MBA909 How To Make Sure You’re Doing What Works

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Validate your business idea with our seven part video course over at 100mba.net you'll see the enrollment form right there on the homepage. Again, that's 100-mba.net in today's episode, you will learn how to make sure you're doing what works when you're building a business. When you're running a business, you're often wondering and asking yourself, am I doing the right things? How do you measure that you're doing what works? This is so important. Not only so you can do what works, but also not stop doing it. You have to recognize you're doing something that's effective so you can double down on it. If you're unaware of this, you can often make the big mistake of. Of stop doing something that's actually getting you results. But if you're not measuring your results, you'll never know. And in today's episode, I'm gonna show you how to do that, how to measure results and make sure you're doing what works. No more doubt, no more fear. No more wondering if your efforts are meaningless. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. When it comes to knowing, knowing what works, I like to use the metaphor of a navigational system like Google Maps. If you set a destination in Google Maps and start moving towards that destination, you're driving and you're looking at the map, but the time starts increasing. So it says time to destination, 20 minutes, and then it jumps to 35 minutes. This actually happened to Nicole and I recently, and we're like, well, what happened? Was there some traffic or something? And the time kept on increasing and we realized we made a wrong turn, we're going the wrong way. And Google Maps didn't pick it up. Well, it did, but we basically had to make a U turn. But the point here is, is that we knew we were going the wrong way because we were measuring our success or our progress to our goal. Usually the time will go down, it will decrease because we're getting closer, right? We're getting closer to our goal. When that wasn't happening, we realized, okay, something's wrong. And that's what you got to do with your business and your business goals. You got to track it. This is incredibly important, especially when it comes to marketing and sales. Often we try to just spray and pray. Like, we just put our ideas and our brand and our market on social media, and hopefully it works. And we may see an uptick in sales or something like that, but we don't know why. We don't know what's working. To me, that's absolutely useless. So let's get into how to measure it so we know what works so we can double down. Then afterwards, I'm going to share with you how I use this method in my own business to know how to spend my time, what to work on. Let's talk about marketing and sales. Let's say, for example, you're trying to get into Facebook ads. You're trying to run some Facebook ads, and you want to see what's working and what's not. Now, obviously, Facebook. Facebook has a way for you to put a tracking pixel and know how many conversions you're making through that ad. So you actually know how much money you're making per acquisition or per dollar, really. And that's a really good way to know if your efforts and your money with Facebook ads is actually working. But what if you're not using a system like Facebook Ads that actually tracks that for you? Or maybe you don't have the budget to do Facebook ads. Say, for example, you're just doing your own social media marketing or your own content marketing. Well, you could definitely track things with Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager allows you to add tags and track what's going on. Works in conjunction with Google Analytics. And at the very least, if you're not using Tag Manager, should definitely link to a special page for each marketing effort. Let me explain what that means. Say, for example, I am using Twitter to market a new course that I'm selling. Instead of sending everybody to the same sales page, I can create a clone of that sales page with a different link that I use specifically to drive traffic to Twitter. This is a very primitive way to do it, but hey, it works. You have a special link, a unique link to a special page, and then I can go into Google Analytics and see how much traffic I'm getting from that. I can see how many people actually bought from that link because I could see how they go through my system. I can look at my checkout page and the page that comes after the checkout page and see how they got there through Google Analytics. But the point here is that I'm not just putting the same link and I can't track what's going on. Whether you're using Tag Manager or creating a whole special page for each marketing effort, you know, if Twitter's working for you in that marketing channel. Let's talk about content marketing. I'm a big believer in content marketing. If you're writing a blog post, if you're creating podcast episodes or video. But let's stick to blog posts for this example. If you're going to write the epic blog post in your niche in a certain topic, you're definitely gonna wanna figure out if it's actually getting traffic. It's being shared. Google Analytics is great for that. But it's also a good idea to put some sharing buttons right there on the page. You can use Sumo.com for that. They have a free plan. You can check it out@100mba.net sumo and it'll actually track how many people shared that post. And you can know, hey, this post is getting traction. It's being shared. And therefore I gotta make sure I write posts that are in the same kind of quality. So. And maybe even elaborate on this topic in the future. If you're creating any kind of content, whether it's a podcast, a video or a blog post like in this example, definitely have a call to action. Some sort of opt in, a unique opt in or what they call a content upgrade on that page. This could be like download my first chapter of my book for free, or get a free PDF guide, or get a free video course. But make it unique to that blog post. Why? Because when they opt into that free guide or that freebie, you're gonna put them on a certain list on your email list so they can get the guide right. Or if you're very fancy, you're gonna tag them with a certain tag to let you know that they downloaded this guide or they opted in for this guide. That's a surefire way to know if that blog post is really converting. Cause people are downloading the guide afterwards. It also tells you how many people actually convert off the blog post into subscribers. If that blog post is converting you a whole lot of subscribers, more than Facebook or Twitter, you better double down on actually creating great content on your blog because that generates you the most. Leads can't grow what you can't track. So make sure you track it. Let's get into a big one. Finances. Obviously your whole goal in business is to make more than your spending. Otherwise you're going to go out of business really quickly. So you got to stay profitable. This is especially important if you're bootstrapped or, or a small business. So let's get into that. If you're using a service, if you made a hire with the hopes that they're going to improve your sales or marketing or bring you in new customers, but they're not, you need to quickly stop doing that. I know that sounds kind of harsh, but as soon as you start to realize that you're not getting an ROI and you've given it a fair shake of a month or two and you're losing money because of this investment, because of this choice, you got to step back, you got to undo, you got to go back to the last most profitable install, right? You got to make sure you go back to where you were before and reevaluate. That's not working. Should never be spending or investing money with the hopes of getting an ROI and then not getting the ROI and continuing to do that. You can't do that. Remember a few years ago I signed up for a marketing service that ran ads for me and it was a set Fee, plus the actual ads that I had to run. And I was spending a few grand a month. It was about $4,000 a month on the service, and I did not see an increase of $4,000 a month in revenue after a couple of months. In fact, it wasn't even making 50% of that. So I quickly had to make the decision to cut that out of the business. Yes, I was making more sales with it, but I wasn't making more than I was spending. A lot of people get sucked up in this trap where they continue to do something that doesn't work because they think it's working, because, hey, I'm making more money than before, but they forget about their expenses. So cut something out when it's not working. And here's a really big one. Your time. Your time is the most valuable asset. You can't get your time back. You can make more money, but you can't make more time. So you really need to understand how to spend your time wisely, how to know where to spend your time, what will really be the best investment of your time. And obviously this is predicated on your goals. But sometimes your business needs you in certain ways, and it needs you now. In 2017, from January to December, this show was not daily, it was weekly. I had to kick it back a little bit. Even though the show has been daily since its inception, 2014, all the way to the end of 2016, I had to make that tough decision because my time was really needed at our software business, Webinar Ninja. We were growing our team, we were developing a whole new software, and I was needed to show leadership. I was needed for management. We were hiring at a rapid pace, and if I wasn't around to show leadership and to train the new employees and make sure that they understand what we're trying to do with our business and with the product, I would have wasted a whole lot of money. So my time was needed on that. As much as I love this podcast, I love doing this podcast, I had to make the tough decision to make it weekly rather than daily. But once we had the team all together and they're well trained and they're where they need to be, I started to think about bringing the show back to daily. Why? Because the show is awesome. I love it. It's one of the things I enjoy. It's also a great way for me to reach out to new business owners and help them out and honestly to build trust with these people, because later on, they're going to want to become an entrepreneur. They want to build their business. They're going to want to take our courses at the 100 MBA or at the very least be a part of the show, listen to the episodes, or read our blog. So I knew that worked and I needed to get back to it. So even though I took that year to do a weekly podcast instead of a daily podcast to focus on Webinar Ninja, I always had it in the back of my mind that we're going to go back to daily once I took care of business with Webinar Ninja. And those are the hardest decisions. Your time making sure you're doubling down on things that work, even when it goes against what you really want to do. Sometimes those are the hardest decisions.

