Sunrise Business Mastermind Series Content Marketing

All right. Okay. Good morning, everybody.

Good morning, everybody. How you doing? Hey, y business mastermind. This morning we are talking about automation. Yay. Yeah. Get excited. Quick story I want to tell you before we start. I was talking to a friend of mine last, last week. He's a plumber. And.

About a year ago, maybe 18 months ago, I was talking to him, I said, how's things going? He said, well, not good. I'm about to close my business down. I'm like, really? That's not good at all, by the way. It's not a joke. So if you're thinking I'm going to say something funny or not. So he said, I'm about to shut my business down. And I said, oh, really? What's the story? He said, it's too much competition for my business.

You know, things are not good. Me and the wife are not going too well, and it's real pressure about running a business. And he said it was pretty close there. As I was about to close down, he said, well.

I spoke to a business advisor and he gave me some advice about what I should do. So I put some motions in place. And he said, the business advisor said, you need to concentrate on two things. You need to concentrate on product and also your position, your position in the market because there's a lot of plumbers out there, right? You can call a lot of plumbers. And so he concentrated on his positioning. He started saying, looking at what he does with his workers. So he made sure that all these workers were background checked so they, they had safe workers, if you like. Because if you're somebody at a house and a plumber, you don't know who they are, what their history is, right? So if he made sure that he checked their background so they were not criminals going into people's houses. He made them wear really nice clothes, like shirts, no butt cracks. There's a big policy about no butt cracks. He made them wear booties, you know, those little booties that they wear. Well, he made them wear booties into everybody's house as part of their culture so that you knew that they weren't looking at somebody else's crap from another job, literally. So she started getting a really good reputation about being a clean plumber. And most importantly, he was on time. So they said they weren't there at 2 o', clock, they were there within 10 minutes or so. So that was his positioning. But then the real magic start happening for his business was when he was creating his product. And what he did to change all of this was that he created, like a membership site if you like, or a membership to his plumbing company. And people were paying about 10 to 15 dollars a month. And what they got for 10 to 15 dollars for his business. So if they had a problem, call them. Let's say I'm a priority customer. And they would be first of all is to get a call out. But he'd also do twice, twice a year, he would do regular maintenance for them. So he would go into their house, he'd look at all their plumbing, we'd get their washers, their on the taps, their toilets leaking, the hot water system, that sort of stuff. And he would make sure that he was doing preventative maintenance for these people for $15 a month. And what happened was that a couple things happened at once. Firstly, his emergency calls were way lower. He wasn't getting emergency calls at stupid times of the day, rather stupid times of the night. So people were doing preventative maintenance. So you didn't have those issues. But the other cool thing that was happening was his diplomas would go on, on a regular site visit every six months and they'd go into somebody's house and they'd say, I'm here to do the maintenance. And while they were there, I think about 40 to 50% of people said, why are you here? I've got this other problem, can you fix it? Right? And they're like, sure, it's only going to cost you. Not going to charge a call out fee because I'm already here. It's only going to cost X amount of dollars. So all of a sudden he was getting a lot more revenue coming through his biggest business because he was going into those people's places. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So business started turning around. But the cool thing was that that second part, that membership stuff was all automated. He didn't have to go and chase them for an invoice. So if Linda came along and wanted to be a member of the plumbing business, he just said, go to my website. Here's the web page you sign up for. And the website took her details. The website sent her the back end system, sent her an invoice every month, or actually direct debited her money out of her account. He didn't have to do anything, he just had to tell the people once and it was all sent and done automatically. So he automated that entire part of his business, which was really helpful because he had about 150 to 200 members. And if you have to go and invoice 150 to 200 members every month just trying to chase up $20. It almost doesn't work right. So you automated this sort of stuff. So I just wanted to bring that up and just let you know that there's all sorts of different ways to automate your business. And this was just one example that I know of that really changed this person's life, if you like. So have a think about how you can automate your business today as we go through and talk about automation processes in your business. So before we get started, just quickly, does everybody know what SCORE is? Anybody not know? Never heard of score.

Wow, that was an easy, easy little pitch, wasn't it? Just for people that don't know and put their hands up like Stephen the Green. So SCORE is a. It's a SBA funded volunteer organization. They have about 350 chapters around the U.S. they're all volunteers, 13 and a half thousand volunteers or retired executives giving their time freely to help business owners like you get through some of the difficult situations that you may face, whether you're starting up or whether you're well into business. Mentoring sessions are free. Who likes free?

Free is good, right? And the cool thing is when you go to a mentoring session, they don't try and sell you anything else because they don't have anything to sell. So it's always free and they're not going to try and save. So they do mentoring sessions that last for about an hour and you can do as many as you like. So there's some school mentors here. So I'm going to. They'll introduce himself in just a moment. But before we do that, I just want to quickly go around the table and find out what your name is, where you're from and what do you know or want to get out of automation for your business. So let's start over here. Cathy Roy.

Cathy. Kathy Keel. Clara Frankenstein. And I'm here primarily because.

You never know enough, Never know enough, never know enough clients. And I'm in the process of automating some things for them.

Great. What sort of things are you automating?

Through Sales Communications and.

I'm attempting to do it through Salesforce and.

No kidding. And I've had to integrate it with Campaign Monitor. And.

Now I'm at that point where I gotta jump off the cliff, make.

A decision to do it right. Thank you.

I think you should skip me.

