Episode 12 Transcript

Heather:

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was so freaking hot outside. Okay. It was Sydney. So it was coastal hot, right? So not too bad, but still hot. Not like Queensland, humid or Fresno dry hot heat. I used to live in Fresno. I'll never forget those, that dry extreme heat. or not sort of California, San Francisco, chili hot, which if you've lived in San Francisco before, like I did too, near it, it would always be like really cold in the summer. Or not like New York air, like thick hot air. It was just Sydney hot. And it was that time of year. It was Christmas holidays. And if you live in Australia, you know that the whole country sort of shuts down. up to four weeks, definitely two weeks, over the Christmas holidays because it's middle of summer. I was doing my yearly reflection and I had my little gingerbread read diffuser out because it's really hard to get in the mood to bake cookies when it's summertime and hot. I still struggle, by the way, with sort of those holidays like Halloween and Christmas. I'm so used to being from originally from California. having people going to the beach, you know, so, so crazy being in Sydney during that time of year. So I was sat there, you know, I was staring at my journals and my workbooks from the different conferences I'd been to over the years. All the plans, all the ideas, never actioned. Lots of good intention in those journals and workbooks. I moved on to my app next to kind of And I have an app called Todoist where I just list things that I want to get done. I've sort of since moved out of that and just have like one core place project management tool that I use, but I was using that for a really long time. So I was looking into that Todoist app. I filtered through the many ideas. Some started, some not. Same situation as the journals. Actually most not started. I then looked at my projects folder in my hard drive. So I have an external hard drive and I popped that into my computer. scrolling through the projects folders. Again, so many ideas for packages that I wanted to launch and offer in my business and courses. So many shiny objects over the years, I would just sort of flit off and try and they were a bit half-baked. Yes, just thinking about this gets me a little overwhelmed. And if I'm honest, I feel like a little bit of a failure as well. Or definitely was during that moment because I started focusing on all the things I had not done. And that's where my head was. Like that time of reflection was, oh boy, I'm not where I wanna be. I'm a bit of a failure. There's so many ideas. I wasn't able to action them. So here's the thing. What if it should be the other way around? For me, that's what I started thinking. Like maybe I flipped this around. Instead of focusing on what I had not done yet, I needed to start thinking about all the things that I had accomplished so far. Are you guys like me at all, by the way? Do you ever do this? Do you ever just like beat yourself up? and go, God, I'm just not where I want to be. I haven't hit the goals, all that sort of stuff. And then it just makes you feel like crap about yourself and you get a bit overwhelmed. So that's where I was. And I was, but I was like, okay, let's focus on the things I have accomplished. What, and you know, I'll post some questions to you. Like what have you accomplished recently in the last year in your business? What have you done really, really, really well? How can you take that thing and how can you simplify it? How can you become known for that thing? that core really good thing that you do really well. And how can you start doing that one thing more consistently so you can actually start to build systems, plan timelines and budgets in your business? Because if you're off scattering around, trying to keep doing new things one after another, that sort of shiny object syndrome, then you don't have enough time to actually develop any consistency in delivering or scaling or growing that core offering that you have. We've heard it all before, right? Success in business is about consistency. So being consistent in your message, in what you sell, so you can become known for something, in your content online. So, you know, when people see you, they know who you are, and if you're consistent in your publishing, you start to become front of mind when they're ready to actually refer or, you know, become a client of yours as well. So question, does consistency fuel overwhelm or? Does it help pacify it? I would argue the latter. Consistency for me is like a huge focus right now in our business, in our business called Website Love. So here's what our business does. If you're new to the podcast and you kind of haven't heard a couple episodes before, we're specializing now in what's called conversion rate optimization. So we do this through building websites and optimizing landing pages to get results for the businesses that we help. ads, so direct traffic into these pages so we can very quickly and easily measure return on investment and what's working and what's not working. We can literally track what's working with this whole system. We're no longer just like, Hey, we're a website company. You know, that's not where I want to be anymore or play anymore. And I'm definitely not somebody that says yes to anything in digital marketing or everything digital marketing. I used to have an agency like that. I've definitely done a little bit with website love. But for sure in my past business called Autopilot Your Business. God, we would say yes to anything you guys. Everything, anything. Hey, can you build us a 10 email funnel in this CRM system that we've never heard about? Sure, yeah, we could do that. No worries. Hey, can you launch an online contest for us and learn a new app that we've never learned to do the contest? Yeah, easy. Get the idea, right? That was all we would do is just run around going, we're... one-stop shop for your business and online marketing, and we can never grow because of that problem. We can never get good at anything. We can never be known for anything. People could never refer us to business because they're just like, I don't know what they do. Well, they do everything. They do this, they do that. So anyway, I digress. So back to being consistent with what we're offering. We're only now offering very specific packages because we can specialize in those and get good results. Once you specialize, you can train your team better. You can develop systems around it. You can find the right team members to deliver it as well. And it just makes your life, it frees things up because you know who you're saying yes to and what kind of clients you say yes to versus no to as well. And here's how I'm actually personally becoming more consistent with promoting my business because now I'm really clear on what we do and where I wanna head with that. I have a plan of promotion that I have systems around and team members around to support it. So I do two podcasts a week. And if you're with me now for a little while on the podcast, Hey, Hey, thanks for being here, by the way. If you're new, that's what we do. Two podcasts a week. Uh, one with me, like this one right here. And one with an interview, somebody in my, my network that's, um, doing really cool things, growing their business and staying away from that sort of hustle grind mentality. Uh, so we do two podcasts a week. We do that. Um, I also have a weekly email that I send out to my database. And that alternates. There's different