Growth+ Podcast

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Alex Branning - Your Marketing Coach podcast. Yes, it is true. Facebook has made a huge change to their algorithm that really punishes Facebook pages, but they made a huge change to boost something else up.

All right. What did Facebook do here? Facebook made a drastic difference in what they call public content, public organic content. Let me give you the layman's terms for what they're talking about. They are really crimping Facebook pages and that's a huge bummer. However, there are ways around it. In my last episode, episode five of the podcast, I talked about different ways for you to organically grow your Facebook page while following the Facebook rules. In the press release that Facebook put out, they mentioned why they're doing what they're doing and they told you exactly what to do so that your Facebook page can keep growing. I talked about that a lot in episode five.

Today, I'm going to talk about where they want users to focus their time and that is in Facebook groups. How do you as a business owner take that information and use it to your benefit? I'm going to dive into that in this episode here. I myself have three Facebook groups that I run. I have my Stay Humble Hustle Hard Facebook group. In that group, it's really about just encouraging and motivating entrepreneurs from all around the world. My second Facebook group is Funnel Fridays. In that group, I talk all about click funnels, sales funnels, lead funnels, and really how to profit from your online presence. The third group that I run is specifically for my Level 10 Marketing Coaching Program. I share all that to say this. I have really embraced Facebook groups and I'm seeing a big growth in my business from following what Facebook is telling me to do.

Let's dive in to what you can do to really take advantage of this. Now when you create an active Facebook group, when you're the admin, the leader of this group, that puts you right away in a position of authority within the group. That's always a good place to be. When you're the one who's in charge of the conversation, you have more control over what happens in that space. It's a good place for you. I was talking with a client the other day, not the other day actually, it's about six months ago now and it was a real estate agent. She was having a difficult time. She said, "You know, Alex, I have just a huge network of people and I want to be able to really focus my attention on the people that I have in my network." I advised her to do this and I'm going to walk you through the same advice I gave her because you should be doing this exact same thing.

I talked to Debbie and I said, "Debbie, here's what I recommend that you do. Create a Facebook group and in that group, I want you to put everyone that's in your network, I want you to put all of your clients, your prospects, the ones that you've already started to work with," because in real estate, timing is unique. Even if they've said, "Yes, I want to work with you," there's still some time. There's a delay that goes into it sometimes just because of the market. "In this same group, put everyone that's on your team. I want your assistant in there. I want your escrow officers, your title. Anybody that works on the deal with you, I want them all in this Facebook group. Then post at least every other day in the Facebook group with the main goal not to be talking about what Debbie does for business. People already know that. They're already connected with you. What I want is I want you to engage your audience. Do fun things. Do things that get people talking. Share about local news. I want your Facebook group, Debbie, to be one of the things that people feel like they have to check on a regular basis to see what's going on and what funny things are being posted."

She followed my advice and now her Facebook group has literally hundreds of people in it. What did she do? She created a meeting space for everyone that knows her, likes her, and trusts her so that she can build her relationship with all of these people and within that Facebook group, she posts twice a month on how people can refer their friends to her. Did you know she just built a referral army of over 200 people that are consistently getting educated on how to send her clients? She has turned that Facebook group into so many real estate deals, it boggles my mind. I gave her that advice, she followed it. It's the same thing I do. I bring my prospect, my clients, and everyone on my team into these Facebook groups and then I just engage, engage, engage. I make those Facebook groups something where I want people to go to on a regular basis.

Now, you may be asking yourself, "Okay. Well, my team, my network isn't as big as what you described Debbie's as. I don't have hundreds of people." That's okay. You only have 15 people, 20 people. I want you to create a Facebook group where you are talking to them, engaging them, really helping them understand what it is that you do. It's important in a group setting to make it so that the people in that group are getting consistent value from you and you're not selling them because look, if they wanted to work with you, they would already be doing it. Your job is not to convince them why they should work with you, your job is to engage them with fun content and educate them on what it is that you do so that they're able to bring you referrals. A group will help you grow because with the right mindset like Debbie, you will be creating an army of referral partners.

If you're listening to this right now and you say, "Okay, Alex, you've inspired me. I'm going to do it. I'm going to start a Facebook group," I have a secret weapon for you that helps you turn your group, your brand new group into an active and thriving Facebook group and it's called The Five Day Challenge. The Five Day Challenge is something that I learned from a good friend of mine named Elena VIncent. She is awesome and amazing.  She came up with this idea that is just absolutely brilliant. What is it? The Five Day Challenge is a competition with a designated timeline, a specific goal, and incentives. Your goal is to fill a group with ideal prospects by enticing them with a fun game where they can win prizes if they participate.

Here's some examples of challenges that I've seen run. One of them was cut out sugar for a week. It was the Cut Out Sugar For a Week Challenge and every day, there were prizes that you could win as you participated in it. You could post in that contest, that specific challenge. You would post what you ate that day. You would just list it out and everyone that went without sugar that day was entered into a drawing to win a gift card or other product. That specific challenge was run by somebody in a health and wellness network marketing space. Here's the thing. Yes, in that challenge, she was talking about cutting out sugar. That was the main goal. During the process, suddenly, she was introducing the people in her group to the different things that her company provided for her with the healthy living. It was a very genius way of not really hammering down her friends' throats of what she did, it was a way for her to introduce what she is using the products for, how she is incorporating it into her diet, et cetera.

Another example of a challenge. Minimize Your Life, Five Days to a Decluttered House. This was a way for people, every day they had a specific task to do to help to declutter their house. It was brilliant. It was a great way for this client's ideal customers to all join together. Another one that I saw, Spoil Your Wife This Week. This was run by a real estate agent who wanted to gather married men in his region all into a Facebook group so that he could be introduced to them as a local real estate agent. He ran this fun contest. It was wildly successful and I highly recommend running some things similar to that.

I gave you different examples. Notice that none of the examples of a five day challenge talked about the product or service that the contest holder actually provided. The reason for that is simple. We want to bring people into our group so that we can then educate them on what we do, have fun with them. We want to create that relationship and then based on that, then we have an opportunity to do business, but we're not using the challenge to sell. We're using it to engage and create a relationship.

Now why run one of these challenges? I mean there's so many positive things that come of it. I'm going to list some of them. It grows your email list. The process of executing the challenge is grooming your leads. It's becoming friendly with you. It establishes you as an expert, an authority in your industry or geographic area. Provides proof of what you're selling. Then with the incentives, you get a lot of participation in your group and it creates a lot of momentum for you.

