Author: Dan Morris

ENMN Conference Insights

I was honored to have a chance to speak at the Entertainment New Media Conference, the premiere blogging event for entertainment and travel bloggers. Screen Shot 2014-02-18 at 1.23.01 PM

One of my favorite activities is meeting with bloggers who have a different paradigm view of blogging. I absolutely love that. Sometimes it’s just bloggers of a different niche that are interesting, like the genealogy bloggers conference I attended, but this time it was something else entirely.

While travel, fitness and entertainment bloggers weren’t new to me necessarily, the culture in which they operate as bloggers was somewhat novel. But I didn’t “feel” it until several bloggers asked me what niche you had to be in to make money the way I help bloggers do.

Learning about that “mindset” was my favorite part of the weekend.

(Don’t let me fool you, meeting Mr. Sean Astin, hanging out with Erica I. Pena-Vest and meeting new people like Pilar Clark and Lisa Robertson were pretty darn awesome times, too. And meeting entrepreneur Andrea Schroder. . . come on. . super awesome. But that’s another story for another time.)

So let’s tackle that mindset.

Some of ENMN’s goals are to create industry-smart bloggers who know how to act around celebrities, what to ask of travel partners and how to be provide content that truly adds value. And they hammered it home all weekend using stories of great blogging experiences and great bloggers (and even throwing in some not so good examples).

During the training it was made clear that you’re not going to get paid cold, hard cash from hotels to blog about them, not that you won’t get unbelievable perks and value from them. But ENMN’s goal wasn’t discouragement by any means, rather education about the industry standard and expectation. With appropriate expectation comes grace and appreciation. Bloggers who lack this whine and make life harder for the rest of us.

[Tweet “With appropriate expectation comes grace and appreciation”]

But that in no way means travel and entertainment bloggers can’t blog profitably. In fact, unless you are independently wealthy or a spouse makes the income, you are ethically bound to produce revenue from that much work.

Take a look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Making sure that your family is loved, has shelter and enough food is the base of the pyramid. If you have no way to pay for groceries, spending 8 hours/day blogging for nothing isn’t in the cards.

How do we make money, exactly?

So the question was “how”? They asked me how they make money if the travel industry doesn’t pay. And the answer is simple as pie. The travel industry is the content you deliver. It is the goods. The money doesn’t have to come from the travel industry at all. The money comes from the readers . . . not only that but when your readers are also customers you have a lot more influence.

Readers not only will pay but they want to pay. You and I are one of them. We love buying stuff. We buy books while we’re at the airport, we buy umbrellas when it rains, we buy shoes because we want to, we buy tickets when we travel, we buy egg timers for the kitchen. When we spend money. . . it is because we WANT to spend money. If it makes our life better, we want it.

Let me give you some examples of things your audience would love to buy. Many would be excited to know that the product even exists

Doug Bowman (@stop) at ENMN, Creative Director at Twitter
Doug Bowman (@stop), Creative Director at Twitter

1. Ebook of your most popular tips
2. 1 tip per day travel club membership
3. Phone apps they can use to make their photos better
4. Insiders secrets club
5. Any “much needed” product via Amazon
6. Sample budget and vacation budget calculator
7. Your Guide to “____________” (Example Lisa’s Best Disney Secrets)
8. Book review videos where you review every travel book on the subject
9. Calendar of your favorite picks form some place
10. Your favorite niche “sayings” on shirts and hats from Zazzle or Cafe Press
11. Adsense and other advertising networks
12. Site, clothing, trip or event sponsorship
13. 21 Day Challenge to do something
14. Guide to saving $2,000 through phone apps and coupons
15. Webinar and interactive discussion with your favorite guru (Wouldn’t you pay $5 to be in a webinar with Bono?)
16. Complete budget, itinerary, grocery and shopping list
17. Printable coloring pages for kids to take on the plane
18. 30 Minute Strategy session with you to learn how to get the most out of . . .
19. Your actual book that you wrote
20. Audio Guided tour of a place they can listen to with their earbuds

The only thing you have to do as a blogger is serve. Serve them awesomeness. Make them better, make them smarter. And when you do charge money for your efforts. You, as the CEO of your company, are no different than Barnes & Nobles, Stephen King, Burger King, Fodor’s, or Nike.

[Tweet “The only thing you have to do as a blogger is serve.”]

When you produce value and others recognize it, they will trade their dollars for it. Gladly.

Remember. . . . There are no retired bloggers.