I'm.

Shannon and Kathy suggested that I come first.

I'm.

This is my. One of my first steps.

Good. That's okay.

Okay, that's good.

What, what's your business?

I. I invented some. Some things.

I've been.

A couple things are patented.

Right.

And they're medical, they're for surgery. And I've been trying to get out big boys and talk to them and I. That's a tough one. Yeah, sure.

So.

So I.

So it's a new business for you?

Well, brand new.

Brand new. Awesome.

And fortunately, Kathy, that's next to me, so she's able to advise me as to where to take steps.

Right.

This is one of her. One of her steps she needs.

Good. Thank you. Make sure you come and see her. Check in with some of the school mentors later and just even book a time in. As I said, it doesn't cost anything. They can chuck you up some great ideas, even some contacts and connections, too.

I'm Stephen and I'm a SCORE volunteer. I've been doing it about three years and my background is in small business management development, running it and then selling it and then running a nonprofit.

We're happy to be of assistance. And I have to say, it's not one or two times. You can come to our three mentoring services for as long as you'd like for whatever issue you have relative to business.

I do.

I'm Greg Birdsall. I do home watching for the snowbirds and provide concierge service for people year round.

Basically take care of anything and everything they would need to be done.

Home watching means you inspect the house once a week. And you inspect everything, the plumbing, the doors, windows, locks, make sure there's been no theft, make sure the landscaper is doing this job, the pool man, the cleaning service, whatever. And you spray for pests so that they don't have to have a pest company come in the house. And then when they come to town, you stock up their kitchen or refrigerator and pull fresh flowers out and make sure gardeners planted flowers, that the home's ready for them to receive them when they come home, even pick them up to the airport and bring them to their home.

So you're. You're. They calling you. That's their automation. Right. Calling on you to do all that stuff.

And I am just learning what automation is. I don't actually know yet.

Cool.

You may do already.

And I love score and I just had my first mentoring session.

Oh, good. Excellent. Yeah, good.

So that's a testimonial.

Thanks, Greg. Good.

I'm W. Bruce Stever. I'm a business exit advisor. What I do is I help owners finish up what they started up by transforming their illiquid business assets. And their hard work into wealth and lifestyle. I do that by developing an exit strategy that's customized for them. And then more importantly.

I'm here because it wasn't that long ago my nickname was Bob the Dinosaur. If anyone follows Gilbert as this character who's so far back in the past, I managed to struggle all the way to become Robert the dinosaur. And I'm trying to go, you know, I'm trying to get the dinosaurs out.

Sometimes you can be so far back here in front. Sometimes you can be so far back you're in front of. It changes that often that you know what, even if you. This is serious though, a lot of people say, well, I've missed a boat. It's, you know, I'm out of technology, you're out of Internet marketing. You know, I can't remember. I don't know where it's at. Well, because it changes so often. If you started today, you're still going to be ahead of most of the people that thought they were up to date last week, if that makes sense.

Does that work with dating too?

I'm a score volunteer. I spent most of my career as a consultant and we always used to say we didn't have to bill our clients to be the perfect job. So now I have the perfect job and complete lack of pay. And I'm here to learn and to recruit new sport clients.

Thank you.

My name is Joanne Collins. I have a business called Buongo Organizers and I organize and declutter homes and business offices. I'm in Palm Springs. Andrew is updating my website. Hopefully we'll be launched.

Up automation. What do you know about automation? What do you want to know about automation?

I need to automate everything that's on my website and a good idea of the plumber example that you gave earlier, I'd like to use.

It's. It's something that people can use.

Yeah, frequently. Maybe every six months. We'll go back to a client and say, okay, how are you doing? We need some help. But that's something we'll talk about.

How many people are in the service service based industry. This is something you can apply to all your businesses. Thank you. Good morning.

I'm Annie and I'm the director of sales at Lincoln and coffee chief.

She makes it go coffee.

I'm just here to find out what automated automation is. I probably could use it in my business with all my clients to cool.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Jer. Today I don't know which hat I'm wearing because I have so many projects related to Internet market. Basically I was an interior designer and probably that's the main thing that I'm trying to put online.

Right.

It's sort of a do it yourself. I'm teaching people how to do it themselves steps and I'm also creating ebooks related to it and I will be selling home accessories too. So get some revenue out of it.

Excellent. Thank you.

My name is lman. I have a tax preparation business.

And.

I got this email information through email recently. Just got interested on the topic.

So now you've got some time this week, right? Yeah.

Gotta find out what it's great.

Welcome. Let's go to the back.

Hi, Jennifer. I work for the Chamber and.

She mentioned organizing since I hadn't organized since in Los Angeles.

I don't have to do it here, but I did it there because I like to be organized.

What about automation? What sort of things do you know or would you like to know about automation?

Well, I wouldn't get better with all.

The social media texts.

Cool. We'll touch on that a little bit later.

I'm David. I'm the president of the Chamber of Commerce.

We're here to help all small businesses and promote score.

Great partners with SCORE and Henry. Jeff and I want to learn about how we can use more automation. Great. Awesome. I love you. We've got.

I'm Amy. Our business, we help you generate leads using video marketing, ultimately sales and I know a lot about automation. We used it to actually communicate with over 100,000 people on a weekly basis for two years, which was awesome.

