James Schramko Podcast

What you need to do to get more things done while investing less of your precious time.

In the video:

00:47 – Is .com still the best?

01:29 – Steer clear of THESE

02:00 – Making a serious offer

03:41 – Stay mindful of your manners

05:15 – When it’s time to buy

05:51 – What you can expect to pay

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Transcription:

James Schramko here, and today I’m talking about how to buy a valuable domain.

I’ve had lots of really good .coms in the past, a lot of two-word domains like SEOPartner, TrafficGrab, and KickingBack.com – some great domains that were already taken when I wanted to use them, so I bought them secondhand.

“Be cool when you’re bidding.”

CLICK TO TWEET

Sometimes you’re lucky, you can pick them up at auction, and that’s great. You just got to remember to be cool when you’re bidding. Also, sometimes people have them for sale, and you’ll see a lot of these sites sitting on a broker’s site, where someone’s hoping to make a big profit. So this video’s just to help you to basically buy a domain at a better price.

Should you aim for the .com?

A few things here. Firstly, is .com still good? I think it is. I think it really is the king of domains, and it’s great to have the .com. If you can’t get the .com, sure there are other options. But you’re probably still going to be driving traffic to the .com version. There’s a few examples: Basecamp, LeadPages, ProBlogger – all of these sites didn’t have the .com at some point, and one of them still doesn’t, and it can be a real problem.

If you want to get some basic information on how to value a domain, I recommend DNSalePrice.com. You can go and have a look at the criteria for what makes a domain valuable. Sometimes it’s how old it is. It could be how brandable it is.

Avoid the trademarks

And just on that, please don’t buy domain names that have trademarks applicable to them. Do a trademark search when you’ve got a great domain that you think you want to use, because if you buy someone’s domain that’s trademarked, for example if you bought iPhone.com, then you’re going to be told to stop using that domain, so it’s not worth buying that. Quite often, those domains are sitting, available for purchase, for an unsuspecting buyer.

On making the right offer

If you are dealing with a broker, then there’s a way to go about that. I’ll get to that in just a sec. If you’ve got a private seller or someone’s got the domain redirected somewhere, or they don’t seem to be using it, look up the Whois information and then contact them, and make a reasonable offer. Like a serious offer, not $50. Quite often, a two-word domain is going to cost you thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars. So a good offer, like a thousand dollars, is a nice “Hey, I’m serious and I’m not wasting your time” type offer.

How do you buy that great domain someone snapped up before you?

In this episode:

01:41 - Leaving corporate America

03:47 - The power of a deadline

05:12 - Sale events and launches

08:54 - Why people hate to lose

11:57 - Motivated by deadlines

14:33 - How many emails to send on the last day

16:59 - The origin of Deadline Funnel

17:56 - Creating the authentic evergreen deadline

20:23 - When the deal is over

21:27 - Filling a manual function with Deadline Funnel

25:51 - Some significant numbers

31:18 - The importance of intervals

32:42 - What a waiting list does for a membership

37:07 - The advantages of automation

41:10 - Segmenting the sales funnel

44:14 - Selling an event with scarcity and urgency

47:33 - Wrapping things up

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See the standout features of Deadline Funnel in our review

Download the PDF transcription and Do You Use Deadlines In Your Marketing?

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here, welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today, we're talking about marketing tactics, and for that, I've brought on a special friend of mine, Jack Born. Welcome, Jack.

Jack: Great to be here, James.

James: Jack Born is from DeadlineFunnel.com, and is somewhat of an expert in the two main tactics of urgency and scarcity, which you will have heard a fair bit about if you've been in the online community for any length of time. Lots of people refer back to the work of Cialdini, we've heard about it in every product launch formula for the last decade, and what we really want to do is talk about these two things in more depth and see how you can get a few tips that you might implement into your own marketing from now. And I'll also share some results that we got using Jack's Deadline Funnel software because it was certainly interesting to me, and there's a few little tips that I learned along the way that you might be able to implement into your marketing as well.

So Jack, where should we start?

Discovering the power of deadlines

Jack: Well, I was thinking one place that we could start would be where I first left corporate America and started my online business. And for that, we have to roll back the clock quite aways to about 2002. And I'll keep the story short, but it really was my first introduction into deadlines. Now, this was before Jeff Walker had codified the Product Launch Formula, this was before everyone was doing product launches. I really didn't know what I was doing, and frankly, I made a lot of mistakes.