And guess what you get to do with the money. You get to bless your family with the rewards of their sacrifice. You get to bless another family if you hire a housekeeper. You get to donate to church and charity. You get to lend money to friends.

Be the professional you are. Your efforts deserve revenue. And that makes everyone happy . . .even the people paying you.

ENMN was great in its focus that you should learn what the industry is all about. You need to heed all that was said, listen to all whose experiences come before yours. Be the expert Erica expects you to be in her industry.

And make money doing it.

If you’re interested in learning more about monetizing your site, come to one of our Blogging Concentrated workshops nationwide and spend an entire day perfecting it.

Use Surveys to Take Action

It’s always in the back of our mind, “I should be surveying my audience”. We all think it and wish we were doing it. And then some of us actually do it (which makes the rest of us start thinking about it again).

But when have you seen the results of a survey? I’m not talking about the graph or chart that shows how many people picked A on Question 2. I’m talking about a change in direction. When have you seen someone take action because of the answers to a survey?

Most likely. . . never . . . or it was something tiny.

That’s because there aren’t too many people teaching surveys. So today, let’s do just that.

Getting Started

In an ideal world you could publish a 100 question survey that didn’t box people into choosing A, B or C. You could ask questions that open up entire realms you hadn’t considered. Then you could put together a team to analyze the answers, devise an action plan, implement it and track if it worked.

But we don’t live in an ideal world. It’s pretty hard to get people to fill out one survey, let alone answer 100 questions. And then to find the time to analyze 1,000 different answers. . . I could only dream of having that kind of fun with my audience.

Nope. Time and purpose are linked and thus we must be more deliberate with our time.

The Action Plan: Survey Questions

A smart survey has a point to it. That point is action. If you’re going to ‘bother’ your audience to garner information, make sure it is information you can take action upon.

To make sure you’re doing this, you need to spend time writing an action plan based on the replies you could get back. For instance if you ask “Are you a stay-at-home parent?”, then you need a plan that says

  • “If only 10% indicate they stay home, I will refocus my content this way”.
  • “If it is 50/50, I will change x, y, and z”.
  • “If the respondents are 75% stay-at-home, I will stop doing m, n and p”.

If you can’t think of a single change you would make or action you would take, then don’t ask that question. Maybe none of the demographic questions would alter your strategy – if that’s the case then skip them all.

You really want to narrow down the # of questions to as few as possible. Narrow, narrow, narrow the focus and your readers will feel they are more valuable to you and part of the solution.

And remember Google Analytics can tell you a lot about your site and how people navigate it. Don’t ask questions of your audience if you already have the answer somewhere else. Figure out the holes in your analytics – and ask those questions.

The Right Survey Software

It’s important to have a robust survey package. You need one that will allow you to branch out after each question. For instance if the first actionable question is the stay at home question, then you will want to ask the people who said “yes” different questions about the future of your blog content than the people who said “no”.

If you serve parents and you spend a good deal of time talking about child care options, separating the opinions of the stay-at-home parents from the employee parents will help you decide how to frame future content to improve reader engagement.

(Think about this, if I told you that the only people who have signed up on your email list are stay-at-home parents, and told you that conversely 75% of your readers are employee parents, what would you do?)

So make sure you use software that can ask separate questions depending on how you answered the previous one. By the way, I recommend SurveyMonkey – it does that.

The Survey Funnel

If one of your questions is “Do you own any of my ebooks?”, then the ensuing questions would be much different for the people who do than the people who don’t. Imagine 50 people saying “no” and 50 people saying “yes” and having the next question say “Was it helpful?”. (Now 50 people are annoyed)

Before you write the survey, build a funnel on paper and ask yourself at each step, “what would I do if learned this from my audience today?” And what do I want to know of the people who say yes vs no? Hold their hand as you walk them down a path learning what you need to learn to take action and improve your site.

It should really only take 4 or 5 questions to learn good, meaningful information. But first you must plan it out – along with the actions you will take depending on the answers.

What type of Questions

In a package like Survey Monkey, the multiple choice answers dictate which questions they answer next. So ask multiple choice questions, but always include a space to leave comments. You don’t want to box people in if they have something to say.

Once your survey has divided your audience into the groups you feel you can learn from, ask them a final essay question to really learn what action you need to take. In the photo (see above) you can see that there are a total of 20 questions, but no one has to answer more than 5 to get to the end.