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Sometimes we get busy with the doing and we forget to analyze what we're doing and to track what we're doing. We just work, work, work, work, work, and we never evaluate what we're working on and if it's working. So I advise you to take the time. Put it in your calendar once a month to evaluate the things you've been working on during the last month, whether it's marketing, sales, finance, your time. Ask yourself, how do I know this works? How do I know I'm getting progress or I'm seeing progress? If you say I don't know, it's probably because you have no way to measure it. So figure out a way to measure it that way. Next month when you do your evaluation, you'll have some answers and you'll know what to cut and and what to focus on with the double down. I know this sounds like a bit of work, but it's going to save you a lot of time and money in the long run. Trust me, I've lost a lot of money and time by not doing this. So put it in your calendar today. Spend 30 minutes to evaluate what's working and what's not. All right, that wraps up today's episode. I hope you loved it. If you did, drop us an iTunes rating and review. If you're listening on your iPhone right now, just click the COVID art. You'll see a link that says give us a rating and review. If you're on your computer, you could do it directly on itunes. Everybody who leaves us an iTunes rating and review enters our weekly random draw. Every Friday we call it Free Ride. Friday we will give away a free ride to one of our courses. This week we're giving away a free ride to ezcourse, a $500 valued course. You could check it out@easycourse.com but we're going to give away a free membership to somebody who leaves us a rating and review. We do that random draw on Fridays and announce the winner on Friday's episode. So subscribe and tune in for that. But you can't win if you don't leave a reading and review. So make sure you do that. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this. You know I told you to schedule time to review what's working, what's not. After a few months, you're going to start getting used to this. About five or six months in, you're going to know intuitively what's working, what's not. You're evaluating while you're actually working. So this is going to get easier. The other thing is that don't get discouraged when you discover something's not working. Just be grateful that you found out it's not working and that you could stop doing it now and stop wasting more time and money. I've been in situations where I would evaluate something and like, wow, I just lost a whole bunch of money because I just discovered this now. But my next immediate thought is, at least I found out so I don't continue to lose money or time. All right, that wraps up today's lesson. I'll check you in tomorrow's lesson, which is Q and A Wednesday, where I answer your questions right here. You can email me directly omar100mba.net if you have any questions. Tomorrow's question is a tough one. What do I do when I run out of cash in my business? We answer that in tomorrow's episode. I'll check you then take.

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