Business Built Freedom

I said, hey, you, get off of my cloud. Hey, you, get off of my cloud.

Yeah, yeah. So it goes without saying, we're gonna be talking a little bit about cloud today, and specifically, we're gonna debunk some cloud myths. So many people, "I came in, we've got clouds we're onto it. Yeah, pretty sweet man, got cloud, got cloud." Just this thing people have, they don't know ... it's like catching a cold. "I think I'm sick, maybe I'm sick. I'm not sure, maybe I've got over it, I don't even know."

Learn more about moving your business to the cloud at dorksdelivered.com.au

People get this thing in their head, "I've got cloud, yep, sweet." But no one knows what it is, or if they actually have cloud or not. Let's compare it to the sickness that then. So, if you're sick you're like, "Oh, I think I'm getting sick. Oh yeah, I'm sick. Oh, now I think I'm getting over it. Now I think I'm over it." When you go and you think you're gonna die, and you don't even know, maybe you do, maybe you will, you don't know how sick you're gonna get. But cloud is the same, people go, "I've got cloud," they don't know what it is.

So we're gonna talk about these different cloud myths. When people say they've got cloud, all it means ... What cloud is, cloud is just your applications in a location that isn't within the physical location that you're at right now, in it's most simplistic terms. In a more complicated way, it can mean having your files in multiple other locations, that are not at the location that you're at now, and that can also be cloud.

If you have a website, and you're operating a mobile business, or you have a website, and you don't have an office, or you have a website, and you have an office, and you don't have all of your machines on all the time and your website stays live, and you're paying a hosting provider, they're hosting the website, your website's not hosted with you, therefore, it is in the cloud. So, you've had things in the cloud for years, it's just a buzz term, cloud hadn't come about to tell you that you had them in there for years.

Then people wanted to sell all this stuff, also the same stuff repackaged for a higher price, and so they started calling it cloud, and that's the short of it. Cloud can offer several advantages, when it comes to other things besides your website, though. You can host files through Box, OneDrive, Dropbox, and many others, that'll give you the ability to access your files remotely. Access your files when you're at home and away from the office, access your files on your computer, as well as on your phone. All these different file-based services store the files in a hosted solution called the cloud. That's all it is, it's a hosted solution called the cloud.

So, now that we know what the cloud is, and now that we know what a hosted solution is, let's look at the differences. You know that you've now got your files in the cloud, and your website in the cloud, but you still don't have everything in the cloud. If you've got collaboration tools, such as the ones that come with Google Suites, that let you use Sheets and Docs, and everything else, in and online environment, then that is also your documents in the cloud. So we're a couple of steps closer to getting everything in the cloud.

But that still doesn't mean your business is in the cloud. If you still have to sit in front of the same computer, with the desktop icons in the same locations, that does not mean that you are in the cloud. You still are reliant upon that computer with different things that are on that computer to work. If you're lucky enough to have set up your business, so that you can jump on at any internet café, and access absolutely everything to do with your business, it probably means that you have VDI, or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

If you've got Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, you may then have your desktop system in the cloud, which is awesome. So that means that from your mobile phone, and from any other computer around the world with the right authentication, you then have your desktop in the cloud. Your desktop in the cloud can then potentially communicate with Dropbox in the cloud, and communicate with your website in the cloud. Then you've got your desktop, your website and files in the cloud, but that doesn't mean everything's in the cloud.

Yet still, it'd be fair to say that most of your infrastructure is, but if you still have a fax machine for whatever reason, and a VCR, for exactly the same reason you have a fax machine. But honestly, if you still have a fax machine that's not in the cloud, then you're not completely in the cloud. You need to use services that'll allow for you to have a fax machine in the cloud, and there's many out there, they only cost $5-$10 a month, and that'll then mean that your fax machine's in the cloud. So now your business has your fax machine, your desktop, your files, and your website, all in the cloud.

How do you answer the phone at the moment? Yep, that's right, it might be through a corded phone, that's going through the wall, through a traditional PBX system, and if that is the case, then you're not in the cloud still. You need to get all of that stuff changed away and removed, and make sure that you're going with VoIP setups, or using IP PBX system, where everything to do with that is also in the cloud. If you've got all your phones in the cloud, and everything else to do with your desktop in the cloud, or you have everything coming through to your mobile phone, if you didn't wanna have it coming through to the desktop phone in the cloud, then you've got yet another thing, another element that's gone to the cloud.

I haven't covered off on one of the most important ones, that everyone talks about, and you might have picked up on it, that's right, your emails. Your emails. Emails through Office 365, if you're on the business Office 365 plan, not the box you bought from JB Hi-Fi or Officeworks, the business Office 365 ... I don't know why Microsoft decided to make more than 20 products with very, very, similar names, just to confuse people. If you have Office 365 Business Premium, or Business Essentials, and you're in the cloud or hosted exchange, then you're in the cloud, as I just said then. That means your emails are then also in the cloud.

You don't have to just settle with that, you can go with Google Suites and things like that for your emails as well. I personally have a preference towards Office 365, just from our clientele, but you do you. For the Office 365 stuff, that means your emails are also in the cloud. So, you've got everything in the cloud, what happens when someone posts something to you? Yeah, that's not in the cloud, that has not been resolved. If someone needs to post something to you, you have a physical address that people need to post it to. If you're trying to run a business that's in the cloud, the only reasons you'd really do that is to lower your capitol expenditure, to have a flexible office workspace, and to be able to go travelling, or be able to do things like that, where you're about to have a collaborative environment where everyone else can talk and work together, but not necessarily be working in the same physical location together.

There is virtual office spaces. For this example, it would count as having something in the cloud, 'cause it's not stored with you on premise, and you're able to change the delivery of where it goes at will. You can get these fantastic office places in Brisbane, and they're not that expensive, and think of it like a PO Box, that when it gets delivered to that location, they then forward it on to wherever the most updated address is that you've got there.

