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Whenever you're giving a Virtual Assistant, or anyone for that matter, access to your WordPress website, it's critical that we assign the right access to them. We wouldn't want the worst case scenario to happen - when all of a sudden your website is down, deleted, and irrecoverable - whether with malicious intent or by mistake. I've given a virtual assistant incorrect WordPress access in the past and when I loaded up my website a few hours later - it wouldn't load...at all. Thankfully, the site they were working on was very much a draft site, but could you imagine if that happened to my main website that brought in thousands of dollars a month? Or to an e-commerce website that had thousands of dollars of product sales per day? Not only that, but there's the immeasurable effect on the company's brand as well. Visitors may view it as unreliable and untrustworthy after such a fiasco. So let's talk about these WordPress user roles so that we don't make that mistake. The general rule here is to provide someone the least level of access that they need. That way, they can't really mess up. And if they do need more access, they can always request more from you. So if you're unsure, start lower and move up as necessary. Okay, by default, WordPress has 5 different roles: Subscriber Contributor Author Editor and Admin The Subscriber role is the default role someone gets when they comment or sign-up to anything on your website. It's for visitors and allows people to view your site and post their comments. Your VA will most definitely need something more than that... The Contributor role allows users to also create, edit, and delete THEIR OWN unpublished blog posts. Take note, these are blog posts, not WordPress pages. And these are unpublished posts. After the post gets published, Contributors can't make any changes to the posts anymore. By the title itself, you should give this to Contributors, such as guest bloggers, to your site. They can't make changes to other people's posts, so if you need your VA to edit, recategorize, reschedule, or change the status on other people's posts, they need more than the contributor role. The Author role adds the powers of being able to change THEIR OWN posts even after they get published, but still not other people's. It also let's them upload files, which is useful if someone needs to upload PDFs or images. The Editor role is most likely the role you want to give your VA. This is the role that lets them to create both posts AND pa

Today, I share with you one of my favorite productivity hacks. It’s based on the paretto principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule The paretto principle states that 80% of the results come from 20% of the efforts and that the remaining 20% of results come from 80% of the work And this applies to almost everything in life When I was part of a sales team in the office, it was pretty evident that 80% of the sales were brought in by 20% of the salespeople. When dealing with my wife, 80% of her love for me is because of the 20% of the stuff I actually get right. And in business, 80% of the stuff we spend our time on only brings in 20% of the revenue, while 20% of what we do brings in 80% of the revenue. That’s what we’re going to focus on today. Stop and think with me for a moment. What do you spend 80% of your time on in a daily or weekly basis that only bring in 20% of the revenue? Do you have any time-consuming, low revenue tasks? Let’s make a list of them. Checking email and social every 5 minutes? Managing your calendar? Doing research? Refreshing the Google Analytics dashboard… Figuring out why your email subscribers aren’t tagged properly? Calling vendors? Checking my transactions dashboard to see how the sales are doing…Doing Bookkeeping? Yes, these are all important business tasks, but there are ways to minimize the amount of time they take up in our day so that we can give more time and focus to the high-value tasks - the ones that bring in 80% of your revenue. Let’s talk about how we can best minimize the time suck of these tasks. First, let’s divide our list of low-value tasks into two categories: time blackholes and delegatable tasks Time blackholes are the stuff we do regularly do that doesn’t necessarily need to be regularly done. For example, checking product sales or affiliate revenue every 10 minutes - sure, it’s nice to see the numbers go up, but nothing you do within the day is going to make those numbers go up or down today. Check them at the end of the day and if there are any problems, plan your actions accordingly. Another example is checking how people are reacting to your social media posts every few minutes. Unless you’re a Twitter celebrity, social media replies can wait. Nothing is so urgent that it requires your immediate attention. The big problem with time blackholes is that they suck all the time around them - just like regular blackholes. What we think will be a 2 minute Facebook refresh becomes a 30