Now when you're preparing to run this five day challenge, there's a worksheet that I have and you fill it out. It's got six questions for you to fill this thing out. Number one, what is the purpose of the challenge? What will you offer your participants at the end of the challenge? Who is your ideal audience? Now what's the topic? The purpose of the challenge, that's for you. For me, when I run a challenge, the purpose is lead generation. The topic, well the topic could change. I'm doing one soon for email list building. It's going to be a fun five day challenge for email list building. Now what's the promise of the challenge? Well, that just depends on what it is that you're doing. For the one who cut out sugar, the promise was you'll feel better, you'll have fun, and you'll meet friends in the area that are also cutting out sugar. It's just way for people to create relationships. With the spoil your wife challenge that I used as an example, the promise of that challenge was that the people who participated in that challenge were going to have a happier wife and a happier life. Brilliant.

The prizes that you'll be giving away. Again, as you prepare to run your challenge, you want to ask yourself what's the purpose of the challenge for yourself? What will you offer your participants at the end? In other words, what's the sales pitch? Who is your ideal audience? Who are you bringing in? What is the topic of your challenge? In other words, what is the thing that you're challenging them to do? What is the promise of what they will get out of the challenge? Then what are the prizes you'll be giving away? I encourage you to give away a prize a day. Examples of some prizes to give away. You could do cash, gift cards, maybe some product, time with you if you're an expert in the industry and people want to sit down and chat with you. You could also give them exposure or awards within the group.

I knew one gal, she was tight on funds, but really wanted to run a challenge. Every day, she would make someone the MVP of the group for that day. She only gave away one prize at the end. She still got a lot of good engagement though because people were having fun during her challenge. When you run the challenge, post daily. Again, incentivize engagement, really connect with your audience. I highly recommend sending daily emails to all the participants and then wrap up the challenge with action steps that they could take to continue the progress that they've made. Always announce the winners, that way people know who won.

I highly recommend running that five day challenge. That's my secret weapon. You can learn more about it and download my worksheet on my website, AlexBranning.com/episode6. If you're interested in running this challenge, I'm going to include my challenge workshop. It's a part of my Facebook Bootcamp. I'm going to include the Facebook Bootcamp when you buy Power Engagement Marketing. You could do that by going to AlexBranning.com/episode6. There is the free worksheet there for the five day challenge, but if you really want to dive in deep with this and work with me on this, I'm making Power Engagement Marketing available to you. I would love to work with you on this.

Thank you so much for listening to my podcast. I hope you got a ton of value out of it. If you did, please do me a huge favor and leave a comment for me on whatever platform you're listening, whether that's Google Play, I got a lot of people on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud. Wherever you're listening right now, if you could leave a comment, that would be awesome. Thank you guys so much for joining me. I hope you loved my jingle. I will talk with you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

Hello. My name is Alex Branning, and you're listening to the Alex Branning: Your Marketing Coach podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. I have some exciting stuff to talk about today. We're going to be diving into Facebook pages, which is like the social media hub of your business, if you're using it properly. I launched this podcast at the beginning of the year. This is only episode number five, and my audience has grown week after week, and I absolutely love it.

Thank you guys so much for listening every single week. And I said, "Man, I got to make a fun little jingle," and so, I got together with my man Ryan, and he put that together, wrote the lyrics, got the full band involved and made it happen. So, Ryan, thank you for that. I love the jingle. It's so much fun. It adds a hint of my personality. It's upbeat rock and roll, it's great. So, I want to talk about the Facebook page, the vaunted Facebook page. One of the things I hear a lot when I do my workshops and talk with clients is that Facebook isn't working for them.

They look, and say, "Alex, I'm not getting anywhere. For real, I'm not getting any business from Facebook. I don't understand what's going on." And diving in, most of the time, I'll ask some standard questions, and if you're not able to answer them, then I know a little bit about what's going on. And that is, number one, how many people go to your Facebook page every month? If they say, "I don't know," they don't really have a guess, then they're probably not looking at the first tool that I want to talk about today, which is Insights.

Now, for those of you who aren't really data geeks like I am, you may be ignoring that Insights tab. However, when you're on Facebook, and maybe you're in front of a computer right now. What I want you to do is I want you to click on that Insights tab on your page. So, go to your page as yourself. Make sure that you are an admin or editor on the page and click on Insights. You'll see at a glance whether your numbers are going up and down on the page. And then, within the Insights tab, if you click on the posts sub-tab in there, you will see which one of your posts are performing the best.

Which is awesome, because that tells you what your audience wants from you, what they're reading, what they're liking, and just as importantly, what they are ignoring. When you get into those Insights and see that data and look at the numbers, the numbers don't lie. A lot of times, we like to think we're able to really put a peg on what our audience wants, but when we're missing the boat, sometimes we just got to admit that we don't know. So, diving into the Insights and going, "Okay, what's working? What's not working?" That's going to tell us what our audience wants from us. Sometimes it's not what we hoped it was, right?

For example, I remember a couple months ago, I wrote what I consider to be a killer Facebook post talking all about Facebook Messenger and the tools that we have in there. I thought I crushed it, and then I looked, and I said, "Okay, how many people are engaging with that? And how many people are looking at it? How many people are reading it? What's going on?" The numbers were just abysmal. I was so bummed. But then, we did another post and right around that same time period, and in that post, I forget what we were talking about, but it was like, I think maybe one of the latest hashtag updates or something like that.

Something that didn't require a lot of marketing brainpower, but it was educational. And that post, it went crazy. It got a whole bunch of shares. People loved it. We got messages thanking us for the content. I mean, it just went wild. So what did I learn? One of the things that I like to say is, in marketing, there are no wins and losses. There are wins and lessons. The lesson that I learned was my audience loves educational content. And so, I started going more in that direction. I got so far in that direction that I started my own podcast where I educate my audience on marketing.

So that's how I took the data and I used it to grow my business. I said, "My audience wants to be educated. I am going to do more of that." So the first tool that I highly recommend that you check out, if you're not already diving into that data, is check out what's on an Insights tab. The second thing that I want to talk about that you probably aren't using yet is the power behind the Facebook Messenger. Now, Facebook has done a lot of cool stuff lately, and they're really diving into the Facebook Messenger platform.

I'm going to talk more about that on episode eight where I dive into the Facebook Messenger. So, we're just going to kind of skip over it, like, a stone going over the Whiskeytown Lake. I'm going to talk about three points here. The first thing about Facebook Messenger is, within your page, you can set up an autoresponder on your messenger. When somebody browses over to your page, the little messenger pops up and welcomes them to the page with a brief message. The second thing you can do is you can have a default reply.

So I recommend doing something like this. When as soon as somebody sends a message to your page for the first time, let them know that it's a chat box. Say, "Hey, this is the Alex Branning Automated Customer Service Bot. I wanted to let you know that I got your message. I'm here for you. If you would like to talk to the support team at the Branning Group, email us here. If you would like to set up a call with Alex, you can do that here." So it's a very powerful tool that lets my audience to know, especially the person that just sent me a message.