So now you've got all the infrastructure elements of your business in the cloud. Once you've got everything like that in the cloud, you wanna make sure that you're using tools that allow you to collaborate with your whole team, while in the cloud, while in a remote workspace, or maybe you still all come to the same physical workspace. For some reason you love greenhouse gas emissions and overheads with leases and bits and pieces. So, if that's your case, and that's you, that's cool.

If that is everything that you're doing there, and you're still coming together, there's still a whiteboard there that you can work on, otherwise there's tools for that as well. There's project management solutions and everything else. But don't for one moment think, because you've got your files in the cloud, or your emails in the cloud, that you are not running a business that still relies heavily on the hardware that you've got on premise. If you're running a business that still has physical hardware, that if I came in with a hammer, or a big water gun and sprayed it, and it meant downtime for you, more than a couple of minutes, more than running down to the shops and buying another computer and having access to everything, then your business isn't in the cloud. Stop fooling yourself, you've got bits and pieces just stored everywhere.

If anything, you've probably just created holes, and vulnerabilities, for people to be able to break into, and if you don't have two-factor authentication, and hardened security for any of these cloud applications. Any of the integrations that you have goes the same way. If you don't have solid API, that's application programming interface, integrations between these applications ... sounds like I'm a rapper, 'cause I'm just using IT stuffs. If you don't have this, then you're probably just creating problems for your business.

The reason you won't have everything going to the cloud, is to remove capitol costs, and to create flexibility. Ongoing, the cloud is more expensive, don't fool yourself. A cloud desktop, and the exact scenario that I just described, which is your whole business in the cloud, for a one computer business would be costing you hundreds of dollars a month. That's right, a month. That's without support, that's without anything else, that's just the costs of what it is.

If you are trying to run more than one computer, it's gonna be costing you exponentially more than hundreds of dollars every month, of course. If you have lots of computers, you're probably gonna need a server, and that means that needs to be in the cloud as well. That means any of your security policies need to be in the cloud, and you have to have tunnels coming through, so you can actually print from the cloud securely. It becomes quite an expensive activity, especially on the internet connections we have in Australia.

When it comes down to it, you still need to have infrastructure that's going to allow for you to connect into everything in the cloud. If everything is in the cloud, you're going to need to have fantastic infrastructure, and that's gonna cost an arm and a leg. $800-$2000 a month would not be unreasonable for internet connection for a business with 10-15 people. So, think about that when you're looking to move everything to the cloud, next time you're at a you're like, "Yep, everything's in the cloud," have a think about what is actually in the cloud, and what isn't in the cloud, and what the cloud means.

You might not need the full setup I just said then, but just make sure to use the terms correctly and appropriately for what it is that you have in the cloud. The cloud brings about more security problems than having it all on premise. If something goes wrong on premise, you can unplug your internet connection, and no one is getting in or out. In the cloud, you don't have that privilege. Hardware prices stay the same, roughly speaking. They increase, as per Moore's law, in the size and speed specifications, but if you go and buy hardware, and your cloud provider goes and buys hardware, it's gonna be about the same price. The only way they're making money is by overselling and under-delivering with what they're offering you, or they're charging you more than what it would have been to have it on premise.

A great example would be Office 365, only last month, went down for six hours for everyone in Australia, possibly elsewhere, but we know all of our clients said, "Our phones are ringing off the hook." So, we know that it was definitely Australia, and we couldn't do anything about it, except tell them, "Hold tight, they're onto it. We can see that it's down when we go to AussieOutages, we can't do anything about it just at the moment."

The cloud brings about removed responsibilities and less control. If your cloud provider's overselling, you're going to have slow performance, and this goes for websites as well. If your website's running slowly, it could be your host, or your cloud hosting provider, or whatever they're calling themselves nowadays. Which brings this back to the start of the conversation.

I said, hey, you, get off of my cloud. You, get off of my cloud. Hey, you, get off of my cloud. Don't hang around, 'cause you're making it slow. Oh ho ho.

That's it, get off my cloud. Think about it, yep. It's expensive to be in the cloud, a lot of security needs to be put in place, and I've hope you've enjoyed this episode, and you're laughing along with me. Even if it's at me, and it's kept you entertained.

If you have liked the episode, jump across to iTunes, leave us some feedback, give us a review, let us know what you'd like us to make next, and we'll jump straight onto it. Stay good.

If you've got everything in the cloud and you don't really understand what the cloud is, you could be up for some strife. So, what we're going to talk about today is making sure that you have access to all of your stuff in the cloud, even if you don't really understand it.

Learn more about dual internet connections at dorksdelivered.com.au

Account Applications

One of the main things that people put in the cloud is their account applications. One of the other things that they pop into the cloud is their core business applications, the things they use day in and day out. They don't take into account A) the ongoing costs that it can cost each month. B) The costs of the additional infrastructure to support it. And C) the cost of the downtime because they didn't buy the additional infrastructure. So, one of the things you need to make sure is if you're using business-critical applications and they're not stored locally with some sort of timed guarantee or managed service agreement that you have. You need to make sure that if there's no continuity agreement in place that you have multiple internet connections come to the premises. Maybe you've got one with Telstra and another one with Optus. Maybe one's got Vodafone as a 4G carrier coming into the building and then you've got Optus and Telstra. Maybe one's got five into the premise and the other ones running off a different technology. You want to have them load balancing or in failover arrangement.

Back Up Plans Are Great

This means that if a provider goes down, you're still sweet because you've got your internet and everything's connected. If two providers go down, you might be having problems depending on how much redundancy you put in place there. However, you're still probably going to be okay if you've gone for a third wireless option in there. The chances of three going down mean you're probably not going to be doing much with your business. The area's probably under water or on fire. Or some other apocalyptic type arrangement that has happened with nature.