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How do we know who our most interested leads are and how do we reach out to them?   Back before computers were a thing, this was really nearly impossible to determine.   Maybe a prospect paid more attention to your TV ads or display ads, or maybe they kept looking at our product in the store.   And there was no real way to reach out to them without reaching out to thousands of other people who weren’t very interested in our product – wasting our money.   Thankfully, with today’s technology, we can see when people are visiting are website, what pages they’re viewing, what emails they’re opening…   And we can identify who these highly interested leads are – then we can even personally reach out to them and give them that extra push they need to turn from leads into customers.   This is true no matter what industry you’re in.   I personally measure who my most interested leads in on a point system.   Whenever one of my leads opens an email, he gets a point. Whenever he visits a page on my website, he gets another point and whenever he signs up for a lead magnet, he gets 5 points.   And when one of my leads reaches 100 points, I get an email notifying me that “John Smith with the email johnsmith@aol.com” is a highly interested lead.   From there, I can take a look at his profile, see what lead magnets he’s signed up for, check what products he’s looked at on my site, and have a very good idea of what would make John turn from a lead into a customer.   John, in this case, owns a dog, and was interested in Chew Toys for Chihuahuas   My next step then would be to personally email John (or I can have one of my team members do it) with a message like:   “Hey John,   Jason here, owner of Toys4Pets.com. We’re launching a Small Dog Festival next week and currently have a 25% coupon for all small dog toys.   I thought this may interest you, so I’m reaching out. Let me know if you have any questions”   You may have noticed that I didn’t open the email saying   “I know what you did on my website”, that’s a bit creepy.   Instead, I made a semi-corporate sounding email that was personalized to John’s areas of interest.   I don’t really own Toys4Pets.com, but I’ve found that this method of scoring leads, crafting personalized offers and reaching out to leads is a very effective strategy for getting more sales for your products.   The best part of this is that it’s EXTREMELY easy to set-up.   I use Drip for

We live in a world of instants. 1-minute instant coffee, same-day Amazon delivery, instant results from our Tinder matches, instant replies via text messages... I remember the times when it took 30 minutes to download an MP3, when coffee took 5 minutes instead of 1, and when you'd have to wait a week for a friend to respond to your letter. I'm not complaining about the privileges we have now, but it's very interesting to see how much instant has become the norm. How we feel that when we don't respond to messages in less than a minute, something must be wrong. And the worst culprit of our instant culture is social media. Are you bored? Look at Facebook and Twitter and get instant entertainment from peoples photos and status messages. Want to share something? Get instant gratification when people like and comment on your posts. And I'm extremely guilty of this. In fact I just posted to my audience in my Facebook group an hour ago and I caught myself checking the likes, comments, and shares every few minutes. Hopefully I can get through the rest of the episode without looking at my post. And this is what social media does to us, because of it's nature of instant gratification, instant results, instant replies; it's trained our brains to be anxious about our post engagement. To the point that this anxiety distracts us from what we need to do. An hour ago, I was supposed to create a blog outreach plan. But I was too busy responding to people on my Facebook post. And when I started working on my plan, I was glancing back every few minutes. If I could have just focused and worked on my outreach plan, I could have had it done in 30 minutes. But because of the mental space that social media was taking up in my head - there it lies, one hour later, barely even started. So today I want to talk about how we should minimize the amount of time we spend on social media. Most days, I can do this. Most days, I spend 30 minutes in the morning going through my social media groups, ads, and pages. That’s it. Social media is the main driver of new business and engagement for me. I’ve found that if I don’t limit the time I spend on social media, I could spend an entire working day on it. Responding to different posts, replying to ads, crafting new posts, responding to PMs. And although my social media presence is extremely important – my time is best spent creating new products and new content. If you’re like me and have your business built on social media, I challeng