Great. Thank you, Jesse. Jeff Harrison is walking in and out. He'll be back in a few moments. Amy's business partner. My name is Andrew McCauley. I'm from autopilot, your business. We do a lot of creating websites, automating a lot of this stuff for you. And then we also help amplify your messages out there using social media and other types of things. So let's dig into automation today. A couple of quick stats that I want to talk about. Automation. Can everybody see clearly? Okay, I'll read it out. 70% of small to medium businesses are still processing most of their data, still processing most of them manually. How many people still do lots of stuff manually? Come on. Really?

Resulting in hours of wasted time. Automation helps you leverage your time. Who wants more time? Yeah, we all want more time. I think automation can lower your cost of doing things. It lets you reach more people. How many people like to have more people to be able to reach? And it allows you to work smarter. I think the number one thing that people come to us and they say we want to be able to work smarter. Automation certainly lets you do that and it eliminates human error as well. There's a lot of times when we're manually doing things and we get tired because it's a boring process and we make a mistake. We want to eliminate human error. Automation will do that for you.

79% of the top performing companies have been using marketing automation for more than two years. Okay. So there's all sorts of different ways to use marketing automation. I'm not going to go through every single one of them. Otherwise I'll be here for a month. But I'm going to go through some of the big ones and some of the things that we're using in our business to help them just spark some ideas for you.

What are the primary reasons for not deploying marketing automation? The number one reason was no need. And I think that really means they didn't know what automation was because everybody needs automation to some degree. And the second one, no budget is often a big one because people have this assumption that automation is expensive. Anyone think about that? Anyone agree with that? Expensive. The tools I'm going to show you today are all free. If they're not free, they're expensive. $5.99 a month. So if you can't afford that then maybe when the wrong business but for free is going to be good and you can get started with a lot of your automation with this sort of stuff today.

So quick question. Actually I want to. I want you to partner up. I want you to do one just. But the person sitting next to you, twos or threes. What are some of the common automated systems that have appeared in the last 15 years that you've noticed? Does that have to be my opinion? I just wanted to come up. I just want to juggle some ideas out there. I put this little picture of a parking garage, right? So these days we don't have anyone sitting in a booth anymore, right? It's all automated. You go up to the garage, you pull your ticket out, you drive in your parking car, you come out and pay. You don't see it. Right? There is. I'll give you three examples. I was in the airport on the weekend coming home and Best Buy had a vending machine in the terminal. They were selling headphones and all sorts of music related stuff for travel. They didn't want to go and put an employee in a shop front in the terminal. So what did they do? They get this little.

Vending machine at this time. Now, is that a good way to automate their sales? Right. No cost to that. And then there's a hotel chain in Europe. It's been in Europe. I don't think it's over here. It's called Formula One. Anyone heard of Formula One? Formula One, it's been around for about 20 years. And it's the weirdest hotel you've ever seen. You go up to the front door and you put your credit card in the door to get in first. And then, in fact, before you do that, it'll say, how many nights do you want to stay? Imagine how many nights you want to stay. It'll say, what size room? And you only have one size. So you pick the size and you go in. And this room is. It has a double bed on the bottom, a single across the top as a butt. Has a TV bolted to the wall. It has a remote for the TV bolted to the wall. Has a window that opens 3 inches and a sink that turns off every. Turns on and turns off after 20 seconds. And then you go to the showers. And the showers, you go on the. Lock the door, have your shower. When you go out, it shuts and cleans itself, right? It cleans itself. Toilets clean themselves, and then they have vending machines for snacks and food. You don't see a person in this hotel. You don't see it first in the hotel. They have a cleaning crew, obviously, to come change the sheets, because that would be weird if they change themselves. But they. So the only people that come and work in the hotel were cleaners and stuff. But this is a fully automated hotel, and I was traveling around Europe, and when I didn't speak 20 different languages in 20 different countries, it was the best thing ever because I didn't have to go and try and book myself a motel and get this holiday.

All the time. So what I want you to do is, with a partner, come up with a couple of things that have been automated over the last 15 years that never used to be automated, that are now. All right, so give you a couple of minutes to do that with a partner. If you got a pen or if you got a paper.

Come up with some of those ideas.

Right.

Sorry. I'll try and keep it here.

Doing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Manufacturing.

Manufacturing. Anything specific in manufacturing, do you think? Help.

Most people won't know what this is, but CNC machines, they're programmed. There are no people on the floor. On the assembly floor. There's a peer operator who programs into the machine in terms of what to do and what to tool.

A lot of that's been automated.

Tesla cars are completely built by robots. There's no human hands.

Touch that car, they start driving them for us too. Right.

Google will be. Google's been testing a car a driverless car for the last.

Yeah, I think they did their first was it LA to New York test drive.

Good.

Anything else? Anything else?

Well, the injection molding which is what I've been looking at shape switching. Look at the. It's all computerized put in it develops this.

Yeah.

Good. Car washes.

Yep. Car wash is a good one. Right. Any others?

Well, automatic checkouts.

Checkouts. Yeah. Now I don't know self checkout. Self checkouts. You know the Alberton's near V I think El. They've got rid of them. They just got rid of them. They just got rid of them. I said to the several other guys, I said what? What's going on? Why are you getting rid of me? More problems than they were.

People kept walking out with stuff or.

Forget to put stuff through contact.

They do but so anyway and that was. They were the last Albertson in the valley to have it. So if you go to Albertsons around there, I don't think it's. You said that. Interesting. How about you guys?

