Weekly Live Q&A with Mark Simpson

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome everybody. So those of you that are live with me, welcome all. Good to see you. Those of you that are watching back on the replay again, thank you very much for tuning in on the replay. All right all. So this week is the final weekly Q A for a couple of weeks now just cause I'm going to be traveling over down to South Africa for an event which very much looking forward to. But with that being said, I know we've got a lot to get stuck into. I want to share my screen, I want to, I want to show you a couple of things and some things that I've realized over the weekend that is kind of interesting and I would love everybody to give us a checkout as well. So obviously we're over here in the zoom for the Boostly members. We're live everywhere else. Just to give people a little sneak peek of what we do behind the scenes at Boostly. But like I do on most normal Q&As. So give a super quick rundown of what we're working on, give a little peek behind the scenes. I want to show you the thing that I've learned this weekend to go and to go and test out and then I will just let you know what's coming up in the world of Boostly over the coming weeks. So with that being said, let's jump in, shall we? So let me share this screen. So hopefully everybody should see my LinkedIn. This is what we're going to start today. We're going to start over at LinkedIn. If I scroll down a little bit, you will see where I am at. Now this is something that I discovered over the weekend and I implore everybody to go and check out the post in full and then go and do the same for your business. So what I noticed, and this has been a thing that I've realized over the last four, six weeks and it was only this weekend when I had a chance to go and dig into it a little bit more, go down the rabbit hole that got me thinking. This is interesting and I think everybody should definitely go and check it out and give it a go. So last month, well, let's just say end of May, we had somebody sign up to boostly and when they were talking to our sales team, they said the reason why they discovered Boostly is solely through chat GPT. So they hadn't seen any of our videos, hadn't seen any of the podcasts, hadn't been any of the Facebook groups, hadn't been a recommendation, hadn't been from an ad, hadn't been from event or a conference, which is how normal people find us. It's through Chat GPT. I reached out to them afterwards once they signed up and just couple of questions, what did you type in etc. Etc. And you know, they, they didn't go into too much detail but they give me sort of a vague idea of what they were searching for, which again, sort of, oh, that's interesting. And then at the weekend, Sunday morning, as I always do every morning, I just like to check to see what calls are coming up over the course of the next seven days. And there was this other booking that came in and I've taken a screen grab of it and I've put it on the LinkedIn post. And again, how did you discover Boostly Chat GPT? Now we haven't yet had the call with this person, this host, so again, hopefully I'll be able to dig in and ask them a couple of questions but this got me down the rabbit hole of well, what exactly is Chat GPT and these other LLM models saying about boostly? So what I did, did like I always do, I went on and went on to Google, went on to Perplexity, you know, went on a couple of forums and I found that there are websites and services being set up that will give you an idea of how your brand is coming up online. Now I've listed off a few in here, one being Peak AI, one being Profound, one being Kuno, one being Brand Rank, Otley, Noah TO and Googie. I've probably pronounced all of them incorrect. Go and check them out. Grant Donahue recommended Peak AI. I did a little bit of a digging around on Peak and they've just done a big funding round come recommended Again, Chat GPT Perplexity recommended them. I had a little go with no at Noatua. No, no etua. Again I'm probably saying that wrong but the reason being is that was totally free to get started with. It's just basically a free service. Now obviously when you do a free service it's not going to be the best of the best, but again it was interesting and also as well, I went to another company and I paid them a little bit of money and they're going to do it for me, this sort of research so I'm interested to to know what they come back with. I won't mention the name yet just in case they rip me off of a couple hundred dollars, but I will let you know what that comes back with. Now Peak has A seven day free trial. I've got it in my notes to sign up and test it. But I'm also very well aware that these next seven days very busy for the world of Bruce Lee and I'll explain why in a minute. And then I'm traveling so I may not give, be able to give this my full attention until I get, I get back. But I will definitely go and check them out. I also was listening to the Marketing School podcast. If you haven't listen to the Mark in School podcast, I thoroughly recommend it. I, I really enjoy digging into it. I don't listen to everyone. They used to do it daily, I think they do a couple of times