A couple of months into the business, I was getting around 50 emails a day with concerns ranging from product inquiries to after-sales support questions and collaboration proposals. Email was, and still is, my primary and preferred method of communication. In a typical day, I’d spend around three to four hours just responding to inquiries – and by the time I’d be done responding to the emails, I was usually too tired to get on with anything else – like product development or improving my marketing. I realized that if I wanted the business to grow, I had to spend less time, and more importantly, energy, on emails. I knew I had to delegate this task to a Virtual Assistant. But I was a bit hesitant to do this for a couple of reasons. I wanted my prospects and customers to still feel like that “personal touch” – that I cared enough about them to personally respond to their inquiries. And it wasn’t that I didn’t care, it’s just that I didn’t have the time anymore to personally respond to my ever growing number of emails every day Even though most of the emails I was receiving were repetitive and could be delegated to a virtual assistant, there were some things that I still wanted to personally respond to – such as outreach emails and potential collaborations Honestly, I was worried that my VA might mess up. What if they made major grammar errors or said something that was totally incorrect? And lastly, I wasn’t comfortable giving out my password to anyone else Despite my concerns, I realized that delegating emails was a must. So I decided to do some research to quell my hesitations and take some actions to make sure things were done correctly. The first thing I did was identify, list down, and categorize those emails that were repetitive. Product inquiries, support questions, prospects reaching out to me, people asking for similar advice… I was surprised to find out that around 90% of my emails were mostly about the same things over and over again. From this list, I did three things. #1: For repetitive product inquiries and pre-sales questions, I highlighted the answers to these questions on my sales pages and website – this eliminated a good percentage of the repetitive questions #2: For support concerns, I created help documents and video tutorials to help my customers use the product. And I added a link to these documents in my onboarding emails. #3: I created around 30 templates for the different repetitive questions and concer

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Any business that has a blog or produces content should be familiar with the process of outreach. Simply put, it's reaching out to other blogs with the intent of getting our own content shared or getting ourselves featured or us writing a guest post on other blogs. It's an essential part of getting your blog and content marketed and 'out to the public'. The most time consuming and tiring part of this is doing the research - finding blogs and influencers to reach out to for us to get featured on, write and a guest post for, or have our content shared. That's why I have my virtual assistant do this for me! Let’s take this podcast as an example: Lazy Entrep My content with Lazy Entrep focuses on Productivity, Automation, and Outsourcing for small business owners. There are a couple of different opportunities that I could shoot for with outreach. First of all, there’s being guests on others’ podcasts. Then there’s being featured on other blogs. And finally, guest blogging. (I won’t go into the marketing implications nor the pros and cons of each opportunity in this episode, but let me know if that’s something you want me to talk about.) When you assign a task like researching bloggers and podcasters to your virtual assistant, you don’t need to have them understand the business reasons nor why you need the said information. However, I personally find that when one of my VAs understands why I need something and what I’m going to do, the research they give back to me is a lot more useful and direct. Whether or not you explain your business reasons to your VA is up to you, but either way, the most critical part of delegating blogger research to your VA for the purpose of outreach is in you giving them clear and specific instructions. After I tell my VA what I’m trying to do, I then give them a specific set of requirements. First of all, I need to tell them what niches I’m trying to get bloggers from. Marketing automation, email automation, sales automation, productivity, getting things done, digital nomads, outsourcing to the Philippines, small business outsourcing, and so on. Next, are filtering requirements: - Does the blog have a post not more than 10 days old? - Does the blog have consistent content of at least 4 posts per month? - Has the blog been active for more than 6 months? - Does the blog have a decent design? And finally, the information I need. - The blog’s name - The blog URL - The blog social media links - Blog email address or

I used to be of the opinion that once a lead turns into a customer, that's it - deal done. If they'd ask for support, I'd give it to them, but otherwise, I wouldn't have any reason to interact with them again - probably ever. In LeadPages Conversion Certified course, the instructors mentioned that when you reach out to customers and see how they're doing, it's really good for the business. It can turn customers into what we call promoters. ​It turns passive users of our product into evangelists who talk about and share our product with others. ​This concept was pretty foreign to me, but I thought to myself "Hey, what the heck, let's try it out." ​So I emailed my customers saying "Hey, how are you doing right now with the product, everything okay?" ​To my surprise, I received responses from more than half of my customers! ​Most said they were enjoying the product, but that they really appreciated me checking in with them. Others even gave me suggestions on how to improve my product, which was really valuable (and has actually resulted in an increase in my conversions) ​and a few of my customers even asked me if I had an affiliate program. ​At the time, I didn't have one set up yet, it wasn't on the list of my priorities. But boy, after hearing my customers asking about it, did that light a fire under me to get it up and running! Now, these (and more) customers are part of my new affiliate program. Results of my experiment: Very good! Even though my product was a single one-time purchase, it seemed that reaching out and checking in with them greatly increased their chance of saying good things about and even promoting my product. So I had to make these follow up or onboarding emails a part of my regular process. As my business was growing, I wanted to be able to have these emails sent automatically to new customers after a certain number of days. After two days, I'd email my customers if they were able to login and access the product - and to let me know if they were having any issues. Only around 10% of my had login concerns (to whom I would direct to some helpful videos about logging in), but 100% of my customers appreciated it. After a week, I'd check in with them again and ask them if they joined my affiliate program. The effect this had was great. First of all, those who were planning on joining the program were reminded to do so, and this email also educated those who didn't even know we had an affiliate program - bringing them in as well

