Episode 31: Where I've Been
July 2, 2021
I had taken a little hiatus from doing the show as life got busy and I ran out of time in my workweek to be able to produce this show. Since then I've found a way to streamline my processes, get WAY more done, and get back to helping people through this podcast.
In This Episode:
What I've been doing the last several months.
How I've managed to streamline my processes.
How I get more done.
A special affiliate marketing course I'm working on (inspired by Season 2 of this show).
Resources:
(This section contains affiliate links; I may be compensated for purchases made)
Onlinejobs.ph - An awesome site to find virtual assistants from the Philippines.
Onlinejobs.ph - An awesome site to find virtual assistants from the Philippines.
Missinglettr - The software I use to schedule out a year's worth of social posts for each piece of content I make.
Tailwind - The program we use to schedule out Pinterest pins.
HappyScribe - Speak articles and transcribe podcasts to get articles done faster, and more SEO benefit out of your spoken content.
Master Affiliate Marketing to $10k - My affiliate marketing course that is $1 as on the publish date of this show. Spaces at this price are limited, so sign up soon if you want lifetime access at this price!
Shownotes: mastersalesfunnels.com/031
Episode Transcript:
This is Justin Coleman and this is the Master Sales Funnels podcast, Episode 31. Where have I been? Well, I've been pretty busy working for the most part. I know I've been gone for several months. I don't think it was March or April for the last episode. So if you're a regular listener. Sorry I've missed you. Hope you've missed me. I've spent the time over the last couple of months kind of trying to refocus my energy and kind of find myself within my business.
I guess you could say, um, what I've been exploring is hiring virtual assistants. So I know I've talked about that a little bit in the past. Some of the things that we started with was another deal with a zip recruiter where we created five articles for them. I actually wrote those five articles this time, but what I did was I outsourced it to a virtual assistant. They did the videos for fairly cheap. They did an excellent job.
And that was me, again, experimenting with other people's time. I know I did an episode on other people's time, but it works really well and I'm really, really enjoying it. The more that I move forward because I get so much more done.
What my process has become is that in April I decided to hire a virtual assistant full time to be a writer for us. So instead of producing maybe one article every week or two because, you know, life is crazy busy, what is happening is I'm pretty much getting an article per day.
And I found the virtual assistant on a website called Onlinejobs.ph. She is an excellent writer from the Philippines and I did pay for some unity courses and some training for her. So she was more of an academic writer when I found her. But now she is actually has taken the courses that I've given her and it's been really good because she's learned about blogging and SEO and is able to implement some of the lifetime deals that I bought like Frege, she takes content briefs that I generate from that and writes really good articles for me. So she's writing for all of our blogs right now and we're getting a blog a day. The problem that I ran into there, which I know a lot of people run into with scaling with anything, is that since she was creating so much work, I now had more work. I had to justify paying her by giving her articles to write. Otherwise she'd be sitting there doing nothing and I'd be paying for nothing.
So in producing more work, I created more work for myself and I kind of find myself in this loop where I'm. The more I try to remove myself from the process by getting more people involved, the more work I'm getting for myself because I have to find something to keep them busy. So I have to find enough content for the writer to pursue and to write, which is great, because I get, like I said, tons more content out there and more opportunity to try and reach people to try and help people and to try and get more money into the business.
What I then found was the problem was not only did I need to find more articles for her to write, but I also had more articles to promote. So my Missinglettr program that I used to schedule a social post for the next year that was getting backlogged over the Pinterest pins, the writers is also very good at creating Pinterest pins. So all of the pins that she was creating for these articles was also in backlog. I didn't have time to go into Tailwind, which I used to schedule out the pins and get that cleaned out.
So I had a backlog of articles. None of the articles were getting seen because as I've discussed in the past, SEO takes time. And in order to justify the writer long enough to get SEO to pick up, you still have to get your content out there in some way. And the ways that I did it to get it out there wasn't really working because I didn't have time to promote the articles. So my solution was to hire another virtual assistant, which again took some training.
