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Presentation highlights:
02:21 – The typical entrepreneur’s workload
03:51 – The hours it takes to make money
05:45 – The things you can’t delegate
09:32 – 7 things you should automate
16:30 – Funneling mapped out
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Tweetables:
What would you do with 2 extra hours a day? [Click To Tweet]
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Transcription:
James: So most of you know that I read up on Jay Abraham books and am a big fan of his work, and one day I got to meet him. When I went to meet him, one of the guests there also was Teddy Garcia. Teddy turns out to be the mastermind behind all the super gurus’ webinars and automation from many years ago.
He’s probably the one who blueprints for them, copied and template and turned them into software and end up in software solutions that you’re seeing now. Chances are, a lot of them trace back to Teddy. I’ve struck up a good relationship with Teddy. I’ve seen him at almost every event that I’ve been to.
He’s extremely knowledgeable, super connected. Even just transferring his slides onto the computer, the names that are on the folders of the people that he works with are all people who are famous and you’d recognize. So it’s a privilege for us to have Teddy here. I’d like to welcome him up to share with us some automation. Come on Teddy Garcia.
Teddy Garcia on stage at the SuperFastBusiness 9 live event
James: You got the moves there.
Teddy: Yeah I did. Awesome, thank you. Thank you so much.
James: Have fun.
Teddy: All right. How’s everybody doing?
Audience: Good.
Teddy: All right. So we’re going to talk about how to create a sales vortex so you can free up your time, have more fun, and make more money. Does that sound cool to everybody?
Audience: Yeah.
Teddy: All right, cool. So what would you guys do with just, let’s just say, if I could give you an extra two hours a day by the end of this presentation, what would you do with it? First, throw some stuff out you might do. Sleep, everyone wants to sleep. What else? What’s that, PlayStation? Do some more marketing, exactly. Family, exactly. ‘Cause the bottom line is we all got in the business for ourselves, so that we could have more time, but the reality of it is that, that’s not always the case, right?
An entrepreneur’s normal routine
So what are some of the things that we’ve got to do as entrepreneurs on a consistent basis? Well, we’ve got to read and respond to emails, and send out broadcasts to our list, right? How many of us have to do that every day?
Just out of curiosity, who’s got a team that does everything for them versus everybody’s solopreneurs? All right, good mix. How about creating content? Like, if you’re doing like an offline business, you’re working with clients, how many of you have to write proposals on a regular basis, things like that? Awesome.
Plan and manage ad campaigns so you can drive some traffic? We all have to spend some time doing that, thinking through, writing the copy, setting up things, etc. How about working on your website, optimizing it, split doing different split task, things like that?
And then also research and learning, right? The Internet is changing every single day. We have to come to events like this, which take out several days off our schedule. Researching stuff online, marketingexperiments.com is a site that I like to research a lot.
I have lots of good different tests that they run. Coaching calls, webinars, who has students that they have to coach, or do weekly webinars, or project update calls to their clients, etc?
And building JV and affiliate relationships, right? That’s why we come to events like this, meet new people, but it’s not just about emailing them right before you’re going to do a launch or something else to promote, you’ve got to nurture that relationship and build it overtime. And then finally, if you do have a team that you’re outsourcing; it’s either managing that team or putting up different job offers to find people to do stuff for you, all that stuff takes time.
Breaking down the entrepreneur’s workday
So if we break it down like read and respond to emails on a typical day, you might spend 1 to 3 hours a day doing that. Creating content and proposals that could be 2 to 4 hours, depending on how much content you’re creating. Planning and managing your ad campaigns, you’ll spend 1 to 3 hours doing that.
Working on your websites, let’s say an hour conservatively, although it’s often a lot longer than that. Doing research, let’s say at a minimum, we spend an hour a day just checking out new tools or new information, things like that. Coaching call, webinars. Some people do these all day long, from morning to night, right? But let’s say 1 to 3 hours.
