VLOG: Preparing For A Launch...What You Don't See 👀

Here's what's up. I am making it a challenge for myself to be more open, to be more real. I recently post a vlog on this channel a few weeks ago where I kind of share behind the scenes of setting up my office. And a lot of you really liked it. But here's my problem. As an enneagram3, it is so hard for me to show up here right now. Hair, makeup not done, the equipment not set up. I'm shooting this on my phone. But I know that this type of content you're all very interested in. I recently did a survey to my email list and so many of you love to see behind the scenes and you want to see more of that. I'm challenging myself to get out of my comfort zone. I ask my students and my clients all the time to get out of theirs. So I'm doing it for myself and I'm going to continue to try to do this vlog series. But what I'm going to be sharing in the next couple of weeks is behind the scenes of planning a launch. In the next couple of weeks we are going to be opening our program Video Strategy Academy. We are going to be launching that with a challenge in front of it. And so some of the comments, some of the feedback that I got on the survey forms were not just about YouTube but a lot of business building. I'm going to grab the paper here because I just literally wrote down comments like words that you all said in there. Some of the things you had was business building, starting a business, creating a digital product, growing an email list, systems for content marketing, all those types of things. So I figured after watching Alex Beaden recently do her launch series over on her YouTube channel, sharing her launch, I'm gonna try to do it as well. Like I said, this is incredibly hard for me to not show up polished on video. So bear with me with this. It's going to take a little bit of practicing, a little bit of weirdness for a while. But what I plan to do with this series is kind of go through week by week what I'm doing behind the scenes. Today is a Monday. I did a small workout this morning at 5:30 in the morning, took the kids to Nana's house. We only have two more weeks till school starts. And then I got down into my office, up in my office and got to work. A lot of you also wonder like what's my day to day life look like at work. So one of the first things that helps me a lot is if you saw that 90 day planning video. I use this full focus planner. And so I have three things written down right here that I need to focus on. And I figured these out when I went through my weekly preview on, I think I actually did this Saturday. And so I have my week planned out already because I need to know when I sit down here again, a lot of you ask about time management. How do you manage it all? I have to have a plan for my week before the week starts, otherwise my time management goes out the door and I never know what I'm working on. So sitting down, looking at this, like I said, I think Saturday I was able to determine what are gonna be my three things I'm working on every day. And so today is a Monday. Right now I'm working on writing scripts for the videos that I'm going to shoot for a challenge we're gonna be offering coming up. So also, if you're watching this PR the end of September, you're going to see a lot of sneak peek content and things that are coming up in my business. So it's hard to share that stuff because you almost feel like you should keep that guarded. But again, throwing it all out the window, trying to be as real authentic as possible with you all. And so that's what I'm going to be working on today. I do have a team meeting with my assistant strategist today. So there's three of them and me. We're just going to touch base. We just hired two of them last week, so, so we're going to touch base here today, talking about, you know, what's working, what's not, where do you need help, where's the feedback? Because this is my first time hiring this many people. Previous to this, I've had one full time employee and one kind of assistant that has been my right hand person. But to bring on two people that are managing a lot of my client work, we're just going to kind of figure out where we're at, what we're doing and then I have a coffee date with a virtual coffee date with a girl, a lady who's in my mastermind, just to get to know each other a little bit more. And then the rest is just going to be focused solely on writing these scripts. So on Wednesday of this week I can shoot these challenge videos. I'm also planning this way out in advance because my challenge isn't going to be till the end of September. But here's the key to remember, life happens. It's already happened. I had planned to shoot a Bunch of content on Wednesday and now my mother in law can't watch the kids on Wednesday. So I'm only going to have half a day to shoot videos. But this is why I bake in a lot of time and prepare in advance for a thing like a launch and a challenge. We've already had this challenge idea rolling around four weeks prior to this. So we actually started planning this challenge at the beginning of July and it's not going to even happen until the end of September. So just so you can get a time period of what this looks like, planning for things. Because I can't just decide I'm going to launch something and do it next week. I've got a lot of moving pieces, I've got kids and this is how I'm really managing and balancing my time. I do have some appointments to do, I do have some personal things that I gotta do. I even have it listed here. There's a little section for personal checklists and I gotta call to get estimates for landscaping. I've got to get a hair appointment scheduled. I gotta reschedule a dermatologist appointment. I still got normal things, family personal things to do in addition to work stuff. So.

