Entrepreneurs In Motion

Whether it's your very first product/service or whether you're adding a new one to your business, beta-testing and pre-selling are two great strategies to validate market demand as well as get feedback on and improve a new product or service. In today's episode I share some best practices for getting the most out of your beta test or pre-sale. Highlights: - What's the difference between a beta test and a pre-sale? - How many people to bring into a beta test and how to invite them - How you should spend the next three months after closing sign-ups - Key ways to build trust and excitement in a pre-sale - Responses to common hesitations when it comes to pre-selling Links and comments: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/beta

Copy is one of the most important elements in your online business, and in today's episode you'll learn how to evaluate and improve the messaging on your website and sales page. My guest is Liz Theresa, and she has some great tips for writing effective copy that connects with your target audience and convinces them to invest in your products or services. Highlights: - What exactly is "copy," and why is it so important? - Elements that make for good and bad copy - Effective sales pages - how to describe the problem and present the solution - When should you write copy yourself vs. hire a copywriter? Links and comments: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/goodcopy/

This year something happened that forced me to get even more organized and intentional about how I run my business and manage my time - I had a baby! My daughter is absolutely wonderful, but the first couple months with a newborn are quite demanding - so I knew I had to plan ahead when it came to running my business. Here's how I reduced my workload to an absolute minimum and gave myself some maternity leave. Highlights: - How much can you get done with a baby, anyway? - Separating the essential from the extraneous - Why I decided to keep e-mail on my plate - How everything is going so far Links and comments: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/autopilot/

Are you struggling to build a sales funnel that actually works? Today's guest, Miles Beckler, has a ton of valuable insight - and his experience comes from nearly a decade of running a business in the meditation and spirituality niche. We discuss sales funnel best practices, elements to test and tweak, and the roots of customer psychology. Make sure to listen to the end to hear the conversion numbers that Miles uses as a benchmark in his own business. Highlights: - What Miles' business sells and how the sales funnel works - Where he would recommend starting your first funnel - What should you do if your funnel's not working? - How can we avoid over-promising our products' benefits? - Specific conversion numbers that Miles uses as a benchmark

When you want to improve or add something to your product, customers will love it! But what if you want to take something away? When you need to discontinue a feature or change the direction of your product or service, you might fear angering your current and previous customers. I'm currently phasing out a long-established feature of my products, and in today's episode I'll tell you how I made the decision to proceed and what the reaction from my audience has been. Highlights: - Two reasons why I decided to remove this product feature - Various potential solutions I considered, and how I chose my final course of action - Aftermath of the feature removal (you might be surprised) Links and comments: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/remove/

My guest today is Madeleine Lambert, and her company is called Content Refined. She is less than two years into her entrepreneurship journey, but in that relatively short time she has managed to create a successful content marketing agency - so she's got a team of writers and a steady stream of paying clients. In this conversation, Madeleine gives some great advice on hiring, delegating, and growing your team while keeping the overall business steadily profitable - it's not an easy balancing act! You'll learn a lot from her experience. Highlights: - How Madeleine's hiring process gets great team members - Was it hard for her to delegate paid client work? - Managing the balance between marketing and delivery - Madeleine's advice for entrepreneurs at an earlier stage of the journey Links and comments: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/contentrefined/

So you've got a product or service that you're already selling... how can you make it better? Today I'll give you some practical suggestions for testing out potential new offers and gathering and processing customer feedback, as well as five ways to up the quality of your products. Improving the experience for your customers and clients leads to more referrals, more sales, and the benefit of knowing you're making people's lives even better! Highlights: - Ways to test a new product idea (and one pitfall to avoid) - How to get feedback from your previous customers as well as competitors - Five specific ways to increase the quality of your products and services Links and comments: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/refine/

Having a well-defined brand is a really important element of a successful business, and today's guest is going to help you build one. I'm talking with Robyn Young, and in this interview you'll learn how branding is more than just "design" as well as some concrete steps for getting to the core of your company's brand. Robyn also talks about the biggest branding mistakes entrepreneurs tend to make, and she shares a case study from her own business on how refining the branding resulted in major growth and clarity. Highlights: - Why is branding so important, anyway? - DIY steps to defining and establishing your brand - The worst branding mistakes business owners make - How Robyn accelerated her own business' growth through good branding Links and comments: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/robynyoung/

I use email marketing extensively in my business, and much of it is automated - emails go out completely hands-off, and the sales keep coming in. Today I'm going to talk about three automation sequences you should be using, regardless of what type of online business you have. Hopefully it'll give you some ideas for taking your automated e-mail marketing to the next level! Highlights: - Why e-mail is STILL king (with real stats) - The dual purpose of your initial autoresponder - don't neglect either of these aspects - How tagging and segmenting can help you customize your e-mails better - Six different e-mail ideas for your customer follow-up sequence Links and comments: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/automatedemail/

So your customer has made a purchase and you've delivered the product or service as promised. End of story, right? Wrong! Today's guest will teach you how to craft an amazing experience for your clients and customers that exceeds their expectations and leads to rave reviews and referrals. I'm talking with Lynne Reznick, a wedding photographer who has added some very special touches to the service she provides her clients. This is a fascinating episode and I know it'll get you thinking about how to surprise and delight your customers. Highlights: - The specific elements that Lynne has added to craft an amazing experience for her clients - What's the line between delivering extra value vs. overwhelming the client or overworking ourselves? - Results and impact from providing these special touches Links and comments: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/clientexperience/  

