733 – SuperFastBusiness LIVE 2020 Review

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SuperFastBusiness Live 2020

In the review:

01:48 – Eleven years, one week and one day ago
03:50 – Nothing really beats face-to-face
04:41 – An all-star lineup
07:51 – What makes the perfect life possible?
11:39 – If it’s in your calendar, it will get done
12:45 – Getting more engagement with your social media vids
14:53 – How to run an effective virtual team
16:05 – Next year’s billion dollar media market
16:48 – What podcast success looks like
18:20 – The paid traffic puzzle that blew minds
21:18 – A surprising marketing agency secret
23:43 – What are you afraid of?
25:10 – Your dream sits between risking and dying
26:07 – The powerful McDonaldized content system
29:04 – Members who got their chance to shine
32:58 – How content marketing works
35:59 – Do you know your business potential score?
37:47 – The preso that stole the show

Let James formulate timely strategies for your online business

Transcription:

James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. This is Episode 733. And we’re going to go behind the scenes from the SuperFastBusiness Live 2020 event, which was held in the middle of March in Sydney. And it was literally the last live event that we could possibly have run before the world changed.

In this particular recording, I’m going to take you inside the SuperFastBusiness membership, where I’m running a webinar for members recapping the event. So I hope you enjoy this episode. It’s a great taste of the sort of training we run inside our membership. But also, if you want to access the recordings from SuperFastBusiness Live, they’re all inside the SuperFastBusiness membership, which you can access now from just $99 per month. And that was a recent adjustment to make it the easiest possible membership for you to justify to grow your business. So please enjoy this SuperFastBusiness Live 2020 review, and let’s see what the event was all about.

Eleven years, one week and one day ago

So there’s a long history to SuperFastBusiness Live. The first event that we ran was in April 2009. So it was actually 11 years and one week and one day from the first event when we ran this most recent event, and it’s really been a very different situation. Back then we had laptops and Ethernet cables. It was technically very difficult. There were 138 people in the room. We used to teach how to find a product to promote as an affiliate, and then buy a domain, write the sales copy and build a website and get it up and running live on the internet. And we were able to do that with 138 people in a two-day workshop. It was insane.

Of course, these days, we don’t need to do that. We don’t even bring laptops or equipment, in some cases. We have attendees there primarily for different reasons. So rather than go there to build and come away with your own website, attendees come to network, connect, learn, and have a great experience. And there’s a great book called The Experience Economy, and I remember reading that back when I was running the Mercedes-Benz dealership. And I’ve always regarded having important and special experiences. And I saw that with our clients back then – we used to run golf days, tennis days, drive car days out of the racetrack, and we’d have entertainers come to our showroom. So experiences really make it great.

We’re at an interesting time in the world where get togethers and live experiences are only able to be done online, at the time of recording this. And I think it’s even more special now in hindsight that we were able to have an in-face gathering, like where we could actually meet and connect. And it’s funny, the theme was connection and networking. And it was literally the last possible date that we could have run this event before it wasn’t going to be possible either legally, but also responsibly. And thankfully, we haven’t had any situations arise as of having this event. So everyone was really good about using sanitizer and washing their hands and keeping their distance.

Nothing really beats face-to-face

But there’s no replacement for face-to-face events. And I can tell you, my entire career has been founded and strengthened by going places and meeting people, you know, in person. And that really is testimony to the incredible community we have at SuperFastBusiness. The members make the community. They might join for the coaching, they might join for the content, but they most definitely are part of this as a community. And some of our members have been to events for the last decade, and that is incredible.

We had a great photographer, Joyce Ong, at the event from New Heights Media and she supplied lots of fantastic pictures. And it’s always great looking back through the pictures and remembering the expressions, the faces, the people engaging. And that’s something that you can sort of do that with a video online, but it’s much harder compared to in person.

An all-star lineup

So at this event, we had a really great lineup, and I purposely picked experts for the topics that I think are in hot demand from my audience. And I’m very connected to my audience because I’m constantly doing coaching calls, I’m answering forum posts, and I’m connected to people all around the world. And I wanted the following topics.

So I had Tim come and talk about SEO. He runs an SEO business, he’s the CMO. And I wanted him to talk about SEO and in particular content marketing with SEO.

I had Rhonda Britten come and talk about fear, because about a quarter of what I do is really mindset-related, and a business owner can usually only flourish to the point where their mindset will let them.

I wanted to talk about lifestyle design, because I have spoken about it before. I’ve written a book, Work Less Make More. It’s something I’m good at and a lot of people struggle with. So I wanted to share what I’m doing, just the essence of it. And I purposely wanted a shorter presentation on that topic.

And Ilana came and spoke about YouTube traffic, but also she managed to develop a traffic puzzle in between when we asked her to speak, so we got both, which was a blessing.

