170: Get Your Perfect Summer PTO Plan (AI Prompt Included)

Foreign hi there. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to ask you an important question. Are you wondering why your hard work isn't reflecting in your bank account? If so, I've got something that could change the game for you. With my digital product accelerator one on one coaching program, I'm on a mission to help entrepreneurs like you bank consistent revenue without sacrificing your time, time or sanity. Imagine shifting from 90% client facing work to enjoying consistent revenue from your digital products, all while reclaiming your time. You already know that you don't need another course and a one size fits all approach isn't going to cut it. What you need is a strategic long term plan tailored just for you. So if you're ready to build the profitable freedom giving business you've dreamed of, apply to work with me by going to destinycop.com apply I cannot wait to learn more about you and your business. 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 generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desks, constantly live launching or worrying about the social media algorithms. I hope you enjoy our episode today. Hi there Destiny here and I am super excited about today's podcast episode and I'm going to talk about and walk you through how you can put together a summer PTO plan. So pay time off plan and over the past few weeks I have spoken to many different online business owners who are interested in my one on one coaching and the one thing universally across the board that every everyone needs help with is managing their time. They are stretched too thin and they don't have a ton of time to devote to growing their business, especially over the summer. They can only do the minimum. But then the question is what is this minimal, right? They're asking me what should I focus on to maximize my results. So today I am diving into how you can map out your summer PTO plan. And I'm also going to share some of my time management secrets with you to help ensure that you get the much needed break while keeping your business running smoothly and to set yourself up for success in the fall. But before we dive in, there is one thing that I just want to mention. I saw a post the other day from an online entrepreneur and she was encouraging folks to take a full summer sabbatical. The problem with this is is what you're doing now will affect your results in the fall and quite frankly going into fourth quarter. So it is important to keep nurturing and growing your audience even during the summer months. Now, for me personally, I definitely plan to off a good amount of time this summer. We have several different vacations planned and I just really want to take it easy at our pool and I have, you know, friends that I'm wanting to spend time with. So I'm going to take it easy this summer. So the bottom line is that while summer is a time for relaxation and you know, basically recharging as an online business owner, you cannot afford to let your business come to a complete halt. So even while you are enjoying your well deserved time off, certain things in your business definitely need attention over the summer. And the first thing I want you to do is to assess what is your have to do this summer. And I'm also going to give you some suggestions here. The first one is your weekly email newsletter. In this email newsletter you're going to promote your content, which can be your repurposed content. You're going to promote any affiliate products and you're going to promote your own products. You're going to give them tips. You might be involved in some audience growth initiatives that you need to promote. Really the goal here is to not be perfect, but to stay consistent. Now if you recall, if you're on my email list for the Creators MBA newsletter, in one of my most recent publications I talk about how I recently read Principles of newsletters by C.J. chilvers, which covers his lessons learned 37 years of newsletter publishing. I highly, highly recommend if you want to check it out. And the question, one of the questions I should say that was posed in that particular ebook was why do mediocre creators often get more attention than the best creators? And the answer is because they are consistent. So if you take podcasts, for example, there are 5 million of them out there, but only around 448, 929 are active, meaning they have published an episode in the last 90 days and even fewer of them stick to a regular schedule. And I can tell you from experience, it is tough being consistent in podcasting. And the same thing, quite frankly, happened with blogging back in the day. And it's also true for videos and it is true for email newsletters now. So staying consistent is a huge, huge game changer. People's attention spans are super short, so you need that consistency to keep them engaged. We are all creatures of habit, so you want to make sure that you are becoming a part of their regular routine. And this is why you don't want to disappear over the summer, it is super important to engage with your audience and make sure that you have your email schedule in even when you're on vacation or just taking time off. So that being said, your weekly newsletter schedule is a must have for the summer, even when you are on PTO now, moving in to the next area that needs your attention this summer. And I'm going to give you some caveats here, and that is your content marketing. So consistent content marketing keeps your audience engaged and it also attracts new customers. It helps you maintain your brand presence, and it helps you, you know, basically keep that authority out there in your niche. And to help you plan for your summer pto, a couple things you can do here. You can batch create your pillar content ahead of time. So that could be your YouTube videos, your podcast episodes, or your blog post. And if you're like, destiny, I don't have any time whatsoever to create new content. You can repurpose existing content to save you time and just keep your marketing efforts consistent. And