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 EP32: Mastering Your Metrics - Transform Your Business By Focusing On The Right Numbers
Tired of guessing what's working in your business? It's time to let the numbers do the talking. In this episode, we dive deep into the power of key metrics. Discover how tracking the right numbers can transform your business overnight. Learn to identify hidden opportunities, measure your business health, and make data-driven decisions that drive growth. Get ready to unlock your business's full potential with this episode.
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What's up guys? Welcome back to another episode of the TBL podcast. Today we're talking about something really, really important. In fact, I just had a conversation recently with one of our students and was feeling super down about her business. Just was like it's not happening, things aren't working, something's got to change. What have you? I looked at her analytics. She showed me her Linux. She showed me what's going on. She's like this close. She didn't realize how close she was to growing her business exploding her business, so we're going to talk about that today, focusing on the right numbers.
Speaker 1:We have a lot of resources inside of TVL for you to check out, and many of you may know that already and some of you may not be using them. So we want to get you using those, because your energy goes where your focus flows. Is that how it goes? Your energy flows where your focus goes, something like that. You get what I'm saying, but it really is a big game changer. It really will change your perspective about your business, how healthy your business is and where your opportunities are, which is the most important thing. And it's not just analytics, it extends beyond that. So we're going to talk about that today.
Speaker 2: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:Introducing my beautiful business partner Kim Jimenez Kim.
Speaker 3:So we're really excited because we wanted to talk and tackle this particular topic on knowing your numbers, the importance of knowing your numbers. What are some of the emotions that can come up right as we look at where we're at versus where we want to be, as well as some of the tools, like Chris mentioned, that we already have inside the business knowledge that you should be making use of. So, as we kick things off, where should we get started?
Speaker 1:Well, that all depends, but I think the number one thing is let's figure out the numbers that matter, right? Email list growth you got to look at it every day, and this is something that we do, right? I look every day in my ConvertKit. I want to see how many email subscribers I got and I want to see what they're downloading right, like what specific resources are they downloading? And then, in what pages do I have those right Embedded or how am I pushing those? Is there a YouTube video that I that I did? That's really seems like. Oh yeah, I just did something on this topic and I included that download. Is that what really is pushing it? Because the faster you get a read on the pulse right, a figure to the pulse of what's happening, the faster you can create more of that.
Speaker 1:But there's a lot of people and I've talked to clients and students and such and they haven't even logged in to look at their email list growth or anything. They forgot their password for ConvertKit. I'm exaggerating, but by and large, that's not what we're focused on. We're looking at our followers on social media and I'm not saying that that's not part of the equation, but that's not what makes us money directly, right. So I think that's the first thing. Uh, I think I would probably, once a week, go to my Google analytics see what's going on, right, like, how much traffic did I get? Where are people going? Where's it coming from? Did my efforts pay off If I was doing a lot of stuff on Instagram? Did that pay off this week? Right, like, things can change, but it's also it's not even a matter of, like, a strategic thing, it's also a mental thing, like I was mentioning with that student.
Speaker 1:You, just when you realize and this particular person I was referring to earlier 4,000 people a month, that's enough to be growing your email list. We have and I'll let you talk about a little bit, but we've had lead magnets that we're converting 75% of referral traffic from YouTube, 40% overall. That's a game changer, because now, in that situation, we know let's go push more of that content and really interface this lead magnet with as many people as we possibly can. So your email list starts growing every day, and then, when it's time to launch a promotion and this is what we see often, and I want you to talk about this as well.
Speaker 1:But what we see often, though, is people will get to a point. They have an email, they're not paying attention to their list, they're not looking at their analytics, they're just kind of putting stuff up there. Then they run a promotion or they want it's ghosts, it's crickets, and they're. They're all down and bummed and you know this and that and and we get that. We totally get that. But the problem is is that you weren't focused on your list, you weren't focused on the numbers that mattered until all of a sudden, they needed to matter and that. So that's a big problem.