a week now. But it is always interesting to me. Neil Patel, Eric sue, the two of them. And they were surprised. Well, not surprisingly. But they, they were talking about this, this AI SEO and they were talking about how people are searching differently. So two years, three years, four years, five, 10 years ago, we were always going straight to Google if we wanted to ask a question, I. E. If we're to look at Boostly, who is the best website designer in the world for Airbnb hosts to get more bookings? That's what people were typing in, right? And we could check that with Google Analytics. It's all changing now. And the thing that stood out for me, the quote that, that really resonated with me, is that when you write your website copy, when you write your blog, you are writing it for humans. Now you've got to write it for a computer, which I'll write it for a robot, which is really interesting to me and how we do this. I have done a little bit more research over the weekend. I've put a couple of posts together. This is post one of free that I'm going to put out on LinkedIn over the course of the next few days. So whenever you listen to this or watch this back, whether it is on Tuesday, Wednesday, next week, come and have a look at the LinkedIn because I've got some really interesting things that I've, that I've discovered, particularly on where chat GPT is getting its data from. And it's really interesting. So what I would encourage everybody to do, boosting members who are in the zoom, people who are watching this live, whether it's biz, besties, vendors, hosts, you name it, go into chat GPT and what's really important is do not use your normal chat GPT because now it has memory and it is saving memory about you because it's got the memory settings in in here, I think it's under personalization Mammoth Manage memories. Okay, I'm not going to click into there because it's got personal information. But you can't just do a normal search. What you need to do to do this properly, you've got a temporary chat here. So you go to new one, I believe, and then you click on temporary chat. So this will not memorize anything of your past conversations with it. It will base it off the, the most recent. Basically treat it like a private mode. So go into temporary chat, turn that on and then just go and ask it the questions. So again, you can ask it who is the best short term rental provider or who is the best medium term rental provider or who's the best accommodation provider in your town, your city. Right. I was basically going in and I think I typed in who is the recommended website designer for Airbnb host to get more bookings. Again, I think I was typing something like that in. I did a couple of different ones. Mine asked these questions here just because I've programmed it in, but you can just bypass it just to say, just write it. It does clever how it writes those few things in. And it came up with Bruce Lee. So again, it's, it's, it's. No, it's not alarming to me to know that we are starting to get people because it is saying us number one. And it's obviously got some of the other ones as well, which is pretty cool, but it's got it there. And again, this is sort of led me down this path to find out, well, what exactly are people searching for? What are they searching for? And then, you know, how are they coming back to us? Because obviously it has to get its sources from somewhere. The post I'm going to put out tomorrow, just to give a little bit of a sneak peek for those that are watching this live, was really interesting to me, is that ChatGPT is getting the majority of its information from Wikipedia, which is interesting. And I'm going to put that data out tomorrow. But then it's blogs and then it's news sites. Okay. So if you are appearing on a lot of blogs, as in, if you look at Boostly, for example, we have been on over 110 podcasts in the last 10 years, as in, I've guessed it on over 110 podcasts in our niche and just on the outsides as well of our niche. And that's, that's obviously blogs, right? Blogs, podcasts. But we've also been mentioned in a lot of websites that have got a high ranking domain authority with, with the search engine. So for example we partner with 27 property management software tools. We get listed on their marketplace. It's pulling information from there. It's obviously bringing from trustpilot from Capterra which are big review sites and then obviously with the work that we did with Abode which is our PR company that we were with for a period of time they helped us get featured in Focus right in skiffed in the BBC, some of the big, you know, big publications, news sites. So the more that I sort of reverse engineer why are people coming to us on chat GPT it makes a ton of sense. And again that data that I'll share over the next few days we'll, we'll break that down. So again I'm not recommending any of these. This the one that somebody was recommended to me which is peak. What they do is they go and do all of this research for you. You give them competitors of your keywords I think and then it goes out and does it again. I'm just starting to get into this. When I know more I'll obviously report back more and I'll let you know if this company