I really want to throw in another tip here. So let's say that you don't have anything to repurpose for that week. You know, you need to get your newsletter out, but you don't have any, you know, content that you can repurpose or you don't have any new pillar content that you want to promote. You can just write a short content section in your newsletter with some tips for them that you can. And you can also repurpose that on social media too. That is okay to do. Again, we're not focusing on being perfect. We are focusing on consistency here. And I'll give you a specific example. So going back to what I mentioned a few minutes ago about that section in one of my recent newsletters that I wrote, wrote about talking about that ebook I had read about, Principles of Newsletter. This is just something I wrote, right? It wasn't a pillar piece of content. Like, it wasn't one of my podcast episodes. It wasn't something that I had, you know, created to put on social media. It really was something that I was writing out my news newsletter and I was like, you know what? I read this this week. This is important information for them. I need to, you know, basically communicate it out. So it was super, super valuable. I've had several people contact me and like, Destiny, I love that you're right. I just need to be consistent. And quite frankly, it was super easy for me to write. It probably took me, you know, just two to three minutes to write that. And I could Take maybe a quote from that and put that out on social media and repurpose it so it doesn't have to be a huge piece of pillar content that you're putting in your new in your email newsletter. Okay, so the next thing I want to focus on is the paid in, the pay time, paid time off, and that is sales funnels. So automated sales funnels, when they're set up and converting, are one of the best ways to get paid while you are on vacation. And somebody asked me today what I thought of the everything pages and should they just put all of their digital products on something like that and link that in all of their emails. And I told them, I said, I think they're fine to showcase what you have to offer, but they don't take your customer on a specific journey like a sales funnel does. So when somebody signs up for your lead magnet, you're going to have this sales funnel to guide potential customers through the buying process, from awareness to decision making, and they work very, very well. It is much more unlikely that somebody's going to come to your website, land on your everything page, and click to purchase. But they will sign up for a free lead magnet. Maybe you've posted on social media, maybe you've been a speaker at a summit, or maybe they're, you know, you promoted that lead magnet on Pinterest. They go and they sign up, they see your tripwire sales page, they click to buy because it's awesome and, you know, completely related to your lead magnet. And then they click to buy that, they add an order bump, and then they may even go on to purchase additional upsells or cross sells. Again, that is a very different customer journey than just linking to an everything page in an email. So I'm a huge fan of sales funnels. I think most online business owners need to have them set up and in their business. And again, they are one of the best ways to get paid while on vacation. Okay, so next, I want to help you create your personalized summer PTO plan. Because at the end of the day, every one of our businesses are different. We have different goals and priorities to accomplish this summer. I have spoken to probably almost 15 online business owners this week, and every single one of those businesses were different, and they were all at different stages in their business journey. So the first step in creating your summer PTO plan is setting very clear priorities and goals. And again, like I said, they're going to be different for you than they are for me. So I want you to determine what you're going to achieve during the summer and what tasks are most critical to your business's success. For instance, if maintaining consistent new valuable content, like new podcast episodes, is a priority for you, then you're going to decide on a batching schedule that works for you, and then you're going to automate that process as much as possible. This way, your audience will continue to receive that valuable content even when you're not actively working. So you're going to write down these goals and then you're going to work to break them down in actionable steps. So this approach is going to help you stay focused and make some steady progress to towards your objectives. And I'm going to give you a prompt that you can use in AI. I've actually set it up in Chat GPT, but you could use this in really a any AI system out there. So I'm going to give you a prompt to help you do that in just a second. The other thing, before I get into that, the other thing that I just want to mention that I do that I think you'll find it very valuable, especially over the summer, is time blocking and scheduling. So time blocking is a very powerful kind of technique to help you allocate specific times for tasks and specific times for personal time. So basically how this works is you might allocate your mornings to tackle business tasks such as, you know, checking your emails, creating your content, managing your social media, working on your email newsletter. Right, all those things that you have to get done. And then your afternoons, maybe, you know, maybe your kids are in the camp in the morning. So you can actually, you have a block of time that you can actually work on those business activities, but you have to go pick them out at maybe 12 or 1 in those afternoons. You can set aside, set aside that block of time for personal activities or family times or your hobbies, or taking your kids to the pool. So time blocking is something I highly recommend that you look into for the summer. Now, to create a customized workflow and really to streamline your business task. What I would like you to do is use AI system like ChatGPT to