Speaker 3:so, anyways, I don't know if you want to kind of take it from there and add your thoughts to that yeah, I think, like what you said, it's some key numbers, and I think that sometimes it can be really overwhelming to just try to track every little detail, and we see both sides of the spectrum. What we see most frequently is you're not tracking any numbers at all, and so you're flying blind and you can't course correct when you don't know what's really happening behind your business. So, as you're making decisions, lots of the things that we hear questions about is like, what should I be working on right now? Like what? Like what do I work on? Because there isn't necessarily outside of our success path that step-by-step, and so oftentimes we can't answer that question until we know okay, where are you at right now? Right, how many visitors are you getting to your website? How many followers are you adding on social media? How many sales are you making every single week? How much is your email list growing? And so these are all basic numbers that you should be tracking.
Speaker 3:And one of the really cool things, um, chris, here is, too, that we've created a brand new progress tracker for you guys. So, bell put a lot of energy and work into creating this. We launched it a few months ago when we redid our onboarding sequence, so we'll have those links for you guys below on this podcast episode. But this progress tracker is a great spreadsheet. It's a really great place to get started on and it's going to help you track every single week. Okay, what are my traffic numbers from YouTube? What are my traffic numbers from Pinterest?
Speaker 3:Simple metrics. You don't have to go all in the rabbit hole and track every single page that people visited and go in and look at conversion rates for every single checkout page. If you don't want to, it can just be a high like level view that kind of gives you an idea for where you're at and that way you can make a course correction. So, for example, if we notice that our lead magnet opt-ins are slowing down, like happened recently, a couple of weeks ago, you were like, oh my goodness, our lead magnets are are like our signups daily are going down significantly. We just made a big change on the website and we tracked it down to. It took us three days but we figured out. This is the change. Brian changed it, reversed that change on the website and immediately the options started going back up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he added a piece of code to the site that disallowed people from being able to right-click and steal our images, because when you start getting a lot of traffic, you'll see your products pop up, places or people using your images and literally selling a similar product with your images the problem is is that so? When we disallowed the right click and the ability to download the image or save the image from the site, it also disallowed people from being able to fill out our opt-in forms. So all of a sudden went to.
Speaker 1:Nothing now, if you weren't paying attention every day to what's going on, or at least multiple times a week to what's going on with your email list, you would have no idea until like months later and you've missed all those opportunities.
Speaker 3:Right, and so we like. The big warning sign was like hey, we're not getting sales for this one product.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:We're like what, and so we went in and we're like we're also not getting any signups, so that makes sense and so kind of just keeping an eye on your numbers like that helps you catch things really fast.
Speaker 1:I think too, and maybe this will change people. I like paradigm shifts because I think this really helps people a lot. Right now, I think most of us act like marketing directors, not business owners.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's true, right, like we're so focused on social media. We're so focused and I always say this, and I know people already think I hate social media and I don't we're trying to provide counterbalance. Yeah, that's the only reason why we speak out as ardently as we do about social media, because we see like 99% of the focus on social media and that's what a marketing director would do. That's what a social media manager would do. A business owner would look at the numbers.
Speaker 3:That mattered so do you think this is really weird? Because I used to be a social media manager and so the instinct would be probably to think that we would be very pro social media. And I think what people don't realize is like, as a social media manager and you saw this having a business when you really get in the trenches, you understand what actually drives the company, and it's not social media, it just isn't. When you start really looking at the data and the analytics, and that's what really was a huge aha moment, it was a blessing for us years and years ago to just be like holy crap, social media is very top of funnel.
Speaker 3:But, what really starts driving things is when you start changing the relationship with people that you find on social media, people who find you on search. Building that middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, is what makes the biggest financial impact, and so we love social media, but the problem is everyone who's in your ear is telling you to just stay top of funnel, and we talked about this in our latest traffic bootcamp, which, if you have not, please, please, please, please, sign yourself up for the next bootcamp, and if you can't afford to join us for that, please check out the replay. We're going to be selling those separately, and so it's going to be a total game changer for the way that you think about your actual social media relationships. We tend to stay in social media and never move people outside of that.
