November 2019 Archives

Productivity Hack: How To Move From Interruption To Search

I had the privilege of attending Russell Brunson’s Traffic Secrets event last year, and it was there that I first heard the phrase “Search vs. Interruption.” It’s Russell’s way of talking about a marketing topic that many of us know as…

Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing

Or sometimes called…

Content vs. Direct Response Marketing

People like Gary V. and Neil Patel lead with content. They invite people into their world by creating value and leveraging organic traffic. From there you might level up into their paid offers.

Russell Brunson and Dean Graziosi are industry leaders in outbound or direct response marketing. This is where you’re interrupted with paid ads and drawn into a funnel, even when you weren’t planning on it. You weren’t actively searching.

In one case, the prospect is actively searching for information and runs into your content (which leads to your paid products). In another case, your prospect is scrolling on social media and gets interrupted with ads that lead to a funnel.

This is not going to be a blog post about the differences between the two types of marketing. What it is going to be is (hopefully) a MASSIVE productivity aha! about how this schema in marketing works with productivity too.

First off, at the bottom of this post is an article I read about productivity and your phone. It’s a long article and totally worth the read, and I found myself implementing a bunch of the hacks in it.

However, what I recognized is this…

To become more productive, it’s important to build your daily routine around the concept of search… not interruption.

Most of us don’t do this. We love interruption. We have the typical *bad* interruptions like social media. We also have *productive* interruptions – like… calendar reminders! These are good right? Alarm clocks do the same thing. Interrupt our activity to get us to take action.

So I’m not trying to demonize the idea of interruption… because there are times when it’s necessary.

But if we developed search based routines, we’d avoid a crap ton of interruption.

Here’s the idea…

In the article I mentioned, one of the things he describes is the idea of using folders for your apps, and also removing badges (the little red notifications). That’s because if you open your phone and see a 45 next to your inbox, even if you were opening your phone to turn on some music or use the calculator, you probably had to resist the urge to check your inbox (or maybe you didn’t resist and went down a rabbit hole).

If you put your apps in folders and remove badges, then there’s nothing interrupting you. You will have to SEARCH for updates, notifications, messages, etc. which means, unless you’re actively looking for it, you won’t see it.

Now let’s expand this to think about in other ways.

How many of us use notifications on our computers too? I know I have it on for Facebook, for Slack, for Voxer… heck even for Trello! I am using the notifications to dictate where I look and when, which is interruption based.

What if I restructured all my work to be search based. At first, I’d need reminders yes. But eventually, I would learn how to use all these apps without the buzz of interruption all the time.

What if it started with a simple checklist? That checklist is all the places you check during your prescribed “admin” time. So for example, at 12pm and 5pm EST everyday, you would check…

Your Trello Boards
Your Slack Channels
Your Voxer Messages
Your Email Messages
Your FB Groups

etc. etc.

I know people do this with email, but there are so many other communication channels now – that we have to carry this idea over to them as well.

Another question to ask yourself is this:

What would your day look like you had NO REMINDERS and had to actively search out anything and everything you were going to do?

Think about that for a minute.

No calendar reminders. You’d have to open your calendar and actually look.
No Facebook notifications. You’d have to pick the groups and places you were going to check for updates for.
No Slack messages. Which channels would you go in and read the happenings on?

Then ask yourself this next level question…

If I received NO INBOUND messages at all for one day – no comments, no emails, no Voxers… WHO would I actively reach out to? WHAT would I actually do with my time?

Then… once you’ve answered those two questions honestly, compare it to your actual day. Are you talking to people you would never reach out to? Are you checking and answering things that aren’t something you’d proactively go after?

If there’s a huge disparity between what you’d do “in the wild and left to your own devices” vs. what you’re responding or reacting to on any given day, then that’s a sign that your productivity should become more SEARCH based.

