If you are thinking about building your mailing list, doing the proper way is always to best thing to do.
So how do you do it and why is it important?
Find out from List Build and Lead Generation expert Jennie Wright.
2:23 How Jennie started with list-building
12:23 list-building for Instagram influencers
40:37 how to get into summits as a speaker
http://jenniewright.com/challenge
Transcript:
Hey guys, Megan here. Thank you so much for joining me today. This talk is going to be pretty fun because I need to learn a lot about what she’s about to teach us. I am here with Jenny, right. She is an online marketing strategist, list builder and lead generation expert. She’s also the creator of List Building 2.0, her own successful system of building your list through attraction and permission, marketing, leveraging over fifteen years of marketing, communications and branding experience for her clients.
Disney firmly believes that if you live your life with passion and transparency, you will create lifelong success. Having managed over two hundred and eighty online list builds for her clients, Disney is a passionate believer in organic, authentic list building techniques for her clients and mentors them through the process from start to finish. And she’s going to tell us how to stop sucking at less building. So, Jenny, thank you so much for being here. I’m so stupidly thankful that you are here, all things.
And I mean, we’ve talked before and so we’ve got a bit of a report, which is great. But yeah, we’re going to have a good time.
Belova So let’s start at the beginning. A very good place to start. How the hell did you decide that list building is your jam and that’s where you’re going to go into all the way completely by accident.
Completely by accident. I left corporate, I was, I was so bummed out, I felt really, really low and I didn’t know what to do. And the only thing I could figure out was there was fiber. Right. Fiber back in the day, which was and so I, I ended up putting out gigs on fiber to help people with data research and all this kind of stuff. And this this woman reach out to me and she’s like, yeah, I need help finding speakers for a summit.
I like research. I got this right. It’s off I went.
I started researching for these speakers for this event. I never I didn’t even know what a summit was. And so I kind of watched her put it together from the side of the research side. It was fascinating. So I decided I would start trying to do some odds. And she invited me into this coaching group that this woman was hosting. And by the end of the year, I had thirty eight clients from this sub. Oh my God.
Was this an online seminar in person? Online. Online. So there was this there was this really big like she’s she’s got a lot of notoriety. There’s really big coach. And the woman that I was working with was one of her employees.
And her employee was helping one of the people in the group, what I didn’t know is that a lot of the people in this group, this coaching group, were not technically savvy. And I was I just came out of corporate, but in that corporate job, I had done marketing communications, I had like rebranded I build websites and stuff like that. So I had some I had a little bit of knowhow and the stuff they were doing really easy for me.
So I was like, I could do this. And I was I was charging stupid small prices, like, honestly, really, really, really, really inexpensive.
And what was fascinating was, is that everybody was like, I need your help. I need your help, I need your help. And it was just referral three for a referrals. So my whole business started literally from a five dollar gain on fiber and just kind of went from there.
And then there were some hardship that came up real quick, real quick, which was the way that certain people are building the list was not authentic. They were going for the, you know, catch everything in the net sort of aspect, which was I want everybody. I want everybody I can possibly get. And then I know that half my list is going to be dumped as soon as I start emailing them. But I don’t care. And I’m going to make an offer to them and I’m just going to basically roll my eyes in the back of my head.
Chop, chop, chop. And I’m just going to see what I could get. I felt very inauthentic and really upsetting to me, but my partner and I had this like, you know what they say, like a come to Jesus moment.
That was right between right between American Thanksgiving and Christmas. I think of like twenty fourteen. And we had this moment. We’re like, oh my God, we can’t do this anymore. We can’t we just can’t do it this way. And so we developed a different way.
We talked it out for hours and hours and we developed this like was Building 2.0, which was supposed to be high authenticity, high connection, only going for the clients you actually want really super neat in all these different kinds of things in terms of making sure that it was like you were going for the right people, which was seating you.
Really, if you think of the time, money, effort, anguish, unsubscribes, I think all those all the things that, you know, we really should be focusing on.
And it caught on.
Clearly, I mean, you are a list building champ, the just seeing and then this is audio for but seeing Jenny’s face light up when she talks about just the authentic side of it. And when you were talking about these people who they just want to do buckshot and just throw and see who sticks and who doesn’t like I had to when I was in corporate, I had to fight so many battles about we’re not buying a list. We’re not doing that.
It’s not helpful. It’s it’s outdated. The email address is most likely won’t work. These people are going to be so pissed off, I would be pissed off.
How did you get my email? What is going on?
And I it was I don’t know why that is still a trope. Do you still have to fight that with clients? 100 percent. Really? 100 percent? Not all the time. I’d say maybe about twenty five percent of the time. This is a situation that comes up where people had these preconceived notions when they’re coming into being and building an online business.