So let's see if we can get these videos.

Script today. I've been working on scripting the five day challenge I'm going to be hosting. I am a writer. Not writer, but pen and paper. I hate to write actually, but I like to get my ideas out on pen and paper first. So I've scripted five days, four days of my challenge. So day one, two, three and four, I've scripted out the bulk of the content. But what I realized when I was writing this, I didn't really determine what the prizes, the giveaways are all going to be. So I've got to now map that out so I can incorporate teasing those things into each video and talking about that in each video. So when you're taking the challenge, hopefully, if you are, we're going to put a sign up for the wait list down in the description box. So whether that's up there or not, there will be a waitlist, so check back if it's not. Or follow me on Instagram. I'll be having it listed there as well. I want to be able to tell you all about what you can win if you follow along and do the things we're doing in this challenge. I really want to make the challenge manageable. I got a lot of feedback on challenges that it got overwhelming that they didn't have time and so these are really simple action items every single day to not only help you get some content planned out but but to get your first YouTube video live then. Other than that, I just have one more thing left on my to do list here. The current time is 2:30. I've been working since about 7:30. Had two hours of phone calls in between and that's how this kind of goes. I probably won't check back in here today. I will check in tomorrow when my mom comes and watches the kids. And tomorrow if I look at my book it's all about, I don't even have it written. If I look at my weekly preview, I'm going to actually be writing that challenge waitlist page and the challenge sign up page. So by the time you're watching this video it should be all up there. Since I'm doing that tomorrow, I will probably wrap up here around 4 to get in a workout and then cook some enchiladas for dinner because that's what's on the menu we meal planned yesterday. My husband went and got the groceries on Sunday. That way we know what we're eating, we don't wonder about it and we get everything we need on the grocery list. Surprise. We've already fast forward to Thursday just like I imagined.

Forget to get on here and share what I'm doing. But for Tuesday I spent the entire day working on a challenge sales page as I'm going to show you here in a minute. Basically built the challenge branding from the ground up. I'm really excited about it. I'm gonna tease it here, but Wednesday was a little bit different because we normally have child care and we didn't. So my husband and I had to flip. He worked a half a day in the morning and then he got done around noon and then I worked the second half of the day. So only got to work a half a day yesterday. And today was crazy because I had an orthodontist appointment. The teeth are almost all straight. I have two more months left to go. Then get my braces off the bottom and I'm done with my retainer. So that lasted longer than expected. And then I had Video Strategy Academy.

Coaching call today which was a hot seat.

We actually go into a student's channel. Well I go into a student's channel and give her feedback on what's working, what's not. Ask answer any of her questions that she has about her channel that she's struggling with. Then that leaves me like two hours.

Today to get anything done.

So the goal was to get the.

Entire funnel set up for this challenge.

So, so that I could send it to my coach to review, give me feedback since she's the expert in this area with sales page and stuff. I just like to have that confirmation that things look good. And so I'm going to show you the finished product so far.

So I'm using a tool or a software called FG Funnels and you can see each step of the funnel that I've had to build. So we're going to have a wait list. Then we need to have the waitlist confirmation. Then we have the actual challenge page and then we have the challenge order confirmation and checkout page. When the challenge goes live, this is what the page looks like. And this is so exciting that I'm sharing this. I've never done like a themed challenge before. And yeah, if you haven't guessed, we are going with a 90s theme for this challenge. You see, I've got this all added in here. This is everything that I did on Tuesday. Basically Tuesday was finding all the GIFs, writing the content, getting this style of this page all created. I'm excited. I cannot wait to see how this all turns out. Then we also have the checkout page. So if people say sign me up, I also created the checkout page as well. And then the last piece of this funnel is the order confirmation. So once they decide to join the challenge, then they are given this page. I need to reshoot this video here and then they can join the Facebook group.