This works for battling shiny object syndrome too. I can’t tell you the amount of times I got sucked into massive amounts of head trash because of something SOMEONE else said, did, wrote, posted, etc. It would derail me for hours.

If you want to JV or do an interview, who are YOU going to choose? Is it the same people that are reaching out to you day in and out for requests for interviews?
If you want to learn from someone, who are YOU going to buy from? Is it the same people that are cluttering up your inbox and your newsfeed now?
Or, what about a slightly off-kilter customer service inquiry on email that then has you re-evaluating your entire business model, value ladder, and material because of a criticism you didn’t even see as an issue?

I’m not saying that these things don’t have their time, place, and value, but if we take our cues from the most successful people on the planet, they have entire teams of people managing ALL the interruptions, and only allow those interruptions to make it to their desk at a prescribed time.

We do need feedback. We need new ideas. We need new people.

But we also get to control how and when and where that information comes into us, and if we ask ourselves… how do I become more search based, vs. interruption based… we’ll go a long way towards better time management and staying on task with the goals that matter to us.

Here’s the article I read —> How to Configure Your iPhone to Work For You. Hat tip to Cathy Olson in our Marketer’s Heart Facebook Group for the find. It’s really good.

Business Strategy Create Your Laptop Life Podcast Nov 15, 2019

Ep. 61 Do You Really Understand Your Value In Business?

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I want to talk to you about a big aha I had after running my Digital Insiders mastermind last week. And if any of you follow me on social media you probably saw posts and Instagram stories and the like, but the thing I want to talk about today is sort of one of those things that we all just say, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s important.” But we don’t realize just how important it is.

So there was a reoccurring theme at the mastermind last week and it happened so frequently and so consistently that I had to share it with you guys. And it boils down to this, I’m going to give you sort of the punch line and then explain why I think it’s so important. People struggle to understand their value. And I’d watch as people would go up to the front of the room and talk about what they were working on or where they were stuck, and casually mention a skill set or a super power they had and I’d watch as other people in the room would get so excited about someone. Right, they’d get excited about either their idea or their business model, and it almost registered as surprise on the face of the person who was presenting. It was kind of like, “Really, you think that’s so amazing?” and everyone’s like, “Oh my God, yes.”

And sometimes, in some cases, we would 10 or 15 minutes talking to that person, convincing them that what they just said was an amazing idea and they should pursue it with all their resources and energy. And this happened over and over again. And then we had some guy who got up, and I’m just trying to keep it anonymous here, and he was talking about stuff, and then he just casually mentioned this idea he had in his back pocket, and we were like, “Why did you wait 12 minutes into this presentation to tell us about that, because that is awesome.”

So why am I telling you all this? I think there’s a large chance that you guys listening today, number one either hopefully have a massive aha that this is you too, you struggle to understand your value. Or you’re going to be like, “Yes, I know this but I’m not sure how to change it.” And if you’re thinking to yourself, “I’m not sure this is that important or relevant to business.” I would argue that anyone who struggles to understand their value will only succeed to the level that they’ve become comfortable with. And I know this personally from experience, it’s happened several times. And I still struggle with it. I’m not, you know, I haven’t arrived at my destination either.

So things like this, do any of these statements sort of resonate with you? My skills and abilities are nothing special. I’m a dime a dozen agency, service provider, coach, etc. I would never rub shoulders with someone on my dream 100 in any meaningful way. My past failures are evidence that I don’t have what it takes. I don’t have anything new or unique to offer in the market. Even if I do have something amazing for the world, my personal habits in life prevent me from finishing what I start.

So if those resonate with you, then this message today is for you. During the event last week several of the members stood up and they offered a give, a particular presentation. We had amazing gives, gives on Instagram stories, Facebook ads, personality taxes, trello, webinars, dream 100, marketing retreats, sales, it was amazing. You should have been there. If you’re not in Digital Insiders and you know that your business would qualify for it, we need to talk. But that’s not the point of this podcast today.