You came up with ideas like for my business where I could have on my website a page that somebody searching for business might.

Yep.

Check off all the things they're interested in sin for a bit.

Also reporting to the clients that. That hire you that are out of town rather than assuming that they just know what you're doing. Letting them know email them every week of all the things you did and anything you noticed have questions about so that they feel like they're. They're getting something that they paid for having knowledge of it.

But you're still doing the manual, still doing that manually. Right. What if you did what you just spoke about doing the automatic check system and you had as you walked around the house you check, check, check, check, do this and as soon as you hit bang it sends off the report to them. Right. You don't have to write an email. It's already done as you're doing it. Right. You know, so this thing, there's certain things like that Anything else.

Nothing else has been invented in the last 15 years. Has it been automated. You're concentrating on what you. What you would like to see.

We misunderstood.

Okay.

Just checking to see if I made it.

The only one.

And.

TV show recording.

Serious.

Email blast and Letters, newsletters and things of that nature.

Today as well. So you've got videos.

Senior care monitoring with cameras.

Tell us a bit about that.

With my mother.

She's in Pennsylvania. She was. She passed away. But.

All the children. I have three brothers and sisters. We signed up with the company and had two cameras put in the home. She would not go to a nursing home. So one in the kitchen, one in the bedroom. So four o' clock in the morning one day I look at my computer while I'm making coffee and I didn't see her. And all of a sudden I saw the curtain move and ahead and she had fallen and her head was by the window and she had just above the bed. I could see her head move. So I called immediately my sister there, who's closest, and I said, mom is down. And she said, okay. They went up there. So she had followed.

But you were able to automate that.

On the same note, there's a lot of security stuff these days. You know, look at these apps so that anyone's got a retail shop. But you can have an app on your phone and see what's going on, whether it's retail shop or even your house monitoring. You can check apps now and watch all your stuff at home. Babysitters and that sort of stuff.

Yeah, Siri.

Siri. For those that don't have an Apple phone, you better tell them. Siri is a picture of my condo in Chicago. There you go.

You've heard of that product, works off the Internet and shows you a picture. I run the front door, so if anybody comes in, I get a text.

So were you going to say Nest?

No, I was going to say I have adt.

So with Nest, people that know what Nest is, Nest is a company that is automating a lot of stuff. They're automating temperature controls in your house. So you can run an app and say, you know, I'm heading home and I want it to be 82 degrees when I walk in the door. And it automates that. It automates things like lights. It turns on lights. In fact, you can even have things hook up now that if the weather forecast says it's going to be a certain temperature, turn on my AC at that time it hits that temperature. There's all sorts of automation stuff and.

I add that to it and what do you gone. It senses nobody's there and so it.

Goes into a. Yeah, it drops everything else.

So they come back. It's really a remarkable system.

Yeah, good. Sorry.

The water company actually has a new device where they will come out and insult on your house for free. And if they. If it senses that it's going to rain that your. Your sprinklers will not come on.

Implemented for everybody here in the future really. Because of the drought.

So now when email says it's not going to sunshine, we need some sunshine. Some of the nor. What else you got?

Surveys. You know when you get the automated calls that everyone hates. You know, survey calls. Yes. And then you know when you go to get a refill, they remind you to, you know, fill your refill. It's coming up.

Yep.

Good go this one. I think they said everything already. But in social media would be the auto response. Somebody said they want to sign. Sign up. They say thank you.

Sure.

Or in E Commerce when they go through like they're buying something and they end. They abandon the car. You have something like an autorespond and say hey, you forgot. Did you forget to.

To buy. Buy your product? We'll talk about that too. Good. Anything else? Anything else?

Schedule twits. Schedule posting and Facebook.

Sure.

Schedule ads.

Good. Excellent. You want.

So it's just. Well, how about some. When you order online and you can just.

Pay online. Paying. Paying.

PayPal. What are the cards? And you can take credit cards on your phone.

People are swiping cards on your phone. Let's say you're in the market, you want to sell something, you can take a credit. In fact, you can even take photos of checks. Now some banks take a photo of the check that goes in your account.

You don't have to go bank.

You don't have to go bank.

Yeah.

I can think of companies. I have a Tempur Pedic bed and they have the ergonomic thing and it's got an app on your phone. You can, you know, raise lower and.

All that stuff you pull yourself and say want to change the.

It does that. I have. I also have one of those robot vacuum things.

That's full of the backup camera on your car. You can usually have those. That's helpful.

That is cool.

You go to Nordstrom now. It used to be that you had to wait in line. I used to buy golden green shirts. You never get those little hand.

Yeah.

Airports. You can just check in on me.

The stuff.

Check in.

Yep. On that note, if you want to travels internationally now, you don't even have to have a customs official anymore to. I mean to. To talk to.

You can. You can basically go through an automated system who does the check. You scan your passport. The door opens up and you through and there's no more stamping and that sort of stuff anymore either. Well, there's some places still stamp, but you can get through a lot of that stuff very quickly. So at lax they've introduced that. In a lot of other cities in the world, they've introduced that. Which just means that instead of lining up, if you've been on a plane for, you know, 10 or 15 hours going internationally, the last thing you want to do is sit flying for another hour while everyone's smelly, trying to get through these customs things.

So there's all those machines that take that tray.