She's awesome at what she does. She's writing the transcript for this episode. So that's awesome that I have somebody doing that as well. But another problem that I had was I need to get enough content produced for this person to promote, she came in and within a week cleaned out the backlog and then now I just have one article per day coming from my writer. And that's not really enough to keep somebody busy for eight hours a day and justify that expense.
So what I've been doing is speaking articles on the way to and from my house on my commute to my job. And in that way, I'm kind of taking what would otherwise be dead time commuting, listening to the same songs over and over again on the radio, which I still do on occasion. Don't get me wrong, it's still fun to listen to music, but I've been trying to utilize a little bit more of that time to be productive.
And in doing so, I just talk an article to my phone and then I upload it to Happy Scribe. And then my new VA is transcribing that, not translating, transcribing that for me. And then I just basically take what is transcribed and put it into an article form. And then not only am I giving her work with the transcriptions, but then she also has more content to promote.
So in hiring these two new people who have been amazing assets to my business, I've been forced to be more productive myself. I have to keep on a schedule. I have to go into Ora, which is the program that I use for project management, and see what I have to do each day. So before with the writer, I would find content for a week and then I'd go about my day doing whatever I wanted, you know, business wise for the rest of the week. But what's happening now is I have to go it every day and I have to make sure that not only does my writer have stuff, but the promoter has stuff, has things to transcribe and articles to promote the social media through Missinglettr and through pins.
So I've had to get to go into the project management tool and it's keeping me reliable. It's keeping me on track and on point. Um, I've been working a lot on my affiliate marketing course. If you want to check it out, then there'll be a link in the show notes because it's the main point of it is it's going to show you how to make your first dollar online in affiliate marketing, and it's going to hopefully teach you how to get to your first $10,000, which I was able to do last year.
And I've already double that amount this year. So it's been a pretty good year so far. Um, but we're only halfway through. So, I mean, um, the point of all this is that I've been talking, um, for transcription purposes, recording my voice on some of the lessons that I'm going to put into that course. So it's been keeping, you know, the writer, the writer busy and it's been keeping well, I guess in that case, I've been the writer.
I've been speaking the the lessons, but it's been keeping the promoter busy as well. So that's that's been making me be productive. I guess there's no slacking or I'm losing money on this. So I don't know if you can afford virtual assistant. So I'm going to put my affiliate link for onlinejobs.ph in the description below, because there are a lot of amazing workers from the Philippines. I read the book that the guy wrote who runs that website first.
And then of course, that was a lead, a lead funnels into signing up for a monthly fee for the onlinejobs.ph. But, um, I only pay for the 1 month find my person and then cancel, which he suggests is what you do anyways. But, um, if you want to see a good book Funnel in action, that one worked because it got me into this platform. But if you do have enough money to hire one, I mean, it does keep you on point.
It keeps you working. And, um, like I said, it's my business is growing exponentially now because I'm putting out 2 to 3 pieces of content per day, whether it's for the course or whether it's for, you know, the blogs I'm forced to produce. And it's going to be very great in the long run once SEO starts picking up on some of these articles and we can just exponentially grow from there. I will caution, though, that you want to make sure that you can afford people because you don't want to hire people and then have to fire them because you don't have enough money in your business.
Just like anything, it takes time for things to work themselves out, to grow and develop. I won't say that I'm making money back on my virtual assistance right now, but I know that the future value is immense because I have all this content that's going to go out there and is going to eventually explode my business. It just takes time. SEO takes time. I'm used to things taking time, but I reached a point in my business where I was able to support the cost of the VA's off of my other affiliate income.
So I have enough affiliate income coming in automatically that I'm able to pay them. And I don't have any issues with that because I know it's an investment in the future of the business. Just like everything that I do. I pretty much put everything that I make back into the business right now because I'm trying to reach that point where I can just kind of sit back and let it make money. But first, it was investing in lifetime deals to save time and money on software and processes.
So I didn't have to hire people. But then I realized that I can take these lifetime softwares and give people access to them. And then I don't even need to run the lifetime software. It's just the next phase in my development. I kind of wanted to let you guys know where I've been, what I've been doing, kind of how it relates to affiliate marketing and of course, that I'm starting the affiliate marketing course.