So there’s one give in particular that goes with what I’m sharing today. His name is Tyler Clark, amazing guy. He got up and talked about the importance of loving yourself, and at first you might think, that’s kind of odd. But he presented such a logical and well thought out case for the need for self love as the basis for every possible love and success we want in life. The funny part about this is Tyler is an accountant. He’s not a personal development expert or a coach. But yet his talk hit home because number one, it was super logical and well thought out, but whatever weird attachments we prescribed to the idea of loving ourselves and understanding our own value, it needs to go away if we’re going to reach the dreams and the goals that we have. We must learn how to increase our own self love, for without it we have nothing to give.

So if you are unable to recognize your true ability or see in value your unique gifts, you will remain stuck at the level that you’ve been at. Why? Why is that so true? Because the hardest bet we make, is the bet we make on ourselves. And I realized this one day when I saw how easily other people were betting on me. When I left Clickfunnels people were offering me deals, positions, C level jobs, and I thought, “These people are more likely to bet on me, than I am willing to bet on me.” And to some degree, when I joined Clickfunnels it was an incredible opportunity, a strategic opportunity, but you can even see in that moment, having already hit 7 figures in business on my own, I still struggled to bet and believe that I could go the distance, even though I was seeing other people, people that I greatly respect, like Russell, bet on my and be like, “No, I think you’re awesome, and I think you have this skill and I want you on my team.” I was struggling to bet on myself.

So think about that. If you see other people regularly betting on you, whether you’re a service provider, agency, coach, consultant, they’re betting on you but you won’t bet on you, that’s a sign that you have no idea how valuable you are. So the first step to fixing it all is realizing that you’re blind. That you have a blind spot, you can’t see what you can’t see. You know? And the only way to solve this is to take a risk and put yourself in a vulnerable position with other people who can act as a mirror to reflect back that which you cannot see.

So I don’t care if it’s a therapist, a coach, a mastermind, a group of friends, also side note, pick carefully who you do this with, other people speaking into your life will be the thing that takes away those blocks. That’s why we cannot play this game alone. We don’t play alone in life, we certainly can’t do it in business. And the gift in all of this is that once you can see this, you see this blind spot, you can then transform your belief, claim it as your own, protect it, grow it, nurture it.

I remember the first time that I really had an aha moment. People were betting on me as an agency at the time, because they trusted and valued my abilities, and I was launching these funnels that would then produce lots and lots of money. And they trusted my ability to produce a funnel and this is when I realized, I was like, my fear of launching my own funnel was because I had not figured out just how valuable my skill set was. And the minute I did, I finally had a breakthrough and built one. And that’s exactly what happened.

Most of our external blocks in business are caused by an internal block. A couple of examples: Are you stuck charging too little for what you offer, even though you’re as good as other people who charge double? There’s literally only one thing standing in your way, and it’s you and your own brain and you’re lack of belief. That’s it. The difference, if you take two people with equal skill sets, and one charges a thousand dollars and one charges a hundred dollars, the only difference between those two is belief.

Another example would be if you’re stuck in the endless cycle of starting things and stopping. You know what I mean? When you just start and then you stop. The only thing standing in your way is yourself, a belief that if you fail you’re going to be rejected or unworthy, or a belief that you’re not finishing something because you’re just kind of cookie cutter? Or a belief that no one will care, so why bother?

And I know a lot of you might be like, “Wow, this just feels so fluffy and unhelpful. I want strategy, I want tactics.” And this is my point. My entire point of this podcast is right here. All of the strategy and all of the tactics in the world will never be used successfully if the brain you’re feeding it to already has decided you’re not worth it. Because to me, that’s like saving money in an account where a gambling addict, has an unlimited debit card to withdraw. It’s completely leaky. All the strategies and the tactics and the learning and the over learning, will just fall through if the brain that is being fed all of this, has already decided that you’re not valuable and you’re not worth it.