Building affiliate relationships, just touching base with people, maybe an hour. And managing your team, maybe an hour. Does that sound fair, or is that like what most you guys are spending to do some of the stuff? So we’re talking 9 to 18 hours a day just doing that stuff.
Now, the good news is, those are all the things that actually make you money. Those are all the good tasks.
The bad news is most of you are trying to do these all yourself. This is the typical work chart for an information marketer.
Building a scalable business
In order to build a business that’s scalable and that can run without you, you’ve got to get out of this mode. And this doesn’t even include all the other stuff that you should be outsourcing, but you probably aren’t. Things like your customer support, managing payments, refunds, doing bookkeeping, social media, lots of other stuff that we’ve got to do in the business.
This is what it ends up looking like. So this if from my mentor, Rich Schefren. I was running an online shopping mall at the time when I first saw this map, and I was like, “Holy cr*p that’s me.” So this is my world. I have been doing all these things trying to grow this company and it’s no wonder that I’m stuck. So that’s kind of when I sought out Rich, and built a relationship with him, and that’s kind of where my career got started in this business.
You can’t delegate these
But those are the things you’ve got to do in your business. There’s other things we all have to do, and there’s other things that we can’t delegate. So what else requires your time on a constant basis that you can’t delegate? How about your health and fitness?
We can’t work very effectively if we’re sick or tired all the time, or we don’t have energy. Obviously, nobody else can go to the gym and workout for you. I wish they could. You can have other people cook for you, but you know, if you enjoy cooking or preparing meals for your family, that’s going to take some time every day.
Feeding your soul. This is kind of crucial, right? To spend some time every day, even if it’s just 20 minutes, just connecting with yourself, or your higher power, whatever it is, to just get that clarity and that me time, which is very important.
Your love relationship, I don’t think you want to outsource this. In most cases, it’s probably not a good idea. You definitely got to devote some time. And you know, as entrepreneurs, we all have very understanding partners usually, but you know, I’ve seen plenty of relationships get destroyed from just working too much and taking it for granted, so it’s crucial that we spend some time there.
And spending time with your kids. How many people have kids here in the room? Awesome, cool. So for me, this is a huge thing.
So do you ever end up feeling like this? Just want to pull your hair out, just wishing that you had more time in the day, just being able to do the things that you actually love to do, when you want to do them, with who you want to do them without worrying about how you’re going to pay for it. That’s really what we all got into this for, right?
Teddy’s inspiration
So for me, it’s all about this little guy here, my son Dawson. He’s about to turn 10 years old. It got to a point where I was working so much. I have split custody of him so I only have him like every other day. So Saturday is like our day to have fun and play and do stuff.
But I was working so much that he just got into the habit of every Saturday morning, no matter what, asking me this question:
“Dad, do you have work to do today or can we play?” And that just wasn’t acceptable to me anymore. So that’s when I kind of really figured out that I need to find ways to leverage my time, leverage my business, and automate things so that…
I love to play. I mean this is what I love to do, it’s part of the reason I had a kid, so that I can actually play with him. And now he’s at that age where this is the fun time. So, I love to do the tricks on bikes, I love to go motocross with him, I just learned to surf yesterday, so that was like kind of a bucket list thing, which is awesome, to actually learn how to surf for the first time in Australia, thank you James.
Snowboarding, playing the drums, like this is me. I have always grown up as kind of an X-Games kind of guy. I owned a bicycle shop as a kid, about 23, so it’s still a kid. But I’ve made a lot of mistakes in that business, and definitely could’ve used some of the stuff during that time.
Teddy’s mission to help other entrepreneurs
So, my mission is to really to help you automate your life so that you can make more money and play more. Does everybody want to do that? Who wants to play more? Have more fun? Awesome. All right.