It lets them know that I'm not here, but I do have ways for them to get in touch with my team or schedule a call with me. Now, some of the people that fill that out, they want to have a conversation with me over messenger, so they’ll just wait for me to jump in, and that's totally fine. But I also give them the option, which is really powerful. That wasn't available six months ago. So, it's a really cool tool. I highly recommend you take advantage of it. Especially those of you that are advertising, you're getting a lot of people that are just checking out your page for the first time. The messenger tool is awesome.

The third thing about messenger that is somewhat new is that you can actually plug in a third-party software system into your messenger so that you can keep track of your subscribers, so you can actually use messenger to send a broadcast. In the same way that you send out an email newsletter, you can send out a quick message over your Facebook messenger. Now, be careful with that though, because some people really don't want you to send spam. So, make sure that you do it right. And then, the messenger stuff that's going on right now, it's like the Wild Wild West. I mean, it's just crazy how fast things are changing.

Again, I'm going to spend a full episode of talking about it, so wait for episode eight, I'm going to dive in. So, my first main point was the tools you're probably not using. That is the Insights and the messenger stuff, so make sure that you dive in and check those out, get them set up. The second thing that I want to talk about today is that your page can now actually be a hub for your business. It's so much more than just a brochure where you post stuff that you hope gets read. There's so many new tools now.

On my Facebook page, you'll be seeing some changes. Look me up. Go to Alex Branning and then look for my Facebook page. You'll see my profile in my page. Like my page. I'm doing a lot of fun stuff there. On my page, I'm going to be actually adding in my products. I have my messenger, which will automatically say hello to people who jump on my page. I have my auto reply bot set up so that I can give you options on how to contact me, and I'm going to have my products. I'm going to have a full ecommerce store on my Facebook page. That's wild, you guys. That's just crazy.

You could actually pay me for a product right from my Facebook page, comment, send me a message from my Facebook page, with your address, and then get the product in the mail. Like, "Whoa." It's just wild. Just wild. I love it. So many cool things are happening on that front. It's just crazy. Another thing that's really cool about your Facebook page and how it could be a hub for your business is within your page, you can create separate tabs on the left. For example, for those of us that use ClickFunnels, we can actually create a Facebook tab on the left for people to get one of our lead magnets, one of our opt-ins.

Like a free report, you could have a tab on the left-hand side of your page that says, "Free report." That's just so cool. You can customize your page for what you want to do. I just love it. It's got so many cool features. One of the things to look at, if you're going, "Okay, I don't want to add products, and I don't know how to add a tab, but I don't really care. What else you got?" Make sure that you dive into your settings. If you click on the Edit Page button, make sure that you filled in all those fields because there's actually a lot that you can tell your audience.

You can leave your phone number, website, location, your bio description. There’s a lot of stuff in there that you can put. I've seen many businesses either leave it blank, or under their About page they'll just be like, "The best real estate agent in L.A." Like come on, tell me your story. The third main point that I want to cover is that Facebook has made some significant changes lately and there's a lot of people freaking out about it. They're freaking out about it for all the right reasons. I mean, it's scary. Facebook is a platform we don't control, right?

So now what? Facebook makes a change, it greatly impacts our business, and we're going, "Okay. How do I respond? What are the changes? How do I fix this?" I got good news for you. Facebook always loves engagement. That means that if you have your audience responding to you with comments, reactions to your posts like likes or loves, if they're responding to you, you're getting engagement. Facebook loves that and they will never punish that. You have to focus on getting engagement. How do you do that? How do you get your audience to respond to you? Well sometimes it's really as simple as just asking people to comment or respond.

When you're talking with someone, let's say you're in a group setting and one of the people there is just talking, and talking, and talking, and not taking a breath to let anybody else jump in. What's going to end up happening is the people that are around in that group that want to talk back and want to be a part of the conversation will simply leave because they don't want to be lectured to, right? In the same way, on Facebook, a lot of times, if you just talk, you don't ask for input, your audience will not respond to you, because they don't think that you really want it. They just think that you're there to talk at them and not with them.

And so, engagement is key. Ask for the engagement. I'll give you a couple tips to really spur some engagement on. Number one, have a fun comment-to-win contest. I love these. Here's some examples. You can do a trivia fill-in-the-blank contest. For example, I could say, "Fill in the blank. The first correct comment wins a $5 Starbucks gift card. How many characters can you use in a Facebook status update? Now what happens when people fill that in? Number one, most people probably don't know. You're going to get a lot of fun guesses with that.

Number two, people are going to go, "Oh gosh. I want to guess. I want to see if I can win." And the people that know the answer, they're going to type it in because they want to win the gift card. You're going to get a lot of fun engagement on the post. It's going to be great. Another way to get engagement from your audience is a caption contest. Do a fun little caption contest where people drop a photo and the one with the most likes wins. Have fun with it. The best thing to do in those situations is let that contest go for a couple days, so that the participants have an opportunity to share your caption contest posts and encourage their audience to like their post that they win, because then you get more people involved.

The last thing, when you're posting and you want to be engaging, one of the big ways to do it is to actually use video, because we really connect with video, right? I mean, when you're on Facebook scrolling down, how powerful is it to see someone's face staring back at you, talking to you? Now if you don't know that person, you don't care. But if you do, you'll stop for just a second, just long enough for them to give you a quick inkling of what they want to talk about, and if that's a good topic, you may watch the video or at least listen for the subtitles, right? So, just to see what's going on.

So, video is a great way to engage your audience, ask a question, maybe share a thought, but people love it and Facebook loves videos, so it's a double whammy. To recap, my first main point was Facebook has so many tools that you're probably not using. Check out the Insights tab and the messenger tools. Second main point, your page can now be a hub for your business. There's so many tools that are available. It's so much fun. My third main point, Facebook pages really rely on engagement for growth. They really do. So I want to make you an offer right now.

If you go to my page, alexbranning.com/episode5, I have a special offer for you to get Power Engagement Marketing. Now Power Engagement Marketing is my at home, done-for-you course where you can learn all the tips and strategies that we use at the Branning Group to drive engagement. We talk about Facebook. We give you seven different strategies to grow your Facebook audience through engagement. I gave you one idea, the contest idea. We have six more. I also share some mistakes that you make, some myths that you've probably heard that aren't true, and I give you various specific examples of what type of posts to make.

Now if you decide to buy Power Engagement Marketing, you also have an opportunity to join me for a live Facebook workshop where you and I will actually go over your Facebook page together. It's virtual, so you can do it from the comfort of your home or your office, and we're going to go over some of the stuff that we learned in the Power Engagement Marketing Course, and we will dive in to do a fun Facebook workshop. So, go and grab that at alexbranning.com/episode5 and join me on the Power Engagement Marketing Course and the Facebook workshop. It's going to be fun.