Yep. They do that really quick now too. Good. So there's lots of things going on as you can see automation today. I just want to talk about a couple of marketing things that you guys can apply to your business as we go. So first couple things I want to talk about building a list. Now, building a list is one of the most important parts of your marketing when you're online. Because if you don't build a list then you're not going to know who's coming to your business. Okay. If you own a shop and a physical shop, somebody walks in and looks around the shop and then they walk out the door. How can you market to those people again? You don't know. If you haven't collected their details, you don't know who they are, you'll never know that. You can go and find out. You can never go and market to them again. Does that make sense? So websites are the same. Somebody comes to your website, they look around, they like what you've got and they leave. You'll never be able to market to them again unless you collect their details. Okay, so collecting an email address.

Part of what you need to have with your online presence these days, opt in forms and landing pages are how we do it. I'm going to show you some examples of what we do with our site to give you an idea of what this looks like.

So here's an opt in form that we have for our giveaway. So we give away something in return for somebody's email address. I like to call it a party start. When you go to a party, the first thing you do is get some hors d' oeuvres or get some nibblies that happen. I like to do this when somebody comes to my website, give them something in return for email address. Some people call it an ethical bribe. Your email address is valuable. I want that so that I can go and market to you later once I have your email address. Then I own that piece of data. So I can always follow up with you later down the track. In this case here, we're giving away a one page PDF. It's called the 55 Easy Steps to triple your traffic. We're probably getting about.

30 to 40 new people every day in our list. 30 new 30, what's that?

Facebook?

No. Well, this is just our site. So they're coming from everywhere. This is people coming from organic searches, people coming from social media. Wherever they are coming from, they're coming to our website. And this is what we offer on Facebook. Things we offer. It's a pretty simple page. It doesn't have to be a lot of information, but it's been collected so we can send it out later.

This is the homepage of our website. We have a thing called the hello bar. Anybody ever heard of a hello bar? Hello bars up the very top in green. Basically. We were testing this for a while and we had this on every page and at the top there it says, are you new here? This is what you need. So start. People read from the top down. And we weren't sure if people were going to actually use this. But this particular bar, that green link, is the most clicked link on our website. We were surprised. But every page has this. And so people, when they click on that, when they click on that, it pretty much takes them back to something like this. We want them to opt in. The first thing we want people to do is to give us their email address. So we, we make an effort for people to give us their email address. Because if we don't have it, as I said, what's the point of having it on that site?

And then the other part of this, if they don't go there, they're going to sign up for down the bottom in that big box there. You see that? And if you've got any questions about this as we go, let me know. Where's the general question?

The about page. Now, how many people have an about page on your website? Usually most websites, this is the second most traffic website, most traffic web page on your site, the about page. And so many people have this wrong. They have it all about them. Why you're good and why you're the best in the world. And that's it. If you're getting traffic to that page, why not collect somebody's data while they're there? Okay, so on our page here we have at the bottom of our about page another reason to opt in, if they haven't already.

So we're very Proactive in making this happen.

And it works. And it works. So some people may think, well, this is way too much. Remember, they're not going, this is this. I'm showing you all of the options on our site. We have a lot of pages on our sites. We're not seeing all of it all the time. Time. I'm just giving you a condensed version of all these opt ins at once. Does that make sense? Okay.

Internal opt ins. So when we write blog posts, we're writing, we're writing articles, we're writing long articles now. And I'm not going to talk about blogging. In fact, on Thursday we're talking about blogging at Palm Desert, right? So we're doing a blogging session. So if you've got Thursday morning off, same time, go and check us out there. But with our blogs, what we're doing is writing really long articles. This is what's working these days. 2000 words or more writing on every week. So that's a lot of things to read. Now people often don't have time to read it, so they may be on their phone. If they've come to our website and they've looked at starting and they're like, you know what? I haven't got time to read it, but I want to read it. So we're giving them the option to download it as a PDF so they can download it and read it when they've got time and they're back home. They can email it to friends and that sort of stuff too. So in the back here at the top, this is the article at the back up the top it Sundays get a PDF version of this keyword research post. Just click here. When they click there opens up this little box and it says do on this video. Just give us your email address.

So we can market to them later. Does that make sense? Y.

Did you have a question, Jo?

This is on this specific blog post. So this, this is just on a blog post. This one is just a blog post. So we've put a little bit of effort into creating this at the back end. In fact, there's a plugin that we use that creates this in literally 20 seconds. The whole PDF in 20 seconds. We don't have to cut and paste and make it nice. It does it automatically. And this may take us a couple of minutes to set up with our autoresponder software, which I'll talk about in just a moment.

They could read the post, but they just can't.

They can read it normally. Yeah, you can read it Normally. So if you come along, you want to read it while you're on the web, you can read it. We don't ask you to do anything.

You don't want to save it and read it later as a video. Yeah. So we're not. We're not asking. We're not putting a date around the content. All the content is still free. But we'll probably get on each of our articles, we'll probably get maybe four or five a week on each article asking for.

So they're. You're posting this to a website where. So by the time they get to this place, blog post, they've already put their email in.

No. No, they haven't. No. All these are all options. We're not making them do any of this. You can read everything that I've just shown you. You can go for free without giving me your email. You don't have to give me your email anywhere. We're not blocking content from you. You can read everything if you don't. All we're doing is giving you options of, hey, if it's easy for you to send it to, sort of thing. Right.

