can we capitalize on the current opportunities we've created for ourselves. Step seven we'll start hiring our tools to protect ourselves from burnout and to start getting prepared for growth. Step eight we're going to hire a VA to do the things that we can't build out in the tool. So if a tool can't do it automatically, then we're going to need a VA to start taking things off. We're going to keep ourselves in the position that we should be in, so the functions that only you can do and that are going to drive ROI the most and get everything else off your plate, if possible with tools and a VA.
Speaker 1:Step nine is we're going to then, once we've hit some of those revenue goals right, your budgeting goals, you should figure that out. We're going to hire a coach to help us take things to the next level if we desire to, and maybe even just to get to a healthy lifestyle business. Where can I cut? How can I maximize what I'm doing? But step nine hire a coach. And then step 10 is to the pros. Pros pay for ads, so scale with ads, follow these and I think you will go far, my friend. Hopefully this was helpful, beneficial. Again, in the show notes below I'm including these 10 steps and I'm actually going to create a printable version of it too, so you can actually grab that, download it. Follow these hope this serves you well and we'll see you guys in the next one.