So I handed out on your seats an overview of what an automated marketing funnel looks like for a typical internet marketing business. And what I’m going to do is go through that and break it down. But I wanted you guys to have a graphical representation of it, not only to take home, but a lot of people struggle when they’re trying to put together their marketing campaigns in terms of what does this actually look like, how do I draw it out?
So that’s the basic flow for most businesses. It involves all the different stages, and then different sequences, for different messaging, and each one of those boxes have different emails and stuff in there. We’re going to break some of that down as much as possible and walk you through it.
7 things you can automate
Now, there’s other things that you can automate other than your marketing. In fact, there’s 7 things that I think you should automate that could easily bring you those two hours of free time right away just when you leave here. For me, the number one thing that has freed a lot of my time was cleaning up my schedule. So we’ll talk about ways to do that.
Writing proposals, that was another thing that should be a huge time suck. We got a way to automate that. Content creation, your content distribution so once you create the content, actually getting it out.
Your email management. How many people spend more than 3 or 4 hours just managing email and trying to keep it organized? And your tasks, your projects, and finally, we’ll get to your marketing.
1. Scheduling automation tools
So your scheduling. I use ScheduleOnce.com. This is a great tool because it eliminates the whole need of having to send 3 or 4 emails back and forth of, “Oh there’s Tuesdays or Thursday of for work, oh no! I can only do 5…” Like you just send them a link. They go to your calendar, they could pick a time, and then you can confirm that time.
And even if they need to reschedule, there’s an easy link for them to reschedule. It sends automatic reminders, and I’m actually working with ScheduleOnce right now to help them create an integration with InfusionSoft, so you’ll be able to automatically target people or tag people inside of InfusionSoft once they schedule an appointment. TimeTrade is another one that does the same thing. But that’s a huge time saver that I definitely recommend you to have.
2. Proposal automation tools
Two, your proposals. There’s a software called QuoteRoller, and a one called NiftyQuoter. When I say proposals, you can think of sales letters as a proposal in some ways too. So QuoteRoller actually lets you create document templates and for each different product or service that you offer, you can have drag and drop blocks of content to describe that.
So you can quickly assemble a proposal, create the pricing sheet, and what’s nice about QuoteRoller, it gives you analytics. If you send somebody your proposal, you can tell if they’ve viewed, how long they viewed it, what sections they viewed, did they view it more than once or twice, did they share it with somebody – all these kinds of cool stuff that you can’t tell just by sending it from an email. NiftyQuoter is kind of the same thing.
3. Content creation automation tools
Your content distribution, so Taki just talked about this actually. So using Dropbox… So we use Zapier to integrate it. So you can either have a team like Taki does, who can go into your folder and get it, or you can use Zapier, which is a third party service that just helps you connect lots of different apps.
There’s like 250 different applications that you can make connections to between Zapier. So you can have the files saved to Dropbox, and then Zapier can send it over to CastingWords, and they can transcribe it for you automatically. CastingWords is a little bit more expensive than using a VA.
4. Content distribution automation tools
Your content distribution; so there’s a couple of other tools that are like Zapier, which is IFTTT.com – if-this-then-that. This is a great tool that helps you put up these kind of rules as well, again to keep between different systems. So a perfect example is you create a new post on your blog, you can create a rule if this then that to have it send that post information to Buffer, and then you can configure Buffer to send it out to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, at whatever schedule you want and distribute it for you.
HootSuite’s another good tool for social media and preloading your social media posts in different content that you want to automatically go out. So you just plan it all ahead of time. You set it up, queue it up, and then it kind of goes automatically.
5. Email management automation tools
Email management. So like I said, a lot of us spend a ton of time managing email. These are the three tools that I really couldn’t live without. One is ActiveInbox HQ.
How many of you are familiar with David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology? So AcitveInbox HQ actually turns Gmail into that sort of system, where it makes it really easy to mark emails as something, it’s urgent, needs reply, as next action you’re waiting on, and then easily sort it by project and context and things like that.