Don't Skimp On Them

You don't just want to go the cheap home grade TPG connections that set you back $70 a month. You need something that's going to be business grade, where they give you an uptime guarantee and back that financially if it goes down. There are plans through companies such as Exetel, Telstra, Internode, IINet, and I know said bad about TPG earlier but there are business grade plans with them also. In Australia, you're going to be talking at about $600 to $1200 dollars for the plan. You might be baulking at that. If you want to be operating a real business and you're wanting to make sure that the infrastructure that you're using isn't going to be going down, you need to go some business internet connections. They will give you the data and the bandwidth and the integrity and the uptime that you require.

It's Simple Math

It comes down to simple math. If you've got everything in the cloud and something goes wrong, and you've got ten employees and you're paying them $20 dollars an hour each. The internet goes down for two days, which is $3,200 dollars that it will have cost you in downtime just in the staffing costs. Now hopefully the staff aren't just sitting there not making you money. If you're paying them $3,200 dollars every two days anyway, you'd be hoping that they'd bring you in at least $6,000 dollars. So that's not only the outgoings of $3,000 odd dollars, it's also the incomings of $6,000 for a total deficit of $9,000 dollars in two days that could be comfortably avoided by having better infrastructure.

The Final Word

If you're operating in your mum's garage, it's not a problem. If you go down for a day and it's just you, you can probably just tether to your mobile phone or something like that. However, if you are paying employees you want to make sure that you're going to have your uptime, put that into account when you're going towards a cloud application. You need to be spending more money on the internet and infrastructure. Or more to Japan where you can get the $6 - $700-dollar plans that we do in Australia for about $50 dollars. I hope this has been helpful, stay good!

Today, we're going to talk about cyber security and can we ever be safe? The short answer is no. So that's all we need to know. Let's cruise into the next episode. That's done. Simple. But we can try damn hard. We can try our best to try and be safe. We can be diligent and continue the game of cat and mouse to make sure that we're on top of it. If we lived in a safe world where everyone worked together and no one was trying to do the naughties and break into things and there was a bit more equality, we probably wouldn't have as big of a problem as we have now, but because we've got these social giants and these big companies that are taking everything that we're giving away for free and then charging for it, with then people starving to death on the streets. We have this disparity where we need to have people try and break into things and steal stuff.

Read more about Cyber Security: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/289-cyber-security-can-we-really-be-safe

 The good news is overall crime in general is on the down. But that's in general. Most homes and cars don't get stolen or broken into anywhere near as much as what they did. Because when you break into a house, what do you get? A tablet that has an IMEI number that people have to then report to the police and it stops working. It's useless. You get jewellery, maybe, that'd be probably the most valuable thing that most homes would have in them would be jewellery. Besides that, there's no real value. But online, huge value. You can hold people, companies to ransom. Everyone is a target and so many people would just walk in there with their dick out. They expect to just be flopping it around and not have a problem with what they're doing. What it comes down to is it's a huge problem. They shouldn't be doing that and they need to be more diligent. You need to be more diligent online.

So cyber security, can we ever be safe? The answer is no. But you can make sure that you've got your stuff backed up and it's in an offsite location. If you've got a managed IT service provider, they can make sure that they're looking after that for you and they're backing it up onsite and remotely in your own private cloud, because cyber security will be a problem for everything, not just you and not just your applications, they don't want to target people like you. They want to target companies like Office 360, Microsoft and Office 365 and Dropbox and Sony and these big companies that have lots and lots of data. That's what they want. That's why Google+ is shutting down now, because they had huge data breach 12 months ago and they weren't very nice with the way they brought it up to everyone, but they had huge data breach 12 months ago that resulted in lots of records disappearing into other people's hands that shouldn't have had them and Facebook had the same and they were run over the coals for it, which is good.

But data breaches and cyber security is going to be an ongoing problem. If there's someone that can make it, there's always someone out there that can make it better. You're great at what you do, but there's going to be someone else at that that's better at what you do than what you're doing and how you're doing it. It's just how the world works. If someone else is out there and they want what you've got more than what you want to keep it, they're going to take it from you. It all comes down to the prize at the end. If you want to break into a bank, you can do that unnoticed. If you want to break into someone's home, you can do that unnoticed. If you want to break into someone's computer, into their business, into their Dropbox accounts or into Dropbox, you can do that as well, it's just how much money and time is it going to take to do that and is it going to be worthwhile with what you're going to be getting with the results at the end.

Most of the time, if you're setting up your security so that you've got cameras at home, you've got an alarm system at home, your businesses got two-factor authentication, you're connecting to all your files over a VPN, using secure passwords, you've got grouped staff members that only had access to certain data and you're doing every single thing that you can, all of that costs time and money and to undo all of that costs time and money. So if you're making it difficult for someone else, they're not going to bother. They're going to go after the easier fish. But if you're sitting there with your dick out and you've got crappy passwords, crappy wifi, and you're practically leaving the front door open, you're asking them to come in and steal everything. Cybersecurity is now a bigger industry than it's ever been before.

The attack on the defense is ridiculous with the way that this is working and what's worse is most of the technologies and the ways that things are made are built upon protocols that are what they call open protocols, that is most of the time have been designed by someone sitting in their garage, tinkering away at it, and then all of a sudden the SSL protocol that you thought was encrypting your website and making sure all of your connections were secure is broken into or the packets are sniffed on your wifi and the WPA2 connection isn't great and you're up shit creek, because big companies take from small companies. There's makers and there's takers. The makers very rarely get paid anywhere near as much as what they should for what they made.

