Discover how to monetize your expertise and work anywhere with Caitlin Pyle.

Caitlin is a 29-year-old former desk zombie turned business transformation consultant. She’s the creator of ProofreadAnywhere.com, home of the online course Transcript Proofreading: Theory and Practice™, the first-ever online course on how to work from anywhere by proofreading transcripts for court reporters. She teamed up with a colleague to expand the brand by launching Transcribe Anywhere in January 2016.

An authentic and effective content marketer, Caitlin turned ProofreadAnywhere into a six-figure+ blog and business within three months, and total business revenue reached $1 million within 15 months. To teach others her unique method of building platforms, carving out authority in a niche, and monetizing digital products, Caitlin developed TheWorkAnywhereLife.com blog and the Monetize Your Genius™ course.

Most people and companies have a goal to "drive more traffic" to their website. But a more crucial goal is to increase your website conversions, or the number of visitors you capture into your sales funnel. You want to make every website click count.

My guest on today's podcast is an expert on the subject of turning browsers into buyers. Justin Christianson is a 14-year digital marketing veteran and #1 Bestselling author of Conversion Fanatic: How to double your customers, sales and profits with A/B testing. He is also the co-founder and president of Conversion Fanatics, a full service conversion rate optimization company that helps companies get more out of their digital traffic efforts.

Justin talks about why conversions are so important and what some of the most effective tactics are for attracting and converting website traffic, including Ebooks, coupon codes, training programs, videos, free products and discounts.

Get ready to learn about the power of direct response copywriting from one of the masters of the craft, Scott Martin, founder of Scott Martin Copywriting. He joins me on today's Go For Launch podcast.

Scott has been a professional copywriter for his entire career. He was born in America, spent his formative years in England, then moved back to America where he lived in Charlotte, North Carolina for 27 years. He now lives in Aspen, Colorado.

He has taken detours into corporate communications, magazine publishing, and writing books but he has always written copy.

Today, he’s a direct response copywriter. His clients include direct marketing giants like Agora, The Motley Fool, and Ryan Deiss’s Digital Marketer. But he also writes for much smaller businesses including a local pub. He has helped this small establishment build an opt-in email database of 2,500 people.

Scott is a member of the Titans marketing group run by former boardroom executive Brian Kurtz.

He conservatively estimates that his copy has generated over $50 million in revenue in the last four years. One of his clients was named the fastest growing business in the Charlotte area by The Charlotte Business Journal.

He’s written 17 books, including a book about Caddyshack, published by Taylor Trade.

Right now, he’s focusing on direct response copy—plus he just launched two websites with resources for direct marketers and direct response copywriters.

Topics we discuss include:

• How Scott was spurred to become an entrepreneur after being laid off as a corporate copywriter
• How he decided to write the book The Book of Caddyshack: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Greatest Movie Ever Made and what it was like to track down some of the people who made the movie
• The basics of the craft of copywriting
• Specifics of Scott’s specialty, direct response copywriting
• Why direct response copywriting is critical to selling products and services
• Scott’s process for engaging with his direct response clients
• Why testimonials are so vital (“like snow at a ski resort”) and how to improve them
• Why Scott does not write branding ads and branding copy (and how these differ from direct response copy)
• The origins of direct response copywriting (in the 13th century!)
• Some of the reasons why it has remained powerful and effective for thousands of years
• A timeless example from the Gary Bencivenga, considered the greatest living direct response copywriter
• Other masters of neurolinguistic programming
• How to measure the ROI of direct response copy
• A great exercise to hone your direct response copywriting skills

Learn to tell your business story with infographics, one of the most powerful and effective digital communications tools.

Brian Wallace of NowSourcing joins me in this episode of the Go For Launch podcast. Brian is the president of NowSourcing, an industry leading infographic design agency based in Louisville, KY. The agency works with companies that range from small businesses to Fortune 500 firms. Brian also runs a local event to make Louisville a more competitive city (#ThinkBig) and he has been named a 2016 Google Small Business Advisor.

Brian began his career in technology, and at one point became chief technology officer at a firm outside New York City. But he wanted more flexibility. He was fortunate to convince the company to allow him to leave and retain them as his first client.

While he was good at the IT work, he found he liked marketing more than tech support. So in 2005, he switched his agency's focus and got into social media consulting early. However, the space started getting crowded and in 2008-2008, he decided to specialize in designing and promoting infographics for clients. See below for a great example of their work.

NowSourcing has become the top choice for companies who need to tell a compelling story visually. Brian and he team spend weeks, not hours, doing a “deep dive” to understand their client’s message and objectives, design the actual graphic and perhaps most importantly drive traffic through their extensive network of media partners.

The company recently launched the first “virtual reality” infographic at South by Southwest.