Speaker 3:And that's a big problem for why most people aren't making sales.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and case in point. So the example that I was alluding to previously, the person was driving 4,000 people a month. There were several blogs that were really really relevant content and like I think they were getting two to 300 people a week on each one of those. Like high performing blogs, like five or six of those, and we say take it from top of funnel, like, okay, you created the blog, there's no opt-in form, there's no lead magnet embedded on those forms or on those pages whatsoever Not a single one. If you're converting at 20 to 40% on that, with hundreds of people every single week, you're talking about adding potentially thousands of people a month to your email list. That's going from top of funnel to middle of funnel. Then what we're talking about bottom of funnel is okay, what do we do once they join? Once join your email list, how do you follow up? Because the fact of the matter is this and people don't realize. This is why the psychology of marketing is so important over 80% of sales happen after the fifth follow-up.
Speaker 3:The fifth follow-up Not the first follow-up.
Speaker 1:Most people just send them their download and then say, okay, have a good life, and then they don't email for six months, if ever. Well, after a week they forget who you are. You're just another person in the inbox, right? How could they expect you? So it's like we're doing so much top of funnel. We're busting our butts creating the reels that hit the algorithm, stuff like that, and I get that because that's what we see. Yeah, that's the part that we see. Every day we log in, we see people that are doing. Well. They're you know they're. They're the people we follow are doing that right, and so that's why I think that we have to be very concerted in our efforts to make sure that we are putting our attention on the other things because when you start focusing on the other things.
Speaker 1:Your viewpoint of top of funnel is completely different. It's a healthy relationship with. Top of funnel is completely different. It's a healthy relationship with top of funnel, right.
Speaker 1:Then you stop looking and say, well, I don't have 10,000 followers, okay, fine, but how many people do you really need to send to your phone and make a sale? Because now you've mapped that out. And the last thing I want to say is this most people, what I think is this the reason they don't do the middle, funnel, bottle, funnel, they know all these things. The reason I think that they necessarily just focus top of funnel is because they're like I'm not ready for middle, because they're so overwhelmed about it. They think that they have to master all these things at once.
Speaker 1:And one of our students, elisa, she's. I've been telling her, for we've we both collectively, I've been telling her for years. She was made for YouTube. She has such an amazing personality. She just pops on camera, she just presents herself in such a way. Her backdrop is amazing. It's the perfect product to talk about on YouTube. We just knew she was going to do well. Well, recently, within the last six or seven months, she created a video, not multiple videos, a video that is in the thousands of views, right. So she came to the traffic bootcamp and we're like Elisa, this is your jammy jam. We've been telling you. This is your jammy jam. We showed her what we do, which is video on a specific topic. Lead magnet that applies to that specific topic into your email list. I think she said she's like, she's like, I can't believe how fast my email list is growing from one video.
Speaker 3:Yeah, she posted about it in the Facebook group, which is really exciting to see. Just get her get actual results, like she's actually adding people to her list every day, right, whereas before it was, like, you know, maybe a couple times.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't think she was really going her email list. From what I can, from what I can gather what she's told us so she's gotten like halfway through.
Speaker 3:Right now she's focusing on okay, how do I get those people to actually purchase my products? Right, and that's the second part. I think oftentimes too. You mentioned people being overwhelmed with top of funnel. I totally agree. There's so much that happens top of funnel. The problem too, I feel like, is so, for for a grand majority of our members that's the problem. But there's also a subgroup of our members who are like what the heck is bottom of funnel?
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 3:I have. I've never heard about this.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:I don't speak the lingo. I feel like everyone is in the club.
Speaker 1:Even some of our TVLC members have said that they're like wait what's middle and bottom of funnel.