Sometimes it is appropriate to ask everyone the same essay question at the end. Then you can compare the answers from one group to the next, which can really supercharge your action plan, can narrow your target market and can increase your income.

Finally, when they’ve answered the last question make sure you take them to a “thank you” page. You can use that page to give away your ebook, have them sign up for your newsletter or give them a link to an article that will make their day brighter. Don’t miss that opportunity to do something nice for them. They just finished doing something nice for you.

Dan R Morris

Are You An Advanced Level Blogger: Part 1

What level of expertise would you say you have achieved in your blogging career, and how do you measure that for yourself? If you’re not a beginner, are you an advanced level blogger? And what would you have to know to consider yourself an expert?

I’ve put together this list of activities that I’d consider to be evidence of an “advanced blogger”. I’ll add the caveat that there are highly successful bloggers who don’t do all these things. Choosing which activities to do from day to day is a sign you know your business well; knowing which activities fit is the “advanced” part. It’s not important as a professional blogger that you know how to do everything, but familiarity is good insurance against poor consultants and bad advice.

So let’s start with the first thing you do as a blogger:

Website Creation

Can you get a website up and going, whether WordPress, Joomla, HTML or otherwise? Do the terms nameservers, hosting and 301 redirects leave you at ease or cringing? Can you upload a site via your cPanel File Manager or by using a utility like FileZilla? Do you know what to change, if you upload using Fantastico,  to secure it from hackers and malware? Are you familiar with the process of adding a subdomain or redirecting a different domain name to your site? Finally, have you customized your .htaccess file to protect your site the way you want, not the default?

Writing Code

Oooh. . . code is scary isn’t it? With utilities like Windows LiveWriter you don’t really have to know any code, but it sure is handy to know how to do a handful of things – and perhaps how to fix some easy, common problems. For some bloggers who outsource coding, knowing how to do it isn’t important. But knowing how gives you great insight into what things should cost  so you never have to accept a high bid.

First of all, are you able to make your posts look like you envision them? I would consider bold, ordered bullets, h1 tags, tables and images to be beginner stuff, do you agree? Can you do the hard stuff like changing the global font in your site? Are there things like centering photos, creating Johnson Boxes and eschewing photos that you just can’t do? How about customizing WordPress themes or knowing when you should hardcode a plug-in instead of uploading it? Do you know how to add hard coded “hooks”, change the header or modify links in the sidebar?

If you’ve done all these things, you’re on your way to expert status for sure.

Money

Are you making money from lots of different sources like speeches, Adsense, affiliate income, membership site dues, Kindle books, mobile apps, in-text ads, coupon prints and even physical products?

Do you understand your site’s money map? From your AdSense account you probably know which ad in your sidebar or on your post pages generate the most income. But do you know which kinds of ads (Adsense, affiliate, or even email opt-ins) in those positions make the most money? Are you A/B testing ads using an adserver or Google Website Optimizer? If someone asked to advertise on your site, do you know what each position is worth in the private marketplace?

With AdSense have you optimized your campaign testing ad sizes, locations and font colors? Have you been to an “AdSense in the City” event to have Google look over your campaign? And do you have the necessary channels set-up to really understand which ads are making you money? Do you know which pages on your site are optimized for “commercial keywords” and which are not? And have you tested whether internal ads make more sense on non-commercial pages than pay-per-click ads?

Have you attracted the attention of Sponsors or better yet gone after the ones you really want? Have you put together a long term contract with a Sponsor that benefits you, them and your audience? Are you finding others requesting Sponsored Posts or advertising opportunities from you? For that matter, do you have a Media Kit easily accessible to those searching?

Are you monetizing everything? For instance did you make sure to change the “powered by Thesis” language in your blog footer into your affiliate link? Are you doing the same thing with your emails where it says “Powered by Feedblitz”? Are you using redirects for your affiliate links in case the affiliate changes something or you get a better offer? Are you using a plug-in like Alinks that automatically turn your main keywords into in-text affiliate links automatically (even in blog comments)?

Part 2

I would consider all these things to be the assets of an “advanced blogging” mind, but that’s not it. In Part 2 we will be discussing “Advanced Level” SEO concepts, how great bloggers are contacting their audiences, and how they’re thinking through their content strategy. And in the final chapter we’ll explore the tasks necessary to becoming an expert in your field, advanced steps to traffic generation and how to use tracking tools to make big moves.

