Boostly Podcast Live

Sam, This is a freestyle going off the dumb.

Ready for my close up, good looking, let me tell you. Get more bookings. Oh, that'd be nice. Giving me tips, tools and advice. Yeah, you're gonna get them, hon. You're gonna sit back, listen to Mark Simpson. Whoa. Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee, like Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard and the T is loose leaf making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely. If you want my respect, you'll better butt direct. Here are the words in the podcast. That's what comes next.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me for another episode of the Bruce Lee Pod podcast. And today this episode is being recommended, requested, should I say, by members of the hospitality community. We had a post put up and it's somebody that can't take guests right now. They are in lockdown and they are wanting to make full use of their time. So they're doing a little bit of online work and they asked about how do they get an online shop onto their website because there's tons of information out there, but there's nothing that is actually practical and, and a couple of people put up some suggestions and I just said, well listen, I can show everybody how to do it. Would you like me? Would it benefit you to do so? And that is what we are going to do. So what I'm going to show you in this episode of the Boucher podcast. Now, if you are listening on audio, so if you're on an Apple device or an Android or you just listening in the car or wherever you may be, there's a little bit of this is going to be visual. So when you get a chance, hop onto YouTube or Facebook and come and find this video and you will be able to walk you through the steps. I'm going to show you on how to actually create and how simple that it is. But before we do that, I want to know where you are listening in in the world. So please leave a message below. Hashtag live if you're watching with me or replay if you're watching back on the replay. Hello replay people also as well let us know the name of your business. Give yourself a little bit of a pitch and a promote. So doesn't matter whether this is on Facebook. We're also now streaming live on YouTube and LinkedIn and Twitter. So wherever you are tuning in, let us know where you are tuning in from. I will go back and I'll go through as many people as possible afterwards. But it really does interest me where you are all tuning in from and also as well, give yourself a little bit of a promo. Okay, so let's get on with the episode now. Why are we doing this? Like I say, it's really, really important that for your business. And this is something that I think we've Learned really in 2020 more than any other time. But it's really important for your business and even hospitality that we have multiple streams of income coming in. And I think what has really impressed me with members of the Boost Lee Academy, members of the hospitality community, just people who tune in and subscribe, is what they've done this year to either maybe pivot their income or do something that they're not used to doing. And that's been really, really, really positive. And it's something that has really impressed myself and so many others. It's, it's, it's really has been like fantastic to see. And what has really impressed me recently is that I've seen people that have taken what they do and sort of start to take it online. Which brought up the question, I believe it was Julie Dell up in Scotland. She was saying, listen, I'm messing around. I've got a chance to mess around. I'm going to use this downtime to get online. And when it comes to having an online shop or an online product, it may seem just total alien to so many people that are watching this right now who have got maybe a bed and breakfast or a hotel or even like a rental property. But if you can sort of crack this and if you can get online and get this part visible, then it will just mean that you have got an extra revenue stream coming in to your business. And the beauty of it is, is what I'm going to show you is something that, that you can do. And you can also build local partnerships up in your area. So first things first, what can you put on an online shop? Well, there may be some of you watching this who have got cookbooks, recipe books, you know, you amazing chefs and people have commented saying how good your cooking is and, you know, can they have recipes and of the cooking that you've been doing and the recipes that you come up with, the dishes that you do and you may have thought about having a recipe book, but it's all, you know, you've just thought, well, it's, it's printing costs and all of that. Well, what you can do is you can create a PDF of this. You can easily do it in fiverr or you can go to somewhere like Upwork, so you can go to Canva or you can go to Upwork or Fiverr and have somebody do it for you. You can just tell them what to put in and then they can create a very beautiful, stunning PDF that you can get put onto your shop and you can sell. So next time that you've got a guest who says, oh, that was such an amazing dish that you did last night or at breakfast, do you have a recipe, you can say, well, yeah, I do. Here's the link to the online shop and you can buy it and you can, you can do it when you get back home. So again, those are just some ideas that we can take in from the world of hospitality. But if you're not a good chef or if you haven't got, you know, the motivation to do something like that, then here's another idea. And this is something that I've seen people doing and it's such a good idea. Whether we like it or not, from what 2020 has shown us, is that every single business, every brick and mortar especially sh to sell, is having to shift online. And there's some that have been really quick to this and have been super fast and they've got their products online and there's some that haven't. And there may be somebody in your local area, there may be a friend of yours or just a business that you go to a lot and you notice that they haven't yet pivoted online. And what I'm going to show you, I'm just going to show you how