Speaker 3:Right, exactly. I don't feel like I understand what is actually happening, and so we're going to talk more and more about what do those terms actually mean in a future episode. For right now, all you need to know is that a sales process is very simple. It's usually three steps right. People find you on social media, on search, wherever they hopefully go to your website, sign up for your email list and then you follow up with them via email and offer them to purchase a product. So three steps, right. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so that entire process of building a business online can be really overwhelming, because each of those stages has a bunch of steps.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would say think of it this way, and I like to equate things to the physical world because I think we understand, I think it's easier for us to conceptualize, right? So, like, top of funnel is the advertising to get them in your physical store, right? Right, let's say you have a physical retail like a mom and pop, you sell cookies, right, the advertising that you're doing that's to get them in the store. When they're in the store and you're talking to them about whatever and you're introducing them and this and that that's. That's kind of the middle of funnel aspect of things. The follow-up after the fact or anything that involves your actual sales process is going to be more bottom of funnel, right? So right now most of us are just like advertise, advertise, advertise, but then when they come into our store, we're there's nothing there right there's no cookies and then there's no sales process as far as following up and be like hey, ma'am or sir, can I help you?
Speaker 1:Can I help you with the process of deciding what's the best option for you? Or maybe this is like what do you prefer? Do you like chocolate chip cookies? Do you like this kind of cookies? You like this kind of cookies? It's like we just ignored, we just no one's there, there's no product, we just whatever. And it's like we have to have a complete holistic sales system. And that's what that is and that's why and most people find this out quickly you don't have to have, you don't have to be popular, you don't have to have. And that's why Kim says profitability over popularity. It just takes a few people a day to come to your site and to buy something for you to have a highly profitable business.
Speaker 3:Well, I love that. I love that idea of profitability over popularity. It's kind of become our thing that we basically trademarked. As you're thinking about your process and your numbers and what you should be tracking, remember that everything that we talk about in these podcasts you have resources for inside the business launch. So if you're having questions about like, okay, I get it, I need to build up my social media Awesome, we have dedicated courses for most every platform on how to grow an actual you know, an audience on Instagram or on LinkedIn or on Pinterest or on YouTube.
Speaker 3:And then we're shifting into the next stage of that. You know, middle of the funnel, where you're starting to build an email list, and so we have an entire program on how to build an email list. We'll link that below as well as what to send to people with our master email marketing course. And then bottom of the funnel, as you're building your sales processes. That's where courses like sales pages that convert and webinars that convert and profitable sales funnels comes in. So you have courses that align with all these stages. But we want to help you kind of zoom out for a little bit, because we can get so granular that we get overwhelmed. Let's zoom out for a minute and talk about, okay, what is it that's going to help you move the needle? Why are numbers so important and how can we use those numbers to make better decisions, not just from a marketing standpoint, but from a business standpoint?
Speaker 3:And so I think a quick example of that Chris could be. So let's say they're, they're writing out their, their numbers, right, and so they're like, okay. So this is how many followers I added on Instagram. This is how many website traffic of visitors I received. This is how many people have joined my email list, and maybe that number is zero, right? Maybe it's no one joined my email list and that we've been there, right? That's a process. So what are some of the things that you could potentially do? If you find that, hey, no one's coming in on my email list, I have identified the problem as to why I can't actually seem to make momentum or start generating revenue. Maybe I should focus, then, on building my email list. What are some of the things? Maybe my lead magnet isn't resonating with people. Maybe I need to run a split test. Maybe I need to get some feedback from my audience to see what is it that they really want.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I think that's. I'm glad you bring up that point, because that's really important, and I think that's part of why people are just putting out a bunch of stuff, because they're like I don't know what's working, so I just need to put out more stuff More, more, more, more, more, more, more.
Speaker 1:And then so then they get overwhelmed, then they're spending a lot of time and one of the reasons you know kind of before I kind of a prelude to what you're talking about here that is getting all this traffic. There's five blogs that are doing well, roughly give or take, that are doing really, really well. What are the topics that are discussed in those five? And then what we can do is this we can take that data and say let's talk about this more on social media because it's obviously resonating with people. And then on social media we can say I have a download for this, I have a resource for this, for these topics. Now what you're finding is you're using the data that you have from your, your site, which is the I mean, the most relevant data you could possibly have. It's the, it's the market telling you what it wants, and then all you're doing is amplifying that on social media, right? So I think that's exactly how you go about doing it.
