Whether you work at a company with staff or you are an entrepreneur, you need to scale so that you can focus on your business and have other experts around you do what they are good at. This includes your digital and social media marketing work. If digital influence is yielded from content creation, you need to stay focused on your content and IP and let others help you do things that are not primary business drivers. I want to share with you what I have done to help scale my own marketing operations and my advice for you.
This podcast episode is a preview of one of the two free webinars I will be doing for those that pre-order my new book The Age of Influence on Amazon. For instructions on how to apply to access, please listen to Episode 144 or read my blog post here.
Key Highlights
[03:28] The Only Way To Scale
[04:12] Integral Part Of Your Marketing Infrastructure
[06:22] How To Find Experts
[08:20] Be A Better Scaler
[08:41] The Things You Can Outsource
[11:03] Summary
Notable Quotes
Learn More:
Whether you work at a company with staff or you are an entrepreneur, you need to scale so that you can focus on your business and have other experts around you do what they are good at. This includes your digital and social media marketing work. If digital influence is yielded from content creation, you need to stay focused on your content and IP and let others help you do things that are not primary business drivers. I want to share with you what I have done to help scale my own marketing operations and my advice for you.
This podcast episode is a preview of one of the two free webinars I will be doing for those that pre-order my new book The Age of Influence on Amazon. For instructions on how to apply to access, please listen to Episode 144 or read my blog post here.
Key Highlights
[03:28] The Only Way To Scale
[04:12] Integral Part Of Your Marketing Infrastructure
[06:22] How To Find Experts
[08:20] Be A Better Scaler
[08:41] The Things You Can Outsource
[11:03] Summary
Notable Quotes
Learn More:
This is the maximize your social influence podcast with Neal Schaffer, where I help sales and marketing professionals, entrepreneurs and small business owners, build, leverage and monetize their influence in digital and social media. Hey, everybody, Neal Schaffer with episode number 148. Of the maximize your social influence podcast. Today's episode is being sponsored by the age of influence my new book, which we'll publish on March 17 2020, I do have a pre order campaign, which is going on, I will post a link to it in the show notes that I actually talked about it in great depth in Episode number 144, as well as a blog post that I recently published. So one of the benefits of being part of that pre order campaign is you're going to get access to two webinars that I will be presenting on. And actually I wanted to spend this podcast to just sort of summarize what one of those webinars is going to be about, because it's about a topic that I have really never blogged about nor podcasts about. But I think as the title of this podcast indicates, and I know that a lot of you listening are entrepreneurs and small business owners, as well, as marketers with limited budgets, scaling is really critical to our success. My father was a successful entrepreneur, and he had a business accountant for all of his career, really, as an entrepreneur. And this accountant became a family friend, and actually, in some ways influenced my career. And I'll never forget, a long time ago, when I launched what is now called PDCA. Social, he actually did my books at the beginning of my business, but I remember him asking me, Neal, how many employees do you have? And this is when I just launched, it was me, it was my IP. And I thought the best way to monetize that IP was really through launching a social media strategy consultancy, which was called windmills marketing that time. But anyway, I digress. You know, what he was saying is Neil, you know, your dad grew his company, because he was able to hire employees. And at the heart of it a consultancy, is really, really hard to scale. It's not really a scalable product. So that's why you see a lot of people, like myself, do many, many different things. So we're consultants. But it's also about creating passive income. And I know a lot of you probably are interested in that topic, you probably listen to other podcasts about that topic. And there are obviously experts out there on it. But when I talk about scaling your digital brand name, this is in terms of yield and influence. Because as an entrepreneur, as a small business owner, as a marketer, you need to stay focused on your key tasks, on your key expertise on your key, what you would call an expert zone, right. And there are a lot of things that you can do to actually scale what you do, even if you do not want to hire someone full time, I have hired people full time in the past. And I've realized that I end up having to teach a lot of these people, a lot of different things. And no one is an expert at everything, you're probably an expert in everything that you do, obviously, as I am, but it's hard to find, we can't just copy ourselves. And I know that would be the ideal thing. The only way for us to scale is to delegate is to have other people do work