How to Find JV Partners That Don’t Suck

How to Find JV Partners That Don’t Suck

by | 13 Jun, 2020 | Biz Tips, Work Smarter

How to Find JV Partners That Don’t Suck

Emma O'Connell

13th June 2020

No matter how proudly you embrace the “solopreneur” title, there comes a time when you absolutely must reach out for help. And for smart business owners, that help often comes in the form of JV partners.

Also called affiliates, JV partners act as your own private sales army, spreading the word about your products and services to a whole new audience—theirs. Not only do you reach people who might otherwise never encounter you, but you also benefit mightily from your JV partners’ existing relationships. By promoting you, an affiliate is endorsing you to her audience. She’s saying, “I know this seller; I trust her, and you should, too.” 

But even with all those many benefits, coaches and product sellers sometimes struggle to find great partners. Sure, lots of people will register for your affiliate program, but the Pareto Principle is alive and well when it comes to JV partners: 20% of your affiliates will do 80% of the work. That means your goal is to recruit higher performing partners. 

The only question is, where do you find these great partners? 

When it comes to JV partners: 20% of your affiliates will do 80% of the work. That means your goal is to recruit higher performing partners. But, where do you find these great partners? 

Pick Your VA’s Brain

Chances are good that your VA works for other business owners in similar niches. If you’re a business coach, she very likely works with several other coaches, and she’s in a position to know…

  • Where her clients are in the business development cycle (ideally you want established partners, not newbies)
  • Their audience demographics (so she’ll know if they’re a good fit or not)
  • Their willingness to promote (some people simply don’t do JV partnership, so it’s a waste of time to approach them)

Look to Your Best Clients

Especially if you’re a business coach, your clients might just be your biggest fans—and they’re in a position to recommend you to friends, family, social connections, and elsewhere. 

Be sure your clients all know that you offer a referral/affiliate program, how to sign up, and what the benefits are. 

Your Competitors

It’s true—your competitors might just be your biggest affiliates, if you give them a chance. 

In some circles (such as business and relationship coaching) clients tend to “graduate” from one coach and move to another. This is normal and to be expected. And when you’re on good terms with your competitors, the coach their ex-clients move to might just be you. 

Don’t be afraid to look in unusual places for your next JV partner. You really never know who can connect you with potential clients and partners. Think about all your relationships—from your team to your social circles to your competitors and colleagues—and consider all of their relationships and how far that might stretch. Then pick up the phone or draft an email and start leveraging your contacts!

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How to Boost Passive Income with Automated Follow Ups

How to Boost Passive Income with Automated Follow Ups

by | 9 Jun, 2020 | Biz Tips, Streamline with Systems

How to Boost Passive Income with Automated Follow Ups

Emma O'Connell

9th June 2020

As any smart business owner knows, the key to passive income is a well-established (and full) funnel.  

So of course you’ve optimised your opt-in pages and monetised your download pages and encouraged more buyers through well-placed upsells and downsells.  

But what about the follow-up? Do you contact customers about the products or services they didn’t buy? Do you encourage them to use the products they have purchased? Are you making sure they know about all your other wonderful programs?  

If not, you’re missing the boat. But the good news is, this can be easily managed with just a bit of simple automation, and when done right, it will smoothly lead your customers from one purchase to the next, at the exact right time for them to take advantage of your best offers.  

Know your audience and your products exceptionally well. Study your stats. Know your open and click rates. Pay attention to the promotions that work, as well as those that fall flat. With information in hand, you’ll be better able to effectively segment your lists and make the most of all the parts of your funnel. 

Segment Your Audience 

Many autoresponder services allow you to target emails based on reader action. Want to send a follow up email to those who clicked a specific link? Create a segment and mail away. Want to re-engage with those who haven’t opened your emails in a while? Easy to do, and you can potentially recover subscribers who have gone missing.  

In more sophisticated systems, such Converkit (which is the Email Marketing System I use and LOVE), you can dig even deeper, and move people from one series to another based on their buying habits. That way you’ll never promote a product that a reader already owns. Not only that, but you’ll always be able to offer the best next thing, no matter where a subscriber is in your funnel.  