Have you been thinking about starting your own business for awhile? Progress from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur with advice from Brian Lofrumento, my guest on this week's Go For Launch podcast.

Brian is the creator of The Ultimate Profit Model and author of the book Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur.

Brian’s businesses have reached over 3.5 million people in over 200 countries. Brian built a six-figure SEO agency at the age of 24 and has helped over 50 clients from around the US and over 3,000 students from around the world grow and automate their businesses by implementing high-converting sales and marketing funnels.

Brian started early as an entrepreneur. While many of his college classmates were playing video games in their spare time, he was starting a website in 2009 about soccer that he grew to a profitable audience of over 3.5 million worldwide.
Soon, people started asking him how he built the webiste traffic so effectively--which led him and a friend to start an SEO agency in 2012. What started as a side hustle became a full-time venture.

But in recent years, Brian started moving away from what he calls the "old way" of doing business which essentially takes a long time to convince people to buy from you. While he still values "long game" activities like SEO and participating in social media, he has developed faster, more scalable ways of attracting and converting customers.

During our conversation, we talking about his "go to" source for marketing his own business. We also discuss his book and his course, which he says is aimed directly at "action takers" only. He freely gives discounts to those who sign up for his course but are not serious on following through.

Brian is currently giving away 1,000 free copies of his book (you just pay shipping).

Have you ever encountered a problem and said to yourself, "There should be a solution for this!" That is what happened to Anne Brewer, who decided to turn frustration into business inspiration.

Anne is the inventor and owner of Pocket Palz® and Potti Pocket®. As the product names imply, these products literally started with a lightbulb moment in a bathroom.

Picture this: you are enjoying an outdoor concert and go to use a portable toilet, only to have your cell phone fall in! That is almost what happened to Anne in the summer of 2014 when she used a portable toilet at a concert and her smartphone fell out of her back pocket and onto the floor. She was lucky it didn’t fall in! But she thought there has to be a better way, and she immediately began researching smartphone holders in concert venues, stadiums, ballparks, restaurants and movie theaters… and there were none!

So she invented Pocket Palz®, the safe, secure, sanitary and convenient place to put your smartphone so you can be hands free.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Anne at one of the Network for Entrepreneurs events in Wilmington, NC. She was kind enough to join me on the podcast to share more of her entrepreneurial journey.

Are you a trainer or a coach? How would you like to make the leap from physical to virtual training?

Jeff McMahon is doing that, with about one third of his personal training business now being conducted virtually with some marquee clients in the online business/marketing space,  including Pat Flynn Chris Ducker, Jeff Wenberg and Lindsey Anderson.

Jeff is owner and founder of Total Body Construction, and he has been a personal trainer for almost a decade now.  He has degrees in Pre-Med/Pre-Pharm and is dual certified in exercise science and sports medicine.

Jeff’s training style is different than most due to his diverse background and expertise.  With a blackbelt in Tae Kwon Do, a certification in lifestyle and wellness, and experience doing massage therapy for three years, he has helped everyone with issues ranging from:

• Weight loss to weight gain
• Cancer to diabetes
• Injury rehab to celiac disease
• Back issues to sports specific training

With over 6,000 different exercises in his playbook, we says you will never repeat a workout and you will never be bored!

Virtual training allows people to enjoy exercise in the comfort of their own home, save time by not having to travel and sit in traffic, and use whatever equipment they have or want to order. There is an accountability factor that is the key ingredient to results and progress.  Jeff calls Total Body Construction a “one stop shop” for transforming your life into what you want it to be.

In our interview on the Go For Launch podcast, Jeff talks about wanting to become a surgeon but being unable to when he learned he was color blind. So he switched from medical school to training.

His mom also had a massive stroke when he was in college. That spurred him on in his training, and he spent three years studying massage therapy. One day when he was helping his mom, she mentioned she wished she didn’t have to leave the house for therapy sessions, and Jeff started to think about how he could help her and other through virtual training.

When a gym he was working with closed, he rented a facility and kept training his clients. Nearly a decade later, he now trains about two thirds of his clients in person and one third virtually. However, he has been growing the virtual side quickly since starting it about two years ago.

Jeff’s clients receive different communications during his virtual training, ranging from weekly emails to a program where they see Jeff for 1-3 hours (using online technologies such as FaceTime, Skype and Zoom) and do workouts together.

Jeff has had his share of entrepreneurial ups and downs. He started a 5k race company to raise money for charity, until to lose $15,000 in the process. It taught him to really focus on what he is best at and loves doing.

What happens when jobs are we know them are gone? Are you ready for the coming end of the 9-5?

Taylor Pearson is on a quest to delve into the current and future trends behind tremendous shifts taking place in traditional global workforces. Taylor is an entrepreneur and author of The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-to-5. Inc.com rated The End of Jobs one of the Top Three ‘Start Your Own Business’ Books and a Top 25 Business Book of 2015.
He joins me on today’s podcast.