So they think that’s the way they need to go. And there’s a bit of deprogramming that has to happen sometimes for those particular people.
They catch on real quick, most of them, and that’s great. But there’s still this mentality and it’s it’s bizarre because you have to wonder where it’s coming from. Yeah. You wonder where that trope sort of continues to exist in the year that we’re in, in the state of the business that we’re in and almost everything like that. I wonder where that mentality sort of comes from. But mostly it’s honestly from people who just don’t know anyone for show.
And once it’s explained, they’re good with it. But there is a small subset that are like, oh, heck, no, I just want you know, I want the easy road. I want to be able to do this like that particular way, because the way that I’m talking is building with authenticity and transparency in those different kinds of ways actually does take a little bit more work and a little bit more planning.
And if you can do a little bit more work and a little bit more planning, you’ll have a better result at the end. So it’s worth it. You have to do it right, Brame.
And that’s the hardest part of all. Just getting that part started before we go into the lowest building part. And your tips, I wanted to touch on something you had mentioned just out of my own morbid curiosity. You said that you were not charging enough when you started.
Do you do you think that that was just you didn’t know you weren’t charging enough or were you afraid you were charging of your skills?
What what made you kind of realize? Like, I am not fulfilling my value. I didn’t realize my value at the time when I was coming into this, I really didn’t have a way of figuring out what the value was of the service I was providing. And I was coming from this mentality of dollars for hours, which was true. How many hours would it take me to complete this event, like building up a summit in the background, contacting speakers?
If I was doing that, doing all the technical pieces, the coaching of the client. Right. How many hours would that take me and what was my hourly price? And if you remember, I was starting off on fiber, so my hourly rate at the beginning was eleven dollars an hour. Like crazy, what a deal those people got. Holy shit. Yeah, for the first time, it’s I did charge three hundred dollars. Wow. Three hundred dollars.
And I didn’t know how long it was going to take me. I didn’t know the extent of the work. So if I was factoring in the amount of time it was taking me and how much I was charging per hour, I was actually really not making enough. So as the demand grew, yeah, I did raise my price and as I actually got good things. So there was another thing, though. I did worry that I was so beginner and I was learning this like the first two summits I did, I was very open and honest and said, I know about as much as you.
I just happened to be better at Tech than you, so I can do this for you. But with like all the other stuff I was I was learning as they were learning. So like I said, they were in this coaching class and my clients were giving me access to the coaching materials.
So I was cramming.
Learning as much as I possibly could about what this particular person was saying in this particular coaching course, and then I was trying to apply it and I was doing tons of research on the side, you know, summits were still not a huge thing. Technically, there wasn’t a lot written about them. People weren’t talking about them as much. And back then they were a catch. All right. And kind of everything. It was like the Wild West.
Everything went, everything went. You know, you put out a crappy summit with a crappy dinner and a crappy page and crappy video and you get five thousand people. And, yeah, you do that now, you’ll get nothing. Right.
So I definitely wasn’t charging my with my prices have gone up obviously over the years. And obviously I’ve had I’ve added more skill and stuff. But yeah, I also I was so heartbroken from my experience and how everything happened when I did leave corporate that I myself worthless in the tank. And that’s why I was willing to do five year gigs. That’s why I was at one point you you’re listening to a press conference and the person says, hi, we have so-and-so from CBC News.
Your line is open. You may not speak. Well, that was me.
I did.
Because and it honestly, it paid twelve dollars an hour. What was doing that? Because when I left corporate, I had no idea what to do with my life and I didn’t know what I was doing. And it just took time. You know, a lot of people now they leave their job or whatever their job is. They come right into this online business and they’re charging a hundred bucks an hour. Have added sister. Right. I couldn’t do it.
Yeah, I. You resonating with exactly my own story. So, like, I can completely understand just the fear of like, well, I could I could do this in corporate, but I don’t think I can do this for somebody else.
I think that I need like, hey, this isn’t me. And then just realizing, oh, actually this is me and I’m actually really good at this. So let’s let’s start with a couple of scenarios for this building.
So let’s say first I want to be an Instagram influencer. What the hell do I need a list for and how do I start doing something like that?
That’s an incredible question. And the funny part about that is, is prior to I’d say twenty, twenty, twenty, nineteen, a lot of the influencers or just being influencers.
But what we saw is we saw this huge transition in late twenty, nineteen and all through twenty twenty for a lot of reasons that they were starting to pull the people off and get them into this building.