super simple it is. But some people think that it's a lot harder than it actually is to get online. Now, if you are really proactive on this and you can create this on your website, say over the course of the next seven days, then what you can do is you can pick up the phone or you can go on Facebook or wherever and you can contact that person and just say, hey, so I noticed that you haven't gone online yet. I hope you haven't got an online shop. Would you like to have a partnership where you would sell me the product at a knock down cost and what I would then do is I would then sell it online and then you can sell it on your shop and then all that you would do is you would work together that rate or a commission or whatever it may be and you can leave them to take care of the postage. But it's a no lose for them and it's a no lose for you. So all you're literally doing is you're talking about and promoting the service or the product and they, the person who doesn't have to do the faff of getting online, they can actually get income as well even if they can't actually have people come into their shop right now. And you can do it with one or you could do it with two or you could go get like a local group of you. So if you know that there's a network of local business owners who are really struggling and they've got these amazing products but they've not got them online, then you can take the lead on this and you can say, right, I'll load it up, you just pay me a referral rate or a sell on rate of whatever, 10, 20, 30% and I will go and sell it online. And again this is something that you can do locally, you can go a little bit further, you can start to reach out to people and see if there's anything you can do on that. And again these are the sort of things that you can put on on an online shop. You can put on whatever you want, that's the beauty of it. And now that I've got your mind thinking and now that you can sort of go, well if it's going to be a recipe book or it's going to be an actual product then what I want to do now is to show you exactly how to do it. Because again this is the, this is the thing that so many people get bogged down is, is that they have amazing idea but then this know how to put it online. So your life is going to be so much easier if you have a WordPress website. And you will know if you haven't got a WordPress website because just by the simple fact when you, when you log in to the back end of your website. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to flip my screen and I'm going to show you exactly the tool that I use for Boostly and I'm going to show you exactly how simple it is to set up an ad summit to your online shop. So let me just flip my screen very quickly and you should be able to see it now. So I use WooCommerce. So WooCommerce is a plugin that you add onto your website, your WordPress website and it is basically your online e commerce shop. Now I've been using this for well over a year and what I love about this service is that it's, it's low cost, it is a cost to get set up. But it just makes life so much simple. And it connects to Stripe, it connects to PayPal, whatever the payment system that you're using, it can simply connect to. And all that it does, it just sits within your WordPress website. So to get started with you create a login, you click on get started. What it will do is it will give you a plugin that you will go and add to your website. So when you go to your backend and again I'll just show you the boostly back end. Right now when you come into the backend, if you just go into plugins and you click on Add new plugin, this system will give you what's called the download, it'll be a zip file. So you take it, you come into here, you click on plugin and you click Add new and then you will load it. So, so let me just quickly open up this page. And when this page loads up you'll see at the top it will say upload the zip file, upload the plugin. So it's right there, all you have to do is click on that and it will come into your system. And when it is into your system it will look like this. Now, when I sit on the dashboard and this is my WooCommerce status. So right now, in what way? On the 10th of the month, my WooCommerce online shop has brought in 4,137 pounds worth of online sales. It tells me how many orders have come in, it tells me what has been the top seller, it tells me all the information that I need. And again, the cool thing, what I really like about WooCommerce is that not only can you use it for one off products and I've spoken about this quite a lot recently and it's something that I think everybody should be having a, having a look about. And I've definitely been speaking about it within the Boostly Academy. It's talking about developing a subscription service. You'll notice and you'll hear about this a lot. Some of the big chains in the world of hospitality are starting to create subscription services, member services, Hilton, I know Marriott are doing it as well. Now just because the big chains are doing this doesn't mean that us smaller independents can as well. If you are fortunate enough to have a very good social media account, a social media page, an email following, you've got regular guests who know, like and love you, then try and think of maybe a monthly subscription service that you could create that somebody would pay to to be part of you could call it your inner circle, you could call it your VIP group, you can call it whatever you want to call it. And in there you will just have maybe recipes. If you're going to do the cookbook route, you can do exclusive discounts if people want to come and stay with you or whatever it may be. But you can set all of this up in WooCommerce. So again, the beauty of this service is that number one, you can have it for one off purchases or number two, you can, you can have it for a subscription. Now once you've added it in, then you want to get started. So all you do is you come into Woocommerce and you come down to products and you will just click add new. And if anybody has ever loaded anything into any online website before, then you will know how easy it is to add it in. You literally