I create a lot of free download giveaways on my website in exchange for email addresses, these are otherwise known as lead magnets. My leadmagnets are usually in the forms of 5 day free courses and downloadable pdf guides I have a basic template in LeadPages that I use whenever I create a new leadmagnet. What I usually do is duplicate my template in LeadPages and then change a few details - the name of the giveaway, the description, image, download, and thank you page. As this was a simple and pretty repetitive process, I decided to delegate this to one of my team members in the Philippines. I give him access to my LeadPages account, instructions on what to do via email, and the information that I needed for the new Lead Magnet. Now, it would normally take me around 15 minutes to do something like this, but I decide to give him a few hours since it was his first time. I waited for a few hours for him to complete the task but he hadn't gotten back to me. He was a pretty reliable guy, so I wasn't too worried. Almost exactly a day later he came back to me and told me that he couldn't figure out how to duplicate my LeadPage... that he'd been trying the whole day previously and was too embarrassed to ask me for help. Okay I was mad...Well, no, not mad, more like disappointed... So I told him: Son, I'm not angry, just disappointed - just kidding I didn't do that Anyhow, If I did the job myself, it would've taken me 15 minutes, and this guy spent over 6 hours on this with nothing to show for it? Really? Mike had been pretty reliable in the past, so this was disappointing. I decided to just do it myself instead and not ever delegate this task to him again ... but then I had a brilliant idea What if I recorded my process of creating the LeadPage and talked him through it rather than giving written instructions? When I needed my next lead magnet a week later, I decided to give Mike another shot, this time with a Camtasia recording of me creating the LeadPage.. I also told him not to hesitate to ping me if he had any questions. I wasn’t as optimistic this time, considering Mike’s last failure, but I wanted to try nonetheless. After an hour I saw Mike had sent me a message, I was in the middle of writing something, so I thought, “Ok, what now?” He said, “Hey Jason, can you see if this is correct?” I opened up the LeadPage, and lo and behold, it was perfect, just like if I had created it myself! I tested the page myself by entering my email address, and it

Parkinson's law states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" Basically, if you allocate 2 hours to finish a report, you'd get it done in 2 hours. Whereas if you'd allocate 30 minutes to get the report done instead of two hours, you could get roughly the same report completed. In the late 1980's there was this Italian productivity guru Francesco Cirillo (I hope I said his name right) who experimented and found this to be true. He founded what we call the 'Pomodoro technique' Pomodoro, means tomato in Italian - Cirillo used a tomato timer for his time measurement blocks (apparently in italy they have tomato timers instead of egg timers). Hence the name 'Pomodoro technique' In recent years, it's been gaining in popularity once again with a lot of gurus saying how they got more done in 30 minutes than they did in 2 hours. Heck, I just had to try it out then. If I could work in 4, 30 minute blocks instead of 4, 2 hour blocks, I'd be totally down for that. The whole idea is that you limit yourself to complete a task in 25 minutes and then take a 5 minute break in between tasks. After completing four tasks, you take a 15 minute break to recharge or whatever. This supposedly works because you're doing 'focused work' - you don't do ANYTHING ELSE during your 25 minute block. No emails, no calls, no Facebook messages - just focus on getting your task done. This is one technique I had to try for my philosophy of working less and living more. So what I had to do was list down all the tasks I'd do in one day and allocate them to different time blocks, or pomodoro. Some tasks may take more than one pomodoro, and that was okay, but I'd try to force a task that would typically take 2 hours into one 25-minute pomodoro. My first day, I wanted to get four tasks done - so 4 25 minute blocks with 5 minute breaks - a total of 2 hours work. I clicked the play button on this timer app on my phone and got started. Surprisingly, the results were pretty good. Okay, I only got two of the tasks done instead of four, but that still doubled my productivity. Each of these tasks would normally take me 2 hours to complete, but with the Pomodoro technique, it only took 1. That night I binge watched Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and only slept 4 hours, so I was working on sleep deprivation. My pomodoro results weren't as good that time. I couldn't focus on my task and kept spacing out. I realzied that in order for you to be effective with the pomo