Here’s why I if you have a YouTube account and YouTube decides to freeze you for whatever reason, some terms of service thing that you don’t even know what happened, then you’re losing contact with your base. And if that’s how you’re making your money, good luck to you. Right. Same with Instagram. Same with Facebook. There are some big names and even my industry who were frozen out of their Facebook business accounts, like their accounts in twenty nineteen and twenty twenty.
If they didn’t have a list, there was no other way for them to make money because they couldn’t advertise. Right. So for whatever reason and some of those people like there’s people like a guy named Dan Henry as an example, his entire Facebook account was completely shut down. He had no way of promoting, no way of doing ads. And I know it took him like more than six months before he could do anything right before he got his account back or changed his account or whatever happened.
Stories like that are literally happening a lot, a lot more than people even know. And so you need to have a list of people you can connect with. You need to have a list of people that, you know, at any time you can send an email to connect and also make a timely offer. The other thing is. We all read our emails from the people that we actually felt like I will open and read Lululemon emails. I love Lululemon.
I will read them right. There’s other entrepreneurs that I will open their emails and I will read every single word because I want to. There’s other ones that go into my little spam box and I’ll deal with them later.
When your email and your people, the chances of people actually seeing your email are a lot better than if you just post a story on Instagram. If you’ve got two hundred thousand followers on Instagram, a million followers, whatever, on Instagram, not everybody’s going to see that post. Right. You’re going to post a heck of a lot, a lot of energy. I can send out one email to a list of.
I don’t know, three thousand people make a timely offer and creating kind of my business and for my life and my, you know, without having to do six or seven, 10, 15 different posts. Right. I can do that. An email list allows me to do that and allows me to do it on my time when it fits for me. And yes, I build my social media and yes, I build all those other channels, but I’m always constantly focused on the health and well-being of my email list.
How do you recommend people start getting subscribers into their funnel for newsletters? What is and I know that that is a really broad question, so feel free to attack it, whatever you want.
But think of it like we have service-based people. We have product these people. We have people in the middle of that. And just is there a way that authenticity runs through all of those different things? Does that make sense?
I don’t think I actually Megan I totally got you. I know what you’re trying to say. So we’re best friends, right?
I got you what you’re trying. So I think the point you’re trying to make is how are we getting people into our lives authentically? How does somebody either potentially start that or continue it? There’s a couple of ways. Right. So your ideal client is on a journey now. Your journey, you is the entrepreneur or a completely different journey. Your journey looks a lot different than your ideal client. Your ideal client is trying to find love, lose weight, do more yoga, meditate, get healing, heal past trauma, whatever their journey is and wherever they are on that particular road, you need to be at the right spot at the right time.
This building, technically, in some ways, and this is going to sound a little bit mean, has nothing to do with you, has everything to do with your ideal client where they are. So you need to serve them at that particular moment. So what you’re going to be absolutely doing is you’re going to be looking at creating lead magnets or downloads, PDF downloads, guides, tips, tricks, those different kinds of things that serve him at the moment that they’re in creates some sort of a change or an opportunity for growth.
Right within the thing that you’re giving them, it helps them in some intrinsic and very detailed way, and then later on you’re going to be able to communicate with that person, those people on your email list and make a timely offer. Right.
So that could be depending on your audience, because that was a broad question. So depending on your audience, that could be a PDF download. Depending on your audience. That could be a three part video series. Depending on your audience. That could be a one hour on repeat webinar. And I guess that could be a monthly challenge that you do on Instagram and offer prizes from right. It also could be something like a quiz. I love quizzes.
Who doesn’t love a quiz? Who didn’t who didn’t open up a seventeen magazine?
I’m dating myself here. Who didn’t open a magazine. Right. Or even do it now and take a quiz to figure out what you know, where you should travel or what job you should do or who you should fall in love with. Like we all did those quizzes. People still love that quiz quizzes are amazing because they actually sub. Segment your audience for you, which is great, and it allows you to say, wow, you love the Color Purple, if you love the Color Purple, then you’re really going to love this or you love the color green because you love the color green and you’re definitely this person and you need this.
Right.
So. I hope that answers the question. Absolutely, and I think that you bring up a good point that we can segway into with in terms of segmenting people and on boarding, someone gets on your list, they get their lead, that their challenge, their whatever. What do you recommend people do next to keep that conversation going? Absolutely, and that’s a huge thing because a lot of people say, well, I had my my PDF download and they registered for Megan and then nothing happened.
Well, duh, they registered for it. And then what did you do with them? How did you support them afterwards? So there’s this thing that we do where it’s a bunch of emails, seven, eight or even nine emails. Don’t worry, they don’t be super long, seven or eight, nine miles. And that nurture sequence, as we call it, helps indoctrinate your new lead into the world of Megan. All right. I love plants.
I, I love candles, cool picture frames. I’m looking at the stuff in your room right now. You live the color green.