So that's important because we want to make. That's a good question. Because we want to make sure. We don't want to put walls up. We don't want people to jump hurdles when they're giving us their email address. We want them to say, yes, I want to give you my email address. Otherwise, that used to happen a lot. People would say, you can't come in here until you like my page on Facebook or you do this sort of action. And they would sign up, they'd get the content that unsubscribed.

Yeah.

And that's not cool because A, you've got these lists that's going up and down all the time, but then B, your mail service we'll talk about in a minute. They look at it, go, whoa, you've got to leave people subscribing and unsubscribing what's going on. You're giving them stuff and then they're leaving. You're not doing something right. And they start putting flag against your email. So we don't.

Or you just don't. Like I do. If I have to put my email in and I want them, you don't.

Do it at all.

I just don't do it at all.

You're missing. So we're giving you options to do it. I'll give it to you if you don't want to do it. That's okay, too. Okay. At the base of our blog, we're doing. We're putting this down the bottom. We hard code this into every blog post that we have. Just another option of collecting email addresses. Now, this one here, we don't get a lot of people signing up, but we do get some people. So it's just giving us the option for people to sign up. And then we have a thing called an exit intent. When you're done and you want to leave the site, you got to hit the X button. This little thing pops up and it just says, hey, do you want to sign up? Doesn't make you do it. It's just that there's a big X there. They can get out of that. But this is a very popular one because people are leaving there. Oh, I'm actually leaving the site. Are you sure you want to leave? I think you spoke about things like shocking cart abandonment. This is just like a warning. So, hey, you're about to leave, make sure you get this freebie that we're giving away. Any questions about those? Yeah. Yes. Does it know if they've already given their email? In this case here, it doesn't. But when they put their email address in, if it goes into our system, we'll know. We'll already know that they've got this. So let's say you come to our site 3 times and put your email in 3 times. When we send an email out, you're not going to get three emails from us. It just says, all right, we already know that that email address is in the system. We only going to send you 1:5 emails. That same thing. Well, from my perspective as a user, to get that again after I put it in twice already on the website.

Oh, put your email in one more time.

It's like, what? So this is if. If you've already got this. If you've already got this particular item, you're not gonna. You'll get it instantly anyway. Because we don't. We don't send you. In this case here. It's usually an instant. It's there on the page. The next page is the thing you page. We'll only send an email if you haven't had one of those emails before. So we know that you're not going to get annoyed with.

I just want to get to that page again.

If you do twice anyway, they'll tell you you're already signed up.

Generally, yeah, depending which system you're using. But most of the time, yes.

All right, so here's one of the One of the tools that I like to use is called mailchimp. Now, mailchimp, all that stuff we just showed you does a lot of this collection of data. Okay, anybody heard mailchimp? No one's heard of mailchimp.

So mailchimp is a service that lets you. It's called an autoresponder or mail service. And basically this lets you put some little code into your site to collect email addresses. Once they've collected that, it's going to give you the ability to send emails automatically. Okay, now you can send them. There's two types of emails you can send. One is what they call a broadcast email. So.

Let'S say, Kathy, you sign up on my website yesterday. Linda, you sign up. A week and a half ago, I sent a broadcast email app. As soon as I send it out, everybody gets it at the same time. So I might say, you know, I've got an event coming up on Thursday. You gotta check it out. I send it. Everybody gets at the same time. An autoresponder is a series of order, series of automated responses that comes out according to the time you signed up. Okay, so can you sign up yesterday? Today you get an email saying, hey, welcome, you sign up yesterday. Just want to check in to see if you've got the information that we sent yesterday. So we know that you signed up yesterday. Today we're sending you day one's email. Whereas Linda signed up, you know, a week and a half ago, she may have already had three emails. So she's in that, in that funnel. She's ahead of you. Does that make sense? She's up to third email, and you're not going to see that until this time next week and a half. So that's what they call an autoresponder. Now, the great thing about autoresponders is that you can write anything you like. You can set it up for any time you like, and you can often sell information to not sell, sell your products or services from those emails as you go. This is why it's important to have those email addresses, because you can reach out to these people as you're moving along. Questions first.

When you start gathering up all these emails, do you need to use an outside service, an email service, or a.

Constant contact or something?

Yeah, yeah. So you can put them on your Gmail account, but you can't do the automation. You're gonna have to manually do that. I had somebody call me last night. He's like, I've got this event coming up in, in May. I've got 700 emails in my Gmail account. How do I send them all out at once? I'm like you can't. And if you try Google gonna say well in fact I think I have a limit of 500. I think 500 a day. You can set Eric within a short period of time.

But they'll often. Emails coming out from a Gmail account will often get put into other Gmail accounts. They'll put into the promotion folder and that sort of stuff. And you'll have to do it manually or stick them all in the BCC column which becomes painful because then you can't personalize any of the emails either. I would go and get a mailchimp account. Mailchimp is free to send out broadcast emails. If you want to send out autoresponders you're running around about $20 a month to do that for up to 2,000 names. But I would look at getting one of these services. Mailchimp is free. Constant contact is free. I think there's another, there's other ones. Aweber I think they run at 20amonth. So for a pretty low price you can get in contact truck. $15. Yeah, $15. But Manchin's got a free version. You can get started with that. Check it out as well. Okay, let's have a look.

Follow up emails. So we've just spoken about those follow up emails. I'm not going to go into those too much more. But this is part of the automation you can do once you've collected email addresses.