Today’s episode is part 2 of our 2 part series - Capturing Email Addresses with Facebook Live. Yesterday, we talked about using lead magnets, content upgrades, and lead digits to capture email addresses. In today’s episode, we talk about my secret method for capturing email addresses and increasing attendance. Can you guess what it is? It’s having people register for the Facebook live session, just like they would for a webinar. One major advantage webinars have over Facebook live is that webinars usually have built-in email reminders - registrants get reminders 24 hours before the webinar, an hour before the webinar, and a few minutes right before the webinar starts. I do the same thing for my Facebook live events. I ask people to register for the events on a landing page, so they still get the email notifications 24 hours before, an hour before, and right before the Facebook Live event starts. These are just to remind them about the Facebook Live, but instead of having a webinar link, I link them to my Facebook page, since that’s where the Facebook live event is going to be. Plus, if they’re fans of my Facebook page, which they should be, they’ll also get a facebook notification when I do go live. By doing this, my Facebook Live attendance skyrockets, which lets me maximize my audience reach. Plus, the more attendees to my Facebook live, the more comments. The more comments, the more facebook juice, and the more facebook juice, the more it’ll be shown in the newsfeeds to those that like my page, who will in turn comment and like the live event more, which will give the Facebook Live even more Facebook juice…ahhh! It’s a wonderful cycle Okay, you might be wondering: how do you actually get it done? I’m actually using three tools to automate this as much as possible: LeadPages, WebinarJam, and Drip. Let me outline the process for you step by step. First of all, I need the creatives: the title of the Facebook Live, the landing page copy, and the related image for the landing page and Facebook post Second, I need a campaign in Drip. I actually just have one campaign in Drip for all my Facebook live sessions, so I don’t need to create a new one everytime I host a Facebook Live. Third, I need to setup a webinar in WebinarJam. My WebinarJam is integrated with Drip, so when someone registers for a webinar in webinarjam, they automatically get added to the “FB Live Campaign” in Drip. Also, when I’m setting up my webinar, I have to make

Facebook Live seems like the hottest thing since banana bread and every marketer is jumping on it. It actually works, I mean, Facebook is still heavily encouraging Facebook Live - with it having the highest organic reach more than any other channels. That means that compared to a page post, image, or even regular video, Facebook is going to show your live video to a lot more people. Even for the replay - after the Facebook live itself. Not only that, but a lot of consumers absolutely love Facebook live. Around 80% of our target audience already spends hours on Facebook every day, so you can get a lot higher reach, attendance, and interaction on a Facebook Live session than you can with older technology. What kind of older technology? Well, Webinars. I’m not saying webinars are bad - in fact, I still love using webinars. Webinars allow me to deliver educational content in a closed-environment - that means that my audience won’t get distracted by the next baby picture or political post - retention is usually better on webinars. Some webinar platforms also let you do some crazy stuff like pretend a recorded video is a live video, or track sales, or other stuff. But my absolute favorite feature of webinars is the ability to capture email addresses so that send my attendees email updates, and I would be able to market to them. That’s the one BIG feature that Facebook live doesn’t have - the ability to do email captures. But what if we could get the best of both worlds? What if we could have the organic reach and attendance of Facebook live, plus the ability to capture email addresses? Wouldn’t that be great? Well, today and tomorrow are your luck days, because we’re sharing not one, but two methods to capture email addresses using Facebook Live. This is going to be a two part episode with today being the more obvious way to capture emails and tomorrow being my SECRET method. I personally use both methods to get the widest coverage and most opportunities to capture email addresses. On to Method #1 This is the method most top marketers are using right now to capture email addresses with Facebook Lives and that’s with Lead Magnets. If you haven’t already heard of Lead Magnets, they’re attractive pieces of content that people would gladly pay money for, but instead of charging $1 or $5 or $10, all you’re asking for is an email address in exchange for that piece of content. Examples are Free Reports or Free Courses. LeadPages categorizes Lead Mag