So I got into an argument with my boss, he and I both came to the conclusion that it was time for me to leave, and I decided, you know what, maybe I'm not suited for this employee thing. With that, I started to build a healthcare staffing website. And I spent a year putting that together and doing odd jobs that were bringing in the money (we didn't have children at the time; I was married, still am.)

And so I was building this up, but I wasn't charging anyone. I just thought, you know, I had a chicken and egg problem because we were sort of like a marketplace, putting together the health care recruiters and the people that they were recruiting. I didn't want to charge anyone while I was building it up. After about 11 months, my wife came to me and said, "Look,

Discover technology that will change the way you use deadlines in your marketing and increase revenue.

In the post:

01:35 - Some names in management software

05:04 - The considerations behind dapulse

06:42 - How it works with teams

10:52 - When used for task management…

13:22 - dapulse in the coaching field

16:05 - Go simple or complex?

16:55 - Value for e-commerce companies

20:03 - Coming very soon…

21:24 - What should you focus on?

24:29 - The post-travel inbox nightmare

28:50 - How the software came about

32:39 - Common mistakes to avoid

38:33 - Summing things up

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Download the PDF transcription

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here, welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today, I'm speaking with Matthew Burns from

http://lnx2.co/2Xe" rel="noopener noreferrer">dapulse.com, and we're talking about project management, and task management, and some of the tools involved in that. So I'd like to welcome to the call Matthew.

Matthew: Thank you so much, James, very happy to be here.

James: Well, it's great to have you here, and it's a topic that is often discussed in our community. Most people listening to this podcast have their own business, or are still running their own business and working for someone else, somewhere in one of those two buckets. And one of the things that happens as they grow their own business is firstly, they find they need to manage themselves better, so that whole self effectiveness is a topic that comes up a lot for us. And the second thing is inevitably, you just get to a certain point where you can't go much further unless you hire a team, and you start having people coordinate with you, with your business.

Some names in project and task management

So they're two of the major areas where I see this tools topic pop up. And we hear a lot of names coming up all the time, and no doubt you'd be familiar with most of them. Then you're with dapulse, which is another tool that's in the mix there. So some examples, in our business over the last 10 years, we would have tried a lot of different systems. We've used everything from Basecamp, which is a pretty popular tool, and Teamwork, Trello, which seems by far and away the most popular one we hear about. And we haven't tried, but we're familiar with Podio, and we've tried Wrike, and of course Google Docs is a mainstay in the back of our system there.

And then as a task management, and these things are sort of slightly separate, project management and task management, I've tried lots of different tools there, from the Reminders app in the Apple, to just notes, to Google Docs, to pieces of paper, Post-it notes, whiteboards. And it really fascinates me how there's so many different tools, but I've never really found many that seem to naturally gel with the way that humans work. Almost all of them tend to be a place where stuff gets dumped, and then we're still doing what we're going to do anyway, and then we go and retrospectively look at the tool to see what we did and then move the blocks around.

And in some cases, one of the most incredible discoveries I made with our team, in the early days, we were using Basecamp, the team would go and update Basecamp, and then simultaneously, they were running a Google document in the background, where they were actually coordinating things. And then I asked them, "Why are you updating Basecamp if you're using Google?" They said, "Oh, that's for you, boss.

What makes for a great task and project management tool?

In the episode:

01:32 - From paper receipts to leveraging the cloud

05:44 - You need THIS to make good decisions

06:28 - Some business nightmares

08:38 - The problem of fraud

12:07 - The ease of using Xero

14:23 - Better systems for greater transparency

17:07 - From the bad to the good

22:24 - Where to limit access

24:42 - Auditing your accountant

27:22 - If you find a good accountant…

29:47 - What numbers should you pay attention to?

32:22 - When customers don’t pay

35:00 - The power of the subscription model

36:32 - Automate when you can

39:07 - Reducing churn and increasing revenue

40:05 - Summary and takeaways

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Download the PDF transcription and guide to Leveraging Financial Systems For Your Business

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here, welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today, I have a special guest, we’re talking about business-y stuff. Welcome Scott Orn.

Scott: Thank you James, great to be on the podcast.