Speaker 3:Um, real quick too. You can do the reverse as well.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:So, for example, if you say okay, these are five blogs that are really resonating, Let me take that content and strip it into shorter form and post it on Instagram and make reels and post stories, create TikTok videos, pins on Pinterest.
Speaker 1:You might find your niche just doing that alone. Seriously, you might find your niche just doing that.
Speaker 3:So if you just want to stay in the content realm because that's what feels comfortable to you right now and you're like I don't know about conversions, I can't deal with that. Yeah, totally fine, you can use these different data points to say what are the content ideas that people really resonate around. Or you can even look at what is working on Instagram, right, let's say, and you're looking at, oh, this post got a bunch of saves, this post got a bunch of shares, this post got a bunch of comments.
Speaker 3:Maybe I should create a blog around that topic, so it goes both ways.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and something we talked about in both the sales page bootcamp and the traffic bootcamp. That I would say cause I'm sure a lot of people are listening to like, but I haven't done years of blogs. I don't have a video that's getting thousands of views a month Like at least I didn't either.
Speaker 1:No, at least I didn't either. But if you're like, but I don't even know what that would be Like, I don't have any data to know what I should talk about. And I again, this is a whole nother conversation. It's a can of worms that I talk about. But it's the problem. We have an inverse relationship with how we should be doing things. Your North node should always be your audience.
Speaker 1:If you don't have an audience, how do you borrow an audience from somebody, right? Or how do you start with the smallest possible audience that you could have? And we talked about during the traffic boot camp your little 10, your big 10. We talked about in the sales page boot camp. We talked about doing insight surveys with your market. One of our members, andrea. She's a big Instagram guru. She took her insight survey and basically just built it into Instagram stories and she got feedback from Instagram stories.
Speaker 1:So it's if you don't know, ask. It's literally that simple. You know if you don't, and we we do this with everything Anytime. We've started a business that way and our first business I've told I've told the story a lot so I won't get too much into the nuance of the story but we started a moving company. We started to get some traction. One of the story but we started a moving company, we started to get some traction, the one of the first things we did when I decided to take it on as a full-time venture. I went downtown in athens, georgia, because our target market was college students, and I literally was interviewing kids, college kids at the bar on a flip phone. It looked terrible, it was so pixelated and gross, but we're interviewing people. Why? Because that's our market, no one's gonna know.
Speaker 1:I think as business owners, we think that we have to be and this is probably a societal thing that like we have to be geniuses. You know it's like the Steve Jobs and the Elon Musk. There's these brilliant entrepreneurs and I'm not dismissing that they aren't. But the most basic form, the most basic version of entrepreneurship is identifying a problem in the market and finding a solution that people want, a viable solution that people want to solve their said problem. What does that mean? All we have to do is go to the market itself, go to the people that we aim to serve and let that guide us. Ask them questions.
Speaker 1:You've experienced X problem in your life. What are the solutions that you've tried? Were you satisfied with those solutions? What would you want more out of those solutions or different from those solutions that you received? What do you feel like the problem is? That's not currently being solved? How did you feel underserved? Right? Did you feel like your means, if you're a single mom, were the problem that you have experienced? The solution that exists, does it serve you specifically as a single mom? Because maybe there's a solution out there, but it's not catered specifically to single moms. That's going to guide you more than anything else. Then you start taking the data that you received and then start testing that.
Speaker 1:You create a lead magnet around that You're talking about on social media. You're doing some blog content around that. You're seeing how it performs. Then you go through that same iterative process that I talked about before, which is okay, this seems to be performing well. Let's see if we can't amplify this on social media. Let's see if we can't create some long form content around this, like a blog or YouTube video, and see if we can't get some traction there, Cause here's the thing and I think this is I want you to take over here, because I think you've done this probably better than anybody that I've seen.
Speaker 1:People think it takes a lot. It really doesn't. It takes one strong lead magnet that's doing extraordinarily well. It takes a couple pieces of flagship content that really do well, like long-term, long form, searchable content like a YouTube video or something, and you can literally drive leads every single day and then start building the components like bottom of funnel around that one thing because you've now built a system that's kind of creating leads and generating new leads for you every single day.