Don't you just hate it when you have to actually call companies nowadays? As most of us are online business owners, we're used to making sure that we put all the information that a customer may be looking for is on our website. And when people need more information we make sure that we have easy ways for customers to contact us via email or twitter, right? So many of us avoid having to put in our phone numbers simply because we're not used having to talk to people on the unless they're our family or friends…or if they're emergencies. But not all companies are like that. A lot of companies still have things on their website that say "Please Call us for more information". In fact a lot of large companies, even online companies, request people to call to get prices and such. And then there are transactions that are primarily done with phone calls - calling our banks, scheduling meetings, and calling local businesses. So it's unavoidable that there are times when we have to make phone calls. And I don't know about you, but I just hate it. I hate waiting on hold, being transferred from one department to another, and having to "call back later". I feel like it's an absolute waste of time. That’s why, when I needed to call around 20 co-working spaces to ask for their details for a blog post I was making, I delegated this task to a Virtual Assistant. So instead of spending my own time (which I value at at LEAST $50/hr) calling one company after another, I paid my VA $5/hr to make the calls for me. It took her 3 hours to get the information I needed. I couldn't even imagine spending 3 hours on the phone just to get that info. So I was more than happy to pay $15 for it. Think about it: there was nothing really special about the 'information gathering' task I asked my VA to do. Sure, I needed specific information for my blog post. But anyone could actually collect that information, it didn’t need to be me. You may be wondering how I could pay someone $15 for 3 hours of their time. If you haven’t been following my previous episodes, I hire my virtual assistants from the Philippines - and my VAs are happy to do tasks for me for $5/hr. But wait a second, can my VAs from the Philippines actually call companies in the US (or Canada or wherever?) Sure they can. First of all, all of my Filipino team members speak excellent English. And with VOiP services, they don’t have to pay long distance fees or anything. They can use Google Voice to make free calls to the US

A lot of entrepreneurs face the same problem - their work or business becomes their entire life. They live, breathe, speak, and eat their work Sure, it’s great for productivity, it keeps our minds active, and keeps us excited, but just like any other drug, it has it’s side effects. And these side effects were evident in my relationship with my wife, my family, my friends and my hobbies. Ever since I started my new business, I gave it my 100% - 100% of my life. I didn’t have room for friends, for hobbies, or even my wife anymore And that was bad... Last week I was on a date with Holly We were having a pleasant dinner eating some chicken and steak, but my mind was elsewhere I was thinking about my most recent Facebook campaign that I launched a few hours ago and was anxious to see the results. I was testing a couple of new ad sets and audiences, and I was mentally planning what reports to check in FB Business Manager - I wanted to see if my audience would respond better to the more personal ad image or… That’s when I heard, “Baby, I was asking you a question” Holly sounded exasperated, and I could understand her frustration with me I was spacing out, thinking about work when I was supposed to have a pleasant date with my wife Even though I took time to spend with her, it meant nothing if all I thought about was work A lot of entrepreneurs face the same problem - their work or business becomes their entire life. They live, breathe, speak, and eat their work Sure, it’s great for productivity, it keeps our minds active, and keeps us excited, but just like any other drug, it has it’s side effects. And these side effects were evident in my relationship with my wife, my family, my friends and my hobbies. Ever since I started my new business, I gave it my 100% - 100% of my life. I didn’t have room for friends, for hobbies, or even my wife anymore And that was bad The entire reason I got into business in the first place was to provide for our future family and kids, and to be able to enjoy the benefits of earning And here I was, earning more than I thought was possible at the time, but enjoying none of the benefits that I touted Holly said to me - at home, you’re working all the time, and even when we’re on a date, all you think about is work. Can’t we have a simple dinner date? She was right. Something had to change or I might risk losing her - the most important person in my life I’ve heard that Mindfulness Meditation can help you ‘li