Are You An Advanced Level Blogger: Part 2

There’s a huge difference between a blogging hobbyist and a professional. While some bloggers seem to have defied the odds and have stuck to WordPress.com, TypePad or Blogger, the rest of us have taken on the challenge of a self-hosted, totally controlled site. But even some beginners start that way. So how do you know when you’ve broken free of the “beginner mold” and are truly advanced?

In the first of this 3-part series, I offered up some of the more advanced knowledge activities associated with website creation, writing code and monetizing a site. In this episode, let’s discuss SEO, audience contact and content strategy.

SEO

Organic traffic is one of the best converting sources when you’re optimized for the correct keywords. No matter your niche, there are people out there looking for exactly what you’re offering. The key is to place yourself directly in their way when they’re searching for it.

The focus is choosing the right keywords. Are you using Google AdWords to test your messaging to determine which keywords convert for you best? Have you tried analyzing written survey responses to look for common phrases used by your audience? Are you using a great keyword tool to find keywords that have a good amount of search volume, but little competition? And did you know that Google’s Keyword Tool is not what you’ve been told.

SEO is different for each search engine, beyond titles and tags and placement, are you doing what’s necessary to get your videos ranked on YouTube, podcasts ranked in iTunes, and your boards ranked on Pinterest? Are you using Google’s Contextual Targeting Tool to determine which related keywords to get ranked for, bolstering your main keywords?

For keywords that are bringing you the most relevant traffic, are you optimized for more than one page in the search results? Have you dominated those keywords by getting YouTube videos, slideshare presentations and podcasts into the search results as well? Have you written guest blog posts that are optimized for your best keywords? Only when you dominate the top 10 for your best keywords are you assured great traffic.

Email and RSS

Are you giving your audience a reason to join your email list? Have you tested different opt-in forms and opt-in incentives? And once you found the perfect ebook or language that inspires your audience to sign-up, have you tested the location and color and font till you found a winner?

Are you using an autoresponder or managed RSS system to contact your community, instead of relying on RSS alone? Are you able to segment your lists by their desires and send them targeted messages? Does your system give you the option to send mass email blasts as well? Have you built in automation rules that unsubscribe members from one list as they add themselves to another?

Are you looking in the “Campaigns” section of Google Analytics for your Feedburner stats? Are you actively following your open rate to determine what kinds of subject lines your audience pays attention to? Are you following up with those that opened your first email with another one of value? And are you resending your messages with changed subject lines to those that didn’t open the first one?

Are these decisions you’ve consciously made?

Content

Have you mapped out the steps that your audience needs to follow to attain their goals and are you leading them from step to step? Does your content also teach them the process and lead them to what you’re offering next? Does your audience know what your next blog post is going to be about before you write it? Do you know what you’re going to be talking about three months from now and are you already starting to plant the seed of that topic’s importance?

With a marketing plan in hand, are you writing the content now that you’re going to need when life gets really busy (like during the holidays)? Have you started creating the images necessary to create great Pinterest boards when the time comes? And have you determined if your audience would occasionally prefer a podcast or a video or just images?

Are you repurposing your content into ebooks, videos, downloadable printables? Are you then loading up your ebooks to Amazon, Google Reader and Kindle to reach a wider audience? Are you turning your great content into powerpoint presentations and putting it on Slideshare? How about repurposing your images for Pinterest, Flickr, Tumblr, Stumbleupon and Infographics?

Are you recording and transcribing interviews, podcasts and videos and turning them into blog posts, emails and other written assets? Have you turned your content into a real book that can be found on Amazon? Are you turning your blog photos into videos with Animoto?

The question is . . . is your content on purpose?

3 Part Series

I would consider all these things to be the assets of an “advanced blogging” mind, but that’s not it. There are still a few parts of a professional blogging outfit that we haven’t discussed. In our final chapter, we’ll talk about becoming the expert in your niche, how to use tracking tools effectively and driving traffic from many different sources.

Are You An Advanced Level Blogger: Part 3

advanced-level-blogger-3

Tracking

Tracking is what separates the hobbyist from the professional. With Google Analytics alone you can know where your traffic comes from, which keywords consistently bring traffic, where that traffic goes and you can know which buttons on your site your traffic doesn’t care about. Imagine that!

And that’s just Google Analytics. There are many great ways to track what’s working and what isn’t in your business.

As far as tracking goes, are you using trackable urls in your emails, pamphlets and .pdf’s to help determine their effectiveness? Are you tracking origin sources, such as keywords, which are creating sales? Did you know that you can use the Google Analytics Goals feature to see exactly how people get to specific pages on your site? And you can see what happens when they leave.