So people are the key. If you don’t have someone in your life that can help you see the blind spots, it’s the most important thing you can put on your to do list today. So this podcast I hope gave you the belief that your number one priority, your number one resource, your number one job is to fill the bank of you, for without it you’re going to rob the world of your unique message and mission and that was probably one of the biggest takeaways I had about the mastermind and the reality of watching all of those false beliefs shatter, and that transformation happen when people realized, “Oh my gosh, I’m not betting on me and look at all these people betting on me.” And that revelation that they’re valuable and they have an amazing thing to offer, was exactly the reason why everyone around who’s had any success will say that who you surround yourself with and who you hook up your wagon to, is one of the most important things you can do in business because it will be a mirror to reflect back your own potential. Appreciate you guys, talk to you soon. Bye.

Business Strategy Create Your Laptop Life Podcast Nov 7, 2019

Ep. 60 Building a Course While Booked Out With Clients

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Today I want to talk to you about how to launch a course when you’re too busy with your actual business, and work. I hear this a lot and I think I want to finally address it because so many of you have said to me, “I would love to launch a course, I would love to create some passive income, but I’m so busy with client work I can’t see the forest for the trees.”

Alright, so if that’s you, I hope you are listening. And maybe you don’t have a service based business but you still feel the same way. You think I would really love to launch a course but I don’t have time. I think, I have good news and I have bad news, and hopefully it will be more good than bad.

The bad news is that when people tell me this, I think they think they’re unique. I think they think that their life is busier than everybody else’s life, or their agency or their coaching business or whatever is busier than everyone else’s and there’s just really no time left. So the bad news is you’re not special, but that’s actually good because that means there are many, many people who have been in your shoes, who have figured it out, which means you can too.

So the bad news is you’re not special, you’re not unique, you don’t have some weird situation on your hands that no one else has ever faced before. The good news is that means that many people have done it, and have successfully sort of dragged themselves out of this sort of hamster wheel situation, which means you can too.

So I want to talk to you about one of my digital insiders, her name is Esther and she joined insiders like many people do, looking for some passive income. But here’s the thing, a lot of people when they join my mastermind are interested in growing their revenue, and that’s great. She wanted to grow her revenue and change her business model at the same time. Which is, I think a lot of people in the service based business world want to do, they like either coaching or consulting, or they like agency work, and then they don’t all of the sudden because they’re trading time for money and they want to launch a course.

So let me give you a little bit of advice on how she did it. The reason I’m focused on Esther right now is she’s been in the mastermind for two years, and when she came into digital insiders, she started, she was making between 5 and 10,000 dollars a month in her agency. Her agency of course was building agencies. So she would actually be the person who was building courses for influencers, and helping them launch. She did do the marketing as well, and she wanted to get away from that. She felt she wasn’t charging enough, or even if she did charge enough it was just incredibly time consuming.

So the idea was she was going to move to passive income. So at the time Esther did have a course for how to become a virtual assistant, it was called 90 Day VA. And it was making a little bit of money, but she could not fathom how transitioning would work with all the clients. So here’s my first piece of advice, when you decide that you are ready to create a new revenue stream in your business that is not trading time for money, it is going to feel extraordinarily uncomfortable and nerve wracking.

And for Esther this was the case. There was a ton of mindset work that she had to do, I mean, a ton. I knew this was coming because I feel like anybody who is used to trading time for money, especially when they’re in a service based model, they’re used to charging people for delivering tangible assets like funnels, websites, course materials and things like that in exchange for money. So when you transition out of that, for you it probably feels like, gosh, people are going to pay me just for my information? It feels very uncomfortable.

And as I was transitioning out of my agency with my course business, it was very hard for me to make that jump. So I sort of went from one service model to the next service model before I was finally able to make that leap. And I went from done for you services, into coaching done with you services, and then eventually scaled out into courses, because it was a hard leap for me to make because of the mindset. I think a lot of people don’t realize how much mindset work you’re going to have to go through to sort of transition.