SaneLater is a great tool for just cleaning out the junk. So basically, SaneLater looks for like anything that has an unsubscribe link in it, and puts it in different folder for you to look at later, it keeps it out of your main inbox so you don’t have to look at it and process it. And then Unroll.me, which is the one I really like the best, is similar to SaneLater. It will take all the emails and one, it gives you a quick way to unsubscribe from everything.
So you can just go through a list of emails and say no, no, don’t want that anymore. And then the ones that you still want to see, it will send you a daily digest every day of all emails that you’ve told it to roll up. So you get one email, it’s got just screen shots of like 50 different emails in it. You can quickly glance at them and figure out which ones are worth looking at, and kind of ignore the rest. So that’s a really valuable tool. Is this helping? Awesome, cool.
6. Task and project management automation tools
Your task and project management. So we use two tools primarily for task and project management. One is Wrike.com, and the other is SmartSheet.com. What I love about Wrike is the fact that it integrates directly with Gmail.
As you know, most of your tasks often come to you in the form of an email, something that a client needs you to do. And Wrike gives you a little button at the bottom of the email so it creates a task. And it will take the body of that email and the attachments, and you can instantly categorize it to what folder, assign it to who it goes to, and when it needs to be done by, and automatically, it’s in your project management system. So there’s no re-entering of information.
And SmartSheet.com, if you’re not familiar with that, it’s kind of like an online spreadsheet, kind of like a Google doc. But what’s great about it is that every row in the spreadsheet allows you to a) have a discussion about that row, and b) attach files to that row.
So let’s say you’re planning out building a landing page for instance, and somebody’s got to write the copies, somebody’s got to create the videos, somebody’s got to set the form in Infusion, and provide the form codes to the Web developer. You can have a different row for each of those things, and then as those things are created, they just get uploaded to the smart sheet, so everything’s all in one place. You’re not searching through emails to find what was the latest version of the copy, or where is the video, or the form, everything’s all together in one sweet place.
7. Marketing automation tools
And marketing. So, it’s three tools that you can use to automate your marketing, these are in no particular order ‘cause they’re all different and some are better for certain things, some are better for other things, they just kind of depends. InfusionSoft is kind of the big daddy for the most part just because they just raised 54 million bucks so they’re doing a lot of development and things like that.
OfficeAutoPilot is another great solution, which in some ways is easier to use and has some other cool features like being able to set up membership sites and integrate with your website a lot easier. And ActiveCampaign is a relatively new one. ActiveCampaign is like the MailChimp of marketing automation, where it doesn’t have a shopping cart, doesn’t have affiliates, just emails.
But you can actually get a free account for 2500 contacts, and you have four marketing automation features you can put if this-then that type of logic in it. In fact you can actually even customize the content of it in a particular email template based on different criteria and create rules in that, so it’s pretty cool.
The funneling map
So this is where we will talk through this funnel a little bit. So the number one thing you’ve got to try is you’ve got to drive traffic to an offer. Everybody else have been talking about this today so I’m going to leave that to the experts who drive traffic, but somehow or another you need to drive traffic, you need to capture those leads, get them into your system so you can start having a conversation with them.
You need to segment and bond with those leads so that they’ll actually know you, like you, trust you, and eventually buy from you. You need to make them some sort of sales presentation, whether it’s a webinar like Taki just talked about, or video sales letter, or just a regular long-form of sales letter, something to make that presentation. You need to convert those leads into buyers once they’ve seen that presentation. And you then need to fulfill the sale and send them to other offers, gather testimonials, referrals – this is a huge part.
Everything on that map, the top part of the map you guys probably understand pretty well. In terms of driving traffic, sending them to squeeze page, capturing the list. What I see most people don’t have in place is the stuff at the bottom.
Like what happens after somebody purchases from you? How do you nurture that relationship? How do you get them to buy more? And then finally, you have an ongoing nurture sequence just to keep people engaged and keep them informed. So we’re going to dive a little bit deeper into each of these.
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