Still another way to segment your list is according to what they do not buy. If a subscriber has been on a list where you’re promoting your top-level coaching program, and she has not yet purchased, it may simply be too expensive for her at this time. Consider moving these readers to an autoresponder series promoting a lower cost option instead.  

All of these tactics require that you know your audience and your products exceptionally well. Study your stats. Know your open and click rates. Pay attention to the promotions that work, as well as those that fall flat. With information in hand, you’ll be better able to effectively segment your lists and make the most of all the parts of your funnel. 

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How to Drive Traffic to Your Sales Funnel

How to Drive Traffic to Your Sales Funnel

by | 2 Jun, 2020 | Biz Tips, Streamline with Systems

How to Drive Traffic to Your Sales Funnel

Emma O'Connell

2nd June 2020

When it comes to leveraging your time, automation is the sharpest tool in your CEO toolbox. It allows you to get more done in less time, and to smoothly move people through your funnel.  

For many small business owners, though, the one area that’s often overlooked is your website.  

Use Your Blog to Build Your Mailing List 

Like any smart business owner, you likely have opt-in forms on your website. They’re in the sidebar or maybe the footer, and you might have a pop-up to capture attention as visitors are about to leave.  

But do you have a solid call to action at the end of your blog posts? When a new reader is finished consuming your posts, she’s primed to learn more. Give her the opportunity by offering an opt-in at the end of each post.  

Even better, make it a logical next step by creating a related offer for each post. Called a content upgrade, these offers typically consist of a simple checklist or worksheet, and capture attention by providing even more information about a topic they’re already interested in.  

Keep Them Reading With Related Links 

How often do you revisit old blog posts to link to newer content? This is an important maintenance job that will help provide visitors with the information they’re looking for by linking related posts together.  

Not only is this strategy good for keeping visitors on your site, but Google approves as well. Posts that link to each other encourage search engine bots to crawl your site more thoroughly, and help boost the rankings of your most relevant posts.  

[Hint: This is a perfect job for your VA.] 

Automation is the smartest tool in your CEO toolbox when it comes to leveraging your time.

Make the Best of Your Download Pages 

Whether you’re giving away a free report or paid product, your download pages can pull double-duty by offering visitors a “what’s next” option. For free download pages, a related, low-cost product is best. It gives readers the chance to learn more about you with a small investment.  

For paid products, consider offering a complementary product instead. If you’re protecting your download pages with a membership script such as Customer Hub, you can even offer upsells based on what they already own, making the choice even easier for them.  

And if you’re using a double-opt-in mailing list, make use of that confirmation page, too! That’s the perfect place for a quick upsell or an invitation to join you in your Facebook group or weekly Periscope.  

Here’s a good rule of thumb to follow on your website: Whenever a reader lands on a page, she should be offered the next logical step. When you write your blog posts or create your download pages, keep that in mind, and your funnel will practically fill itself.  

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Emma O'Connell

Emma O'Connell is a Web Designer from the UK. She works with female creatives to help them elevate their brand fast with a website done in a day, so they can get back to making an impact. She firmly believes in working smarter not harder, setting yourself up for success and spending more time with the people that matter most.

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How to Turn Your Dream into a Plan

How to Turn Your Dream into a Plan

by | 26 May, 2020 | Work Smarter

How to Turn Your Dream into a Plan

Emma O'Connell

26th May 2020

As a coach, it can be difficult to watch the lack of progress of so many promising entrepreneurs and coaches. They’ve dreamed for so long about creating a solid, sustainable business, and yet, all they do is dream.  

You know the people I’m talking about. They attend conferences, sign up for free webinars, buy paid training, and sometimes even work with a coach or two. And yet week after week, month after month, year after year, they fail to make any progress toward their dreams.  

Are they just lazy? No. It’s something worse. They don’t know how to move from a dream to a plan and they’re stuck. 

Start With the Long-Term 

If you’ve ever been on a job interview and were asked, “Where do you want to be five years from now,” you might have thought it an odd question. But as a business owner, that might just be the most important consideration you can have.  

Without knowing where you’re headed in the long term, it’s impossible to create a map to get there. You need to know what your destination is, so that every day, week, month, and year you can check your progress to be sure you’re still headed in the right direction.  

Create Milestones 

Once you know your ultimate destination, you can draft a plan for getting there, and create the interim goals that will help you stay on track.  