Hi, this is editing Trina. Yes. Wearing the same shirt that I was in that video a few weeks ago. Since this video, we've totally changed the look of the challenge. After speaking to my coach, we went another direction. So you will still be surprised, but you'll see a pretty cool 90s version theme that I did that I may still use sometime. But just be aware, we changed that a lot.

So that was my basic goal for this week. If we look back at my full focus planner and I go back to the beginning of the week when I was planning things out, the goal was to get these pages set up because my coach reviews these things Monday morning. So I want to get this all out to her so I can get that review on Monday morning. One other thing that I did Monday when I was working on content, I ended up creating kind of a content content social media plan. This is kind of a mess, but I started creating a social media plan. Leading into the challenge, you'll see that all the red sticky notes or post it notes were ideas that I had for content and then I just created a makeshift calendar. Let me get this situated with this large post it notes and stuck in the ideas for content that I have for social media on those days. There are other things going on in my business. I'm not able to do all of this by myself. And so for a long time my core side of my business, my education side of the business just kind of hung out. I haven't openly done a large launch like this that I'm gearing up for since February because the agency side of my business actually took out unexpectedly. I hadn't done ads to it, I hadn't really talked about it. It kind of became word of mouth and then people finding my website and people submitting an application. And so I was really heavily focused on the agency for a long time. And now that I got my head strategist Erica over there and we onboarded two new assistant strategists that are helping her. She, Erica is able to basically run the agency on her own. I check in every morning, get a quick brief of what's going on, any problems that we're having, any feedback that they need from me and then the rest of the day is focusing on this launch stuff, focusing on how to uplevel our students inside of Video Strategy Academy's experience. And so don't think that you can do these both at the same time. You cannot run an agency and launch a course at the same time. I've learned this and this is kind of what my balance has been. It's been agency heavy, course light, then now we're going course heavy. But luckily I have people helping me on the agency side. I also wanted to touch base a few. A few weeks ago I shared my 90 day plan and that would have got me through September. We are halfway through that 90 day plan and I had to do a little bit of a reevaluation. Childcare was a little wonky. Some things took longer than expected, some things popped up. So what I did is again my brain starts to run crazy and if you look at that, I'll link that video. But all I did was grab the notebook and I started writing down the list of all the things I needed to get done again. So we have this, this is all launch stuff that I was focusing on and then this so that I could re shift my focus or just tweak some things around in the plan that I made out for the 90 days. It's all basically the same. In fact, if I look back what I wrote in Pencil. There's just a few things that changed from that initial 90 days. So if I pull that calendar, why I wrote in pencil as well. I actually decided to not do a project until the end of this 90 days to see if I have time for it because it's not a priority. Not much of a priority as I thought. So I moved it to the end of the 90 days. I moved up another priority that I didn't think was going to be a top level priority and I'm going to be focusing on it next week instead. I wasn't able to shoot YouTube videos this week, so I had to shift that around to make sure I got the content planned out and over to my editor Annabelle in time. And then it's just making sure that I had the time to add in. I'm speaking, I'm a guest speaker at three different events in October, so I need to make sure I have the time to get that content shot. And then tomorrow is our last Friday pool day. Every Friday this summer, I committed to not working and going to the pool with the kids. And this Friday is the last day because school starts next week and mom's back to working without any childcare issues. So I hope you are excited to join the Video Game Plan challenge. I actually didn't even have that name when I started this video back on Monday. I finally came up with it. I think late Monday and then Tuesday the branding of it all started to unravel. I haven't been this excited for a challenge in a while and this is basically the week that it all kind of came together. Anything you want to see, any processes or systems, let me know because these are the videos I'm really trying to break out of my comfort zone. Be less poised, so to speak, less prepared. I didn't script any of this. I knew the story I wanted to tell here. I wanted to share kind of how a challenge unravels, like what I do behind the scenes to get to that point. What else is there? What did you like about this? What is your biggest takeaway from this? I want to know to create more of these videos that you like what you're liking. If you didn't catch that 90 day planning video that I did, I will link it on your screen right now to watch. I hope you subscribe because that means you're liking these vlog freestyle videos and I'll see you soon.