Soulful MBA Podcast

This quick episode shares our five rules for sending cold emails. By following these simple guidelines, you’re much more likely to receive a positive response (or any response at all).

1. Introduce yourself. Dropping a note to a new person? Want to pitch yourself for a podcast guest spot or a guest blog post? Please share a bit about yourself and include a link for how to learn more about you.
2. Be authentic. Personalize with context or, even better, a compliment. Don’t blast people a blanket request without any personalization. Let the person receiving the message know that you’ve actually engaged with her/his content.
3. State the value proposition. What’s in it for the person receiving the message?
4. Use complete sentences. Maybe even proofread? Enough said.

Have a specific call-to-action. What do you want the person to do? What action would you like for her to take?

Good sound quality is EVERYTHING when you’re running an online business. In this quick episode, we share our top recommendations for high-quality microphones: 

Sandy’s Mic: Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone

Jeni’s Mic: Electro Voice RE-20 Cardioid Microphone

Our favorite Wireless Option: Rode RodeLink FM Wireless Filmmaker System

Inexpensive Webcam with Mic Option: Logitech HD Pro Webcam C920

In this episode, we explore the topic of expertise. Our new tagline, “leverage your expertise into a profitable online business,” has become a bit controversial in our community and we want to offer some thoughts as to why “expertise” might be a troublesome concept for some of you.

Perhaps you identify with Sandy, who is fine with someone else calling her an expert, but not ok with calling herself an expert? Or maybe you’re generally uncomfortable with the word and don’t know why?

Here’s a loose list of criteria we’ve come up with for evaluating your expert status:

1. You have more knowledge that other people in a particular area of work
2. You have credentials in a given area
3. You have a demonstrated track record of excellence
4. You’ve impacted people through your work
5. You’re receiving referrals
6. You’re confident in your expertise

We’d like to encourage you to explore your own relationship to expert status, since it can be such a powerful driving force in the growth of your business.

Joy: FREE Workshop: 7 Ways to Leverage Your Expertise into and Online BusinessHustle: If Only Quoting Women Were Enough

In a follow-up to last week’s Office Hours episode, we now dive into some specific pre-selling strategies, including how to offer a beta group and why we recommend using webinars to pre-sell your offering.

A few general guidelines:

Don’t promise specific results: Never pre-sell by guaranteeing measurable results. This is especially important if your offering is more informative than tactical.

Don’t plow ahead if feedback is negative: If you go the Beta group route and the reviews are abysmal, consider trying a different topic or format. Even if you’ve already sunk some time and money into this offering, it may still fail to resonate. Honor the input you get.

What happens if your pre-sale brings in your revenue goal? You’ve hit on a winner. Build it out, heed the feedback you get from your first customers, refine and hone, iterate, and celebrate.

“You have to hire for the talent and then train for the skillset.” - KayLee Hansen

This episode features an interview with KayLee Hansen. We met KayLee through a mutual friend and quickly hired her to carry out a personality assessment test on the two of us, known as the Lumina Spark Portrait.

KayLee is a certified Lumina practitioner, a facilitator, and a training and development coach for executive teams and individuals. She’s spent 13 years working in the luxury hospitality industry and has also independently consulted with the leaders of industries ranging from engineering to construction to higher education.

Working with KayLee, as you’ll hear, has been incredibly eye-opening and also validating for both of us. We think you’ll enjoy the conversation (and you may just feel the urge to sign up for your own Lumina portrait assessment).

Other Mentions: KayH Consulting Inc

Joy: The Book of AwesomeHustle: The Lumina Spark

Pre-selling is the practice of creating a private launch before your product is completely built and perfected. Why do this? Because it validates your concept and means you get paid for conducting market research. Because it allows you to sell your pilot products instead of offering them for free. Because it WORKS.

If you sink time, energy, and money into an endeavor, you want to be sure it will pay off. Unfortunately, simply asking your followers if they’d shell out for a program or class will not get you reliable feedback: Your fans are inclined to tell you what they think you want to hear, so polling yields dubious results. (What people say and what they do are often divergent.)

So to determine if an idea really has income potential, you need proof that people will pay. You need to build something you know you can sell, and then push it into the market and see how much it can earn. If it does well, gather user feedback and iterate on it. Improve it, revise it, and resell it. And then you’ve got a business model that’s predictable, reliable, and consistently profitable.

How should you decide what to build? Ask questions that gauge interest, and get people talking about their pain points. Don’t construct your offering around your own interests or expertise; Build it on what your people want and need.

(Join us next week for Part 2, where we dive into some specific pre-selling strategies for launching your next online offering.)

In this episode, we talk with Cathryn Lavery. Cathryn is a serial entrepreneur and designer. As co-founder and CEO of BestSelf Co., she took the company from zero to 8-figures in less than two years. After launching the Self Journal on Kickstarter, she went on to win Shopify’s Build a Business Competition in 2016 and the Build a BIGGER Business competition in 2017 – making BestSelf Co. the only company to win both awards consecutively.

Originally from Belfast, Ireland, Cathryn moved to New York City to work as an architect, but soon realized that she wanted something more. We met Cathryn back in 2014, when all three of us were learning how to build software products from scratch. Cathryn is a powerhouse and her work has been featured in Fast Company, Entrepreneur, MTV, Huffington Post, Forbes, and Inc.  

Other Mentions: Deep Work, Little Might

Joy: Coffee MeetingsHustle: Self Journal, Win the Day

In this quick episode, we share some productivity and lifestyle tools that we each use to make our lives easier and have more time and mental space to grow our businesses.

Head on over to the show notes to download the full list (including links) of the resources mentioned in this episode.

In this episode, we chat with Minneapolis-based writer, Sally McGraw. Sally is a freelance writer, ghostwriter, editor, and copywriter with more than 15 years of professional experience. She specializes in ghostwriting non-fiction books and book proposals, but has written everything from artist statements to self-help books for her clients.

In the interview, Sally gives us some insight into her writing process and shares her inspiring journey from employee to fashion blogger to freelance writer.

We are both impressed with Sally’s ability to shape her entrepreneurial work around her lifestyle—choosing to pursue her own brand of ambition and define her own terms of success along the way.  

Other Mentions: Sally McGraw, Already Pretty, The Power

Joy: Katie KroeckHustle: CoSchedule Headline Tool

In Part 2 of our Instagram micro-blogging episode, we dive into several additional strategies you can implement to ensure your Instagram posts perform well:

Use location tags: Whenever you can (and feel comfortable doing so) forego mentioning location in your caption and simply use Instagram’s geotagging feature instead. Users love to know both what they’re seeing, and where it is in the world. Plus, location tagging increases engagement by 79%.

Lean on “link in bio”: Although Instagram makes you work for it, putting in the extra effort to direct people from your posts to your website pays off. At the end of each caption, include the words “link in bio” then create a trackable, unique URL with a tool like bit.ly so you can monitor traffic flow from your Insta posts to your site. (We use and recommend the paid linktree software.)

Use hashtags: This is a great way to get your content in front of people who aren’t following you yet! Using hashtags allows your posts to appear in search results with other posts sporting the same hashtag, exposing your brand to a wider audience. Start typing related keywords and Instagram will show you the most popular related hashtags. (Check out our previous hashtag episode if you’d like a deeper dive on this topic!)

Interested in checking out some active Instagram micro-bloggers? Here are some of our faves:

@thehellyeslife

@local_milk

@foxmeetsbear