Taylor’s book is full of anecdotes about the sweeping changes in what constitutes “work” for most people. For example, he talks about a child being born in 1870, when 80 percent of the population worked in agricultural jobs. Yet over the next hundred years, that figure would flip to 80% of people working in offices vs. just four percent in agriculture.

He asserts that what used to be “safe” (having a 9-5 type of job) is now risky…whereas the opposite is true for entrepreneurship, with fewer barriers to entry and a bigger potential upside.

He talks about several big trends, including globalization; the massive increase in the number of college degrees and the rise of ubiquitous of software and technology. For entrepreneurs, he cites several pluses including ready access to a large pool of capable talent and inexpensive software for communications and other key functions.

Do you have a business that is largely dependent on your providing services? How would you like to transition to sell products instead. That is what my guest today has done, transitioning from services provider to custom software developer. Greg Forehand is the founder and CEO of Ekos.

Since starting the company in 2002, Greg has designed and developed software for some of the largest companies in the world. More recently, he has moved the business away from custom software development and is now focused on writing software used by craft beverage manufacturers such as breweries and distilleries.

Since launching Ekos Brewmaster in the summer of 2014, the Ekos team has seen a very positive response from the craft beverage industry. With more than 500 craft brewery customers, Ekos Brewmaster has quickly become the most widely used brewery management software in the world. Greg lives in the thriving craft brewery community of Charlotte, NC, with his wife Kate, and daughters Maddi and Lilly.

In our interview, Greg recalls the challenges of being mainly a services provider and how they made the conscious decision to focus on being a product company. Over time, they kept looking for the right opportunity to serve a small, underserved market. Early on, they explored building software to track raw materials in various agricultural areas. In the process of doing research, he reached out to talk to a few breweries about what raw materials they use and learned they had needs that were not being fulfilled. After lining up several initial breweries to advise him as industry experts, they began to build Ekos Brewmaster in an iterative fashion.

Now in a mature state, the cloud-based software handles everything from purchasing of raw materials, planning of recipes in batches all the way through production processes, plus packaging, invoicing and accounting (with QuickBooks integration). Due to many industry regulations, the system also tracks a lot of information for tax purposes and compliance.

Greg talks about different ways to bring an idea for software to fruition, especially if you do not have technical skills. These include hiring a developer outright or partnering with someone and co-owning the intellectual property. He also goes into detail about “pacing yourself” when going into a niche direction, in order to prove the business model works—as well as ensure you have the cash flow to support it in the early stages.

One final note—let me give a special shoutout to Wicked Weed Brewing in Asheville, NC, for the Black Angel beverages we enjoyed when we taped the show!

What’s ailing you? What if you could solve your pain and start a business at the same time? That is what my guest on today’s podcast did with a revolutionary new health product.

Jerry Collins is CEO and cofounder of Treadwell Corporation based in Wilmington, NC. After graduating from the University of Maine with a degree in finance and and an MBA, he spent 10 years as a commercial bank manager and lender. This was followed by three successful entrepreneurial ventures in the retail grocery business, financial consulting and a medical services organization.

Jerry also served for 20 years as executive in the C-Suite (CEO & CFO) for Rural Health Clinic and Federally Qualified Health Center organizations.

In 2009, he joined Treadwell after the system they invented helped him personally treat symptoms of Restless Leg Syndrome (cramping of feet and legs at night) that had been previously unsuccessfully treated for the prior five years.

In our discussion, Jerry shares a very cautionary tale about how he bought his first business, a grocery store in a growing community. The aging owners painted a rosy picture of profitability when in fact they were fabricating the numbers to boost the sales prices. Despite Jerry’s banking acumen and access to a lot of industry and financial information that told him everything looked great, on paper, the owners fooled him.

Within six months, he found the business failing—despite customers who raved about it. He had to tap into this savings until he nearly went out of business. This was followed by months of legal pursuit. Fortunately, he did receive some remuneration, yet tragically the original owner took his own life when the full extent of the damages were revealed. In the end, Jerry sold the business for a profit after three years.

On a brighter note, Jerry talks about how he a childhood friend and physical therapist, Richard Hand, discovered how to solve Jerry’s restless leg pain with a device Richard was developing to help elderly patients improve their circulation. Interestingly, the device was fashioned after an old treadle (foot pedal) used on a sewing machine, which was sitting in the home of one of the elderly patients he worked with.

The device, known as the TREDLR™, increases circulation significantly throughout the body with minimal user effort. They are making inroads into long-term care, assisted living, primary care. independent living and adult daycare facilities. Additional markets they are pursing include workplace wellness, athletic recovery and performance, the consumer in-home market and medical diagnostics.