Are you tracking your email open rate and sending a second email to all the people who didn’t open it the first time? Are you able to watch your site rise in the rankings for your intended keywords? And did you know Google provides evidence of their tracking efforts to tell you which keywords directly support your main ones?

Are you putting filters in your analytics services so they don’t track when you’re looking at your own site? When you change something on your site, are you flagging that date in Analytics so you when something you changed actually worked? Did you know you could track pretty much everything including phone numbers, contact forms and even how the on-site activity of your first time visitors is different than your regulars? Knowledge is golden.

Expert Status

Click-and-Clack became auto repair experts through a syndicated radio program that pretty much ran on Saturday afternoons across America. Think of an industry, can you name that industry’s experts? Or even just one?

Seth Godin became a blogging expert  with a book. Lance Armstrong became an expert with a race. My folks became experts on front porches because you’re hard pressed to search for any front porch related keyword and not find them. And Dr. Phil became an expert because he was a guest on someone else’s show.

What are you doing to prove to the world that you’re an expert? Have you interviewed the other experts in your field? Are you proactively looking for guest blogging opportunities in your niche? Do you have a podcast, a mastermind group, or a syndicated column? Are you providing weekly information to your local news or run a forum known in your niche?

Check the “topics” in Klout and the “lists” in Twitter. Both might seem hokey, but if you look at the experts in your industry, their lists and topics reflect accurately what they’re known for. If you’re a landscaper and you seem to be mainly listed on Fantasy Football lists, perhaps you’re not sharing your knowledge as much as you should be in your quest to become an industry expert.

Traffic

Traffic is the holy grail isn’t it? The key to massive traffic is leveraging lots of small sources of traffic to build up to large sources of traffic. Do you dominate lots of small keywords in your niche? Going after small keywords means less work dominating them. And once you’re on the first page of the search results you start getting comments, forum posts, and social media mentions. All good stuff.

Are you also writing the posts necessary to support and bolster your efforts with bigger traffic numbers? Have you completed a keyword theme map and are you working the plan? There’s nothing like thinking about your traffic generation plan ahead of time and putting it on paper. Have you completed and executed a marketing calendar complete with a hashtag schedule, editorial and holiday calendar?

Once you’ve determined which keywords are working for you, have you started dominating other properties with those keywords? Have you created YouTube videos, uploaded images, created Slideshare presentations, joined forums, and started writing guest posts to drive traffic?

Google traffic is great but it can fluctuate. Make sure you’re looking for other “non-Google “sources to maximize your traffic. And if you’re doing keywords make sure you’re concentrating on both evergreen keywords and seasonal ones. Meet your audience where they are searching and they will find you.

3 Part Series

I would consider all these things to be the assets of an “advanced blogging” mind, but that’s not it. In all three parts, we’ve discussed some of the activities that should be considered once you’ve moved past “hobby” and into a professional role.

Link to or Embed your YouTube Videos?

So you’ve just recorded a video, uploaded it to YouTube and are ready to exclaim it to the world. So what do you do?

Marketing and strategyThis goes to the structure of your business. And the answer is completely dependent upon that structure. As a blogger, your home base is your blog. It is the property you own, you control, you monetize. As a blogger, your goal is to drive traffic to that blog, capture it and turn that audience into a community. Picture a bicycle tire where your site is the hub in the middle and your traffic comes from the many spokes of your online visibility.

Part of building that business is making yourself known to all those you could benefit. That means working to be seen by people using search engines. That means writing content so good people share your links. That means being active on the social media platforms with your community and in front of the new.

But not to be forgotten that means providing content across the web that can educate and entice those who stumble upon it. Some of those content hosts that command large audiences are sites like YouTube, BlogTalkRadio, Slideshare, Flickr, and EzineArticles. For a blogger these content hosts are the spokes on the wheel strategically driving traffic back to the center, to the blog, to home base.

So when does it make sense to link from the center back out to the traffic drivers (in other words from your site back to YouTube?) Well, it always makes sense via email because once you have captured their contact information, sending them to your YouTube Channel is part of building your community there. If you have their email address, by the way, your first goals of traffic and capture are complete, so move on the step 3.

But it doesn’t make sense to link out to YouTube videos prior to capturing your new reader’s contact information. With most content hosts like YouTube, Slideshare and Flickr you can embed the content directly on your site, in a blog post. In doing that you retain that new traffic on your site and still have a great opportunity to monetize or capture their contact information before they depart.