was legit or just took a bit of my money for that. So go and test it out. So those of you that are in the, in the zoom room again go and take advantage of this. Go and go and do it. Okay, so let's just jump into behind the scenes of Boostly. This is what has happened over the the last week we have had 234 customers that we have helped 37 tickets resolved 634 replies. Our average response time is 20 hours which again my goal is to always keep that under 24 hours and I always try and keep this under two days. So again the, the, the the the response where we've applied and helped is with with one day and two hours which is cool special shout out behind the scenes to the amazing pow Mayan, Kent and Anoop Again they're doing loads of tickets which is fantastic to see. Over the last week we have had if it lets me scroll up five websites that have gone live from Gbabe, Jamie, Alexandra, Jim and James. Again really cool sites. We've got Florida, Florida 38 I think that's Florida sleepover not that's UK based and then cozy nest retreat. The PMS is that they attach to hospitable lodgify hospitable guesty and host away again this is always interesting to me to know where people are getting connected up and with and who. But running out in the lead with 150 sites in total, we've got host away, then hospitable then hopefully. And again, those numbers change all of the time. Just this week we've had four of our members come to us and say, hey, we're moving from X going over to. To Y. So again, the. The amount of times that we're asked, we're having people ask to change the PMS because we've got these 27 connections. It's really easy to do when it makes it harder is they come to us and go, hey, I'm with Resley. So we've just properly got connected with Resley. Takes a lot of time to set up a connection, but the team are doing really good work behind the scenes. So to Adele and everybody, fantastic work. I did ask in the Facebook group to put any questions that you've got that you want me to answer in the Q and A. And I'll also further open to the Zoom room. Now, if you are in the Zoom room and if you have any questions, just pop it in the. In the chat box. Anything that you like to quickly discuss. There was a question that I saw, one of the things that we posted about and I posted about a couple of hours ago. You will maybe have seen this on Airbnb. You will maybe have seen this on the news websites because it's starting to get a bit of traction. And I spoke about this on a YouTube video two months ago because we noticed that the cancellation policy had been altered in 11 countries around the world as their tester. And we said if the test works, they'll launch this fully. This looks like it's going to happen and it's going to happen October 1st. So at the moment you've got the options for strict cancellation. What they're doing for anybody who joins now, you haven't got the option for strict. It moves it to firm, which basically gives your guests the opportunity to get out of the booking. So it aligns more with a general ota. And we class, obviously, OTA is booking Holidays, Group and Expedia. We've mentioned about this, I mentioned this last week. Every move that Airbnb making is tomorrow align themselves with the big OTA. So the big OTAs obviously booking holidays, group booking.com, priceline, Agoda, etc, and then you've got the Expedia Group, which is verbo and all the ones that they own. Now, if you don't want to lose your strict cancellation, what you need to do is you need to come into the back end and you need to opt out. So there is an opportunity on your back end to opt out and if you don't have that then you've got to make sure you contact them. And again, we're having hosts reply back and report that it's different for different things obviously as well if you're in the Facebook group for Boost Lee so our private Facebook group, for some reason Facebook have turned this on, which is an AI. So if you ask a question now in the group, I don't know where Facebook are getting this, but they are going to look at all the questions asked over the last like eight years that we've had this Facebook group for and it will try and get an answer for you in the comments. Again, I didn't ask for this to get turned on. I noticed it this morning. It's there. It's called the Boostly buddy. We'll see if it's any good or not. But again, look at Meta doing meta things now. Mindy asked this question in the group, does anybody know of a good way to manage upsell early check ins and late checkouts? So cleaners are notified and the right amount is collected from guests? So this is a great question, Mindy and Mark, one of our amazing hosts over in Australia has put our PMS does this automatically. Which PMS are you using? So again, your PMS of choice, whoever that is, does offer these services, but you've also got services and solutions like Turno and Breezeway, especially with cleaner notifications. But again Mindy, the answer is what Mark has put here. So when you're watching this video back, and I know you said you're going to watch it back, go to your pms, whoever that's with and I don't know it off the top of my head, I do apologize. Go to them first and then if your PMS doesn't offer