If you would like to talk with me, and say, "Alex, I just need help," I highly recommend that you jump on that Facebook workshop, because then we can spend hours together. It's a four-hour long thing. It's really good. But if you just want to talk to me for just a minute, I want to make myself available to you. Go to alexbranning.com/call and grab an open time slot on my calendar for us to have a quick little free 30-minute consultation. Let me see how I can help you out. Thank you guys so much for being a part of my Podcast. I hope you loved my fun little jingle, and I look forward to catching you on Facebook.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm so glad that you're here. This is episode four of the Alex Branning podcast: Your Marketing Coach. Today I'm going to discuss all about referrals. I love giving and getting referrals. We're going to dive into what it means to give a really good referral so that we understand what it is when we get one. I'm going to talk about setting up systems within your business so that you have referrals coming in on a consistent and regular basis. And then I'm going to close this out with a really, really good resource that will instruct you and guide you into executing the systems that I'm going to be sharing about.

First, I want to introduce a villain. I want to introduce a bad guy, if you will, in the marketing space. You know how those pictures where on your shoulders, on one side there's the angel and on the other side there's the demon or the bad guy who tells you to do the wrong thing? I want you to visualize in place of the angel, there's me, the marketing coach who's guiding you and wants you to make the right decisions and on the other side, there's random marketing guy or wing it, if you will. Wing it has shiny object syndrome and doesn't plan things out and just wants to try things and throw them against the wall to see if they stick. Wing it, or I'm going to call him that, I'm just going to make a fun little cartoon character called Wing It.

Wing It wants you just to go with the flow and marketing will just happen and referrals will come in when people remember my name. No, no. That is not good. We need to plan this out. We need to build systems around referrals, create opportunities for the people that love us and love what we do and get good results from our work. We need to put systems in place so that they can refer us easily.

Let's talk about this. Number one, what does it look like to exchange referrals? What does it look like to give a really good referral? If we know what it looks like to give one, then we know what we're looking for when we get one. I have a book by a gal named Stacey O'Byrne, she's brilliant, she talks about referrals and she uses this great word picture of a piggy bank. She said, "You have to put money in a piggy bank before you get the money out." In other words, if you just grab a piggy bank from the store, you go to Target, grab a piggy bank, take it home and then you pop the cork out and shake it expecting money to come out, you're going to be sorely disappointed. In the same way, if you start asking for referrals but you have not given referrals, you are not a giver, you won't be getting any good referrals.

When I meet a new business ally, I'll explain what an ally is in just a moment, I look for people that I can refer to him. A good referral that I give is when I introduce my friend or client to this business ally, I always introduce the two of them together in an email or a Facebook message. I tell my client who the person is that I'm referring them to and why I think they are a great match. And then, I tell the person that is getting the referral who the client is that I'm sending their way, why I thought that they would make a good fit for each other and the best way to get in touch with them. It could be just replying to the email or in some cases, I will give out the phone number if I know that I have permission.

That's what a really good referral looks like. I am giving the person who will be responding information on who the person is, what triggered them in my mind and the best way to get a hold of them. And I'm telling the person who would be hiring the business, I'm telling my friend who I am connecting with the other business ally that I have, why I think that they would make a great fit. This is not a random occurrence. In other words, I don't sit down and think, okay who am I going to refer today to my friend Chris? That's not usually what happens. It comes about in conversation. It's one of the things that I keep at the top of my mind. When I'm talking to client I think, okay, who can help this person achieve their goals? I'm usually part of that team which is why they're talking to me about different marketing plans. But I also am looking at who else can support this person in getting to where they want to go.

That is one of the things I want to teach you on this podcast is how to describe yourself in a way that you become top of mind when people meet your ideal client. Let's talk about the three different referral systems and then I'm going to share how to introduce yourself so that you become top of mind. I have three different buckets that I put my referral partners, my referral systems in.

1. Ambassadors
2. Allies
3. Affiliates

Number one, the ambassadors are the customers that have hired you and work with you that really enjoy you and they want to introduce you to their friends because you've done a great job for them and they want to be seen as a hero both to their friends and to you. They want to get in good. They're givers. An ambassador's just somebody who's out looking to give, give, give. You know these people, you like hanging out with these people. The ambassadors that are in your life are not going to be the leeches that come around us. These are people that are always looking to give and help others. In my business, the Branding Group, I have many ambassadors. They could be people that I've helped on a coaching call. They could be people that I work with on a regular basis or they could just be somebody that I met at an event that really connected with my message and my personality and they just want to help see me grow. Those are ambassadors.

Then we have allies. These are business allies. These are people that you can send referrals back and forth to and they know that you are going to support their client. For me, I'm in the digital marketing space, my company builds websites, apps and we help with Facebook. For me, I'm looking to work with small businesses and solopreneurs. My ideal business allies are people who also help small business owners and solopreneurs but don't compete with me because I'm not looking to take business away from them. Some examples would be people who are in the printing business, promotional products, insurance agents make a great fit because they help with writing commercial policies. Those types of businesses are great allies for me.

Then you have affiliates. Affiliates are people that are looking to bring you business in exchange for something. It could be in exchange for some free services or products. It could be in exchange for money. So, I have an affiliate program where I pay percentage of all the revenue generated by the referral. And those are my affiliates and I love working with affiliates. I have a very strong affiliate army that is regularly bringing me new clients to work with. We have a lot of fun together.

Some of my allies are also affiliates. That's totally fine. For me, when I have an ambassador, somebody who brings me a client, I always send them a gift as a thank you. It's a part of who I am. I want them to know that I appreciate them. It just makes them feel good about connecting their friend with me. Number one, they know that their friend or referral's going to be treated well and number two, they have gift card from me so that they can go out to dinner with their spouse or their kids. It's a fun way for me to show my appreciation.

So now that we've got those three buckets, I want to talk about some mindset shifts around referrals and I've learned so much from my sales coach, Eric Lofholm. I want to make you an offer, if you go to my website, alexbranning.com/episode4, you'll see a link to download this book “The System” at no cost. I'm going to give you a PDF copy of the book “The System”, Eric's allowed me to do that. In chapter 12 he talks all about generating unlimited referrals and I'm going to share some of his best ideas from that book.

First, I want to identify some of the negative beliefs that we have around referrals. We say things to ourselves like, "I feel like I'm bothering the person when I ask for referrals." That was the big thing for me. I felt like I was bothering them. A lot of that came from me not knowing how to ask for them which I'll get to in just a second. Other negative beliefs that we tell ourselves are, "I'm not good at asking for referrals. It's hard to get referrals." And then we kick ourselves by saying things like, "I always forget to ask for them."