Speaker 1:And the reason I say it is because Kim has had some offers, even one that's a $9 offer. I know because I was looking at her numbers. She's made millions of dollars off of a nine dollar offer that performed well organically, that then all she did was pump ads into it and ran it for years and made millions of dollars off that and built an entire membership off of the backs of presenting that offer and then inviting people for a trial to to the membership, and that's what's crazy. So if you would speak to that a little bit, that'd be awesome yeah, what would you like me to expand upon?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I guess just kind of the process, like how did you arrive at that specific offer, how did you know that that was the actual offer?
Speaker 3:Well, I didn't at first right, I didn't, and so I started just creating content, like you explained and like we've been talking about, and then there's an experimentation period.
Speaker 3:When you're just getting started, you are trying all different kinds of content ideas and just throwing it out there to see what sticks. For me, one of the things that I think that helped me the most was long form content. I dove into blogging and creating YouTube videos and that exposure allowed me to get faster and faster. When I say faster results, what I mean is that, yeah, it took six months for blogs to start getting some traction, but once they did, it was like immediate feedback, whereas with social media it takes a long time to build an audience that can give you enough feedback on. You know, new posts all the time, whereas with long form content you kind of post it one time and then it starts building that momentum as time progresses. So what I started doing was when I had a service-based business. You know I could put out maybe two blogs, two videos a month. That's all I could do because I didn't have enough time.
Speaker 3:I was servicing clients, it was a lot to deal with, and so putting that content out there started helping me to build that audience while I was working on the service-based space. So one of the mistakes that we see often is people are really busy either servicing their clients, working a full-time job, raising kiddos, being good moms and dads and it can be really overwhelming. So what I love about long-form content is that there isn't that hustle game of like.
Speaker 3:I'm having to put out new stuff on Instagram every single day and people who find me two weeks from now are not going to go back and watch that old video to give me feedback. So I'm not really sure of whether that unless I keep reposting it every week, I don't know if it's resonating. So I don't think that social media is the best at giving you cohesive feedback all the time. I think it's awesome once you have an audience to get that instant. You know. You can put a poll on on stories, you can ask right on a live. You can put out a TikTok video asking for feedback. You can do the same thing on YouTube. But that is works great once you've established an audience.
Speaker 3:It doesn't always work in the, you know, kind of initial stages. But kind of going back to the numbers, because I don't want to get too into the strategy, one of the things that I think is really important for all of us to start thinking about is how much money are we actually making every week? Yeah, is it actually moving the needle forward for us? And that can be challenging, that can bring up a lot of emotions, and I think it's something that we should definitely talk about as we wrap up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do you think that people are spending too long on a certain strategy because they're not paying attention to the numbers, or do you think that they're not being patient enough with the process?
Speaker 3:I think both. I think that there's no benchmark of like how long should you, how long should you try? There's no parameters.
Speaker 1:I've never heard anybody give parameters Like, hey, you should do YouTube for three months consistently, and if you're not seeing anything, then YouTube's not the right thing for you.
Speaker 3:So let's put out some benchmarks right now.
Speaker 1:Long-form content you should be at it at least for two years before you're like this isn't working and you should see some and that's like once a week or once every other week. Once a week.
Speaker 3:I think once a week, at the least twice a month, but ideally once a week. And when I'm talking about long form, we're talking about YouTube, we're talking about blogs and we're talking about podcasts. Russell Brunson would tell you five years. He would say you need to do it for five years, and if in five years it doesn't work out, then shifts strategies. I think that's a little too long there should be in between some clues, but even you, like, you've been doing youtube for two years and you're just now being like oh my gosh, my videos are.
Speaker 1:But I'll say this, though, but I'll say this though, there were signs along the way, yes that it was working exactly me what I mean by that.