James: You're a listener of the podcast, and you've reached out and said you'd love to share some ideas around systems and financial processes, and after my eyes glazed over, I said, "Yeah, sure, that sounds fantastic."

Scott: [Laughs] Well, what we're trying to do here is, you know, at Kruze Consulting we work with about 140 startups, and we have learned all the best processes, best softwares for new businesses to establish themselves on, and so I was hoping just to give your audience some tips, and get them going in the right direction with the best processes and best software services, and save them a lot of grief down the road and do it right the first time.

The shoebox of receipts

James: Perfect. So you've been working with KruzeConsulting.com. And in that process, you've seen a lot of different approaches. I imagine when you first take on a customer, you would find some pretty shocking and horrific accounting practices and systems. So I'm sure that's true, right?

Scott: Oh, absolutely. We literally have CEOs come into our office with a shoebox full of receipts. Like, that happens.

James: Well, you know, I've met CEOs who wouldn't even know where the shoebox is. [Laughs] I'm often surprised at the lack of understanding around numbers by business owners, and it's certainly something that we've pushed to the front of our awareness. In the high-level coaching that I'm doing, we have to know our numbers. We got to understand all sorts of numbers, so we'll come back to what sort of numbers are important in a sec.

But over the years, I went through that process as well, where I'm keeping paper receipts for everything and doing printouts and then a once-a-year tax return, which I used to just dread, putting all that stuff out onto the huge table. I had a large table, it was 1500 cms, which is one half meters, which is pretty big. It's like, probably five feet or something, I'm not sure exactly, but five by five. And it was full of papers. And I would write everything down in a journal, and then I'd go and visit my accountant, and then they'd do the tax return.

A process upgrade

And then of course through that we sort of upscaled to the process where he would send a bookkeeper out to my house once each quarter,

Does your business have the systems it needs to stay on top of its numbers?

In the podcast:

01:33 - James’s brief history with apps

03:34 - A look at some stats

05:27 - Jarrod’s app experience

08:27 - Pokemon Go for Phys Ed

10:20 - The value of having an app

16:50 - Where do you start?

20:35 - What app makers need to consider

24:53 - Why hire a developer?

27:42 - Before going down the app path...

29:08 - Summing things up

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Download the PDF transcription and What An App Can Do For Your Business

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today, I have a special guest who's been here before. But we're talking about a different topic. Welcome back Jarrod Robinson from TheAppMatch.com

Jarrod: Thanks for having me James. It's always a pleasure to have a chance to chat.

James: Now we've spoken many times. You've brought a lot of value to our community. You've shared with them some of the things you've been doing with automated webinars in our previous series, we had a multi-part series, you spoke at SuperFastBusiness Live this year, and we're recording this in 2016. You spoke about some of the things you changed to really improve your business. I get the pleasure of working with you behind the scenes, talking to you about business stuff, helping you grow your business. I know you just came back from a big live event that you ran, which was very successful. Congratulations.

Jarrod: Thank you.

James: What we're talking about today of course is apps. We're specifically talking about matching an app for your existing audience. We'll have to sort of break this down a bit, but people who are following SuperFastBusiness will know that I recently launched an app for SuperFastBusiness. I got to say Jarrod, I was a little bit skeptical about it because it wasn't my first app. When you were helping me with this, you would have seen there were a couple of other apps in my account. I've been down the path before.

The last time, it was kind of difficult. I had an idea for an app that I was using with coaching clients. One was called Leverage, the other was called Wealthification. It was a bit of a trial to get people to develop it for me. They were already my second and third app. There was actually one before. My first blog, Internet Marketing Speed, had an app. Back then, some company created an app that was really just pulling in my blog and a few media things. It was OK, but it sort of invariably went out of date, and then I changed my domain. So it sort of dropped off the face of the planet.

But with the Wealthification and Leverage one, I hired someone to do it inhouse. They were kind of a flighty programmer and they ended up leaving. I don't know where the source code is, and they're getting out of date too. So I wasn't that excited about my fourth app. I've seen other people do apps. But we've been talking about your app experience, and I've seen how prolific you are with apps. How many apps have you made so far?

Jarrod: Well, I mean it would be around 100-plus mark for both Android and iOs. I'm sitting here saying that I have no idea how to program any of the languages bu...