this, then come on into Turno, Breezeway, etc and they might be able to help with the turnout with the communications. All right, another thing that we've noticed, Airbnb are doing a lot at the moment. So again, I've always said that we are very lucky with the OTAs, particularly Airbnb where we still get the phone number. For those of you that are adopting my call your guest methodology, this is an amazing way of getting more direct bookings and more guest relationships and etc. Etc. Doing a little digging around and I noticed and this isn't new, this has been there for a while before anybody Tried and says, this isn't new, Mark, but if they're testing it, like with the cancellation, they'll roll it out more. And this is only in a limited number of United States customers and listings at the moment. But they're testing temporary phone numbers now. I've always wondered how they were going to do this, how they were going to take the phone number away from us. If you've ever done any work on upwork before or fiverr, you'll know that they don't share the phone number, but they make you do the call in in the app. And I was thinking, will Airbnb do this? But no, they've gone down the other way of giving you like a temporary phone number. So the guest and the host will be assigned temporary phone numbers. After the stay, that phone number deletes, which is just like email address is genius from a Airbnb point of view, but from a host point of view, this is the start of not getting the the proper phone number for your guests. So you can't do SMS's, you can't do, etc. Etc. So again, something to be aware of. And Anthony put in there. I'm betting guests that have had their last four as the code for entry on smart locks will be so happy. Insert sarcasm, which did make me chuckle. And if you want to go and find out more, I can't just put the link in because Facebook are determined to kick me off the platform for putting links in. So I've done help article is 73764 if you want to go and check it out. James has obviously been putting loads in the group. Liam support Liam. He's been putting links in the group. On his other account, he's got kicked out, he's created a new account and he's done a really good video on where to go for the training videos. How do I join the live calls? What happened to the Facebook group? It's all in in here. So thank you very much, Liam, for doing that. You can find out everything there. And what's this post here from London? Oh, yeah, he was just basically asking some questions about his website that we actually went over on the Thursday call. So if you're wondering what the Thursday call is, every week we have two calls. Right now you're listening to this, which is my weekly Q and A. And on every Thursday, Liam and Mars, and Mars is from the CRM team. They come on and they go over everything that you've got to ask about the CRM resources, etc. That's on Thursday at 7:30 UK time, which is 2:30pm in Eastern Time. And then just work out the rest from wherever you are in the States or if you're in Dubai, it's like two hours South Africa. What I found out today is on the same time zone as as the uk, which is going to be easy for me to work out times, but that's by the by. So those are there. This is our community in the CRM. Again, we still are keeping our Facebook group because I know that everybody loves the Facebook but we are slowly moving to where all of the videos, all the links that we mentioned will be in here. We've got 127 Boostly members in here. You've got the special link to be able to join, which is obviously here. If you've not yet joined, I'll put it in the chat for the Zoom. I think everybody in the Zoom has joined. You will only be able to join if you are signed in to the CRM. If you don't know how to sign into the CRM, please email the CRM team and they will sort you out. And again, Mindy's put some great questions in here. I'm new to Boostly, my website is almost done and I'm wondering what the next best steps is to working towards boosting my direct bookings. Can anybody direct me? So number one, we've got the guidelines and we've got the roadmap. Mindy, that I'll put the link into here afterwards so only you can see that. Liam, obviously, the recording of his Thursday call and I have watched this back, it is a really good one. And again it's when I was watching it back, I was watching it back yesterday, yesterday evening and again he was talking about. So obviously this should be on my radar. This is like Karma, this is fate. This is like somebody telling me to say check this out more because he obviously he covered this on Thursday. How to get your business seen in AI searches, which again, fascinating. Google Business reviews, Google Business listings, CRMs and all that good stuff. But again, we've got some real nice ones and more questions in here, surprisingly, than what we do in the Facebook group at the moment, which, which I'm really excited to see. Okay, so final, final thing, let me just look at the quick question. Sunny timeline for Boostly Connect. Great question. I'm glad you asked. So we've gone a little bit quiet the last two weeks when it comes to the Boostly Connect because Adil and our team in the API are doing the