It's the takers that make the money and the takers then go back to the makers when something breaks and says, "Well, make it better. "I didn't have enough money to do that. I didn't have enough money to put a team together to test it properly. You just took my idea when it was half baked and put it together and put it out to the public to make money off of it. It's terrible." Stay diligent. Make sure you put up your boundaries and your walls so that no one else is able to come into your business and come into your home. Locks only keep out the honest criminals and that is a statement and a quote that holds true for anything online. If you are not putting down some awesome, awesome locks and making sure that you're really, really locking down your whole infrastructure, you're going to be having the nasties come in.

Leaving your windows open and your car door open and your home door open, your home windows open and everything open, and then seeing if anything goes missing, even the smallest of criminals, if it's easy enough, will just be like, "Oh, let's go in and see what's happening, what's going on." So don't fall victim. Be diligent. Get into it. If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure to jump to iTunes, leave us a review and would love to hear your feedback on how we can make the channel even better and grow our audience even bigger. This is a great day for us actually. We've got so many more subscribers. By the time this goes live, it's going to be through the roof, but we've surpassed a thousand people now in only two months. So I'm impressed, very impressed. So I'll keep doing what I'm doing and you keep doing the listenings that you're doing and let me know how we can improve it. Stay good.

Take your marketing to new heights. Today, we're going to go through practical and proven ways to take your marketing to new heights using techniques and strategies that are up to date. Sometimes, you have a customer that's a bit skeptical, and the way that we like to overcome this is to make sure you have the answer to the question that they might have. If they're skeptical on the price of the product or the service that you're going to be providing, give them reasons to not be. This could be something as simple as customer reviews and feedback from people that have already done this that gives you an elevation and prestige, and that might wipe away those negative thoughts and feelings.

Learn more about marketing at dorksdelivered.com.au

Offer a Free Trial

One of the other things that you can do is offer a free trial or a lower priced trial of whatever it is that you're doing. If you're a pie shop, giving away a sample might remove the skepticism. If you're a technology provider, dropping the price of one of your services so that they can get an idea and a taste and a feeling for how you work can be a great choice. This is known as a tripwire. It's something that they trip over and go, "Oh, okay. This is good," and then they get excited. It gives you a warmer way to start the relationship off as opposed to being cold and skeptical.

Make Sure Your Online Presence is Suitable

An easy way to give this away is online, so that means you need to make sure that your business is online and you have a good, active presence. That means that have a website that is updated regularly and have great content on there that could remove their skepticism. Twenty-four hours a day, people can be looking up reviews about you and working out why they want to work with you. Have a Facebook page with lots of posts on it. If you don't post regularly, get rid of your Facebook page. There's no point having it. Don't have social media channels for your business if you do not have yourself actively updating those channels. That's at least once a month for a business that is offering high-value products, or a couple of times a week if you're selling to a business to consumer business that is selling pies, for instance.

Social Media Marketing

Social media. There are lots of different outlets. If you've moved online or you're looking to move online, there's LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube, all these different things, and many more. You should think about how you use each of these different outlets. Twitter is great for small comments that people might go, "Oh, yeah. That's good." Just like a little SMS type of amount of comments. Then, you have Facebook, which is what is called the casual social setting, which is where you have things where customers are commenting, and you're putting up posts about why this is great and making people laugh at a funny photo or two. Then, you have LinkedIn. LinkedIn is your professional network where you'll be putting things such as new advancements in pie recipes or other such things such as moving location or look at this happy prized pack that someone won, or whatever it is. LinkedIn is definitely more about the business, not about the community. Snapchat, for most businesses, is going to be required. Snapchat will be exactly like Facebook but shorter. It's just a small video service where you could share stuff like happy customer videos.

Pricing

Pricing is a big one that we should be discussing as well. People seem to hold themselves in a certain position that pricing is the number one thing that clients are looking for. I completely disagree with this. You go to any funky bar with the hipsters in their beards in Brisbane, and it is full of people paying for overpriced coffee. Why is that? The coffee doesn't cost that much more to make. It hasn't been digested by monkeys, and even if it had, why are we paying so much more for it there? The reason is that everyone else is, and you want to fit in like everyone else. If you are hell bent on price personally, you have to think about the type of customer that you're getting and if they're the same as you and the same mindset as you. If they don't have the same mindset as you, then you shouldn't be looking at the price. If price is very important for your industry and there are no other identifiers and you're running very, very lean, then you've got to have some seriously wicked awesome integrations with automation to make sure that if you're making 5% or 2% on anything that you're doing, that you're able to deal with tens of thousands of customers as opposed to hundreds. In short, sell on the fantastic service, the fantastic product, the experience that they get. You want them to have a wonderful experience.

You Pay for the Experience

When you go to a hipster bar you're paying for the experience. "Oh, this is kind of funky." Same as going to the movies. You can watch the movie at home, but you're paying to be the person that watched it first or one of the first people with the experience. The actual movie did not cost any different to be made. It's just the way that it's being shown, so change around the way that your business shows its products and services, and you better change around your pricing, and make sure that's nor your identifier.

Do You Have a Recurring Income Stream?

Most businesses are moving to a model where there's a recurring income stream for them, and there's a little to no capital investment for their consumer. The reason for this is over time, it works out better for the business, and it means that the entry point for their customers is much lower. It also means that when planning for your exit strategy, your business is valued significantly higher than what it would have been if you didn't have a recurring income stream. When you go to the bank and they say, "How much do you earn?" you can say, "Reliably, this is how much I earn." Now, it doesn't work for every business yet, but if you can think of a way that your product or offering can be delivered in a re-occurring way, you got to be on the road to victory.

