MBA1164 3 Skills That Will Save You Money When Getting Started

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It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Provide perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey O welcome to the $100 RMBA show. The business podcast says no fluff, just the good stuff every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. It is Christmas Day, so Merry Christmas and for many of us we're a little bit tapped out on money. But at the same time we're thinking about starting a business in 2019. That's why today's lesson is so timely. In today's lesson you will learn three skills that will save you money when you get started. These are three skills that I highly recommend you cultivate when you're starting a business. Why? Because you're going to have to rely on these skills very frequently and getting somebody to do them on a frequent basis is going to cost you some bank. By just having these skills, it's going to really help you save a lot of cash and get your business started on a bootstrap budget. I'm going to use this from a perspective as somebody who started several businesses over the last decade, actually over the last 16 years now. Wow. And these three skills have come handy every single time. I'm so glad that I took the time to learn them. So in today's lesson, I'll tell you what those three skills are and how you can build those skills and invest in yourself in an affordable way. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. When you're starting a business, you're going to be juggling a lot of different things. Building your product, working on your marketing, working on your sales, working on your customer. You're pretty much gonna be doing everything yourself at the start. You might make a few hires, somebody that's gonna help you through the way, maybe in a virtual assistant. But if you're on a budget, you're probably gonna be bootstrapping it and just wanting to see if this business has traction first before you start building a team. Now, there are things you're gonna be doing over and over in your business that can cost you a pretty penny if you don't know how to do them yourself. These are reoccurring, reoccurring tasks that you can take care of yourself if you know how to do it. So let me start with skill number one, and I really believe this is super important. No matter where you are in business, and that's website management, your website is the home of your business. It's where you blog, it's where you market, it's where you sell your products and services, where you change your prices. It's where you update things, upload images and videos and all that kind of stuff. There is really no excuse in this day and age for not knowing how to manage your own website. I'm not saying build your own website. You. You may want somebody to do that for you or help you through that. Even though building your own website these days is pretty easy with all these tools and website builders. But you need to know how to manage it. You need to know how to update things, to enter a new blog post, to edit a blog post, to create a landing page, to edit some copy on your sales page to see what converts best. When I go to conferences, I'm so surprised to hear how many people say they have a web guy, or I should say web person, somebody who edits their website that uploads their blog posts for them and they have them on retainer and they pay them month after month. And I'm like, you know, this is pretty easy. You can learn how to do this yourself. And in fact, often it's faster for you to do it yourself than to describe what you want and give instructions to a web guy. Often these, you know, maintenance services or these web guy services are bundled with your website itself. And I don't recommend that. I think you should build your website with your own asset you have full control over and that way you're not being overcharged. Sometimes you're going to be charged 5, 6, 7,000, $2,000 a month whether you utilize their services or not. So how do you pick up the skill? Well, number one, you have to be open minded and you have to be willing to learn. Number two, if your site is built on a platform like WordPress, wherever you're hosting that website, whether it's something like a hostgator, AWS or WP engine or whatever it is, those hosting solutions usually have tutorials to help you get started with WordPress, to show you how to manage your website. And basically it's just sitting through some video lessons. If your site is managed with WordPress, there's tons of videos on the web, on YouTube, but I actually would recommend going to your hosting provider and asking them for some tutorials because, hey, they're definitely going to have them and it's going to be a lot easier to just go through a course than to search through YouTube videos. If you're using a website builder, whether it's Weebly or Squarespace or whatever, they definitely have sport tutorials. They definitely will show you how to do this. They might even have 247 support. Or you can call them or chat with them and ask questions. But the best way to learn is to do while you're learning. So while you're watching these videos, start changing things, start editing things, start adding things, start writing blog posts on your website. I guarantee you if you do this consistently for a few weeks, within a month you're going to feel very confident when it comes to editing things on your website. I'm not asking you to be a, you know, award winning designer or developer, but I'm asking you to be tech savvy, to be tech conscious, understand the technology you're using and use the interface that they offer. In this day and age, whatever platform you use to run your website, it's super simple. You just have to use it. You have to actually get your hands dirty so you can learn how to make it happen. This is going to save you a ton of money and headaches because you can just roll up your sleeves and make the changes that you want at any time. This is going to allow you to be flexible as a marketer, as a salesperson, to change headlines, to change landing pages, to test different things out that empowers you to do that when you have to rely on a web person to make the changes. It's a very slow process, communicating back and forth. So empower yourself and know how to manage your website. All right, Skill number two, copywriting. You have to know how to write. You need to know how to communicate through the written word. You can't just expect people to buy your products and services without you being able to communicate its benefits. People don't know why they should