most important part, they are connecting the, the app, the dashboard, whatever you want to call it, to the plugin in WordPress and to the app in Go High level. So this is the most important part, this is the most hardest part because it is like looking for needles in a haystack. It's a lot of code, it's a lot of things that go well over my head. I've set the deadline for that for the 30th of July. Realistically they should be done by the 19th of July, but then it gives us that sort of 11 to 12 days to do in house tests and then as soon as that is done, I'm going to be giving it to the focus group, to the Connect focus group separate access login so they can go and test it, break it, do all of the things and we can use potentially the whole of August to really do that. So everybody that's on the focus group, everybody who's in the wait list, you know, basically helping me break this thing, you'll be doing so. And then when I'm properly back in September, then we can start the countdown to launching this for reals. For reals. Which will be cool. So again, if you're part of the focus group and you will know you are because you're in the, the separate WhatsApp group and you get my emails about it, hopefully as long as everything goes well, you should have access to it. Now when I what I will say about that, what's really important about that is that when Connect is ready Boostly members, it will not replace your current website setup that you have for us. This is something separate, something that you can just use however you want to use it and once it is ready and I can show you, I'll show you loads of the different use cases that I've got in my mind of how we can use this. But do not worry, it will not replace any of your existing website setups which is, which is cool, but great question, Sonny, thank you very much. And with that being said, let me just very quickly, that's I've done that one. Oh, this is one I haven't done so in. I've already organized the next three day boot camp that is going to be coming up as you can see, in 84 days time, which is the 30th of September. So away a ways from now, it's going to be days and it's going to be about AI day one. I'm very excited that I've lined up Bart from autorank. He has got A phenomenal talk that I want him to rerun for everybody. And his company helps you rank higher on the OTA. So Airbnb booking.comverbo and he wants to lay it out to you exactly how they decide where you rank. And it's obviously with AI massively a part of it. So he's going to be coming and doing that and then the other two days is going to be just me, me and you. I'm going to show you some cool things when it comes to tweaking and making sure that you get the best out of AI Chat, GPT, etc, so we're going to do that. If you've already signed up in the past, don't worry, you don't need to register again. I'll just let you know when that is happening. But that's all I've got to show you today. Now, if it is any final questions, please do put it in the Zoom Chat. The reason why this is the last one for a few weeks, as I mentioned. Next week the family and I are setting off to South Africa. I've had such an amazing opportunity to speak on the 29th and the 30th in Cape Town. For those who don't know, my wife Laura was born in South Africa. I have never been. She hasn't been back for years. The kids have obviously never been. So I'm really looking to go in and checking out a country and a part of the world that I have never been to. But with that being said, we're gonna go. We're gonna take and make full advantage of the fact that we're being there. If for whatever reason, anybody in South Africa can get to cape town on the 29th and 30th July and you've not yet booked tickets, please do. I think they're capping at about 120 people, 150 people. It is going to be a really good event. We've got some really good speaking sessions lined up and yeah, if you can get there. I know it's a long way to go. Trust me, it's a long way to go. Especially when you're flying with four kids and a two year old as part of that makeup. But if you can. Awesome. So this is going to be the final Monday call for a while. Obviously we've got the Thursday calls and obviously I'm still going to be on the WhatsApp, the emails, the, the, the Facebook. As long as Facebook keep me there and, and LinkedIn and all that good stuff. So you'll still obviously I'll be around I just won't be on Zooms and podcasts and whatnot. But with that being said thank you very much everybody that's tuned in that hasn't been any more questions in the in the Zoom chat which is great. So with that being said I hope you have a fantastic week. I hope that all of the guests especially who are in USA and Canada for over your holidays I hope they all behaved and whatever you are working on this week please do let me know in the community in the Facebook group any questions jot them down at any time. If I can't get to it a member of the Boost Lee Besties will get to it or another member of the community will and if nobody fails to get back to you then I will cover it on our next Q A. So thanks for everybody in the zoom. Thanks everybody on all the lives and I'll speak to you very soon. Thank you very much. Tada.