Allie Bjork is another one who has been in my mastermind for a couple of years, she was in the same exact boat. She was a done for you service agency, wanted to scale through passive income, she did the same thing I did, where she kind of did that hybrid model where she went from done for you to done with you and then creating courses. But prepare for some mindset thunderstorms when you make this transition.

So one of the excuses that resistance tells us when we’re trying to do this is, “Oh, well I just don’t have time. I’m too busy in client work, and this is a unique situation I’m facing, which is why I haven’t had success yet.” No, the reason why you haven’t actually taken action is because in your mind you don’t yet believe that it’s possible that people would pay you for your information in your head. So you’re making an excuse that you’re unique, and you’re not.

So that’s kind of some tough love, but hopefully helps sorts of jolt you awake. The second thing is you need to be able to create a course that is going ot be something people will buy. So if you are new to the service based model, or you’re new to the online space and you’re just getting your feet wet, the hard part about what I’m about to say is that you can’t rush launching a course if you have no expertise yet. Now the good news is that you don’t have to launch a big course, like Esther did, she launched a $500 program. You could launch something inexpensive like Allie did.

And Allie, the truth of the matter is that Allie was an expert, but she was wanting to start with a low ticket product first, so she decided to launch a content calendar, which by the way, now so many people have imitated her because she did so well with her funnel. Her funnel started with a $27 offer, and she ended up making over, I think she crossed $400,000 in sales just with that funnel, there were a couple other offers in there, obviously her average cart value was a little higher. But she went after something she knew people would buy that wouldn’t require her to have some crazy testimonial.

If you’re going to launch a funnel product, or you’re going to launch a FAcebook ad product, or you’re going to launch something like that, and you haven’t actually gotten results, it’s going to be very, very difficult to sell. So you want to find something that you have results in that people will pay for. And if you’re not ready like Esther was, to build a big course, then go with the smaller one, and you’ll have to pick the right funnel and the right launch strategy and the right campaign strategy and all that kind of stuff. But you can do it either way.

Esther did it with a $500 course on how to become a virtual assistant, and that’s a very typical model when someone builds a service based business, they then teach how they did it, and they have themselves as a case study and it’s an easy documentation. Or you can go the way Allie did, which is find a very specific monetizable result that you can get for somebody, and then sell it at a low ticket price.

Okay, so that’s the second thing. Third, you will have to make yourself a client of your own agency. And you know, obviously it depends on what kind of agency or service based model, but whether you’re a coach or consultant or done for you agency, you will need to pretend that you, building your course, you are a client, which means displacing other things to get it done. Again, even if you don’t have an agency or service based business, displacing other work to create space to build something that’s important, doesn’t feel good. It feels uncomfortable.

And I have the example, we just launched the Offer Cure, Cathy and I, October 1st. And when we got together in July, we decided that we were going to try and have this done by October 1st, and I looked at my calendar and I was like, “This is not going to happen.” But if we didn’t make it happen, it just wouldn’t happen. There would never be that right time. So we had to very uncomfortably try to displace work. And for us that meant hiring people. There was no way it was going to happen if we didn’t hire people and sort of unpack our own schedule.

So for you, you may have to hire people, you may have to say no to clients, you may have to be okay with a dip in revenue, you may have to go into a little bit of debt to do all of this. And if you’re unwilling to do that, if you’re unwilling to hire somebody or take less clients or put some money on a credit card, you know put some supplies on a credit card for a while, or whatever it happens to do to get that revenue stream, then you don’t understand the laws of economics. Because any business that is investing in a new product line, let’s just think about you know, big companies that we all know, Nike, Adidas, Disney, all these companies, whenever they create a new product line, they have to assemble people, they have to assemble capital, they have to assemble time in order to get that out the door. And is it a risk? Uh huh, it’s a total risk because they don’t know if that new game or that new shirt or that new shoe is going to sell. They do the best they can with market research and looking at trends.