on our behalf, there really is no other way. Obviously, you can look at everything you're doing. Pick the top three things, stop doing the other things. And there's a lot of productivity, things that you can do to try to improve upon the efficiency of what you do. But at some point, you need to hire out to scale. And that is really the critical point that I want to drive home. If you are not hiring out, if you're doing everything yourself, you're doing yourself a disservice because as a influencer as a content creator, because obviously in order to yield Digital Influence, you need to create content. And in order to really yield that influence. Once you create that content, there's a lot of other things you need to do to promote that content. And the content becomes a integral part of your infrastructure. If it's not a blog post, maybe it's a podcast, but maybe it's also an email newsletter, maybe it's a YouTube video. And then obviously, you want to promote these other digital assets that you have in order to yield more influence, get more subscribers, more website traffic, and obviously more sales, or to better monetize whatever you do. And the only way you do that is if you can focus as much as possible on that core content creation. Now on this webinar, I am going to go into more details. But what I have realized over doing this for over a decade now is it really comes from the influence of When I used to sell semiconductors in China, my best salesperson was out of Shanghai. And he would always say, Neil, you know, you've done really well at surrounding yourselves with smart people, obviously, he was a really, really smart person. But there are other smart people that I was able to hire. And he said, you know, you can't do everything. You're, you're basically the sum of everybody around you. And you want to hire people that are smarter than you if you want your business to grow. And those words are very profound. And what I realized is that now that we are in the second decade of what some used to call the social media revolution, there's a lot of people out there that are experienced, I remember, I was with a client last year on a consulting call. And he said, Neil, you know, social media marketing, there's no, I still believe there is a secret sauce, obviously. But it's a commodity, there's just a lot of people that do it that you can tap into. Now how well these people do it, are they following best practices are not, that's really your role, right. But there are a lot of people out there that can help you. And not to say that there aren't awesome virtual assistants that can do a lot of different things for you. I'm sure they're out there, I have not been fortunate enough to find one at my budgetary level to meet my needs. And if you're in the same boat, or if you want to try to figure out how to do more with a slightly larger budget, I tap into experts. And there are really, really easy ways to find experts these days, you could start with LinkedIn. Right? That's, that's an obvious choice. There are sites that specialize in experts, the two biggest sites that you've probably heard of, are Fiverr and Upwork. Now, I know you hear a lot of horror stories, okay. But I have found excellent, excellent people that are really skilled at what they do that I hire for specific tasks, I probably have a team of a dozen people. And obviously, based on because I have an agency as well, which is more of a boutique type. So based on certain projects, I ramp up or ramp down. But there are people that I've hired that I work with for several years, there are people that are excellent content writers that really know how to write in my voice. There are people that helped me with my podcast, this podcast, right? You know, I know a lot of people, here's the thing, oh, I need to start a podcast. Oh, you know, what are the tools I need? What's the software I need? Don't get lost in the weeds. And there's a lot of people in the blogosphere who are experts who like to talk about the Weeds don't get lost in it. I'm recording this podcast. I know, it's not the highest quality sound, right? But I'm recording this in a Sony IC recorder that I got in Japan a few years ago, they sell a similar model here in the United States. It's, it's less than $100. Right? But it's portable. The battery lasts a heck of a long time. I plug it in it comes with a USB connector, I just plug it in and boom, I can upload it, I can send it to my podcast editor and I'm done with it. Podcast editor does everything else. Yes, I create the title, the description that's going to be an iTunes, what have you, but I can focus on the content creation. Pinterest pins, you know, from listen to my podcasts, I generate a lot of traffic from Pinterest. I'm not there in Photoshop, creating my own pins, I let the experts do that. I tell them what pins I want. I decide on sort of the design, what templates I'm going to use that are highly converting or what have you. And they created for me. And guess what, once the pin is ready, I don't want to be in tailwind, putting into my smart loop or uploading. I have someone that does it for me. And this is what I'm talking about. So I want to teach you in 2020 to become a better scaler of what you do. There's a lot of great people