help you with this. And I have put together a prompt that I'm going to share with you in the podcast show notes that you can use, you can just copy and paste it and you can use in really any AI system. And it basically what it will do, it will, based on your goals and what you want to get accomplished this summer is it's going to give you a very specific customized workflow for this and the Particular prompt that I have put together assumes that you're working no more than 10 hours per week. But if you have more time to allocate like 20 hours per week, you would put that in there. And you would also customize this prompt based on your specific goals. For example, if one of your goals this summer is to create a new tripwire sales funnels, you're going to add that to the prompt. So it's broken out. It basically breaks it out for the role. So it's telling the AI that you are a productivity consultant and you specialize in creating comprehensive and efficient plans for businesses to ensure seamless operations during periods of reduced staff availability, such as summer pto. So we're basically telling the AI, you know, this is who you are and this is what you're going to help us create. So we have the task in there, we have the context, and that's where you're going to put in, you know, the hours that you want to work and between, between the contact context and the task. That's what you're going to put, what your goals are, how many hours you want to work. And then we have the steps in here and the constraints. And that's going to give you a very personalized plan that you can use over the summer to really kind of streamline your workflows and still achieve your business objectives. Okay, I will make sure that those links are in the show notes so you have all of those prompts and you know exactly what to do there. So there you go. I hope you enjoyed this episode and it helps you create a personalized summer PTO plan to nurture and grow your audience and bring in revenue over the summer, even while you are on vacation. But before you go, I just want to mention something, and you may have already seen this. I have recently announced that I have opened up a few select spots to work one on one with me to help you grow your digital product revenue while working a limited summer schedule. And I want to just give you a little bit more additional information on my one on one coaching program. And when you are ready, I would love to work with you. So let me just go into details and explain exactly how this will work. It is personalized, one on one, unlimited coaching. We do that via Voxer. But I have a ton of other perks in there for you and basically how it works. After you sign up, you're going to complete an intake form. This is going to give me some details about your business, your goals, some of the struggles that you have had to date and I'm going to use that, I'm going to review it, we're going to meet via Zoom and we're going to put together an action plan. So for the majority of my clients, one of their main goals and their target outcome that they want to achieve during our time together is growing their digital product revenue. Your goals may be a little different, but most people definitely want to focus on growing their digital product revenue. And I would say that while we definitely put together a customized plan, I do have a profit growth blueprint that I work with and I have a very step by step process there. The first step is we define your personal and business goals. In step two, we refine your messaging and your targeting. Some people have that all buttoned up and some people just need have, you know, we need to do a little bit of refinement there. Then in step three, we work to update your offer portfolio and your pricing. Then in step four, that's when we really focus on lead generation and visibility efforts. In step five, we work to fine tune your business processes and automations. And then in step six, that's really where we go in to amplify your growth and scale your business. So every single week in this program, at the beginning of the week, we're going to work together on your goals, what you want to accomplish for that week, and then on Friday, we're going to celebrate what you accomplish. So you really do get that accountability. The other thing that you get in here, and I would say that a lot of people say that this is one of the things that they love, one of the things that they love about the program is that every single week you have the opportunity to submit a weekly 15 minute marketing audit. And really this could be anything in your business. So if you have question about one of your offers, you have questions about pricing, you have questions about the offers that you're including in your sales funnel. Maybe you want feedback on a sales page, maybe you want feedback on a landing page, maybe you want feedback on a lead magnet that you're using to drive traffic into your funnel. Really, it's anything in your business and you can do that every single week. So essentially it's like a done with you type of service where you can get direct feedback on what you're working on just so you don't get stuck. And of course you can ask questions at any time and get coaching via Voxter, even if you have a question in the middle of the night. I had a client tell me this week that how much she appreciates that she can ask the question at any time she wanted because if she waited she'd forget all about it. So she really enjoyed that particular aspect of it. So I have opened up my calendar for express one on one coaching sessions to really assess whether or not we would be a great fit to work together. So even if you're just a little bit curious about this, I can hook you up with a time and we can talk about your specific situation. I've been doing these all week and let me tell you, I have absolutely loved them. So what I want you to do is go to Destiny, copy apply and let's touch base. Bye for now. Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you love the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.