A listener asked me about my morning and evening routines - and I actually don't have any! I prefer habits - things you make a part of your life/work so that you practice them naturally and consistently, without necessarily following a rigid set of steps. In today's episode I describe five of my own habits that keep me feeling great and performing at my best as an entrepreneur. Highlights: - Two reasons I don't do routines - Hacks for managing my health and fitness - Ways to practice gratitude and positivity - My preferred working rhythm - A fairly recent habit that makes me more productive Comments: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/routines/  

As an entrepreneur, it's easy to feel overwhelmed when your attention is scattered among all your different tasks and projects. Today's guest, Amy Demone, will teach you how to finally get organized and establish reliable systems in your business. We also talk about delegation and the challenge of knowing when it's the right time to take someone on. Highlights: - What does a business look like when it has effective systems vs. when it doesn't? - Practical steps you can take to start getting organized - How to know what to automate vs. delegate vs. keep handling ourselves - Indicators that it's the right time to outsource or take on an assistant/employee Links and comments: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/getorganized/  

At the end of last year, I reviewed my business expenses and made some major changes that ended up reducing costs by about 20%. Keeping an eye on your expenses can be the difference between your business surviving and thriving, or crashing and burning - regardless of the size of your company. Here are four principles I used to evaluate my costs and decide what to cut, change, or keep. Highlights: - Don't pay for what you're not using! - How I used a creative workaround to cut a bill in half - Evaluating each of your expenses vs. its ROI - Looking for better, cheaper options (and when not to do so) Links and comments: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/cut/

One interesting question that you might not have considered is whether you tend to make decisions more with your head, with your rational mind, or more with your heart, your gut, or your intuition. This tendency can have a lot of repercussions not only in your business, but also in terms of your own well-being. Today I'm talking with Michaela Light, the host of the Intuitive Leadership Podcast. She's a very experienced entrepreneur and she has a lot to share about how using intuition can help you not only make better business decisions and better hires, but also bring more joy to your work. Highlights: - How we can use our intuition to guide our business decisions - Tips for successful intuitive hiring - What Michaela's business looked like before and after she started using her intuition - Michaela's advice for anyone who's hesitant or afraid to use intuition Links and show notes: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/intuition

If your business is based on trading your own time for money - for example, by doing one-on-one calls or customized client projects - you'll eventually hit a point where there's no more time in your schedule to take on new customers. How can you grow your business given these constraints? I'll give you four possibilities in today's episode. Highlights: - Reasons I personally chose NOT to do any one-on-one work - Why it's important to raise your prices, and by how much - One way to simultaneously offer a more affordable option AND increase your income per hour - Ins and outs of the agency model - Creating complementary hands-off income streams Links and comments: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/nomoretime

A huge percentage of businesses end up failing... but what if you could avoid the major pitfalls that most tend to fall into? Today's guest is Bob Bethel - after going through an excruciating business failure of his own, he has managed to rescue 77 failing businesses and turn them into profitable ones. From his decades of experience, Bob shares the three biggest factors that cause businesses to fail, and gives some powerful advice to solopreneurs and early-stage entrepreneurs. Highlights: - Make sure you do these three things in your business to avoid failure and set your company up for success - How can we balance planning with flexibility? - Two important tips for solopreneurs Links and comments: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/failproof/

Now that I'm heading into my 7th year of business, you'd think I'd have everything down by now, and not make dumb beginner mistakes anymore. Well... not entirely! Today I'll tell you some stories from the pretty recent past about stupid things things that have gone wrong in my business. I think it's important to share experiences like this - not only to learn lessons from them, but also show each other we're not alone in the struggles. Highlights: - My weekend of wasted time - How I almost lost a $2300 domain - The month that started out in the red Links and comments: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/stupid

Today's episode is packed with powerful social media tips! My guest is Sabrina Torres, a social media strategist at BeTrulySocial.com. She describes the strategy she used to get her own business off the ground in a matter of months, and then shares her expertise in creating both organic and paid social media content that's strategic and effective. Highlights: - How Sabrina got her first clients so fast - and how she grew from there - How can we know if our social media is "working"? - What makes for a good live video? - The best places to start with paid ads on social media - Two tips for effectively engaging in social media if you have little time Links and comments: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/betrulysocial/

This past fall, I took a deep dive into the world of paid advertising. Up to this point, my business' growth has all been through organic content marketing, so I wanted to see if I could accelerate it with paid ads. Listen in to find out how exactly I set up my campaigns, the somewhat surprising results, and my main takeaways. Highlights: - Three ways I narrowed down my audience for the ads (3:18) - A crucial decision to separate two groups (6:05) - Specific numbers of new subscribers I acquired (9:26) - Tracking their buying behavior over three months (11:45) - Lessons learned from this experience (15:48) Links and show notes: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/advertising/

How much of a handle do you have on the financial metrics of your business? Today's guest, Lynne Somerman from TheWiserMiser.net, is here to help. We discuss what numbers you should pay attention to, how to divide up revenue and prioritize expenses, and practical steps for getting your company's finances under control. Highlights: - The number that can sink your business if you're not careful - How much to pay ourselves vs. reinvest vs. save - Tips for getting a handle on business finances and avoiding money mindset problems Links and comments: http://www.entrepreneursinmotion.com/thewisermiser/