I've said many times that I don't pay a set price for a doctor to keep me healthy. They do this in third world countries, but they don't do it in Australia. In third world countries, you pay the doctor only while you're well.  They want to make sure everyone is well because anyone that's unhealthy and unwell, they don't get money from, so it's in their best interest to keep everyone well. If a whole community is paying a doctor only a few dollars a month to stay well, the moment that doctor finds anything that can make the patients better, it's going to be in their interest to continue to make the patients better, and he gets a lot more money from everyone. Everyone is a lot more efficient. Do that with your business. That can apply to anything where you're fixing anything. You could be a mechanic, replacing surfboard fins or whatever it is. Anything would work if you look at it like that.

Find out the Difference Between You and Your Competitors

You need to work out what the difference is between you and your competitors. You need to work out why you are the person they want to do business with, and then you need to market that strength and market the hell out of it. Jump on Facebook. Jump on all these different social media platforms. Start a YouTube channel. Write a book. Do all these things, which set you apart from your competitor. Have it so that they are no longer your competitor, and then you don't have anyone to compete with. If you separate yourself and you become an industry leader by writing a book, by holding community sessions, by teaching people whatever it is that you do, the reaction will be "Wow, this guy really knows what they're doing. They really know what they're on about." That in itself speaks strongly enough, and they'll start working with you.

What I've Done

 I'm doing all these podcasts, blogs, YouTube channels, all the things, and giving away lots and lots of knowledge and advice technically in business, in marketing, in life, in everything, and that doesn't mean that I'm watering down my products. It's showing people how things can be done, how things are meant to be done, and it's showing them how much is out there. If you're creating content that is engaging and helping your customers, it's going to give you a platform to pivot off and maybe in the future, if you did want to make a book, a book is what I would call a business card on steroids. A book is going to absolutely throw you into the future. If you come to a client meeting and you have a book, they're going to go, "Oh, this guy is good."

 If you're selling pies, just a little e-book that's only a few thousand words long that you can offer to clients will be better than nothing. Creating all this content sets you apart from your competitors because you've had a different walk of life than them and you have different goals in life than them. This screams throughout the content in whatever you're creating. It elevates your prestige, and that in itself is great for credibility.

You Will Start to See the Results

Once you have credibility and you have content out there and you've got your website and you're updating everything regularly, the next wonderful thing comes. Your conversions increase. I'm talking an average website gets between .5 to 2%. Someone that has great engaging content is 20 to 25%. Convert them from someone who's just searching online to someone who's actually jumping in and making actionable steps towards using you and your product. Create a following and a community around you and your product. Doing this will mean they are your spokesmen. They are your marketers, and they will believe in it. I've got a fantastic company that we work with called Energy Boost Fitness, and he's created a following, a cult following of 700 to 800 people, possibly more now. All these people, he'll put up a post about an event, and 60 to 70 people, he'll have from putting the post up to attending the event and paying to attend it at $70 to $80 ahead. They have faith in his decisions, and they have faith in the direction that he is pushing them and what they're going to be achieving out of his recommendations.

Now, he might put this post up a couple times a year, but with a following like that and a conversion of nearly 10%, at those sort of numbers, he's making $11,000 or he's having $11,000 be spent from just that post. That's pretty good. When you have a community around like that, it's the best marketing you can ever do. These events that he organises have people rock up and they've all got power finale. They've either made that matched his branding or they've bought branded items from him in way of shirts and so on, to make sure they're looking like a community and all working together. It's crazy, and that's what you need to do. Make a cult following around your business.

Talk to Your Customers Individually

When you're focusing on your marketing online, make sure that you're talking to your customer. Don't talk to the group of customers. If you have five or 10 different types of customers that you work with regularly, write up and create a different name and personality for each of those 10 customers, and then write up and create a different branding profile for each of those 10 customers. Think about what would their favourite colour be. Would they rather go on a yacht or would they rather go on a ship, or would they rather just spend the weekend golfing? What would their interests be? Do they have kids? Do they have a wife? Do they have a husband? What are they? Who are they? How are you going to market to them? A great example would be, if you have a celebrant who is selling her services, wedding packages, if she is to say that she marries everyone, that's not speaking to anyone, but if she specifically states in one of her marketing campaigns that she marries LGBT members and that is her specialty and she has photos up there with rainbows and lovely same-sex couples and so on, when her community members see that, they will then go, "Wow, that's amazing. Oh, that's really great. She is the one that we want to go with," because you're going to speak more strongly than anyone else.

This can work for any business. If you're a plumber, you can just as easily install a hot water system as you can replace a tap within reason. If you advertise yourself as a hot water specialist, that will mean that anyone that has a hot water problem is going to come to you because they see that that's what you're doing above and beyond anything else. When you start talking to them and start having a discussion with them and you've already got them through the gate and they're no longer a lead, they've been qualified, and they're now a client, and they've dropped some coin on you, you can then start talking about other services that you do. They're going to be, "Oh, you can replace taps as well? Well, that's great. That's awesome. We'll keep this guy on our record."

The Final Word

In closing, make sure that overall, your business is online. You've removed skepticism. You've made a pricing strategy that works long term for your business and works for your clients for you to stay profitable. Make sure that you've got great credibility, and establish yourself as an industry leader to increase your conversions. Focus on your marketing, and make sure that you're using a sniper marketing approach where you're talking directly to your customers so that your customers are listening directly to you. I hope this has been helpful, have a nice day, and stay good!

You've decided that you want to do something about your website. Maybe you're getting lots of traffic and now that's been on the decline, or you've decided that you want to start getting lots of traffic but you don't know where to go.

Learn more about website metrics at dorksdelivered.com.au

Get a Benchmark

The first step that you need to do is get a benchmark measure in place so you know where you are so you can work out where you're going. Every step you do in business, you need to be analytical and have the data to back up your decisions. There are three tools that we use that really make things easy. One of them is called PageSpeed Insights from Google. It's a great tool, but it is in beta, so it's not 100% finished off. The other one is Dareboost. It's great! It gives you a very, very detailed report, but they do charge for them.