Dynamic content now, dynamic content is something that's coming out now which we haven't seen before. It's not that old, maybe six months old. But what dynamic content is is it's giving information on a website according to the person or the content that's already there. So let me give you an example of what this looks like.

We have a post here 7 benefits of social media that don't involve driving traffic. What's our traffic? So this is an article we put up on the right here there is a little ad. This is our way. That's just an ad for one of our things. But we have put this ad here according to the content that we want. So whatever page somebody lands on, we can dynamically create the content according to the blog post that we've written. Does that make sense? So this appears on this widget. Most websites in the past used to have the same thing there. It was always the same. Doesn't matter what your content was about, it was always the same. Now what we're doing now is putting dynamic widgets, or ads if you like, on the slide of the content according to what people are reading.

Yeah, well this is a, this is a little sales. This is like a. We have a seven dollar item that we sell so it sends it to a sales page in this case. But the reason we're sending them to a $7 sales page because this content that we're selling here is, is related to the topic that they're reading about right now. All right, so we have some other products that we have but are not related to social media. I wouldn't send them to those other products because we want to get what are people reading? What are they interested in? If they're reading about social media, they're going to probably want to buy something about social media. Does that make sense in our case? So think about how you can do that with your stuff as well.

And then also on the bottom of our posts as well, we have this too. It's giving them related content. What else is related to the story you just read? You've probably seen that on New York Times and la, New York, all those newspapers, they always have what else is related to the article you just read? So this is what I call dynamic content. Any questions about that?

Another automated thing is thank you page upsells too. So when you sell something, how many people sell things on the website right now?

So a thank you page upsell can be like your best salesperson, especially after a sale. So if somebody, if you're selling something and somebody comes to your thank you page. This here, somebody just opted into one of our giveaways and it says here your logins have just been emailed to you. You'll be accessing this. And then we have another sales piece on the bottom. We're finding that 20 to 30% of the people that come through here will buy the next thing that's upsold to them. Now if we weren't doing that, we'd be leaving all this money on the table. Right. So you know, two or three people out of 10 are going to buy this next item. The original item was $7. This one's $47 a month. We're getting extra the sales because this is all automated. We don't have to get on the phone.

Social media automation. How many people using social media? I was about to say still using social media. Us using social media. There's a number of tools out there for social media automation. Anyone? Name some of the.

Name social media automation tools. Which one? Events creating events no, some of the tools. Yeah, Some of the tools that let you automate social media every time.

So advertising tools in mailchimp. Mailchimp, there's a little button that you click at the bottom of the page to send out your email blast. Do you want me to automatically post this?

Yes.

Yes.

So mailchimp lets you do this as well. So if you're writing a broadcast email to people, you wouldn't do that with an autoresponder because they're in a series. But as a broadcast email, you can automatically post that article to your social media accounts. Your Facebook account. Who's on Facebook and Twitter, right?

Yeah, Facebook, yeah.

So you can automatically do that.

Yeah. It's really good if you're doing events. That's what I'm saying. If you share it.

Right, right.

You create an event and then share it.

Yes. So what I was. There's a couple of tools out there. How many people have heard of hootsuite? You heard hootsuite? Hootsuite is a tool that you can get a free version, and you can get a version that's. I think it's 5. Maybe it's gone up. I think I paid 5.99. It might be 9.99 now. Do you use it?

Yep. So it lets you automate your social media. So how many people. I just don't know how much time in a day they've got to spend on social media. Right. So I. I will sit on a Sunday and I will load up my week's worth of tweets or post to Facebook or LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Facebook, whatever I want. I can load all this stuff up and schedule it for the coming week. So right now, right about now, the post just went out. Supposed to go out when I'm standing here or when I'm driving or when I'm traveling or whatever it is. And people think. Well, it's not so much about thinking whether I'm live or not. It's about the fact that I can put valuable information out in front of people and have a chance to answer it later when I get back to my computer. Just means I'm doing it on a regular basis. So when I was traveling on the weekend, I didn't even take my computer, but there was still posts going out, still people connecting with me on social media because I was using Gitsuite. A couple of the other tools you may want to look at. Buffer. The FBR buffer does some automation. It actually, you set the times in advance of when you want the Post to go out and you can send your articles to Buffet it post them out for you automatically, which is pretty cool.

Oh, and here's so here. I'm going to wrap up with this one too. This is an example of how we do automation with our video. So we have a little.

A tool called Tuesday Tool Time Tips to something. Lots of teas and Tuesdays. Full time Tuesday is Jeff and I doing lots of little videos and we do under three minute videos, sometimes a little bit more. But every Tuesday we'll send you out a video a little bit tip about online marketing, whether it's something to do with Facebook, whether it's to do with blogging, whether it's to do with automation. Every Tuesday, if you want to see how all this works, you can text the word sunrise to nice on your phone. When you go to a day, you'll see automated system. It's not just at the back writing you an email as you do it, but this is how we do a lot of automated systems and this is the sort of thing that you guys can do too for your customers. These, these SMSs are an automated system. If you're running an event and you have got people, then you want them to join your list. You can get them to SMSA word or text a word and add them to your list formatting.

All right, I think that's it. If any questions about some of this automation, I know we've got, we don't have a lot of time but we try to cover as much as we can about automation. Anyone got any questions about it?

Is there such a thing as too much automation? Is there such a thing like this hotel in Europe?

