156: A Glimpse Behind the Curtain: What Worked in 2023 & Plans for 2024

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Welcome to the Creators MBA Podcast, your go to resource for mastering the art and science of digital product entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners craft robust growth strategies that combine the magical world of digital products and selling them via automated funnels and savvy e commerce practices. Join me as I unravel the secrets to boosting digital product revenue and designing long term business growth. From exclusive interviews with industry leaders to in depth analysis of successful digital product models, this podcast is your guide to thriving in the digital product marketplace. So sit back, relax and enjoy the show.

Hi there. In this podcast episode, I'm going to give you a behind the scenes look at all of our different brands in 2023 and walk you through what I'm going to be focusing on in 2024 based on our results. I know for me personally, I really love to get a behind the scenes kind of peek behind other businesses because I want to know that I'm not alone in my struggles and in my successes. So I want to know that there's other people out there that are going through exactly what I've been going through. So let me start with giving you kind of a behind the scenes look of 2023. What we did, what worked, and kind of what we're going to keep focusing on. Now. Last year we had a ton of different kind of initiatives and activities and things that we were focusing on. And let me tell you, we worked extremely, extremely hard in 2023. So here, here's some of the numbers. We launched 14 summits and bundles. Now most of those were live summits. We opened two Shopify stores. So our Hobby school Shopify store and our hello Content Shopify store we sold 2,879 digital products. Now that was through the summits, through our Shopify stores and just through my personal brand, we built 17 automated sales funnels. We created hundreds of digital products for our E Commerce Shopify stores and in 2023 we served 1,543 paying customers. We had over 22,000 attendees in all of our events across both brands. And we collaborated with around 330 business owners, basically helping them, you know, basically promoting their business, whether it was through one of our virtual summits or our bundles. Now that's a lot. And let me tell you, we worked a lot of hours to make that happen. And we're not going to do that in 2024. And that's one of the things that we're going to change in 2024. We're going to Take a step back and focus on exactly the. The events that worked well for us, and we're going to double down on them. Another thing that I had happen in 2023 was I had two major surgeries at the end of 2023. So in fourth quarter of 2023, at two major surgeries, one of them being a total knee replacement at the end of the summer, which I, quite frankly, I'm still recovering from. So. So that was also extremely difficult. So not only did we have all of these events going on in fourth quarter, I also had these major. Two major surgeries that I was recovering from in October, and then I kind of bled into November, and then at the end of December, I had total knee replacement. So I'm kind of still kind of recovering from all of that, which is why it's taken me, quite frankly, some time to kind of get going in 2020, 24. So last year, in 2023, our main focus was on growth, whether it was expanding our email list, expanding our audience, selling these, you know, affordable digital products through the various channels that we had, whether it was through the Shopify stores or our automated funnels. And I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna lie, you know, those strategies work. The strategies that we have in place in terms of the lead generation with the summits, the bundles, those definitely work. Now, we had some events that worked better than others, but it was a ton of work, and it was incredibly demanding. So when I kind of took a step back and I said, you know what? I can't keep going the way I've been going, you know, we definitely have to stay back, take a step back and refocus our efforts and really double down on what work the best. So looking ahead to 2024, basically what we're going to be focusing on is honing in on the events and the activities that basically produce the best results from last year. So in Hobby School, we're going to only be doing six major events this year, and we're kind of spacing them out throughout the year. But we took our events that we did that we made the most money on, that we had the biggest, you know, attendee growth on. And those are the events that we're going to focus on in 2024. The other thing that we're going to be doing is enhancing our affiliate program with Hobby School. So our affiliate program with Hobby School is, you know, very robust. We have over. I can't even. I don't even have the number in front of me, but I know we have over 200 affiliates or people who could be affiliates for our various events. And actually we get a lot of our sales for the summits from our affiliates. So we're going to really double down on our affiliate program for hobby school. The other thing that we're going to do is, and we've already started working on this and we have this on our website, we have outlined a lot of different collaborations and sponsorship opportunities, whether it's through our events that we're doing or just our email promotion. So just to give you a very specific example here, let's say that somebody, for whatever reason, is not invited to be a speaker at one of our events, but they still want to participate for the lead generation opportunity. So we have a way that they can sponsor the summit at a very, you know, basically at a, you know, an affordable cost, a low cost, where they can still grow their email list. It gives them an opportunity to get in front of their ideal customer. They can still grow their email list by donating a product to our digital back swag. So, you know, there's a lot of different opportunities that we have that people can collaborate with us in hobby school. The