out there. So I'm going to give you and these are just some examples of what you could do. Now, some people like to be a little bit more hands on, that's fine. But I think every podcast you listen to for entrepreneurs will say a similar thing. But nobody's talking about well, what exactly can you outsource to who what can you get. And also there are tools you can use. I'm a big fan of Agora Pulse, you all know, that can help you scale as well by leveraging the tool to do some of the work for you. So that's going to be the topic of this one of the two webinars I'll be doing how to scale your digital branding. But I really want you to think, what are you doing that's taken up a lot of time? Is it the related to your sole business and if you're an influencer, that's content creator, If your business isn't related to directly selling your product, if it isn't, you got to scale. You got to find someone to do that for you. If you're still doing it if you have the budget to hire person full time, that's awesome. I know a lot of you listening may not unless you work for a larger company. So that's the message for today. I want to end this podcast with a thought. And I have a brother I guess sort of being an entrepreneur runs my family's have a brother, one of my few brothers I have who's a successful entrepreneur. And in his words, he says most small business owners focus on things that are completely irrelevant to their business. And my brother talks about how he spent hours and hours and hours trying to research the best copy machine for his office back in the day. He doesn't do that anymore. Obviously. In fact, after that he went you know, and this is a long time ago. But he's like we have to, we have to be paperless. And everything we do in this company, this is before we had Docusign. And what have you, you need to focus on the right things if you want to drive the right revenue. And in order to do that you need to scale and often with marketing, specifically digital and social media marketing, we need to find people that can do these things for you. And I want to help you find those people in 2020 and beyond. Alright, so your homework is to write down all those tasks that do not either directly impact your bottom line, or that are not related to your core competencies. And in this case, if you're an influencer, which is going to be content creation, what can you have other people do for you? What are things that you know, there are experts out there, and if you're curious, go into Fiverr, go into Upwork, and do a search, I'm going to put the links in the show notes as well, if you've never used those sites, do a search, you're going to be pleasantly surprised at all the amazing talent that's out there. Now, finding the right person getting the right quality, these are other topics that we're going to talk about, but it is the first step in freedom for your time to be able to do bigger and greater things this year and beyond. Alright, as always, I thank you for listening to this podcast, I appreciate all of the reviews that you've all written. If you get any value from this, it would mean the world to me, wherever you're listening to this, whether it's iTunes, Google Music, Spotify, I Heart Radio, I don't know, wherever it is, if you would be so kind as to just take a few seconds here and leave a review, it would obviously help my message get out to more people out there that need it. I want to read one review here from Brazil 2014. I enjoy a lot of your acknowledge I have started my career in social media consultant. And as I am progressing, studying a lot and practicing with couple businesses, I'm implementing your tips and ideas into my service. It is just fantastic how it works. I'm following you on Twitter and just got this podcast. I'm excited to learn more. I am already working on big social media company, which I prefer to keep private. And because of that, I decided to continue this path. And getting to know social media leaders is a amazing journey. Thanks for helping me. Well, Brazil 2014 Thank you so much. If you write a review, it would be awesome if you left like your Instagram or your Twitter handle. And part of writing review is hey, if you just want to post a screen share of you listening to my podcast, wherever you're on the world and tag me on Instagram, on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, wherever you are, that would mean the world to me as well. That's really what keeps me going here. Right is those comments and seeing you talking about my podcasts and social media. So I'm going to stop there. This begins the busy season for most of us out there that do a lot of speaking. We have Social Media Marketing World coming up soon, obviously, I have the launch of my book in WoW, by the time you hear this podcast, it's it's literally going to be a month away or a little bit less than a month away. So I have some international speaking coming up. I will be in Europe. I will be in Asia, I will have my first speaking event in Mexico, which I'm really excited about. So I hope to see a lot of you wherever I travel around the world. But until then everybody I just want to say wherever you're on the world, make it a great social Day. Bye
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