Our Favourite Tool

The one that you want to focus mainly on is called gtmetrix.com. That's going to give you a very, very easy to read, as-if-you're-at-school report, where it gives you anything from an A all the way through to an E. Like a naughty child, you want to make sure that you're not getting these F's and E's. You want to get A's and B's. C's get degrees, but A's will get customers.

A Good Website Must Be Fast-loading

A fast-loading website is the number one thing to push you up in ranking if you're looking for an organic result. It's also a really sensible idea if you're using any paid advertisement, because, for paid advertisements, Google will look at how fast your website is and how relevant your website is. If your website is faster, they will charge you less and show you more frequently. So there are lots of reasons why you want to have a fast website, that's why we say this is the line in the sand and the first thing you need to change. Now, to get a fast website, it can cost you some money, but it's totally worth it because you have saved all that money in the amount you're paying for your ad words paid per click. So get your site running quickly, that's number one every time, always number one.

Have Relevant Information

The next thing after that is to make sure that your site has information on it that's relevant. Now, this one's a bit harder to measure, but what I'd suggest is chart Google Analytics on your website. Then you'll be able to see right at the start as your traffic's trending down or trending up, so you'll be able to see when you've made your website faster, how many more people are staying on your site, what your bounce rate is, and all these other cool stats that give you more information on exactly where your website is and where it's going. Once you've got that implemented, start with the on-page stuff. The stuff you want to do is make sure what's called your meta keywords and meta descriptions and titles and headings are working the way that they should and are geared towards the keywords that affect you in your industry that your customers might be looking for.

It'll Take Time

Once you've got that under wraps, those steps, everything I've just said then is gonna take six to eight weeks to take effect. When you've done these things, you're not gonna see the ramping up in Google Analytics for six to eight weeks, it's quite a process. But you wanna have a fast website before you start changing things around on it, and you wanna have a fast website before you start promoting your website for customers to get there. So there's an order to the chaos.

Make Good Content

So you're at a spot, your customers hopefully are still consistent with where they're going, the number of visitors you have coming to the website might be starting to peak up, but you really want to take the world by storm. The next thing you should be considering is writing good quality content for your site. Creating a blog or a podcast that you can give to your customers, that gives them informative, actionable information that they can then jump out and do something with. What it comes down to is you are the expert in your industry, so you're gonna be able to give people advice on whatever your profession is. By doing this you will be elevating your position in the industry as someone who's giving out great knowledge and someone who is giving back to the community.

Don't Plagiarise

Google does not reward people for knocking off content, stealing it from someone else or having badly written stuff that's being converted from English into Chinese,.Google, let's face it, is smarter than you and I. They know what's going on, they're not silly ducks. So make sure that you're making relevant content with keywords in it that your customers are looking for, and that will thrive you through to success faster than anything else.

How Regularly Should You Add New Content?

We get asked the question all the time, "How often should we be making an article for our website?" It all depends on the industry, how competitive it is, and all sorts of things like that. For us, in our industry, we release two to three a week at a minimum, and we've been known to release as many as 100 in 90 days. So it really varies. But there are other companies out there that do it once every two weeks, and that is perfectly fine. The thing that you gotta remember is you're trying to take baby steps. You don't want to start making 10 blog articles every two weeks just because. You want to make sure that you have measurable steps.

The Final Word

So that is an overview of the metrics that you should be looking at. Thank you and stay good!

If you use your website as a source of income, you want to make sure that you are driving traffic to your business organically and not just through word of mouth. You definitely need to make sure you've got a world ranking website. There's been a whole bunch of different episodes I've done which discuss how to get a website ranking a bit better and making sure that you've got a good website, but we're going to be talking about how to use backlinks today specifically.

What is a Backlink?

A Backlink is a link from someone else's website that's going to yours. It sounds simple enough, but let's say that you've got a makeup business, and you're wanting to promote your business. If you were to go and contact L'oreal, or Maybelline, or whoever else and you said, "Hey, I need you guys to send a link to my website," these people are probably just going to laugh at you and be like, why would we do that?

How to Encourage Backlinking

What you need to do is make sure that you've got really great, engaging content on your website that's relevant, and maybe even using their products. Then if you send them a link saying, "Hey, we've got this thing that we've made. It's all about your products and how they're reshaping our industry" they could be like, oh, this sounds pretty good, and they may mention you. They may link to you. They may say that you're a partner, or they may elevate your position that you have with them. Depends on exactly how big of a fish you are.

Who to Target

You want to make sure that whoever you're having doing the backlinks to your website is a bigger fish than you and they've got more traffic going to their website because that is what's going to give you more results. You don't want to have these little fish talking about you. That'll still help a little bit, but the way that backlinking works is that if they've got say a million people coming to their website a month, and you've got 100 people coming to your website a month, when they talk about you, some of their success will rub off on you, not with their customers, but with the Google ranking. This will then push you up in the ranking, which is awesome and that's what you want.

Network Within Your Industry

Know who the industry leaders are, and anyone that you could see to where there are some parallels. Maybe you've got a similar customer base, but you're not competing with each other, and you could set up a joint venture, where you're both rubbing each other's back, so to speak. Doing this will allow both of your businesses to grow. Again, as long as you've got great engaging, content. A great place to find things that people are searching about is by keeping up to date on blogs. You can look through different industry blogs and go okay, this is all really good stuff. Take that information and then write a blog about it, and answer their questions. Leave it in the comments saying, "Hey, check this out. This could be relevant for you."

In Closing

You want one or two dozen backlinks per article ideally, and hundreds over the whole website, as long as they're all relevant. If they're not relevant, it's not going to help your ranking and page views increase as much. I hope this has been useful. Good luck!