Speaker 1:So I'm probably better case studying this, because you're so far along. You're 10 years into youtube. I'm only like two, two and a half years into youtube. Um, within six months, I was driving, I think, probably twice as much traffic to my website as I was from my instagram, and that and my instagram had like five to six thousand subscribers or followers. Rather, I'd been there for some time. So youtube, within a very short period of time, was already exceeding the amount of traffic that I was driving. Why do I care about that? Because traffic matters to me more.
Speaker 1:That's the. That is a number that means something to me. That means people coming into my cookie shop. Remember, that is a number that means something to me. That means people coming into my cookie shop. Remember, like, that's what that is. So if people are coming into my store, I have a chance to sell them something.
Speaker 1:If people are seeing my advertising and they're like, oh, that's a cool ad, but they're not coming in my store, then that's not as important to me as people coming into my storefront, right? So that's how I tend to try to look at it, and it changed the game for me a lot. So that was an indication within six months, even though my views were tiny and I think I showed people this in one of the workshops or coaching calls that we had. But I showed that like and I know it resonated because people were like, oh my gosh, that really like changed my perspective. I only have 2,000 subscribers, I don't have a large channel, but you'd be surprised I've driven like. I drive like 10,000 views a month off of the 2,000 subscribers A tiny channel.
Speaker 3:A tiny channel.
Speaker 1:But also the amount of traffic that I drive. It's my number one driver of traffic, more than my podcast, more than any social media platform. It drives traffic. And now I've doubled down on re-optimizing videos and including lead magnets and then also teasing the lead magnet at the end of the video and that has just exploded like 5x my email list growth just doing that one thing alone. So you find something that's working. You look at the metrics. What is a win for this season? A win for me was am I driving traffic? Then it was can I convert that traffic? What is going to convert that traffic? Then it was how do I double down and optimize? And that was the entire process. And now I'm like I'm in, now I, now I know I can scale that because I found out what's working there.
Speaker 3:So I feel like you have to take it iteratively and have benchmarks for each season of that process. Yeah, I agree, and I think that a really good resource for this would be to go through the success path and in each of the stages there's a section that talks to you about, like, what's going to come up in this season, and when we we talk about that, we're talking about the emotional aspect.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because, for you, there were many times where you came to me and you're like this isn't working.
Speaker 1:No, my video had 43 views and I sunk my heart and soul into it and it's like this is crazy, this isn't working.
Speaker 3:Right, you're like you know we're investing in a full-time editor and like I'm just frustrated, this isn't working.
Speaker 3:Your podcast took off really fast, and so it definitely was a big difference there, and there was a lot of times when I could tell you were very discouraged. But, um, I think that knowing what to expect with each of them makes it easier and knowing that, hey, it's normal to feel discouraged, it's normal to look at your numbers and have a reaction. We had one of our coaching clients in tblc the other day. Um, she was like guys, I'm like sobbing, I'm crying right now because it's so hard to look at my numbers and be I feel disappointed that I'm not further along there's always so much resistance.
Speaker 1:When we say your numbers, it's like, okay, give me a few weeks, I gotta make them perfect, I gotta like this and you can tell it's they haven't looked at them and they don't know. Because there's such a resistance to it?
Speaker 3:But I think there's a vulnerability that it's like I feel seen and I feel vulnerable because, like this isn't a representation of our hard work, or there's a worry that we're going to judge you and we're going to make you feel like, oh, you should be so much further along than you are and that's not the reality. The exercise is really meant to be a good light on where we're at right now. It's just taking inventory of where are we at right now, so that then we can really build momentum on the back end.
Speaker 3:We can't know on the map right where we're going and how far it's going to be to get there if we're not sure where we're at right now. So as you look at your numbers, as you use this spreadsheet, I want you to have a ton of empathy towards yourself. I don't want you to be judgmental because unfortunately, that's not useful. It just isn't. It's not going to help you grow faster. You're only going to start beating yourself up for no reason because, by the way, you have no idea what stage of business you're in and whether it's normal to have those numbers. So we love giving you feedback, we love giving you benchmarks for each individual stage in business, but, for example, if you're in the hustle stage, we want to see you have a goal of reaching your first 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers on your email list.