You know, you’re into this and that. Like, you had to be really authentic in those emails because what you don’t want to happen is you don’t want to present yourself as this great shiny thing and perfect and all polished and then in your other communications and your Facebook lives and whatever else you’re doing to connect with those people, that you’re a different person, they have to be the same. So then nurture sequence email is like, hey, look, Minhas, hey, I want to get to know you better.
And I can’t wait to understand more about your business. But first, let me tell you a little bit about me. Let’s see if we jive and I’ll give them a bit of information. Like I love baking muffins at a moment’s notice. I love plants. Can you tell me and I’ll tell them a little bit about myself so that if they ever see anything from me, they’re like, oh, yeah, that’s Jenny. She likes to bake muffins and oh, that’s Jenny.
She loves she loves to have plants. Right. So there’s there’s this congruency and we get them into the Jenny train, we indoctrinate them into the Jenny train and then I’m bringing them along. Right. So they they download the PDF to solve a problem. My communications with them, they’re on board, are putting them in front of other things that would solve or help that problem. All right, that makes sense in their journey so that when the time is right and that time is different for everybody and I know I’ve said that a couple of times, but when the time is right, you can make a good offer.
That offer might be right away. That offer might be in two weeks. It really depends. And you’re don’t have to sort of figure that out. It’s all it’s a lot of it is trial and error.
Going to be honest with you.
You had mentioned like, OK, this person knows I like plants. And they let’s say that they got here because they like the color green and green and plants and now they’re into this nursery sequence.
How do you recommend to you keep people separate all the time? Do you keep purple separate from green all of the time, or do you eventually funnel them all into one list?
Good one. I, I’m very specific.
Like we were talking about that quiz where if you like The Color Purple, if you like the color green now you can change that and say if you want to follow the Kyoto diet or if you want to follow a plant based diet from this quiz. Right.
Or if you know, if you want to grow your podcast or if you want to grow your clubhouse as an example. So I keep them separate because the people who are interested in clubhouses should only get information about clubhouse. And the people who want to learn about growing their podcast should only get information about running their podcast. However, I will send some blanket emails. For some things that make sense, they’re very they’re very rare, right, so I don’t like to carpet bomb my list because they’ve already self-identified and the people who they self-identified are not going to want to hear about clubhouse if they only want to hear about podcasting as an example.
Right. So the carpet bomb email should only be used very sparingly and it should only be used when you know that there’s something that’s intrinsically shared by both groups or however many groups. And that could be the fact that you’re hosting a new online summit as an example and you’d like to invite them to participate and be a participant in it, because there’s something there for everybody in your niche. Right, versus the fact that maybe I’ve got a brand new podcasting course coming out and so I will only advertise that to the people who I’ve identified in that way.
So I do keep it very separate.
I use I use a software called Active Campaign, and most software can do this email marketing software. By the way, they you can create tagging and segmentation. And if you haven’t started doing tagging and segmentation yet, start now. Better time was yesterday. As time is today, go for it. And you just start by segmenting if you’ve never segmented your last great time during a quiz or survey. Yes.
Surveying your people to find out what they want, get them to self identify and put themselves into groups and then survey the groups at exactly the right time with exactly what they want. And you’re getting a lot more success and a lot less unsubscribes.
And your open rate is going to go so much higher if you’re so good when you send an email and it’s like I have a 30 percent open. Thirty eight percent open rate today, like that happened to my partner last week because he’s so Neshin and he sends only the rates like he’s only talking to the people who want the information that he’s sharing. Those open rate is massive and he gets people clicking links and doing all the things right. So that feels really good.
It feels really crappy when you send an email and you a 10 percent open rate, like, what do they do? They don’t love me anymore. And six people or 10 people or 15 people unsubscribe.
That feels crappy to. If you do the segmentation, less unsubscribes, more open rates, more clickthrough, better chance of actually getting people to do the thing you want, whatever it is. Right. That’s so fascinating and the question that comes into my head with that is how do you keep that all going regularly? So say you have three different segments. How do you recommend for your clients they handle, let’s say, weekly emails or things like that?
Do you have them front load everything and have it like an automated system or do you do everything? Every Friday we get a new update about blog posts and offers and things like that.
That depends on the client. I will say, and it really does depend on their audience and their audience kind of responds and reacts, what I will what I will say is that some of my clients who have the segmentation will send what we call a weekly round up, which is sort of a.
It is a little bit of a carpet bomb, you know, it is an email which goes to everybody and it’s like here’s what’s been happening this week and here’s what might interest you then.
It’s the the subject specific emails that come out on a timely basis that are only going to the particular segments. Right. So there’s no problem.