Today, we're going to be talking about how to create engaging content. The idea here is you've just got yourself an awesome website, or maybe it's been established for a while. You got a few visitors and you're wanting to ramp that up, or you might be an established blog or content creator already looking for some hints and tips.

Know Your Audience

The best way to find and create engaging content is to know your audience. What I would suggest you do is you ask your current clients or your current visitors to your site to see what it is that they like. You could put a survey up that they can fill in and maybe give them a bit of a reward at the end for doing that. A lot of the time you can find out questions that they want to have answered, which can give you a plethora of content.

Try Answer the Public

If you're a new business and you don't have any clients or it’s just too hard to get the information on what you're looking to be able to do, there's a fantastic resource that we use called AnswerThePublic.com. Its got a creepy old man when you get there. He's going to yell at you probably, but yeah, you type in pretty much any of your different services that you do, and it will explain different things that people search for and how that relates to you. It's definitely a resource you should go check out, so try AnswerThePublic.com. Great resource.

Use a Storytelling Format

Hopefully, you've got a few different ideas. Top 10 tips and things like that are great to use to create engaging content. Once you've got these ideas together, you need to make sure that you're relaying them in a story type format ideally, so you want to get people interacting and having people engage in your content. These tips go hand in hand with stage presentation or first meetings. Very similar to elevated pitches. You want to make sure that you're snappy as hell and you get people's attention. I don't like people to dilly-dally around. You want to make sure that you're letting them know what it is that you're doing, and how you're going to do that, and how you are different to everyone else. Get your content produced in a way that relays the message to that you're wanting to have.

Have Relevant Keywords

If you're wanting people to come to your site make sure relevant keywords are written three to five times throughout the content that you're creating. That way, Google is happy with the content you're creating as well. The biggest hint and tip that I can give you today is to be detailed and professional. You are the expert in your industry, so you can talk about it. Already talking about it creates the content. When you start talking about it and writing it down, you can then start having actionable steps that allow for you to create this awesome content, and you'd be surprised at how quickly it will start spurting out. When you get this content and you've created enough of it, that's then a platform that you can pivot off to start looking at doing other things such as writing a book or becoming an industry speaker that is an influencer in your industry, so it's all very cool stuff.

Final Words

To recap, create engaging content by making sure that you're resonating whatever your content is with your clients. Research your clients and your keywords that you may be using on Google. Make sure to have them mentioned throughout the content. Use Answer The Public.

Be the one in your life that you're most proud of. Anyone that knows me or has known me for a while knows that health is incredibly important to me. The most important thing that we have is our health and then family, friends, and your other interests. but your health is the most important thing. You need to keep yourself in tip-top condition and you can do anything. People look at me and they say, "how do you have enough time to do all the things that you do? You're running multiple companies, you've got podcasts, YouTube, blogs, Facebook posts, Twitter posts, LinkedIn, you're writing a book, all these things that are happening." That is fair, it does sound like a lot of things, but it's because the finely tuned machine that is my body is finely tuned.

Read more about Wellness: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/306-you-are-what-you-eat

Your Body Is Your Instrument

The only instrument we're given in this life for our mind is our body. Keep it in good shape and you can do anything. Your mind is controlling every aspect of your life. It shows you your reality. It keeps your blood flowing, it keeps your words coming out, everything comes down to the six inches between your ears. You need to keep it in tip-top condition. My diet consists primarily of raw vegetables. I have the occasional beer now, I used to drink a bit more before but I have the occasional beer now and very occasionally I'll have things such as meat or dairy. I love animal products but predominantly it's 100% vegetables. I'm not saying this will work for everyone, I've got a very strict diet where I eat a lot of vegetables, I drink a lot of lemon juice from freshly squeezed lemons, and I found that in keeping my body in tip-top shape I'm able to perform nearly superhuman feats.

Have All Round Discipline

So many people have the discipline to own a business and to be in business and to help people out but they somehow, their health falls short when they're doing that. You need to be able to put yourself forward first and make sure that your health and the way that your body works is number one. You need to do this so that you can make sure that you are the best person for yourself, which will allow for you to be the best person for all of your customers, your employees, and everyone else in your life. There's a lot of mind-altering substances that people pop into their body, whether it be traditional things or what has become traditional things, such as alcohol or caffeine or cigarettes, but all of them alter your perspective on reality and sometimes you become reliant on those. Being able to remove each of these from your life lets you see the impact that they are having on your life. I don't consume any caffeine. I don't consume anything that I feel is giving me results that I wouldn't otherwise enjoy or like or see myself pushing myself forward with that, which comes to another topic.

Just Because It's Legal Doesn't Mean You Should Do It

A lot of the things that are legal, such as cigarettes or drinking alcohol a negative overall effect. There are other things that you may not be aware of called Nootropics. Nootropics alter your mind to increase focus. What's important to know here is regardless of what it is that you're putting into your body, it is still altering you for that moment and altering you at that time and that may or may not be a good thing. I have dabbled with some Nootropics and found that they give you the ultimate way to focus. 

Understanding Nootropics

This word Nootropics might sound new, might not. They have been covered in popular culture in movies called  Limitless and another one called Lucy.  Major plotlines revolve around taking these drugs that make you able to use more of your brain and make you able to focus more and retain more information.  The thing is though, with anything, anything good comes a bad. You don't get anything for free in this world, there's always some negative effect that can happen.