buy, they're not going to buy. And copywriting as a skill is something that you have to work on from day one. And it's something I continue to work on and read books on and learn from people that are great at it. You need copywriting for every aspect of your business. Writing emails within your team, writing emails to your customers, automation campaigns, your sales pages. Even if you're doing a sales video, you're going to script that video. Even if you're a lover of social media, those social media captions have to be written well, have to be engaging. You have to sell your ideas. Just like we mentioned in yesterday's must read episode. To Sell as Human by Daniel Pink. Communication is a mother of all skills and the better you can communicate in written form, the better off your business as sales will be. So where do you cultivate the skill? Well, I would recommend three books to start with. Number one is I will teach you to write better by Neville Medora, great copywriter. Number two is exactly what to say by Phil M. Jones. Really really good sales book and copywriting book. And number three, the Boron Letters by Gary Halpert. This is a classic. It's an oldie but it's a goodie. I would start there but again you gotta put this stuff in practice and one of the best ways to do this is to blog. If you're new to writing, new to copywriting, I would write a blog post once a week that forces you to put your skills into action and build upon those skills. If you don't use it, you'll lose it. Write an email newsletter once a week to your customers. Write an email newsletter to the people on your list that are not customers yet. Write. You get the point. If you want to dive deep in a course. I know Neville Medora sells a course called Copywriting course and copywriting is with a K and courses with a K. He's the author of the first book I mentioned and I really like his style. I like how he brings the concepts and the fundamentals to modern day application. You could check out his course@copywritingcourse.com Again, copywriting is with a K and courses with a kid. I'm not an affiliate. I am not getting a dime for saying this. I just know that he's really good at this and I would recommend his course to anybody. All right, third skill, and this one's a biggie. You may not think it's important, but you'll be surprised how often you'll need to have this skill, and that's media editing. When I say media editing, I'm talking about photos. I'm talking about any kind of images, video or audio. If you're writing blog posts, you're going to need feature images for these blog posts. How are you going to create these? Yeah, you can use Canva, which is a great tool, but you need to know how to edit, crop, change things. You have to have these skills. Even if you're using an easy to use tool like Canva. I personally recommend it's worth learning how to use Photoshop. I am so glad I learned how to do that. Early on in my career, I use Photoshop always changing images, changing logos, cropping things, removing backgrounds, helping me cultivate a better sales page through these skills as well as great images for our blog posts, these are great skills to have when you start. This also applies to being able to edit your own video and audio. This may sound like, oh wow, this is a big skill. It's actually not that big of a skill. If you have a Mac, you have imovies and you have GarageBand, which allows you to edit audio. You can literally learn both of these over a weekend. It's such a simple, simple skill. But you need to know how to trim your videos, trim your audio from, you know, the start and the finish. I can't tell you how many times I've seen sales videos where they had people still holding their camera and you saw their arm at the end of the video because they don't know how to trim their video looks very amateurish. There's no reason why you can't learn that. Learning simple things like how to make clean cuts and transitions, adding titles to your videos, these are things you can learn literally over a weekend. If you have a Mac, you can go to the Mac store and you can just sit at the Genius bar and ask them a whole bunch of questions and they'll show you how to do these things for free. And often these Apple stores have free classes on these pieces of software. If you don't have a Mac, I highly recommend you check out lynda.com if you're using any kind of Windows based video or audio editor, there's going to be plenty of tutorials on like Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere or Audition. These are the video and audio versions of editors in the Adobe suite. Again, hiring out for this is going to cost you a lot of money at the start. Money you just can't afford. And you can learn how to do these quickly. An investment of one weekend can save you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars every time you need that service.

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To wrap up today's lesson, these are the three skills I highly recommend you build as you're starting your business to save you some money. Number one, manage your own website. Check out your hosting, check out your website builder, find other tutorials that they can offer and start building so you can use the skills that you're gaining. Number two, copywriting. Got to communicate your ideas. Check out those three books I mentioned as well as Copywriting course by Neville Medora. Number three Media editing. Whether it's learning how to Photoshop or edit your video or audio, lynda.com is a great resource to learn about that in a quick way. And again, if you're on a Mac, you can just visit a Mac store and they can help you out. An Apple Store, I should say. That wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening again. Merry Christmas. For those who are celebrating, it's great to have you here every single day, even on the holidays. If you want to show us some love, drop us an iTunes rating and review and let us know what you love about the show. We'd love to hear from you. I read every single review, so thank you in advance for that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Investing in yourself, even if you have to spend a little bit of money to learn something, is an investment worth doing because you're going to be able to reap the benefits for as long as you're running your business. As far as long as you're an entrepreneur. And these skills will require very little investment of time and money to get a great roi. That's why I mentioned them in today's episode. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care of.

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