If you're listening to this right now, the course is a dollar. So seriously, link down in the description, if you want to learn about affiliate marketing, it's no nonsense. I'm trying to make it as quick and concise as possible. I'd love for you to sign up and take the course that one time be of a dollar and you get lifetime access to the course and all updates.
Why is it a dollar right now? Well, I can't really charge much for it because it's just one section of text. I'm still writing out the plans basically for each of the lessons and I don't have any video yet.
But I would like to get people in reading the content and seeing if it's helpful and getting feedback for that. So again, link in the description. If you want to check out that, I'll link to the other resources in this episode. I hope to see you on the inside of the course and as always, Keep Funnelin'.
I guess you could say, um, what I've been exploring is hiring virtual assistants. So I know I've talked about that a little bit in the past. Some of the things that we started with was another deal with a zip recruiter where we created five articles for them. I actually wrote those five articles this time, but what I did was I outsourced it to a virtual assistant. They did the videos for fairly cheap. They did an excellent job.
And that was me, again, experimenting with other people's time. I know I did an episode on other people's time, but it works really well and I'm really, really enjoying it. The more that I move forward because I get so much more done.
What my process has become is that in April I decided to hire a virtual assistant full time to be a writer for us. So instead of producing maybe one article every week or two because, you know, life is crazy busy, what is happening is I'm pretty much getting an article per day.
And I found the virtual assistant on a website called Onlinejobs.ph. She is an excellent writer from the Philippines and I did pay for some unity courses and some training for her. So she was more of an academic writer when I found her. But now she is actually has taken the courses that I've given her and it's been really good because she's learned about blogging and SEO and is able to implement some of the lifetime deals that I bought like Frege, she takes content briefs that I generate from that and writes really good articles for me. So she's writing for all of our blogs right now and we're getting a blog a day. The problem that I ran into there, which I know a lot of people run into with scaling with anything, is that since she was creating so much work, I now had more work. I had to justify paying her by giving her articles to write. Otherwise she'd be sitting there doing nothing and I'd be paying for nothing.
So in producing more work, I created more work for myself and I kind of find myself in this loop where I'm. The more I try to remove myself from the process by getting more people involved, the more work I'm getting for myself because I have to find something to keep them busy. So I have to find enough content for the writer to pursue and to write, which is great, because I get, like I said, tons more content out there and more opportunity to try and reach people to try and help people and to try and get more money into the business.
What I then found was the problem was not only did I need to find more articles for her to write, but I also had more articles to promote. So my Missinglettr program that I used to schedule a social post for the next year that was getting backlogged over the Pinterest pins, the writers is also very good at creating Pinterest pins. So all of the pins that she was creating for these articles was also in backlog. I didn't have time to go into Tailwind, which I used to schedule out the pins and get that cleaned out.
So I had a backlog of articles. None of the articles were getting seen because as I've discussed in the past, SEO takes time. And in order to justify the writer long enough to get SEO to pick up, you still have to get your content out there in some way. And the ways that I did it to get it out there wasn't really working because I didn't have time to promote the articles. So my solution was to hire another virtual assistant, which again took some training.
She's awesome at what she does. She's writing the transcript for this episode. So that's awesome that I have somebody doing that as well. But another problem that I had was I need to get enough content produced for this person to promote, she came in and within a week cleaned out the backlog and then now I just have one article per day coming from my writer. And that's not really enough to keep somebody busy for eight hours a day and justify that expense.
So what I've been doing is speaking articles on the way to and from my house on my commute to my job. And in that way, I'm kind of taking what would otherwise be dead time commuting, listening to the same songs over and over again on the radio, which I still do on occasion. Don't get me wrong, it's still fun to listen to music, but I've been trying to utilize a little bit more of that time to be productive.
And in doing so, I just talk an article to my phone and then I upload it to Happy Scribe. And then my new VA is transcribing that, not translating, transcribing that for me. And then I just basically take what is transcribed and put it into an article form. And then not only am I giving her work with the transcriptions, but then she also has more content to promote.