They say that it costs 5x less to sell to an existing customer than to acquire a new customer. I tested this out early in my business and let me share the results with you. At the time I had just around 20 students in the only course I was offering at the moment. As my course was being sold as a 'premium' course for my market, the average time it took to turn a lead into a customer was around 30 days. As part of my growth plan, I launched a second course, which was basically an upgraded version of my existing course. I was a bit hesitant to sell to my existing students - I didn't want them to think "I just paid a lot of money for your product, and now you want to sell me another?!" But again, the experts kept saying that it costs 5x less to sell to existing customers...blabla Alright, I drafted an upsell email to send to all my students and hit the send button. I waited around for a while with my email open and nothing happened. Just as I expected, not only had I not sold anything - I probably also pissed off my customers. So I turned off my laptop, cursing the 'so-called' experts for ruining my business and went to bed. The next morning, I got 2 emails from students saying they wanted to upgrade...hmm, maybe the experts weren't so wrong after all. In the space of 48 hours, 6 of my students chose to upgrade (okay, maybe I jumped to conclusions the first day - I did send it at 9pm...) Now that I have over 400 students, (which is significantly more than 20), I've automated my upsell process. It gets a bit complicated as I track how often students login to measure their engagement, but the most basic version of my automation flow is that 30 days after someone signs up for my 'beginner course', they automatically receive a 30 day email upsell series. And the results are amazing. While I have to use FB ads and SEO to bring in new customers, I don't even to spend any money selling to my existing customers. So no, it isn't 5x cheaper to sell to existing customers, it's infinitely cheaper (comparing my typical $30 cost per acquisition to my cost per acquisition of $0 with my upsell process) And the best thing about it is that it's all automated. I'm currently using Drip to automate my email upsell process. The way it works is that when a lead becomes a customer, they get put on an onboarding workflow. The onboarding workflow sends them the welcome emails, onboarding emails, and tracks log-ins to see if they're engaged. For those that are engaged, the upsell proces

One of the most common problems entrepreneurs face when it comes to outsourcing is that when they post an opening for, let's say, a Virtual Assistant, they get something like 50 applicants for it and it just takes WAAAY too much time to get through all of them. Let me share with you a few methods to find thoes amazing freelancers, those 1 in 50 diamonds in the rough. Sometime last year, I was getting slammed with the amount of emails, Facebook messages, research, and other menial tasks I had to do. So I posted an Upwork opening for a Virtual Assistant who had Excellent English. In the space of 3 days, I had received 72 applicants. I couldn't seriously screen them all on top of everything I already had to do. Heck, the reason why I'm hiring someone is cuz I can't handle all the tasks I need to do, and now I had to do another one. But let me tell you, within 10 minutes I was able to shortlist the 72 down to 8. I did this by including a simple trick in my job posting. In the job listing itself, I instructed applicants to have the first line of their cover letter say "Blubber" Surprisingly, around 90% of all the applicants didn't bother to read or follow my instructions at all. Anyone who didn't follow my instructions was someone I didn't want to work with. I didn't care if their reviews were all 5 stars or their job success score was 100%, if I couldn't trust them follow a very basic instruction, there was no way I was going to trust them with anything important in the business There we go, from 72, I was down to 8 applicants. From the 8, I eliminated 3 more based on their cover letters...and from the 5 remaining, I interviewed them and found my assistant, who still works with me today. Hey, my screening method worked! So just to recap, include simple filtering mechanics when you're posting jobs. Things like having them say the word "blubber" as the first line of their cover letter or email. And be sure to include those instructions at the very end to make sure they read your entire job listing. If you want to know more about hiring virtual assistants, I have a free Ultimate Guide to Hiring Virtual Assistants. Just head on over to lazyentrep.com/va to get yourself a free copy. Links Review Us on iTunes Visit Our Website The Ultimate Guide