There really is no problem with sending a little bit of a weekly round up. I do them right. And when you’re first beginning, you don’t have to have 30 segments. You can and nobody should have 30 segments. Can I be honest? You should put that means you’re not nation. All right. So don’t do that. But if you can have, you know, four.
For segments like I have, I have less building lead generation, and I think the last one I have is like podcasting. Because my podcast with my co-host, Alison Lines, and then Alison and I have a separate list just for the stuff that we do for what we do, the system to thrive stuff.
So technically, I have four segments and that’s it. And I don’t even want more than that. I mean, I’ve been doing this since twenty twelve.
I don’t want any more like Novick’s. So what I’m hearing you say, that is it’s best to kind of set up a drip campaign for these segments, would you say? That’s right, yeah, I like campaigns.
I think that’s a I think it’s a good thing. I think getting people into your I think getting people into your list the proper way is the first step. But in terms of email marketing, if you want if you want to make sure that people are getting the right information, your campaigns work, if you like, drip so to automations and so do weekly campaigns that you just write and send. So I’m a little bit of a procrastinator and I’m also a like I’m one of those people who acts on inspiration so stupidly.
My inspiration comes at ten, forty five at night.
I don’t know why and sometimes it sucks, but that’s usually when it’s like six o’clock in the morning, one of the two, it’s never in the middle of the day. How about it. So whatever that is, I play into it, I write my email, I get this in SEO and then that’s my email for my weekly round up. It is very challenging for me to preplan those. The only time I have pre planning and I do this a lot, however, is when I’m launching my at the time of this recording, I’m launching a challenge.
I’m in the process of launching a challenge. And I have six emails that are currently written that I’ve I’ve loaded in and will only be going to the people who self-identified as people who are interested in this building, because the whole challenge is about this building. So it’s going to only them. It’s not going to the people who listen to my podcast as they that’s more general group and it’s not going to the people who are interested in other things. It’s only going to the list building people, because those are the people that I want to target.
So, yeah, when it’s a launch, that’s a different it’s a different story altogether. I have prepared content and I highly recommend it for everything else.
It tends to kind of happen when I feel like the inspiration hitting me.
Fair enough then. I mean, that’s when the power happens and that’s something that happens. It’s why I fight it.
I, I have like 16 million more questions about list building and I know everyone else’s. But let’s get to summits because I am super interested in what you have to say about summits.
We had a conversation with Ben Dell from Missinglettr Energy Summit, who runs the summit software.
And so I have been so intrigued by the concept of creating a summit myself. But also I know a lot of people listening have to because I get emails about it a lot.
So let’s talk summits. Let’s talk.
What is it? How do you do this? What kind of expectations did you have for on? OK, all right, board questions, I love these. All right, I’m going to, like, pull all the stuff. So if you don’t know what a summit is, let’s start there. The summit is an online event where there’s any number of experts. It could be five experts, 15 experts or 50 experts where you as the host. I’m going to say Megan is the host on this.
Megan is the host and she’s going to prerecord interviews or presentations with all of her experts. She’s going to be doing this for about 60, maybe 90 days prior to it actually launching. And then she’s going to launch it at a specific time. Let’s just say it’s going to launch in May. It’s going to launch me for a second and third. Then the interviews are dripped out over those couple of days and Megan is working on creating some interest around that prior to the launch.
There’s a period called the promotional period, which is when Megan and her experts are promoting the event. The goal of the summit is to build your list. And the way that we do it is we’re relying on our experts who we’ve now interviewed and are in the process with us to promote it on our behalf. They go to their email list, they go to their social media and they say, hey, I am an expert with Megan and she’s doing this really great online event and you just got to check it out.
It’s about ABC and Z. They tell their list, they tell their social people, go to a landing page, which Megan as the host has created, and they often. Once they locked it in, now they’re in Megan marketing software and they’re part of her email list. So online event, prerecorded interviews, experts help us promote to get more exposure, the host receives the list and the host runs everything. And you can usually see yourself working on one of these for about three to four months.
That’s tech. That’s typically the amount of time that I work with among clients or with clients. Sorry. And the results are varied depending on your needs. Like I have I have a summit right now. I’m running with a whole team in Romania. Supercool, it’s this my client, it’s her first foray into English language business, she has an incredibly successful business in Italian, an incredibly successful business in Romanian, and now she’s hitting the English market.
So her husband actually, at the time of this recording is launching in a week, not even a week, it’s like four days and she’s got thousands of people registered. She’s made over ten thousand dollars just alone on VIP packages, which you can do in a sign that you can sell a VIP package, make some cash. And she’s doing amazing. Other summits have different results. I’ve done the summits for people who are into healing different kinds of healing modalities.