And I think sometimes we get a little sloppy because we think, “Oh, well it’s just a course you know, there should be no risk, there should be no capital, there should be no…” and maybe you can build the course yourself and you don’t have to pay someone to build it for you, but you’re sure as heck going to have to pay someone to buy back your time if you’ve got an agency or a coaching business. Every new product line, every new asset that comes into your business that is able to produce revenue is going to cost you in time and in money, it just is.

So switching your mindset around how to do this, and I know what a lot of you are thinking, you’re like, “Okay, that makes sense. I get it but I don’t want to invest time or money or hire people or what have you, because I don’t know if it’s going to sell.” That’s a fair point, we all face that. We all face the fear that what we’re going to put out is going to flop, but there are two things that you have to remember. Number one, do some research. So don’t just, you know, actually try and think through your product before you do it. I would recommend you purchase offer cure if you haven’t yet, already. Because that helps creating, especially digital, offers.

And think through it and then take the gamble. I mean, that’s really the choice that lays before you. And if you’re unwilling to take the gamble, it means that you’re not quite ready, or maybe you know you need to put a little more time in, and sort of energy in, in developing a skill that is monetizable, and that’s okay. So for some of you it is going to be a year of slogging through client work or coaching, or whatever it is that you have to do before you can actually turn it into a course. And a lot of us have done that, and that’s okay.
But if you know that you have an expertise and if you know you want a new product line, the first thing you have to do is stop telling yourself that you’re unique, stop telling yourself that nobody has ever figured out this whole balance between agency and service work and launching a course because lots of people have. Number two, destroy the false belief that a new product line won’t require both time and money, and if it’s not money in relation to building the new thing, it’s definitely going to be money in order to keep the old thing afloat while you build the new thing.

And number three, don’t expect that it’s going to feel comfortable, that everybody who’s building out a new product line feels the pull of, it’s like trying to fit yourself, you know, your business has got a certain amount of work, a certain amount of time, a certain amount of resources, and all the sudden you’re trying to stuff something new in it. It’s going to feel tight, it’s going to feel like, “Oh, maybe I need to create a container for this.” And that’s all normal.

So the good news is that Esther, and now that I’ve come back to Esther, she after two years in the mastermind, not only was able to shut down her service based business, not only was able to launch, you know keep her 90 Day VA program as her primary source of income, but she just this month, celebrated her first 6 figure month. So that going from a $10,000 a month agency, done for you agency, to a hundred thousand dollar a month course business, is the transition that she made.

If you look at someone like Allie, she also has been in the mastermind for two years, she transitioned out of a $10,000 a month service based model, she did coaching as a hybrid because she loves to coach, and she probably will always continue to coach in some capacity, launched a digital product that made her over $400,000 in less than 6 months, and is now doing a coaching/course model hybrid. She just finished her launch and did over $160,000 in revenue, in just that launch.

So two examples, of course myself and lots and lots and lots of other people as well. You can do this, pick the type of course that you can monetize, whether it’s a small specific result skill or something bigger, in terms of how you build your own service based business. Expect it to be uncomfortable, tell yourself that you’re not unique, remember that all new revenue streams that create money will require time and capital both either in the creation of it, or in the leveraging of your time back. That’s all normal, you can do it, I’ve got you. Go get the Offer Cure if you haven’t gotten it yet, and I‘ll talk to you soon.

Create Your Laptop Life Podcast Digital Marketing Nov 5, 2019

Ep. 59 Three Must Haves For Your Next Launch

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If you are listening to this podcast right after it was released, you know that I am in the middle of a very large joint venture launch. If you’re listening to this after the fact, that’s okay because what I am about to share with you today works, no matter what.