I want to replace those negative referral beliefs with things like this. I really believe in positive affirmations and so positive affirmations around referrals are, people love to give me referrals. That's a true statement. If you take care of the people that are sent to you, people do love giving you referrals because they like being the hero. They like being the connector. It elevates them in their community. In their circles. It is easy to get referrals. That is true. I am a referral master. Each day I'm getting better and better in the area of referrals. Now, how do you get better getting referrals? You get better at getting referrals when you get better at giving referrals. When people know you are a giver, when people know that referrals come into your business and flow out of your business, they want to be a part of that economy.

For me, every single day I have people that are being added to my database, to my connections, that I'm able to come alongside and help. And so I'm meeting people, a lot of people, on a regular basis. The people that are in my world that also serve those clients, want to do business with me and the people that I'm bringing into my community. They know that I am more than happy to give referrals and so what happens? They are happy give me referrals as well. They are happy to give me referrals because they know that I am going to treat their referrals well and they know that those referrals are going to be reciprocated in the future because I am a giver.

People give referrals because they want to help you. A lot of times people will give referrals because you ask the right way. I want to talk about that. I learned a great method from a gentleman named Rick Silva. I was at an Eric Lofholm event and Rick Silva got up on stage. He was sharing his methodology for asking for referrals and I'm going to give you a slight paraphrase because he has a very specific way of doing it, I've modified it slightly for my own voice. You start not with your name because when people stand up at a referral meeting or they get introduced, the name is one of the things that they look for but I always respond, they say, "Hey who are you?" And I say, "I am a lead generation expert. My name is Alex Branning and my company works with entrepreneurs and small business owners to generate leads on a regular basis at little or no cost." That is how I introduce myself. That's my generic introduction.

If I'm talking to an insurance agent, for example, and I either know that he's an insurance agent or it says so on his badge, the way that I introduce myself shifts a little bit and I say, when I introduce I say, "Hey you know I'm a lead generation expert in the insurance space. I help insurance agents like you all across America generate leads online at little or no cost and I would love to work with you and other agents in your office." Now do you see how that triggered him? He's going to go what? Lead generation? That's something that I need. And then, the way that I’m positioning myself says a lot.

When I stand up at a networking event or post something online, I always use very specific language and I identify specific target markets that I want to work with so that people will remember me when they're talking to those individual clients. For example, if I say, "I'm a lead generation expert for small business owners." That's very broad. If I say, "I'm a lead generation expert working with insurance agents to generate low or no cost leads." Now the next time they're talking to an insurance agent, my name is more likely to come up because people know me and like me in my community and I was very specific in how I can help them.

I'm going to be putting together a video resource from Rick so that you can get his full explanation on his 30 second pitch. It is absolutely brilliant. I highly recommend it. I butchered it a little bit on this podcast so I'm going to be delivering that to you. And I butchered it because again, I took what he did and I modified for my voice. So, what I want you to do is not take what I've done, I want you to listen to how he does it because he actually owns a referral networking company and so this his specialty. He thrives in the referral space. So, I will be getting that to you. Check out my website. Again, alexbranning.com/episode4 and I'll have that for you.

I want to end with this. I want to end with goal setting. A lot of times we don't set goals for ourselves. Earlier in this episode I introduced that villain, the random marketing guy. The guy who's just winging it. The random marketing guy does not know how many referrals he got last month because he's not keeping track. If you don't keep track, if you don't manage it, if you don't write it down, you will never know how many more referrals you want to get the next month. In other words, if you don't know how many referrals you got in January, how can you say you want to get more referrals in February if you don't even know what that number is? How can you measure that? You can't. You have to know, okay, I want this many referrals and then go for it.

For us at the Branning Group, I always set goals for the number of new leads that we're going to get from Facebook ads. Number of new leads that we're going to get from referrals. And I even break it down based on the social network so that way I can be very specific as far as what I'm searching for. What I'm going for. If I don't have a finish line, how could I run the race to completion when I don't know where that finish line is? If I don't know where finish line is, how do I know if I should be sprinting or pacing myself? Anyway, make sure that you set goals please.

For me, our goal at the Branning Group is 10 referrals a month. Happy to say in December, which I thought was going to be a slow month, we actually got almost 10 referrals, we ended up with nine referrals that month in a two week period, which was just phenomenal. In January, our goal was 10 and we ended up getting, I think we're going to end up with about 12 when it's all said and done. Just waiting for the contact info on a couple more. So, we did hit our goal. Without us hitting our goal though, when we have it on our goal board, we say we want this many referrals, it pushes us to ask. If you have it on one of the things that you're keeping track of, it pushes you to ask for referrals. If you don't ask for them, people won't give them. A lot of times. There are people who are just naturally givers, but a lot of times you just have to ask.

You have to ask nicely and here's one of the ways that I recommend doing it. When I'm talking to somebody I'll say, "Hey, you know, I would love to work," if I know for example, that they are, if I'm talking to an insurance agent, I'll say, "You know Chris, I would love to work with three real estate agents that you do business with and I would love to help them create a lead generation system where they benefit and then you can benefit by writing their policies. Can we set up some phone calls with three of your favorite real estate agents so that we can work together to create some lead generation systems?" What that does is that puts the insurance agent in a position where when they introduce to their real estate agents that they love doing business with, they know that their real estate agents are going to get taken care of because I've already done the work and shown them that it works. They also know that the systems that I'm going to be setting up will benefit them. It puts them in a really good spot.

Other times when I talk to a referral partner, what I'll say is, "You know, I'm looking to give, over the next week, any referral that comes in my normal commission as well as an extra $50 gift card to Outback Steakhouse so that you and your wife can go out to eat. If you have a referral, specifically somebody that does not have a mobile app that would be a good fit for me, I would love to talk to them about how I can help them set up a mobile app that would help generate leads for their business. A mobile app that would be on iPhones and the Google phone. So, if you can connect me with somebody in the next week, I will give you my normal commission plus the $50 Outback gift card."

What does that do? That puts the person on the phone in a position to where they are now thinking, okay, who do I know that doesn't have a mobile app that I could connect with Alex? It encourages them to actively seek out that referral for me. It puts me in a really good spot, puts them in a good spot and that only works if they know I'm going to take care of the client. If there's a question about it or this is the first referral that they've given me, that's not a good move because that request has to be made from a position of trust. But that's another way for me to generate referrals.