Always be thinking strategically about how your videos, blog posts, podcasts, pins and guest posts are going to be helping to grow your empire. Each should serve the purpose of capturing contact information, driving traffic, monetizing or enhancing your community. And ask yourself how does this help my prospects, my readers, and my cheerleaders 1 year from now.

Keep thinking strategically using these tips to improve your business.

P.S. Since views of a video are also counted when the video is embedded on your site, driving them back to YouTube to increase the views does not make sense. You can just as easily drive up the views on your site alone.

You don’t need help, you need leverage

 

blog-leverageRemember learning about leverage in physics class?  I think the discussion revolved around weights, pulleys, fulcrums, and anvils. Or something like that. The idea was we needed to lift something heavy and needed to find leverage to make it easier.

In our blogging  world we’ve already gotten leverage in so many ways:

  • WordPress: Isn’t adopting a content management system like WordPress easier than developing our own?
  • GoToWebinar: You could always call the phone company and coordinate a bridge conference line. But isn’t using a system that works without much effort easier?
  • Facebook: Go ahead Email all your contacts your daily status updates, then call and ask them what they’re doing so you can comment on it.

Leverage is how we exist the way we do. So why do we work ourselves to the bone trying to do every other thing in our business? And then when we stop working why do we work ourselves to the bone cleaning the house and doing all that? Why is it that some kinds of leverage is ok, but others we just won’t accept?

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Let’s switch gears, sorta. How many ideas do you have written down that you’d like to do? Get a book on Kindle? Load up all your presentations on Slideshare? Do more YouTube videos? Start a 30 Day Challenge with your audience? Create a physical DVD to sell and mail your people? Do a giant coupon workshop?

How many of your most bestest ideas ever would be great because they would make you money? I mean think deep. Think of your mostest bestest idea that you wish you had time for. (Did you think of it?) Yeah, that one. Isn’t it awesome? I can’t wait to see it too.

Back to Reality

So what do you have to do today? Blog posts? Affiliate links? Pinterest Photos? Facebook updates? Worry about SEO? Email? Blog Posts? New Deals? Pin stuff? Blog posts. . . . and even though we’ve been doing this for a long time everyday. . . something tells us that it’s going to payoff tomorrow.  Right? Why else would we wake up everyday to do these monotonous things?

Really deep down inside we know that if we keep doing things this way, we’re going to keep doing things this way. Nothing will change.

That’s why you need to think about getting leverage.

Help

Leverage doesn’t mean hiring the lady at church who knows how to write recipes. Leverage doesn’t mean asking your VA to do a couple more tasks. Leverage means making a list of all the things that need to be done and finding an expert to do them. Don’t hire someone you have to train how to use WordPress. That’s adding several hours and to-do’s to your list.

Write out what you need, specifically. Make it strict.

“I need a housekeeper who can come on Monday’s between 3 – 5, clean the house including the laundry, dishes and backyard dog poo. I need them to be able to fold clothes and put them in the right drawers in the bedrooms. I need someone who won’t leave all the washed dishes in the sink to dry, but will dry them and put them away.”  LEVERAGE

“I need someone who knows how to use WordPress including uploading tables, images, links, iframes, fixed width and full width pages. Knowledge of CSS, style sheets, anchor text links, Feedblitz. The person should be able to set-up and manage an automated network of posts to all my social media properties and create new profiles on new social media properties as we find them. The person should know how to write web copy and drive sales from blog posts to shopping cart pages. The person should be able to work 20 hours per week, communicate via Skype, phone and email,  be prepared to clock-in using Freshbooks, attend Monday morning meetings and be happy”.  LEVERAGE

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Only when you get Leverage can you do what you’re good at. Which is all the stuff on Page 2 of your to-do list. Going to conferences, speaking to brands, writing books, creating podcasts, doing interviews, coming up with new ideas for the team, directing efforts and spending time with family.

Get past the idea that you can’t afford to  hire someone, because you’ll NEVER be able to afford it if you’re not freed to do the things that make you money. Eat rice and beans if you have to. Just do it. 

Now iff this post resonated with you, then you’re 100% ready to take that next step. If not, you’ll get there. At some point you’ll get that “I’m burnt out” feeling in the back of your mind and then you’ll realize that you weren’t gifted with the ability to post deals. You were gifted with the ability to help people. When that day comes, you’re ready.

Dan R Morris