That those kinds of summits tend to have a little bit of a smaller response, so it’s a thousand people maybe registered for it and they made two or three thousand dollars still awesome because get this, a summit creates what I call a list injection. Right. So if you if you if you promoted a PDF without Facebook ads and you did it for a whole year, you still wouldn’t get a thousand people to join your list, probably because it just takes a lot of time and effort to get that many people to sign up.
But in 90 days, if you can get eight hundred a thousand fifteen hundred or two thousand people to join your list, Kylie Nehushtan, let’s be specific and then you get to market to them for the rest of the year. Hello. It’s a great opportunity. Right? And so summits do that for you. And if I can take the fear out of it, the only fear that people have in a summit is for the things that feel a little bit outside of their comfortability.
That’s being on video recording the tech. What do I do and the strategy. The only thing I want people to worry about is how good they’re going to look on camera, if that’s their thing and recording, and I want them to farm out the rest. There’s people like me who run some ads for a living. I do the strategy. I do the tech. You just have to find the experts and interview them. I got the rest right.
And I bring my people through the whole process. So it’s not as scary. If you’re going to do it on your own, then plan. Just plan it out. I want to launch it in May and work your way backwards. That’s the thing that people don’t do is they don’t work their way backwards. So it’s there’s some it’s live for a week or three or four a week from a period. Then you need the time to book on board and interview your experts.
So you’re looking at probably two and a half months there, because if not, it’s going to take over your life and we don’t need that. So all told, it could be 90 days and one hundred and twenty days. That’s on the on the top level, that’s what we’re looking at. First, I have a side question, which is you had mentioned advertize running Facebook ads for free PDF. Do you recommend people advertise to get people on their list for free?
I do, but only if they have an established audience already. So the next question going back to summits is how do you entice speakers? How do you get people interested in you, especially they never heard about you before? That is a perfect question.
And this is something I deal with all the time, because one of the biggest things is I’m a nobody. I’m just starting out. How is so-and-so who’s got twenty thousand people following them on Facebook or something? Why are they going to be interested in my son? That the answer is exposure. You’re going to get twenty to twenty five or thirty experts in a virtual room and they’re all going to get exposure to each other’s lists. So let me explain.
Megan is the host. I’m an expert and my friend Allison is also an expert. Megan, as the host has interviewed my friend Alison and I. And now we’re going to promote OK, people are going to join on the list. I’m able to, as an expert, get exposure to everybody else’s list on this summit by the method of offering a free gift. OK, so I do my interview with Megan and then Megan says, here’s this awesome interview with Jenny.
Right. And by the way, you can grab this free gift that she’s offering everybody at blah blah, blah, blah, blah, dotcom.
And as a result, everybody else on the summit who’s registered gets to see my free gift, OK? They get an opportunity to opt in. I’ve been on summits where I’ve added two, three or four hundred people to my list from one summit. It’s great. Now, I’ve for one hour of my time and a little bit of promotion, I just got 300 people on my list. Yes, please. I’ll do that all day long because those people are more highly connected than if I spend one hundred or two hundred or even a thousand dollars on Facebook at.
The other thing, and this is what’s great about summits these days, is they’re more highly connected. SEO Megan is the host will do things like networking panels. Well, the summit is happening or even during its promotional time, will do some really cool prizing or offers or different kinds of things to create connection and highlight her experts as the experts that they are through different lives, Facebook lives, Q&A sessions, things like that that can be built into your summit.
So it really creates a ton of exposure for the expert, which supersedes the I’m a nobody. Nobody knows who I am. And allows you to host an event like this and have some really big people on it. Will these big people usually say yes or do they expect payment for their time? I guess, but very I mean, I’ve been I had way back in the day, there was a really, really big guy in my space that I almost got on my summit.
His request was that I sell a hundred books for him. I was like, dude, I can’t do that, but I have, you know, good luck to you and you still big in the space, but I couldn’t do it most. First of all, never pay your expert money, ever. User free events. That’s just kind of the way it works. Don’t pay your experts. I do find that some of the big people do say yes, it’s all about communication and it’s all about the way that you approach them and how much time, if you approach an expert four weeks before your summit supposed to launch and say, hey, do you want to be in this?
People can be like, nah, I’m I’m busy. I’ve got other launches planned, which is why we plan so far out, you know, three or four months out so that you have the time to connect with these potential experts. I have people that I reached out to Maione summit is not going to at the time this recording. My summit is not going to launch until April. And I reached out to some people in November because they’re busy and I know they are.
And I said, I know I’m running it. I want you on it. I don’t have all the details yet, but I want you, like, no problem. So feel like I kind of got a little bit of their time.