Alright so 21 successful launch ingredients, I sent an email out to my list a couple of days ago, talking about launches. And the reason is because Cathy and I from Funnel Gorgeous, are releasing a Launch Gorgeous coaching program. This is basically a step by step done with you program where we’re going to help people launch their next offer. And we’re offering this for free for anyone who purchases Pete Vargas’ Stage to Scale. If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook, you’ve probably seen me talk about it.

So I was thinking about what goes into a successful launch, and I’m not sure that I’m going to be able to get through all 21 in just one episode. You can see on my blog over at Juliechenell.com, you can see the 21 successful launch ingredients blog post. And I go through these features that I think are incredibly important.

A lot of people, I asked, if I were to go deep into one of these topics, one of these ingredients, “Which one would you want me to go into?” and I got tons of responses from you guys, so I really appreciate that. And a lot of you had the same answer. And a lot of you wanted to know a day by day breakdown. And it’s funny because for Launch Gorgeous, for this bonus that we’re giving away, we are going to do a day by day breakdown. So anybody who joins Pete’s Stage to Scale program will get Launch Gorgeous and we will walk you through the steps of a launch.

And it’s funny to me because while I love day by day breakdowns of like, “Okay, on this day this is the email you send, this is the Facebook post you write, this is the Instagram story you put up.” The truth of the matter is you don’t really need a day by day breakdown if you understand the art of launching. So I want to kind of talk about that a little bit today on this podcast because I think is something that gets missed.

Launching is about telling a story. There needs to be a story line and sometimes I think when the risk when you just rely on a day by day breakdown, is that it can sound really stilted. Imagine for a minute that you have, my son Evan is 16, he really wants a girlfriend. And I sit down with Evan and I say, “I’m going to give you a day by day breakdown of what you need to do in the next 30 days to win over some girl” that he likes. So I do that, I say, “Okay, day one you’re going to go up to her and you’re going to hand her a little note. Day two you’re going to buy her lunch at school. Day three you’re going to ask for her phone number.” Whatever it happens to be, and it works sort of. But I think what happens is you sort of strip, if I were to do that I would strip Evan of his ability to tap into his own creativity, his own ideas, his own intuition and reading the room, and reading the girl he’s interested in. He would be stripped of that because he would be following this sort of letter of the law breakdown.

And I understand why a breakdown is helpful, but when you understand that a launch is a storyline, then there’s literally unlimited amounts of creativity and intuition you can use to create incredible launches. That’s not to say that there aren’t rules and formulas to follow, because honestly in my mastermind I have been testing a lot of my ideas on the insiders, and the last several launches that have come out of Digital Insiders have been insane, like insane conversion rates.

In fact, I have a client in there Larry, he sold his first $2000 course, now mind you, he did have an audience, and sold 423 units in 7 days, which is something like $846,000. Ridiculous. So there are methods, but in a launch here are the key pieces of a storyline.

The first is that there is always anticipation. I like to call this pressure, but a sense of something coming. If you do a launch and you don’t create anticipation it will fall flat. So when you think about a song, when you listen to a song on the radio, you have a verse, and you have the chorus, and then you have the second verse and then you have the chorus, and then usually there’s a bridge, that’s what they call it, a bridge where it sort of builds an intensity and then back to the chorus. That third chorus is the climax of the song, that’s the point of the song where you usually feel the most emotion. And if you watch songs like, I’m just going to give an example, Frozen, there’s a verse, first verse, and then “Let it go, let it go, let it go.” That part, then there’s a second verse, and then “Let it go, let it go.” And then if you’ve seen the movie 8 million times like I have the part where she’s talking about the frozen fractals all around and she’s building the ice castle, and it’s the bridge, it’s the part of the song that doesn’t really match the verse, and it doesn’t really match the chorus, but it’s sort of this intensity building, like “Oh my gosh.” And then it’s the third chorus, “Let it go, let it go.” And it’s the most dramatic of all the choruses.