Today, we’re talking about MeetEdgar, and the newer player, PromoRepublic. MeetEdgar is like the prettiest girl in school - everyone’s talking about her, she plays hard to get, she sounds amazing, and to get to her is expensive - around $50-75/mo. Think of PromoRepublic as Canva, Buffer, and your virtual assistant mixed together. In today’s episode, we continue on our Social Media Scheduling services review. In the last episode, we talked about Hootsuite and Buffer, Hootsuite, which offers monitoring, reporting, and scheduling And, which is a scheduling service more than anything. Today, we’re talking about MeetEdgar, and the newer player, PromoRepublic. MeetEdgar is like the prettiest girl in school - everyone’s talking about her, she plays hard to get, she sounds amazing, and to get to her is expensive - around $50-75/mo. MeetEdgar’s selling point is that all you need to do is bulk-load a bunch posts, categorize them, create a schedule, and MeetEdgar does everything else. For example, if I had 50 different possible Monday Motivation posts, 75 content wednesday, 100 Throwback Thursday, posts, and so on - I’d just load them all up at once, tell Edgar that the motivation posts go out on Mondays at 9am, the content ones on Wednesdays at 3pm, and the throwbacks on Thursdays at noon, and Edgar would automatically schedule the posts from now til kingdom come. This is great for those want to that post multiple times a day and have sooo much content. MeetEdgar can literally save these folks hours a day. The reason why it wasn’t the perfect solution for me was for two reasons. 1. I only post once or twice a day - I don’t really like blasting 10 posts every day 2. I like posting more time-sensitive and personal stuff, not stuff randomly pulled from a library Lastly in today’s episode, we have PromoRepublic - a smaller and newer player. Think of PromoRepublic as Canva, Buffer, and your virtual assistant mixed together. You know how everyone else on social media can make beautiful picture posts on Canva but when you try to do it, it looks butt ugly? PromoRepublic has thousands of attractive pre-existing templates and content ideas for you to use. And they have this built in Canva-like photo editor so you can change stuff or add your logo. One of my favorite things about this is that they also have a library of stock images that you’re allowed to use - no more paying $1 everytime I make a Facebook post! Don’t tell anyone, but when I need motiva

In this episode, I’m going to talk about the different social media scheduling services. Social media scheduling services are a HUGE help to any business that wants to harness the power of social media. The whole idea is that they automatically post updates at scheduled times so that…well…we don’t have to. Any type of automation or anything that helps me save time is good in my book, which is why we’re talking about them today. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat. The list of social media websites goes on and on and on And as business owners, we really can’t ignore social media Social media is the first thing that most people check on in the morning and the last thing they check at night. What I usually do with my social media scheduling is schedule my entire social media posting schedule every Sunday night. I have a couple of Facebook pages and Facebook groups that I schedule posts to everyday, so these automatic posts really help In addition to that, I also make some unscheduled posts at times. Since my audience loves it when I share personal things as well, I make sure to do so. Alright, the different Social Media Scheduling Services… We’ve got the Big 3 of Hootsuite, Buffer, and MeetEdgar And one smaller player that I’d also love to mention - PromoRepublic I’ve used all four and here’s my take on them. I’ve broken this review into two episodes with today’s episode talking about Hootsuite and Buffer, and tomorrow, we’ll learn more about MeetEdgar and Promorepublic. First of all, we’ve got Hootsuite - Hootsuite has been around the longest. For around $15/mo, you get a whole slew of social media features. First of all you can create a bunch of different dashboards showing your different Facebook pages, Twitter profiles, comments, groups, profiles… And you can do scheduling, assign comments to different team members, create reports, and more. It’s a little overwhelming to be honest. I tried using Hootsuite and ended up not using it because it felt too overwhelming. Maybe it’s because I approached it the wrong way. Hootsuite is a social media monitoring service first, and a scheduling service second. So if you’re just looking for scheduling, it’s a bit much. But if you want to track and monitor all your social accounts, comments, and replies on one dashboard - I guess it works. I only check social media at certain intervals, so the dashboard didn’t really appeal to me. Next up is Buffer. Buffer is real