Right. And that’s one method of doing it. So there’s there’s always a way around it. If you feel like a nobody, if you feel like nobody knows who you are, then just to get your first expert, I call there’s a difference in experts, right? There’s the the premier experts, the gurus. Then there’s what I call the the the worker bees. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean, it’s the people who will do the work, promote the thing, show up eager, happy to be part of it.
Those are the people that you go after first, right. To just kind of break the ice in your hole. I need to find experts thing because trying to reach after the big girls, it’s going to feel really demoralizing if you don’t get any. So get fired. You get the first five people in your summit feel good about what you’re doing. Get that. It’s almost like proof of concept. When they say yes, then you can go after other people.
That makes it easier. I think.
On the flip side of all of that, what about I want to be a speaker. How do I start getting into summits as a speaker? What have you seen as a successful route for people to take this?
That’s a really good question. And the easiest thing you can do right now is join Facebook groups that are specific to speakers. And you don’t pay me money to be a speaker. You don’t have to join a networking group and pay money. You don’t have to do any of that. There’s Facebook groups that allow you to do it and say, hey, I’m a brat. Hey, I’d be interested in speaking on your event. The best thing you can do is create basically a little bit of a one sheet.
It doesn’t have to be a big deal, but just kind of just go and Kenber and create a little bit of a one sheet and your name and your picture and a little bit of what you do in the talks that you can do pick for talks, not ten for talks about what it is that you can talk about and be very specific and.
Have that, and it’s not even something that you’re necessarily going to post right away, and I would suggest that you don’t, but you have it ready and you posted these Facebook groups that I was just talking about and say, hey, I’m looking to be a speaker on events now. There’s going to be some people who are going to be like, oh, what’s your list size? And if you don’t fit their preconceived idea of what the live shot size should be, they’re going to say no to you and that’s going to happen.
And it’s OK. There’s other people who don’t care about it and are willing to have you as a speaker on their own, regardless of your size, because they just want the people to speak about the right thing. If you had a small list and you still want to be a speaker, start growing your list. We talked about that a little bit earlier and do yourself a favor and get on podcasts. There’s a lot of people in the podcasting arena that don’t care about your listeners.
They care more about the content you can provide to the audience. And by being on podcasts, you’re going to hone your message. You’re going to get really good at that, you know, speaking your truth and speaking the thing and talking about it in a very eloquent and more storytelling style of way. And as a result, you’re priming yourself for being an expert on a summit and you’re going to be able to say, hey, I’d like to be an expert on your summit.
I was recently featured on this and this and this, and it gives you a little bit more gravitas.
So just just get started. I love that. And I love you. Got me thinking about OK, so podcasts.
But also what are your thoughts on like having a YouTube channel, running your YouTube channel so that you get the idea of being exposed on camera and like here’s a quick clip about me saying blah blah blah. Do you do you see that a lot in the space, too?
I don’t, but it’s a great idea. I don’t. So I find that a lot of the entrepreneurs that I work with are not using YouTube as a medium to get exposure, really. I do. It’s and it’s and it’s a medium that they should be using. It’s a medium that they’re leaving behind. It’s a medium I haven’t used at its full extent that I want to. For me, it’s been about timing. It’s been about the whole thing.
Yeah, it’s a whole thing. Yeah. And in twenty twenty I birthed with my co-host this, this podcast that we started together and that felt like a lot.
And now, you know, it went from one episode a week now to three episodes a week, crazy as it sounds, but you get used to it and now it’s like I’m going to add the YouTube channel and I will get used to it. But right now it’s like, do I actually want to take that on? So YouTube is a really good idea. I think it feels overwhelming.
That’s fair. And I can especially because you’re on clubhouse, you’re on Instagram, you are on a ton of platforms.
I can imagine your workload is banana sound.
Dear, but I’m really good at compartmentalizing.
I’m talking about this the other day with my co-host. We were talking about everything that’s on our list and I said, yeah, I’m I’m really good. I’m really good at compartmentalizing because I’ll be like from nine till 10:00. I’m working on a giveaway because I’m planning a giveaway in July. From this time to this time, I’m working on my son. It from this time to this time I’m working on because right now I have a challenge in promoting a summit that I’m working on, a giveaway, an offer.
And I’m already looking at my fulsom plus I have all my clients that I serve and take care of. Right. And I mean, yeah, wow. But at the same time, we all have something like that, your your container for being able to handle more increases.
The more you’re doing this in business, Jenny from seven years ago would be putting her pants right now and literally would be sobbing in a corner, rocking back and forth, praying somebody would give her a blanket and a cup of tea.