other thing that we're doing this year, which we didn't do last year, which quite frankly, if I had known that that particular summit was going to be something such a big hit, I probably would have done something. But last year we launched a summit where people can take their hobbies and turn it into a money making business. Now we're doing the same thing in January of this year. We're calling it the Monetize your craft summit. But we're also launching a membership program following this summit that's really focused on helping people who have these hobbies and they want to turn these passions into a profitable venture. So I will definitely keep you updated on this launch and let you know how the launch of this goes. But that's another thing that we're doing differently this year. Now moving on to hello Content. As you may or may not know, hello Content is our Shopify store. It's tied in with my personal brand, the Destiny Cop.com brand, but it's called hello Content. So it's hello Content Shop. And basically what we have there, we have a ton of digital products that people can use in their online business. Now some of the products there they can use as a lead magnet or they can use as partners part of an online course or a membership, or they can just use it in the marketing of their business. So we have social media files we have email swipe files. So there's a lot of things that they, we have there that they can use just to market, market, you know, their business. So what I have learned there is while I can email out to my email list about flash sales and promotions for the hello Content Store, you know, I run the risk of basically burning my email list out. Right. So what we're going to do for hello Content, we're going to put a lot of focus in 2024 on blogging, SEO and Pinterest with the goal of really building that up to drive organic traffic, organic search traffic to the hello Content shop. So I'm really trying to diversify the traffic resources there. I traffic sources there. I don't want to focus solely on email promotion. The other thing I'm going to do with hello Content is explore the potential of really building out the affiliate program for that store. We've started it, but we haven't put a lot of emphasis there. So that's another thing that I want to do there. Now what I'm really excited about and I cannot wait to tell you about this is everything that we're doing in my personal brand. So the one of the things that we're doing is rebranding the podcast. So I'm going to put a major focus on this podcast in 2024. So we're rebranding it from the course creators MBA podcast to the creators MBA podcast. I really feel like that's a title that reflects our audience and the people who are listening to this. Right? You guys are creators. Whether you're, you know, you're creating digital products, maybe online courses, memberships, you know, maybe low cost digital products, you are creators. So we're going to continue to dive in and really go deep into topics like boosting digital product revenue, mastering these automated funnels. As you know and you I told you about, we built a lot of automated funnels this year and also focusing on building out savvy e commerce strategies. So that's another area that we have folk basically experience in with our hello Content store and our hobby school store, the two Shopify stores that we, we have, we're going to go dive deep into those e commerce strategies. Now the other thing that I'm doing in my personal brand, I'm going to put a ton of focus in email marketing. So with the podcast and with email marketing, I've already hired two different coaches to help us with that. So I've hired a coach to help me with my podcast strategy and I've also hired A coach to help me with my email marketing. The other thing we're doing is we're updating all of our courses. So we've already updated the course in a box program. It is updated with all the latest and greatest strategies. We're upgrading our evergreen funnel and then we're launching a new course called the Funnel Cure that's going to be focused on those tripwire type funnels and really go into details on those because I truly believe that every online business owner out there, you know, you have a lead magnet. I want you to have a tripwire funnel on the back end of that so you can gain those automated instant customers there. Now the other thing that I'm going to place a major focus on in 2024 is our digital product accelerator program. So this is my personal personalized coaching one on one service. You get a limited one on one coaching with it weekly marketing audience. And I tailor all of the coaching to your own personal unique needs. Okay, so that's another thing that we're going to be focusing on majorly in 2024. Now, we do have some collaboration opportunities in 2024 with my personal brand. If you recall, last year we did a lot of online learning virtual summits. Now we're not going to those this year. Did they work? Yes, they worked. But I felt like the bundle that we ran last year was more in line with what I was looking for from these events. And what I'm looking for from these events is basically lead generation and collaboration opportunities. So we're going to do three free bundles this year. We're going to do one related to sales funnels. So automated sales funnels. We're going to be doing one related to digital products and we're going to continue to do the one that we did last October that's related to business planning because it was a huge, huge hit. So that's our roadmap for 2024. I kind of walked you through what worked for us, kind of where we struggled. But I would really love to hear from you. What worked for you in 2023, what didn't work for you in 2023 and what are your goals for 2024? You can reach out to me on Instagram, LinkedIn or just send me, send me an email. I would love to know. And if you have any questions on what worked for me or what didn't work for me, I'm more than happy to go into more specifics. Just let me know. I'll be more than happy to answer any questions that you have and bye for now.

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