Last but not least, I talk a lot about how I can help you and come along side you. Right before I recorded this podcast episode I was on the phone with my Level 10 group. Every Friday we do a live ask me anything coaching call. If you go to alexbranning.com/level10 I talk more about it there. On this Level 10 call, we were talking today about ways to increase the value that we offer all of our clients and creating some new revenue streams and I was talking with one of them about email marketing and in our Level 10 calls, we really dive in deep on how to actually execute the strategies that we talk about. Every week we bring up, I release training on Wednesdays in the Level 10 group then we talk about it on Fridays. Ways to implement this. Active community.

The Level 10 coaching program, it's only a dollar a day and I highly recommend checking it out. It's going to be a huge benefit for you. Especially if you're listening to this podcast going, "Man I really wish that I had an active referral network. I just don't know how to get started on it." I'm hosting some pretty high-level training in the Level 10 group and I recommend that you join so that you can follow the system. I also recommend that you get that free book that I offered, The System by Eric Lofholm. If you go to alexbranning.com/episode4 you can grab a free copy of it. Eric's given me permission to give away the free PDF. It's all yours if you go to the website. Go to the page for this episode. I will also have a free resource from Rick Silva so you can check that out as well.

Thank you so much for being a part of this podcast and listening. I'm so excited. Next week is the first week of February and it is Facebook February. Doesn't quite roll off the tongue, but every single week in February we are talking about Facebook. We're talking about Facebook groups one week, we're talking about how to grow your Facebook pages. I'm diving deep into Facebook ads. And then I'm going into some very unique strategies on Facebook that continually work to generate lower no cost leads for your business.

I am Alex Branning, your marketing coach. Follow me, don't follow the random marketing guy. Make sure that you have a plan and you're not winging it. I appreciate you, your business is going to grow in 2018. You have so much ahead of you. The best days are yet ahead. Please connect with me. Search for Alex Branning. You'll find me on LinkedIn and Facebook and I look forward to supporting you in the future. Talk soon.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. My name is Alex Branning and I am your marketing coach. The topic on the podcast today is putting yourself in a position to win. What I'm going to be discussing with you right now over the next 15 minutes is really going deep into analyzing whether or not your marketing is effective and where it's leaking.

A lot of entrepreneurs come to me and they say that their marketing is not effective and 99 times out of a 100, the problem is not in the messaging necessarily and it's not even in the offer, it's that they're not putting themselves in a position to win by making it easy for the customer to understand how they can help them and also how to take the next step.

Right now, if your marketing has no concrete plan, if you have not written out your marketing plan for the next 30, 90 and 360 days, what you're doing is what I call random acts of marketing. What that looks like is this, if you answer yes to any of the following questions, you are doing random acts of marketing.

Number one, when you see somebody who has put together a really good ad, do you immediately try to copy that for your business? If so, you are stuck in random acts of marketing. If somebody comes to you with a new idea or a new platform or a new format for an ad and you consider it and then take action on it in less than three days from first hearing about it, you are performing random acts of marketing.

If right now, if I was to ask you what you'll be promoting in 30 days from now and you don't know, you are stuck in random acts of marketing. Now, a lot of entrepreneurs when I talk about this to them, they'll tell me, "Alex, I don't have time to plan out my marketing efforts." What they mean by that when they say that is I'm overwhelmed and I don't really know what I'm supposed to be doing.

I want to walk through that with you right now. When I say I want to put you in a position to win, my definition of that is I want to help you so that you have a very clear marketing message. Your customers who follow you know exactly what benefits you provide to them and putting yourself in a position where they can do business with you immediately after they see your messaging.

For some of you, doing business with you may mean setting an appointment. For some of you, it may mean that they are able to pull out their credit card right there on the spot and close the deal. I was talking to a lady in Idaho, she has these fun meetings that people go to. Her entire business is bringing people to an event.

Now, I sat down with her and I was going over what her numbers were and she said, "You know, when I talk to people about these meetings, they absolutely love the idea of it, but I just cannot get them there." When I was talking to her, I said, "Are you making it easy for them to buy it from you?"

She said, "Absolutely. When they walk in the door, I make it very easy for them to buy." Now, here's the problem and she didn't know that this was a problem and so I suggested, but I said, "The next time that you're talking to somebody, what I want you to do is I want you to be in a position where you can pull out your mobile phone and then from there, you can either text them the URL so that they can buy the ticket or pull out your mobile phone, go to a website and then actually input their credit card for them so that they're reserving a seat at the next meeting."

What just happened when we made that shift in her business was we changed the marketing message from you should come and now we have to depend on them, remembering the meeting, feeling good about it when the night comes, making sure that nothing comes in the way to actually putting money on the table and saying, "Okay, I'll be there."

Now, she no longer has a lead, she has a buyer. Even if that person is given a huge discount for that first ticket, the odds of them actually coming are very high. I want you to ask yourself this question, is there a way for me to put myself in a position to win? Now, one of the ways that I do that is that I have a very easy link for people to follow when they want to jump on the phone with me and do a free consultation.

I'll be talking with somebody and I'll say, "You know what? Why don't you pull out your phone right now, go to alexbranning.com/call and grab a time on my calendar that works for you, that way, you and I can talk about it." Now, walk them through the process while we're sitting there. That puts them in my calendar and then when they fill out that form to reserve the spot, I have their best email address and phone number.

Now, I am no longer depending on them trying to remember my name or my email address. Hopefully they didn't throw my business card. I don't have to worry about any of that. I have put myself in a position to win because now I have them on my calendar. They have or committed to that next meeting.

Now, the other thing that I want to talk about. My first main point was stop doing random acts of marketing, my second main point is I want you to build in automation and upsells into your digital marketing. You know that someone left because they never heard back. This is a huge problem. Now, especially if you are an appointment-based business, in other words if you sell insurance, real estate, you have a gym, et cetera, they have to actually meet with you for you to close the deal.

Automation is going to be your best friend. I want to take you behind the scenes of what happens within the Branning Group Marketing System. Now, we use ads, our favorite is Facebook, we're also moving into Instagram, Twitter and others then when people click on our ad, we give them a valuable piece of content that they have requested and then our next ask is either purchasing one of our programs in which case they can buy it right on the spot or they can set up a consultation call with me.

When they do that, I'll know exactly where they came from so I'll know what they're interested in and I'll give them an idea of what we're going to be talking about on that call. Now, after they set the appointment over the next 72 hours, they get an email from me confirming the appointment. They get a text message from me telling them I'm excited and I'll talk to them at this time.

I send them at least two separate emails about the topic with added value and client testimonials and I didn’t do any of that manually. It was all set up through our automated system. What happens? Well, they sign up for that call, they get the confirmation, they get the text, they get those two additional pieces of value with success stories.

By the time I get on the phone with them, they have a very good idea of what I provide, what my prices are and the success stories of other clients. I am making it easier on myself to close the sale. I am putting myself in a position to win. Here's another example of the Branning Group Marketing System and how we have helped other entrepreneurs.