For example, if in five years you want to be free to travel for 8 weeks every year, then you need to have a few pieces in place before that can happen: 

  • Enough income to cover travel costs 
  • Passive income to sustain your business while you’re not working 
  • A staff who can manage the business while you’re away 

With this list, you can then work backwards from your five-year goal, and create milestones along the way. If you know you’ll need to earn $150,000 annually in order to fund your travel plans, and right now you’re earning $60,000, then reasonable milestones might look like this: 

  • Year 1: $70,000 
  • Year 2: $85,000 
  • Year 3: $105,000 
  • Year 4: $125,000 
  • Year 5: $150,000 

With these milestones in place, it’s much easier to figure out exactly what you need to do to achieve them, by setting monthly, weekly, and daily goals.  

Without knowing where you’re headed in the long term, it’s impossible to create a map to get there. You need to know what your destination is, so that every day, week, month, and year you can check your progress to be sure you’re still headed in the right direction.  

Create Small Goals  

If you say to someone, you need to move from $60,000 to $150,000 in five years, that’s a pretty overwhelming task. After all, it’s a $90,000 increase and most people will look at that and immediately dismiss it as impossible.  

But when you break it down as we have above, and then again into smaller steps, it suddenly doesn’t look so daunting.  

In the first year of the plan we have outlined here, your income needs to increase only by $10,000. That’s less than $1000 per month! Surely that’s easy enough to accomplish!  

You can further break that down by week: $1000 per month is just $250 per week. If you sell just one more group coaching package, or five more of a $50 training program, you’ve already reached your milestone.  

That might mean sending one more email to your list, or investing an additional $20 per month in Facebook ads, or perhaps reaching out to one more JV partner. The point is, reaching this much smaller goal is far easier than thinking about that five-year plan.  

So what’s your big dream? How can you deconstruct it into achievable milestones, workable goals, and finally, daily and weekly tasks? If you can do this (and you definitely can) then you can achieve anything in business and in life.  

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Why Your “Why” Is So Important For Success

Why Your “Why” Is So Important For Success

by | 21 May, 2020 | Work Smarter

Why Your “Why” Is So Important For Success

Emma O'Connell

21st May 2020

What do super-successful coaches and small business owners all have in common?

It’s not experience.  

It’s not extraordinary skills.

It’s not even a powerful drive.

Although all of these things can definitely help your business grow, they’re not a prerequisite for success. After all, no one is born with experience or skills, and plenty of successful people lack drive.

The one thing that does make a difference, though, is your “why.”

Why did you decide to become a coach?

Why do you spend too many hours in front of your computer every week?

Why do you stay up too late and get up too early, just so you can work on growing your business?

The “why” is what ultimately drives us to success, but here’s the thing: it’s different for everyone. Your why is not my why, and my why is not her why. It’s a deeply personal choice that can have great meaning…or not.  

Your “why” is the one thing that will ultimately drive you to success. It’s a deeply personal choice that can have a great meaning….or not.

A mother of small children may be saddened at the thought of sending her kids to daycare just so she can go to work to (barely) pay for it. Her big why is a drive to spend as much time with her kids as she can, while still supporting her family.  

A young, fresh out of school entrepreneur might resist taking the same path her parents took, working for a corporation for 40 years, only to retire and find themselves with barely enough to live on. Instead, she dreams of having the income (and the time) to see the world while she’s still young enough to enjoy it.  

So what’s your big “why”? It might be the freedom to travel, the option to spend time with your family, the ability to take weeks off at a time to care for a sick family member, or even to earn enough money to support a charity that’s close to your heart.  

Whatever it is, your “why” is the driving force behind every action you take. When you’re deciding whether or not to take on a new client, ask yourself if it’s aligned with your “why.” When you’re setting goals for the year, ask yourself if those goals are moving you closer or further from your big why. Thinking of branching out into a new business venture? Make sure it’s in alignment with your big why, and success is suddenly much more attainable.  

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Emma O'Connell

Emma O'Connell is a Web Designer from the UK. She works with female creatives to help them elevate their brand fast with a website done in a day, so they can get back to making an impact. She firmly believes in working smarter not harder, setting yourself up for success and spending more time with the people that matter most.

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