types of content that go into that. We have a monthly newsletter called the Growth Guide, which we also publish over on LinkedIn. We have ongoing invitations to different things we have in the business as well. So we have our weekly email, we post, we have a full posting plan on social media with different content pillars that highlight the podcasts, that highlight behind the scenes content, to highlight upcoming promotions that we have in the business as well. And by the way, you guys, I love the tool repurpose.io. If you have not heard about that tool, it's really amazing. If you are doing video content on social, it helps you repurpose it to all these different places. So it's just something that we've developed in our systems in the last couple of months. I'm really loving it. We can post like a snippet from this podcast on Instagram, and then we pop it over to TikTok and YouTube shorts all at the same time. It's really cool. Okay, anyway, continuing on. So we have our two podcasts a week. We have our weekly email. We have our posting plan on social media. We have a monthly live online masterclass and I've gotten very specific on that as well. We call it the CRO Masterclass Series. Makes sense, right? Conversion rate optimization, the CRO Masterclass Series. We do one of those a month. And now recently a brand new live event which I'm gonna do live and in person in Melbourne and Sydney coming up soon in Australia. And then I'm looking to take it also to the States, fingers crossed, soon too. So... Just so you know though, I mean that might sound either that sounds impressive to you or it doesn't right? So you might have a business that's already like yeah yeah we do all that awesome great but if you're listening to this and you're like how in the hell can I ever even get there? The best advice I have is you just move from one thing to another strategically and you don't try and do it all at once. Obviously you got to kind of know what your business is doing and specialize on that and get really clear on your packages and then you move into how you're going to promote that So now the live event's coming in, kicking in, right? So the podcast is up and running. We have an amazing audio team. Shout out to Julian, you're editing this right now. A beautiful video editor, Natalia, I have my amazing assistant, Prue. The three of them basically get this whole show published and going. So now that that's underway, I'm gonna now focus on the live event. And that's gonna be another sort of system in flow. But literally, two years ago, I wasn't even emailing my database consistently. I just had to focus on emails and like, what am I going to email to people? And you know, I went there, so I had to get consistent with that first. And then I was moving on incrementally to social media next. And then from there is the podcast and now the live event. So consistency, but you don't can't do it all at once either. What's next from here. So I'll be diving way deeper into specialization. And I think that again, it just. gives me sort of a sense of calm because simplifying, I can get clear on what we offer and really focus on delivering that in an outstanding way. So I'm cleaning up SEO search engine optimization on our site, so I'm revamping all the keywords that we are found for and I'm looking at, does that make sense for what we want to do for businesses or what we are doing for businesses currently? And there might be a bit of a strategy behind changing the keyword phrases for SEO. Blog categories, you know, are we are we actually teaching categories on the site that makes sense what somebody wants? And just messaging to really stay in our lane of what we do So that's what I'll be looking at a bit of an audit to what we're doing I had a membership by the way called websites that work I think some of you guys are listening to this my members shout out to you guys So websites that work was more of a generalized lessons in digital marketing and getting more business from your website It was quite broad and I think that that was the problem. Um, although a lot of people got incredible results that went through the program, it was quite broad. So I'm going to change it. And basically with it, we're going to just do very simple levers or levers to pull to optimize your CRO, your, your optimization, right? Um, I'm going to redo this and redesign it for many of you who want to know about CRO, you either have a team member, a virtual assistant and you want to upscale them on how do you actually do social media for results versus just doing social media for the sake of doing it. Like how do you actually track for results in your business? What is, what do you do? How do you get the numbers? How do you then improve things incrementally? So I'm getting going to revamp it on that because again, that is where, where I'm going to do what I'm going to do to stay in our lane for our business. And I even spoke about this in episode 10, right? I was talking all about the team that you need to be a success in your digital presence online. And a big part of that and doing that episode just got me remembering that so many people have no idea what team members they need, let alone how to even help get those team members to get them results, right, in the online space. So that's why I'm gonna revamp our websites at work program. I'm glad I can just kind of hang out with you guys right now and brainstorm where I'm going. So anyway, so that's in the works as well. And... Right now I'm just thinking of all the things basically I'm working on to support my team growing better. And you know what, you guys, I feel actually strangely calm about it. I'm not feeling like I can't breathe or I'm gonna start hyperventilating on you. I just feel kind of like, this is cool. I have some really solid things in the works to grow my business to the next level. And I know that because I'm sticking with something I can focus on and be consistent with. instead of chasing around the next shiny object like I used to for years and years. And I know that's why I haven't grown to the level that I want is because I just kept half baking ideas and not ever waiting long enough. That's key. Waiting long enough or promoting it enough to, or testing it enough to know if that's really the direction I wanted to go. So question for you guys, as we start to wrap up is what about you? Are you trying to be a Jack or a Jill of all trades in your business? Or do you want to be known for something? And what is it? If so, what is this thing that you want to be known for? And what do you need to do to set up your business to really excel with this area of specialty of yours? So when people are like asking a friend or a colleague or somebody just at a conference, hey, do you know somebody that can do X straight away? Your name, your business name is on there, that person's lips because that's what you're known for. So here's to consistency. But before you start working on consistency, make sure that you are also really clear on what you want to be known for and start to develop those services out and those products out. And then you can start to be really consistent with the delivery of promotions, the delivery of those services and a team that knows what they're doing. And you're able to reward them according to that, because you know the results that you want to get. Thanks again for tuning in you guys. It's been a pleasure as always. And I really look forward to hanging out with you next time. Thank you so much. Bye.