My Experience

What I found for myself with Nootropics is they're a great thing at creating patterns in your life. Conditioning your mind to be able to form sets of routines or sets of tasks can take a very long period of time and especially if they're boring mundane tasks. You can convince yourself not to them. Whether that be sending out invoices or going through and reconciling, or finally writing that book or writing a new business plan. Nootropics can give you 100% absolute focused tunnel vision towards whatever it is that you're doing. You get this laser focus. Once I smashed out 19,500 words towards the book that I was writing.  I would never suggest having Nootropics as a long term thing. What I would suggest is trying them and seeing what happens. The same is you have a drink of alcohol and go oh yeah, this is good. You're not going to be having it for your breakfast.  The take home here is it's good to try different things and to understand what works for your body, understand your body has the instrument that it is and how it's controlling your mind with what you're putting into it.

Final Thoughts

Nootropics taught me how to sit at a computer and stay there for 19 hours unencumbered by any distractions. Nootropics did not give me superhuman strengths, superhuman powers, and superhuman focus ability. What they did was that it gave me the ability to create a condition where my body was able to see, where to spend time, and how to get into a routine. I hope you all got a bit out of this. Rock on.

Elevator pitches. The first three seconds are critical. This is one thing that I learned from reading the book the Way of The Wolf by Jordan Belfort. Years ago you could talk to someone for a little while and they would keep interested. Nowadays you have to be on the ball and be ready with some decent great things to say. You really need to hone in with a sniper approach as to what it is that you do, how you do it, and why that's relevant to the person that you're talking about. There's a lot of engineering that goes into an elevator pitch. In the modern world everyone is just clicking, click, click, they're clicking next, they're swiping up, they're swapping down, and most people are not interested in listening to you for an extended period of time. The first three seconds are critical. I can't stress that enough. Make sure that you have the person that you're listening to engaged in the first three seconds, and think about who it is that you're listening to.

Read more about Elevator Pitch: https://dorksdelivered.com.au/blog/307-what-is-the-importance-of-an-elevator-pitch

Analyse

One of the first dos is to analyse your audience. If you're at a barbecue and someone asks, what do you do in business, make sure the things that you are talking about are relevant to that person at the barbecue. If you're at a business conference, your elevator pitch might be completely different. If you're at an industry-specific event where you're surrounded by your peers, again, your elevator pitch will change. You don't want to be saying to a prospect the same elevator pitch that you'd be saying to a competitor. It doesn't make any sense.

Position Yourself

Ideally, you want to position yourself with the competitors, so you don't sound like a competitor. Sounds like an interesting thing to do, but depending on the industry that you're in, it's not that difficult. Predominantly I'm in IT, and so I do business management, IT auditing, and overall make sure the health of the business and its uptime is where it should be, up. Other people might just say, "oh, you're in IT," and you say, "oh yeah, I'm in IT." That's a terrible way to introduce yourself. You want to make sure your elevator pitch is clear and concise.

Don't Waffle

The next one is making sure you're aware of waffle. You don't want to be there talking for ages or going off track. This isn't just for an elevator pitch. This also just goes into general communication that you would have if you're at like a networking event or something like that. Networking events especially have lots of people that are there, for one thing, that's right, to network and to talk to lots of people. So don't get caught up talking to just the one person if you can talk to multiple people at once. Make sure you're covering off on their needs and wants, but mostly their want over their need, and don't discuss your needs and wants. People don't spend $700 on a bottle of wine to get drunk. They spend it on the experience. This goes the same for fancy restaurants and everything else. The food isn't more nutritious. It's the experience that comes with it. That's why people go and buy fancy things. Make sure that you're selling the experience and you're really honing in on what they want.

Hone in On What They Want

 Most people won't buy what they need. Make sure that your elevator pitch has exactly what they want in it. If you don't know what that is yet, ask different people that you're already working with, and trial out your elevator pitch with different friends and family to see what they say. Make sure it's no longer than 30 seconds. That is at a max. You want to get them hooked in in three seconds and be comfortable to listen for 30. Don't talk about we and us if the business is just you. It distances yourself from the business and it shows a level of falseness that you don't really want to have to go across. If you're passionate about it, talk about it. Mention how interested you are in this.

Remember This

In closing, the most important things are, keep it short, concise, hone in on what they want, read your audience, and make sure that you're ready to go. Good luck and stay good!

The gift of giving. We're still in that seasonal moment where it feels like Christmas is just finished, but summer's here and work's kind of back but kind of not.  Something I've been doing for a number of years is that I give a six pack to my postie and my garbo. I got this idea originally from the Go-Giver by Bob Burg, which is an amazing book. Since I work from home I often get caught up and can be very busy. Sometimes I get the bin out on time. Sometimes I don't.  My garbo is aware and sometimes he will actually stop and wait for me, even though because of it he's going to be a bit late. He's seen the value that I have given him by gifting him a six-pack. That's around 50 cents a week that I'm paying to have him wait there for me to make sure I've got my bins out. That's a very small price to pay really to have that convenience and that relationship with someone.

Build Quality Relationships

Something that's really important is building quality relationships with your customers and with your vendors. The gift of giving is what I find to be the number one thing you should be doing in business. You should always pay yourself last. Put the food on your staff's table, even if it means you're eating crumbs for a while, as it shows the integrity of the person you are and where your priorities lay.

Here is Something for You

I'm giving away for you guys a free IT order for your business. You're welcome. Nobody said regifting is tacky either. If you don't need this, feel free to spread the load and spread the love and regift for another company that you work with, as long as it's someone in southeast Queensland. This is saving them thousands and they can use this any time for the next six months. Simply go to offer.dorksdelivered.au/it-audit.

What Can You Do?

Now that that's out of the way, have a think about how you guys can give and keep giving to other people. Donating to charities is something that I do quite frequently. Taking anything that I no longer use that is still loved, but not overly loved I donating as well. I think it's a fantastic thing to clear your mind, clear your life, clear your house. It brings about clarity and direction. Most of all it feels fantastic being able to help someone else out. Become a go-giver and keep giving.