And Jenny now is like, yeah, I got this. It’s uncomfortable. And occasionally I want my blanket and a cup of tea, thank you. Can we still get blankets? Is that an offer that we offered? Blankets are good and we are pro we are pro blanket on this podcast. Yeah, we are pro blanket and we are pro T version. And but I can handle it more now. And I think that’s the difference. I’ve learned the techniques.
I made a huge mistake, massive mistake in my business. It pretty much broke me. And then that was what I was doing some of early on without really low price tag. I ended up getting clients and they all wanted someone to watch at the same time. So I had 18 clients at once. And I don’t know how I did it, Megan, I was up at six working from 7:00 until midnight on 18 different segments, I had a spreadsheet.
That my my partner made and it was like, did you do this, this, this, this, this? And it was literally because it’s mindless work at that point, because it’s just technical stuff.
But it was taking me that amount of time, the day it’s more than 12 hours.
It was like 15 hour days and it killed me and I’ll never do it again. But it did teach me how to literally handle this much work scaled back.
And I’m a lot better about it. But yeah, it was crazy time. That’s amazing.
I got I you deserve all the blankets, all the blankets in the world for that one.
It was it was insane. I’ll never do it again. It didn’t I didn’t mean for it to happen, but I was like I had that mentality that I couldn’t turn away work. Yeah. I couldn’t turn away work.
And these people all needed it. And they were like, can you do it? Can you do it? And I was like, yes, I can. Of course I can.
I don’t need to eat today or shower or sleep. And but I came from a culture. I used to work in a big box retail store and the culture there was you do it right. It was called needs of the business.
The needs of the business dictated at some times of the year for this particular company that you would work thirty six hours straight because you would do these things called inventory, where you would inventory the entire world to right you in literally the whole place.
It would take hours and hours, you’d get a couple hours of sleep and you’d come back and you’d keep doing it. And it was the needs of the business. When I came into doing my own business, I still had that mentality. The needs of the business dictated that I do this and everything else comes second. And I had to change that because honestly, there would not have been there would not have been a working, functioning Jenny anymore.
No, I can imagine the crash of that and the oh, my God, I can’t.
People on this podcast have heard repeatedly about my burnout. And so hearing that and the like, it makes my palms sweaty, thinking about it.
It’s just, oh, I’m so glad that you were able to dig yourself out of that.
Yeah, I was able to. I’m grateful that I was. It is in no small part to having a supportive partner who is like I you just can’t keep doing this anymore. If you do this, I help pick you up. I helped do all the things because they had to step in and do everything on the lifestyle of the of the person, you know, to take care of the food and the grocery shopping and all the other stuff. But it was not tenable.
It was not a situation that could have continued and I’ll never do it again.
The lessons that you have had to learn just sounds like you’re like a little Hallmark Lifetime movie, just of your inspiring trajectory up into the stratosphere of kick ass list builders.
Thank you. Yeah, it’s taken some effort.
And I if anybody can learn from my things and not do the same mistakes, then it’s worth talking about, right? Absolutely.
Well, we are getting close to time and I know people are going to ask questions about like when should I start selling on my list and when should I start doing this and this? And so I think this is all in your challenge, right?
Yep. So the challenge that I’m doing and at the time of this recording, depending on when this comes out, there still will be accountability for that. But yes, the challenge I’m doing is going to be covering is called the ideal prospect, attraction, ideal prospect, attraction, strategy, challenge. It’s got a good long name and it’s all about attracting your ideal client and how do we actually get in front of them and solve them. So there’s this building component in there and there’s a sales component.
How do people get it signed up for that, Jenny? Right. Dot com forward slash challenge. If the page says the challenge is closed, there’s going to be a beautiful little box on there. You can enter your name and email and the challenge will come up again really soon and I’ll notify you that it’s beautiful.
Well, what else should people know about before we get going?
Start now. Start small. Even if it means creating something in Canada and getting it out there, but just start now. Don’t wait until everything is completely perfect and is exactly the way you want it. I mean, I ran this business without a website for years, even though I shouldn’t have I should have had a website, but I didn’t. And I still managed to grow the business because if I had waited, I would never have gotten it done.
That’s just the kind of person I am. So get started now and do something, even if it’s small and keep testing out, because you know what? Not everything is going to work. I have had many failures before I received any success and I say that I received it because it’s. I didn’t get six hours, I received it from people because I finally dialed into exactly what they wanted and they bestowed upon me the fact that they would they would give me their email address.
So I made a lot of mistakes, some that I wish I hadn’t, but some I needed to make. And if you just start now, then you’re going to find out real quick.
We needs to work for you and you’ll start making some progress, which is where we need you to be. That is a perfect ending. Thank you so much, Jenny. Thank you, Megan.