give it the product name. So if I was going to sell Mark's cookbook, I put it in there, I guarantee I spelled it wrong, you will just give it a little bit of a description. So again, you put your copy in there explaining you know, why you've done this, explain the story behind it and then give them the offer of how much it's going to cost. Again, you put the price. So if it's going to be a one off cost, you will just call it what it is. If it's going to be a subscription, you've got simple subscription here. So if you're going to create your granary VIP group 5.99 every month for example, and you will set it up that way or if it's going to be a one off product, you create as a simple product, you will tell them if it's virtual or downloadable. So if it's going to be the Mark's cookbook idea, we've got the, the downloadable virtual product right there. Regular price, $9.99. If you wanted to even have a little sale, sorry, 5 9. If you want to have it as a little sale to launch it, you could put it at that. Once you've created your PDF so you've gone on fiverr or upwork and somebody has helped you to design a fantastic PDF, you could put it in there quite simply and upload it. There's no download limits or anything like that obviously. And then again you would give it just a super quick bonus subscription here. So Max Cookbook for his yummy dishes. And the final things to do is I'm just going to move some boxes out the way that are in my way. It would be to add your image product gallery, which is down there. Once you've added the product gallery, once you've added the image, you would hit publish. I'm going to hit the preview button. And when the page loads up, it will show you exactly what it looks like. And then all that the user would then do, or sorry, all that the customer would do, click on add to basket and they would check out. And it's as easy and as simple as that. And within a matter of minutes, you have got an online product that is for your business. You've got a chance then to email out to your list. You can put a post out on social media and you can inform people of your new online product, whether it is a recipe book or whatever you decide to do. And again, the reason why I wanted to do this episode and the reason why I wanted to show everybody the simplicity of it, is that right now, if you are on lockdown right now, if you can't open and if you can't take guests for whatever reason, and if you want to make full use of your time, then on your WordPress website right now, you've got the ability to go and sign up to WooCommerce. You can either upload something that you can easily sell. So if you've already got, say a farm shop, but you haven't been able to get the things online, you can add the options to upload it online, or you can start to network in your local area, start asking around on Facebook groups. You can, if you don't know anybody, just start googling local shops that have got big reviews or good reviews in your local area. Reach out to them, give them a phone call, send them a message. I'm sure that right now they would love to have some extra ideas of way to get income into the business. And again, if they haven't done so already, they haven't done so for a reason. And you can start to strike up these partnerships and business relationships. And the cool thing about all of this, that when lockdowns do end and when you can reopen and when you can take on guests, is that all of this is being created, all of this has been set up so you've generated for yourself an extra income. And whether it is just going to make a small needle of a difference, maybe 2 or 3% to your monthly or your annual revenue, then it's something that you've already created. And for the most part, depending on what the product is, it can become 100% passive, which is what every business Owner wants to strive to be is have passive income coming in into their business. So I wanted to create this to get your mind juices going, your brain juices going. What I would love to know whether you're watching live with me now or on the replay is in the comment section below. Are you doing something like this already? If so, what are you selling? What are you promoting? Have you got links that we can go and have a look at to get some inspiration? I would also really appreciate if you could take the link to this video and share it in a Facebook group with a friend or just in a local community and just sort of show them how easy is other hospitality owners, how easy it is to build in these extra income if your main source of income the hospitality. If you isn't able to take bookings right now, this is obviously a part of the Boostly podcast series. If you want to go and check out more, just go to boostly.co.uk podcast on there. You've got nine seasons that you can go and check out. There's tons of episodes. You can download it on Apple, on your Apple phones, on your Android phones, you can even tune in on Spotify, you can even chat to your Alexa device and ask her to play the boosted podcast and it will go, which is amazing. But thank you so much for tuning in. I would love to get your feedback on this episode and if you've got any requests of any future podcast episodes that you would like me to do, then all you need to do is find the hospitality community Facebook group and go and post it up in there. Ask the question. If loads of people agree, then I'll do it. As always, thank you so much for tuning in wherever you are tuning in in the world on whatever platform. My name has been Mark Simpson. I help hosts give them the tools, the tactics, the training and the confidence to go and get more direct bookings. I will leave you with a freestyle wrap all about Book Direct.

Now let me try and get this hashtag down. Here's a little cause that I respect. You've got to make sure you book direct, go to the hotel, go to the place. Don't do it through Google a disgrace or booking.com or hotel.com. no, call them on the phone or or the phone. I add an e to make it fit and say hi, can you discount a little bit? And usually they'll be happy to agree and that's why you should book directly.

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