I'm just curious.

No, here's the thing. If you're looking to go to a five star luxury resort, that's not your hotel, right? If you're a truck driver driving through the countryside and you just want somewhere to crash and you don't care about all the other extras that they want to charge, does it suit your needs, personal preferences? So there's a market for it, Right? So for me, I was happy to stay there because I knew I didn't have to go and learn Serbian or whatever or whatever country I was. There's always an option for English on all of this stuff. In fact, all of the languages are covered in these hotels. So it doesn't matter what country you're from, you can push the button for your language and you read the language there. So it covers for everyone. That barrier is gone because why have to go into a Hotel at 10 o' clock at night and try and talk to the poor who was a kid that they put on at nighttime and hoped they understood English. I was in trouble.

I was sleeping in my car. So this sort of option was the right for me. What sort of thing for me. So is there too much automation? I don't think so. I don't think so. There's companies out there. There's a company called disc.com. it's a big factory warehouse just out of New York. And what it does is it creates CDs and DVDs. So if you've got content, let's say you've got a DVD or video you want to share with your audience and I want to buy it from you. I go to your website, I buy your disk. Let's say you charge me 20 bucks. The order goes through this warehouse. There's no one working this warehouse. It's a fully automated warehouse. It's all robots, robotics, and they get your water, print the disk, they wrap it, stack it and ship it to your customer. You don't even see it. You don't have to see it. You just get the money.

The disc.com sends you an invoice for $3 or whatever it costs them to build it, and you're charging $20 for your customer. Your customer gets it, everybody's happy. And no one works at this, at this factory. Now, is that too much automation? You can't get much more automated than that. But it does serve the purpose, keeps the cost down. There's no error. Very, very few errors. It's like they've got these machines so that they're one in a million errors. Is that too much automation? Not if it's keeping costs down. Not if everyone gets the right thing on time at the right time, get the right result. That's just my.

Cool. Anyone else?

I have a question. What about automation? Your blog, you said you do a 2000 article once a week. Is that. Is that original content?

Totally original, yep. So we started doing this in November last year, and since then our traffic to our website has increased 400%. Just the website and the blog chunk itself has been increased 800%. So our traffic has got much more stronger. They're staying around reading our stuff, more people. The big thing in the last two years was do a blog post every day, do 300 words every day. No one reads anything. No one's reading it because they know it's just shallow. It's like whatever, read it and it's just the Same I read somewhere else. So what some of the, some of the biggest, some of the smartest marketers are doing. He's saying let's do it all differently. Let's do something wrong. We're putting a lot of information in there, like pictures and images, video. And we're talking, we're connecting with a lot of different influencers too. So we might say, let's say we put a picture about Coca Cola in there, for instance. We'll reach out to Coca Cola and say, hey, we just mentioned you in our article. Now, whether they do or not, but sometimes they'll tweet. Like we've had people like Billabong and GoPro tweet our links back to our website. Now they've got millions of followers. What do you think does for our traffic if they just do one tweet? It's awesome, right? So we're doing a lot of content, longer content. And as I said, Google love it because there's lots more organic search in there and there's also a lot more time spent on site, which is one of the metrics that Google looks at.

How many people do you have on staff?

Three, Four. One writer. I have one writer who writes it for me. I don't like writing, but she, she loves writing. So she's up in Tahoe. She will give her, let's say, let's write an article about this. She writes it. And then I have one girl from the Philippines who helps me just put the bits and pieces together. She cost me $5 an hour. So I don't, it's not a big, I don't have a big company as far as that goes. We have, we have eight people on our staff and in that process there's only three. Me, that's me reading it at the end of it. And these other two bring it together for us. So. Yeah, but it's certainly changed what we do now. If I could do it every three days, I would. I just have a topic to do it today, but I would if I could. So. Yeah.

What's that?

You need to automate that.

I need to automate this. Well, that's right. So we're opening systems in for that. But, but you know, there are automated writing systems. In fact, there's a number of them out that have been around for a while. You can put in some keywords and it will go and pull bits and pieces from all different articles around the world, put it into an article for you. But it's still not right. It's still not you know, and it's like.

It'S not. It doesn't. You know, when you read something and it doesn't make sense, you think someone's.

Either it's not your voice, it's not.

Your voice, and it's just not right. So. So we look at that, and it was good for some ideas, but for overall, you know what? I'm going to stick to writing it. And here's the thing. If someone says to me, what's the latest in SEO? Long blog posts. Write posts that people want to read. Don't just write to fill in. Don't, like, write articles that fill in 2,000 words. Like, yes, I'm there because I filled all this crap. Make sure it's stuff that people want to read. If they want to read it, they're going to want to share it. When they share it, they stay on the site longer, they read it more, they download it, they put in their PDF, and it's something you're proud to share as well.

All right. Anything else? One last question before we go.

Okay. All right, so Ron up the back, we're informed to introduce himself. Elon's on screen as well, but Jay and Stephen as well from Store. If you guys want to make an appointment with them, they can either quick chat to you now or book you in sometime on their automated system. Is that right? Yes, yes.

Go online too, and you can sign up.

Go online. You go on storecv.org and you can book your mentoring sessions there. That's an automated process too. Imagine that. So thank you very much, guys. Hope you got some good things out of that today. Oh, we've got evaluation forms. Yes, thank you.

Just before you go, if you can decide, just so we know.

Um.