So in hiring these two new people who have been amazing assets to my business, I've been forced to be more productive myself. I have to keep on a schedule. I have to go into Ora, which is the program that I use for project management, and see what I have to do each day. So before with the writer, I would find content for a week and then I'd go about my day doing whatever I wanted, you know, business wise for the rest of the week. But what's happening now is I have to go it every day and I have to make sure that not only does my writer have stuff, but the promoter has stuff, has things to transcribe and articles to promote the social media through Missinglettr and through pins.
So I've had to get to go into the project management tool and it's keeping me reliable. It's keeping me on track and on point. Um, I've been working a lot on my affiliate marketing course. If you want to check it out, then there'll be a link in the show notes because it's the main point of it is it's going to show you how to make your first dollar online in affiliate marketing, and it's going to hopefully teach you how to get to your first $10,000, which I was able to do last year.
And I've already double that amount this year. So it's been a pretty good year so far. Um, but we're only halfway through. So, I mean, um, the point of all this is that I've been talking, um, for transcription purposes, recording my voice on some of the lessons that I'm going to put into that course. So it's been keeping, you know, the writer, the writer busy and it's been keeping well, I guess in that case, I've been the writer.
I've been speaking the the lessons, but it's been keeping the promoter busy as well. So that's that's been making me be productive. I guess there's no slacking or I'm losing money on this. So I don't know if you can afford virtual assistant. So I'm going to put my affiliate link for onlinejobs.ph in the description below, because there are a lot of amazing workers from the Philippines. I read the book that the guy wrote who runs that website first.
And then of course, that was a lead, a lead funnels into signing up for a monthly fee for the onlinejobs.ph. But, um, I only pay for the 1 month find my person and then cancel, which he suggests is what you do anyways. But, um, if you want to see a good book Funnel in action, that one worked because it got me into this platform. But if you do have enough money to hire one, I mean, it does keep you on point.
It keeps you working. And, um, like I said, it's my business is growing exponentially now because I'm putting out 2 to 3 pieces of content per day, whether it's for the course or whether it's for, you know, the blogs I'm forced to produce. And it's going to be very great in the long run once SEO starts picking up on some of these articles and we can just exponentially grow from there. I will caution, though, that you want to make sure that you can afford people because you don't want to hire people and then have to fire them because you don't have enough money in your business.
Just like anything, it takes time for things to work themselves out, to grow and develop. I won't say that I'm making money back on my virtual assistance right now, but I know that the future value is immense because I have all this content that's going to go out there and is going to eventually explode my business. It just takes time. SEO takes time. I'm used to things taking time, but I reached a point in my business where I was able to support the cost of the VA's off of my other affiliate income.
So I have enough affiliate income coming in automatically that I'm able to pay them. And I don't have any issues with that because I know it's an investment in the future of the business. Just like everything that I do. I pretty much put everything that I make back into the business right now because I'm trying to reach that point where I can just kind of sit back and let it make money. But first, it was investing in lifetime deals to save time and money on software and processes.
So I didn't have to hire people. But then I realized that I can take these lifetime softwares and give people access to them. And then I don't even need to run the lifetime software. It's just the next phase in my development. I kind of wanted to let you guys know where I've been, what I've been doing, kind of how it relates to affiliate marketing and of course, that I'm starting the affiliate marketing course.
If you're listening to this right now, the course is a dollar. So seriously, link down in the description, if you want to learn about affiliate marketing, it's no nonsense. I'm trying to make it as quick and concise as possible. I'd love for you to sign up and take the course that one time be of a dollar and you get lifetime access to the course and all updates.
Why is it a dollar right now? Well, I can't really charge much for it because it's just one section of text. I'm still writing out the plans basically for each of the lessons and I don't have any video yet.
But I would like to get people in reading the content and seeing if it's helpful and getting feedback for that. So again, link in the description. If you want to check out that, I'll link to the other resources in this episode. I hope to see you on the inside of the course and as always, Keep Funnelin'.