I was talking with another coach. His entire business depends on him, getting people on the phone so that he can share how he can help their business. He was having a hard time with that because really unless somebody knows exactly what you are going to talk about with them, they do not want to commit to even a 15-minute free call, especially if it's free.

If it's free, there's no value in it for them, however, if you're going to tell them exactly what they'll get out of the call, now there's a little bit more value. What we did was we set it up so that they could set aside a 15 minute free strategy session and we were very specific about the benefits that they'd get out of the call which comes down to messaging and I'm not focusing on that today, but we put him in a position where we were very clear about the outcome.

Then, if they went on the page and they did not set the appointment, we put in retargeting so that we were able to follow that person around Facebook reminding them of the ways that we can help and encouraging them to set an appointment. Again, this was done automatically. When people go to the page, when they go to the website and they have not yet set an appointment to talk with my client, if they have not ever set an appointment to talk with my client, but they have been to the website, we follow them around, encouraging them to set up an appointment, giving them a very easy way to do it straight from Facebook.

The number of appointments that my client has gotten has gone up 10 times what he had before. Why is that? We put a relatively simple marketing structure in place with the retargeting and the ability to set an appointment online and we made it easy for them to do it and we made it inviting and we use good messaging so that they didn't feel threatened, but what happened was based on his massive amounts of success that we're seeing now, it's not hard for me to deduce that the number of appointments left on the table in the six months or so from before he started working with me because now he's getting roughly 10 appointments every two weeks. About an appointment a day.

Now, if that holds true, then all we did differently was given them an easy way to set that appointment and then we re-targeted them so that they were reminded to finish setting the appointment. Now, if he was getting an appointment a day with those two simple changes, how many was he missing out on? Well, if it's one a day, then that means in the past six months he missed out on about 150 sales appointments and you can do the Math on what that means for his revenue.

Now, we're not here to focus on the past and focus on the loss, but I want to share with you that now he is getting about an appointment a day because of those two marketing systems that are in place and he is absolutely thrilled. Why? We put him in the position to win.

Now, the third main point that I want to share with you is to never stop marketing. Put links to your value offers everywhere. For example, I'm going to look at myself in the mirror here. I am presented with opportunities to increase my business, I'm presented with opportunities to read really good content on a regular basis and I've trained myself so that I don't jump at all the shiny objects, however, there are a lot of things that I see that I would want to go back and look at if they were put back in front of my face.

A great example of that is the podcast that I listen to by Eric Lofholm every morning. I love listening to it. However, sometimes things happen and I'm not reminded about it until I see him post on Facebook and he's all over social media and my world. I'm constantly reminded of his presence. The same way, I have put myself in a position to win with my people because I want to make sure that number one, they see me on a regular basis with high value content either in the Facebook groups that I run, the emails that they get from me on a weekly basis, the ads that I'm running to my people, etc.

I never stopped marketing and I'm always doing little things to switch up the message. That way, if my first message stays on how to use Facebook to generate leads, if that one doesn't get them to click, maybe my video marketing seminar or my list building workshops will so I continue to put things out there so that I can put myself in a position to win some additional business by providing additional value to my audience.

I never stop marketing and there's a lot of ways to do that without it really costing you money. One of them is your email signature. If you've got an email from me, you'll notice that there's a couple of different offers in the email signature and I change it up on a monthly basis. That way it's always a little bit fresh and new. We do some fun things with that.

I use Facebook ads to post and follow my people around. Again, I don't want to annoy them, but I want to make sure that they see my stuff on a regular basis. I also have email marketing. I do text message marketing. I have Facebook messenger marketing. I'm going to be using a lot more direct mail. What is the point?

The point is I'm putting myself in a position to win more business by providing more value and putting offers in front of my audience on a regular basis. Now, I learned all this from a book that I want to recommend to you and Russell Brunson does a great job of breaking it down, the book is called DotCom Secrets and he really talks a lot about how to put together a marketing plan online, what to do to set up automation. It's absolutely phenomenal.

I would love to make you an offer and help you set up these automated marketing systems, set up these funnels, put in these retargeting ads and really help you so that you pay me to build this out and you have this lead generating system that's going to work for you for as long as you have it on.

If you are interested in this and want to work with me on this, please reach out, you can reach out to me at alexbranning.com. You can go to my Facebook page at Alex Branning. You can even set up an appointment with me at alexbranning.com/call. We can set up a time to talk about it.

A free offer that I want to make to you, please look up and join my funnel Fridays Facebook group and I would love to have you join. We talk a lot about creating funnels in there and every single Friday, I do some free training, I'm answering questions, I'm doing live support. We have a lot of fun.

Here's the takeaway that I want to plant. I want to plant this seed in your mind. What am I doing right now that is getting people interested and how can I leverage that with an automated system to close more business? What am I doing that's working and how can I improve it to get more business? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you would please do me a favor and subscribe the podcast so I can see it and drop a review, I would love that. Thank you so much for your time. Have a great day everyone and I will see you soon.

Today we are going to talk about the roadmap to business growth. Specifically on this episode, I'm going to plant some seeds that are going to show you how to double your business in 2018. The topic today is going to be profit centers within your business and traffic channels, and how you find your customers. The pain point that I'm looking to solve is: if you're not making enough money and you don't know what to do to fix it, this episode was created for you. What we're going to talk about today are three main points.

1. I want to help you identify how you make money so that once you see it, you can improve it.
2. I want to help you with is identifying where you find your customers and where to find more of them.
3. I want to give you ideas on creating recurring revenue in your business.

Let's start by identifying how you make money. There is a worksheet that is going to help you through this. On the top, the header row has the traffic channels for your business. For example, you could write down Facebook, networking events, your referrals, etc. On the left hand side, that first column will be your profit centers. For myself, a profit center would be custom web design, hosting, funnels, etc. What I want you to do is I want you to list on the left hand side all the different products or services that you are selling to bring in money, and along the top you'll have the traffic channels that you're using to find them.

Why is this important? When you create this worksheet, when you sit down to think about it, I want you to write down all of your profit centers, so for example, for me I write down web design. I want you to write down how much of your revenue comes from that one source in the boxes where the profit center and the traffic channel meet. On my sheet, where web design and Facebook come together, I write down what percentage of my business is that traffic channel bringing me. For example, for web design, Facebook would be about 30%, so I'd write 30 in that box on the spreadsheet. Referrals are more than 50% of my custom web design business, so I would write 50 in that box on my spreadsheet.

When you have figured out how you're making money and where that money is coming from, now you can identify areas of growth. That is absolutely important for you to be able to figure out where that business is coming from and how you can increase it.