Your third chorus is your cart opening, it is that sort of like, “Oh my gosh.” I think part of the problem with launching for people is that they don’t realize, they think that, in a song, the third chorus is the end of the song. There’s the verse and the chorus, and the verse and the chorus, and the bridge. So there’s essentially four sections of the song before we get to that third chorus. So there’s a lot of buildup, and I feel like people don’t understand anticipation, buildup and pressure well. And they think that what they do every day during an open cart launch is what makes the difference, and it’s not. It’s everything that comes before it.

If I turned on Let it Go right now and I literally just turned on the bridge and you’d never heard the song before, it would do nothing for you. If I turn on the whole song and you hear the whole song, and then you get to the bridge, now it’s a whole different ball game. And if I then add on top of it the animation, well now you’re weeping. Well, maybe not, but you get my story, you get my drift.

So that is so key, anticipation, pressure, all that kind of stuff. So that’s one thing. The second thing is people want to know that they are a part of something exciting. And when you have a very wrote day by day breakdown, it can feel like you’re removed from the actual playing out of the launch. This is why I love it when people write their email copy and write their posts live, because there is an energy in words that are live, that is different than automated.

I can’t prove this except that all of my experience shows me that if I sit down and I write something live and in the moment, it is going to sound more real and more alive than if I write something ahead of time, and just schedule it out. It doesn’t mean you can’t schedule things out, it doesn’t mean you can’t prepare, doesn’t mean you can’t brainstorm hooks and storylines and all that kind of stuff, because I actually think that you can and should.

In fact, one of the things that I’m going to be doing in Launch Gorgeous, with the people is helping them come up with just unending amounts of hooks and angles to take the story from. That way when you’re in the live moment, when you’re writing the emails, writing the posts, the cart is open, you’re getting the feedback from customers, you can go to your bank of hooks and be like, “You know what, this is the hook that they need right now. This is what’s going to happen.” And there’s no way to anticipate that ahead of time, so you prepare, and then you act as live as possible.

So that’s the second piece. You know in addition to pressure and anticipation, people want to feel like they’re a part of something exciting. And that usually means unpredictability, a little bit of variety right. Tony Robbins says that’s one of our human needs, variety. Where something switches or changes in the middle of it. Or there’s something unexpected that happens and they want that sense of live energy.

And then the third most critical component of a launch in addition to anticipation and excitement in the moment, is scarcity and urgency, and the fact that things are ending, that there is a time limit. When you put, when you really understand anticipation, unpredictability and scarcity and urgency, when you understand those components, most launches, assuming of course that you have taken the time to have a great offer and good design and good copy and you have an audience, most launches will be above average in their success if you get those three components really dialed in.

So I do this all the time, I talk about pressure building, I talk about plot twists, plot twists are that variety, that excitement, that unpredictability, that sense of it is happening in real time. Think about any sort of big news event, right now as we are, the time of this recording, we are watching as our congress does an impeachment inquiry. Whether you are for it or wildly against it, doesn’t matter. Everybody’s dialed in. Everybody’s checking Twitter. Everybody’s turning on the news and seeing what is the next, it’s live, it’s happening in real time. There’s that sense of like, “Anything could happen.”

And then the third thing is that scarcity and urgency, and that is the thing that forces people to take action, because they’re sitting on the fence or they’re procrastinating, and they know that if they don’t take action it will, you know, it will be gone and they will miss out.

So those three components are absolutely critical in any launch. And if you are going to purchase Pete Vargas’ Stage to Scale Method, you will be getting our Launch Gorgeous bonus, which is more than just a course, it is an entire program done with you where, yes of course I will give out the checklists and the breakdowns, but more importantly I’m going to teach the art and the science of these three unbelievably critical pieces. The anticipation, the unpredictability, and the scarcity and urgency. And then of course, we’ll talk about creating great offers and nurturing your audience, building your list.

But I know that if I get those three pieces right, that somebody really understands them, every launch they do will be successful because they understand how to tell the story in a way that gets people excited for the ride. So I hope that was helpful and I’ll talk to you guys soon.