Speaker 1:That is the goal.
Speaker 3:That is the goal and those benchmarks are in the success path. So it's normal to have an emotional response to your numbers. We just don't want you to unpack and live there, because that's just not helpful. Right.
Speaker 3:And so we wanted to kind of close with that idea of like hey, it's okay to be frustrated by your numbers we're often frustrated by our numbers but we've built up the resilience to say, no, actually numbers are empowering to us. Because then we're like okay, we're not where we want to be financially, but look at how many people we're adding to the email list. Like the client you were talking about, it was like she's feeling super discouraged, but you're like, you're so close, look at how many people you're driving on this other side of your business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like doing all the homework and doing all the tests and not looking at the report card.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:We got to look at the report cards, baby. We got to know what's going on. The report cards are your email list and how much money you're making Exactly, and I feel like we're ignoring that part. But we're doing all the work and the problem is if you don't start seeing that progress, that's when moving forward and growing our businesses.
Speaker 3:And oftentimes I feel like when we see y'all's numbers, we did this for a TBLC, the beta that we launched. We had everyone send us their numbers and oftentimes there was this disappointment and this, like you know, heavy feeling and we looked at the numbers were like what are you talking about? This actually is totally in range. This is normal for the stage of business you're in.
Speaker 3:You're actually doing way better in this area that you didn't even think about, and so there's always those happy surprises, too, of like wait, I actually I'm actually moving forward.
Speaker 1:I just didn't realize that I was moving forward. Yeah, no, I totally agree. We see that often where it's somebody has a mole and they turn into Mount Everest.
Speaker 3:It's not that big of a deal.
Speaker 1:in fact, I think sometimes you look and we say, okay, we need to x, y and z, and then they're like oh, oh yeah, I can do that and then they feel empowered, right, right. So I I totally agree this needs to be the focus, and I'm actually glad that this became our second episode, you know, in the tbl insider podcast, because it is the foundation of of, I think, our orthodoxy, what we teach, preach and teach.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know it's like profitability.
Speaker 1:Not everybody is going to break through and become an influencer and I'm going to tell you right now we have people like those influencer types that have come to us that we've talked to, that they're barely making their bills their numbers.
Speaker 1:They're not making money and then we have people that are very niche and they don't have a large audience. They don't have a large community and it's doable for most people to get to where they're at, but they've built good systems and processes. They focus on the right numbers. They're at, but they've built good systems and processes. They focus on the right numbers, they're doing the right things and have a very healthy and thriving business. That's achievable for like 99% of people that's achievable. So that needs to be the benchmark.
Speaker 1:We don't want to rely on the algorithms, to the algorithm gods to show us favor.
Speaker 1:We want to do things that we know give us and set ourselves up for the best chances at success, and that's why I feel like our students here are getting results. That's why people say I feel like in this community, that I can, in this membership, that I can succeed Absolutely Right, and that, to me, is such a cool thing that we're working on and I think, if we can you know, age information is great Right, and unfortunately, we kind of were before. Social media is what it was today in terms of when we started a business. In the first business, there was none of these fancy tools and gadgets and gizmos and algorithms. They just didn't exist and it just gave us a good foundation of things that actually work timeless principles, and so that's what we're trying to teach, that's what we're trying to help people do here, and I love I get really passionate about it because I love to see people being able to win and realizing it's not as hard as they've been making it.
Speaker 3:In the meantime, would you let us know if you enjoyed this episode? If you're listening to the podcast, text us. Did you know we have fan mail now? It's so awesome. You, literally, just on your favorite podcast player, look for that little highlight link at the beginning of the episode description that says text me a question. Was it helpful? Did you have questions that you'd like for us to go into deeper in the next episodes? This is all about the community. It's all about you. We're doing it for you guys, and so we'd love to hear your feedback. But until then, thank you so much for watching Chris. Anything else you would like to say?
Speaker 1:Un beso.
Speaker 3:Un beso Bye for now. And we'll see you soon.