When you see this laid out you can immediately identify areas of growth. For example, for me there was a while where I wasn't talking about social media management to my referrals that I was getting. I wasn't mentioning it in my email marketing that I was doing. Just by writing this out and identifying where my business is coming from, I was able to quickly identify areas where I could grow my service offerings and bring in some more business from current clients. When I identified that I wasn't using those traffic channels to grow my social media marketing business, I was able to find areas of growth.

Now we move on to point number two. We need to write down where you find your customers. The easiest way to grow your business is to sell to your current customers, but so often we spend our time and energy trying to find new customers.

I want to give you a visual picture. To get somebody to switch from going to McDonald's on a regular basis to going to Arby's on a regular basis requires a lot of things to happen. However, for the McDonald's customer to increase their average spend at McDonald's does not take that much persuasion. It could be as simple as asking, "Hey, do you want an apple pie today?" from the drive-through. What's the point? The point is that person is already shopping at McDonald's. You ask them for a couple more things within their lunch, and now you have increased their spend.

For you to grow your business, you need to get your current customers to buy more often, you need your current customers to spend more than they're already spending with you, or you need to find new customers. Those are the only three ways to grow your business, and finding new customers is the hardest (and most expensive) way to find new customers... yet we spend so much time and energy on that.

As business owners, we spend so much time trying to get new customers when the reality is the easiest sales that we can make are to the people that already know us, trust us, like us, and spend money with us. You as the business owner, if you're saying, "I want to double the profit in my business," the answer is probably not in finding new customers (although that is a part of it). The low-hanging fruit for you to grow your business are going to be the people that are already spending money with you.

One of the things that I'm doing as a way to increase the amount of money that people spend with me is increasing my value in their business.

What that looks like is people are so used to working with me for their websites and the mobile apps, but they have not yet joined some of my coaching programs that I'm doing to help them with their marketing. They're do-it-yourself marketers. They don't want me to come in and take over their social media or run their Facebook ads, and that's totally fine. I want to get in to companies where I fit in. I don't want to push myself in. They don't really know what they're doing. They want to do it, but they don't know exactly how to do it. One of the areas that I'm going to be increasing in 2018, and I'd love for you to join me, is I'm starting coaching programs. That's how I am increasing my value.

When I approach my clients and I say, "Hey, guys, I'm doing something new and fun. It's just going to cost you an extra 30 bucks a month to be a part of my level 10 or 100 bucks a month to be a part of my Double It coaching program," I am pitching those products to people who already know me, trust me, like me, and are spending money with me. That's a lot easier of a sale for me to make.

However, if I was to go out and start talking to somebody who has never met me before, I have to really climb that mountain. Number one, they have to figure out who the heck I am, why they should care about what I have to say, do I accomplish what I say I can accomplish within their business, and then they have to make the decision to open their wallet. Does that make sense? It's a lot harder for me to make money from a new client than it is from an existing one.

If you are looking to double the amount of profit in your business in 2018, I want you to start thinking about ways that you can provide value to your clients and customers that you already have now in a way that increases the amount of money that they spend with you on a regular basis. That could be a coaching program. That could be a warranty. That could be identifying other areas where you can support them. That could be making money by connecting them with people who can help grow their business.

For example, if you are listening to this right now and you are in the mortgage business and you say, "Man, I want to make money, but all I do right now is loans," ybe one of the things that you do is you and I work together. I can help support the real estate agents that are in your network, and you can join my affiliate program where you get a small amount of money for the real estate agents that you send my way. That could be a new profit center. I have people making hundreds of dollars a month from the Branning Group for people that they've sent me months ago. That's one way to do it.

You could also look at providing other services, maybe putting together a coaching program for real estate agents where you provide accountability, you bring in experts so that you can help support those real estate agents. What I want to do is I want to plant some seeds for you so that you can think about ways to make money.

The third thing that you should think about doing is creating recurring revenue. If you're looking to double the profit in your business, this is my third point and my last point, I want you to think about ways that you can create recurring revenue in your business. There's a book by a guy named John Warrillow called The Automatic Customer. In that book, he drops a whole bunch of really good ideas on ways that you can create recurring revenue in your business. It's an absolutely phenomenal book, and he goes over so many great ideas. You can read that book, go through it. You can even skim the table of contents if you want to. I highly recommend that you look at that book with an open mind and say, "Okay, what am I going to do here? What programs am I going to implement? What things could I consider starting?" Maybe it might be creating a new "business" that supports the people that already know you.

An idea for a subscription model or a recurring revenue model would be maybe creating a membership website or a private club, maybe creating a networking model, maybe coaching or mentoring, depending on what business you're in, a monthly maintenance or service contracts. Monthly maintenance and service contracts take up about 40% of your revenue month after month. We have literally built our business on that. Creating a private club, just depending again on your industry, private clubs could be the way to go. It gives people that exclusivity. If you have a restaurant, creating a private club for your restaurant where those people get priority seating, you have special meals that maybe only they can order. These are just ways to think about creating value for your current customer base, driving revenue for people, and encouraging them to spend more money.

I'll tell you what, the people that are on my maintenance contracts, because they're already used to spending money with me, they spend more and more money with me as I launch new products. They're always the first people that jump in. Why is that? Because they're already used to spending money with me, and they already know that I do what I say and that I can provide the service.

If they're looking at a new service that I'm doing, (example: when I launched my Facebook ads done-for-you service), they already knew that I did great work on the hosting and maintenance. Now that I'm providing this new service that they had thought about doing, they reached out to me to provide the new service because they know me.

I hope this inspired you!

• I want you to look at the different traffic channels that you're using right now to bring people in to your business.
• I want you to think about identifying how you can support your customers,
• I want you to just really imagine scenarios and business models where you're creating recurring revenue for yourself.

I have a book suggestion for you. I mentioned it already, The Automatic Customer by John Warrillow. It's a phenomenal book where he talks all about different recurring revenue models. T

I also recommend a free toolkit, Affiliate Bootcamp over at ClickFunnels. In the Bootcamp they show you how to grow your affiliate revenue with ClickFunnels, but you can apply that knowledge to other areas as well.

I would love for you to join my Level 10 group. In the Level 10 group every single week we have weekly training , a live Ask Me Anything phone call so that you can ask questions as they come up. The ask me anything phone call does not necessarily have to be around the topic that I have on my podcast. It can be about anything you're working on, I'm there to coach you and help you. Last week one of the students in the Level 10 started talking about the training that I had provided that week, and then we totally went off in another area talking about marketing ideas to bring people to her live events.

Level 10 is for you if you want that group coaching environment, and it's only $1 per day. You're not going to get a better value. Entrepreneurs from all over America are in there, and it's just a phenomenal group of amazing and brilliant entrepreneurs. I'm so blessed to be able to lead that group.

Have a great day!