William Wang talked about the lessons he’s learned running a marketing agency. Because when you do high volume and you’re really good at copy, and you have a technical mind, you’ll see things other people will never think to test.

Charley Valher talked about podcasting, and he runs podcasts at ValherMedia. He’s running podcasts for a living. And he’s got clients who he grows their podcasts for them. So he’s aware of things that we miss if we’re just solo podcasting.

Chris Von Wilpert was a late starter. He actually replaced the speaker who couldn’t make it due to the outbreak of the virus, and living in a household with someone who is, you know, should not be exposed to it. So, Chris stepped in. I initially asked him as a guest, because I love his content marketing stuff. And then when the spot became available, I said, “Would you speak?” and he did. And he’s really good with content marketing that doesn’t rely on SEO. So we got to see the yin and the yang of content marketing. And I’m big on content marketing. I publish a lot of content – videos, podcasts. Our blog’s gotten thousands of pages indexed.

And then Kat Jarman talking about how to run an effective virtual team. She has a stable of OBMs, that’s online business managers, and she’s seen some of the things that can happen, because she’s exposed to business owners.

Joyce Ong came along and did photographs for us. And also, she asked if she could present on videos for social media. And I said yes, that’d be great.

Kory Basaraba was invited to speak about CRO. Unfortunately, he couldn’t make it, but we did get a presentation from him, and it’s now a digital bonus that was put inside the SuperFastBusiness membership. And he’s also running a live course for attendees who were invited to that course, and they are raving about it.

Bob Serling also couldn’t make it due to an injury. Thankfully, he’s fine, and he was talking about powerful licensing strategies. And again, he supplied us his presentation, which we’ve put inside the SuperFastBusiness membership.

Now, as a bonus to that, we were able to squeeze in some extra guests, and I’ll cover them in a moment. But let’s just have a look at how the event progressed chronologically.

What makes the perfect life possible?

I spoke first. It’s always probably the right thing to do, to open up your own event. And it’s nice to get that done so that I can really concentrate on making sure that I have a great experience facilitated for attendees. And I was pretty keen to talk about lifestyle design. And the premise is, you know, I’ve managed to carve out a good business for myself where I have a seven-figure income, and I get to surf every day. And I’ve often sat out there while I’m surfing, thinking, you know, I wonder if this sort of concept would be useful to other people. I’ve seen wage slaves, I’ve seen grinders and hustlers and people who are focused on the money. And I wonder if maybe they’re missing out in some way. And I wanted to just put forward an alternative. And I think there’s a few keys to it. And I went through a couple of them.

So the main concept we have to be aware of is that we’re always open. As an entrepreneur, with an online business, we’re always open, it’s 24/7. Your website never sleeps, which means you could be tempted to be thinking about work all the time. And in some cases, people literally do work all the time. And that’s not really an existence that is healthy. And it’s certainly not everybody’s goal.

And one of my mentors taught me a concept that everything boils down to yes or no. And the one question I really proposed at the event is, are you enjoying your life? You know, are you actually living a life that you would say you’re happy with? And you know, I went out to friends and the public on this. And I don’t interact with, you know, normal people that often – I mean, what is normal? But I’m talking about just regular people with a normal job, who are usually living paycheck to paycheck. And I would say a lot of them would say no, they’re not living their perfect life.

So what things make the perfect life possible? That’s what I wanted to zoom in on. And one of the most essential items is to understand that you can choose your lifestyle. Just like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz – at any time, she could click her heels, I think it was three times, and she could say, “There’s no place like home.” You know, “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.” And if you choose to have a different life, if you’re not happy with the life you have, it’s up to you to do something about it. You can change it. Don’t wait for the government to do it. Don’t wait for someone else to do it. Don’t wait for the lottery. You make the changes. You are in charge. That was the biggest point I could possibly make.

I gave a few steps, and step one was to reduce. If you delete things, if you filter things, score things, ditch your to-do list. And I gave some tools to do that. The 64/4 method, the EHR method, the impact method and the ROE method (not the ROI, but the ROE method, which stands for return on energy). You can catch the full presentation inside SuperFastBusiness.

Step two is leverage. And there are three areas that you want to leverage. One is your business model, and I went through some of the business models that I’ve found particularly effective. And recurring business model is my sweet spot. If you can’t have that, at least have recurring relationships. If you’re some kind of agency with one-time customers, memberships, productized services, information products are all fantastic.

I talked about the fact that you need a team. I could not have the life I have without a team. And then I talked about tools. The two main tools I would recommend for someone will be Slack, that’s your virtual office to run your team, and then 10XPRO. I’m very keen on that, and I’ve set up my own 10XPRO installation, because it is the easiest tool to get your productized services out there, to get your recurring subscription membership working, functioning quickly and easily. And as it turns out since the event, I’ve put a number of family members and friends onto that platform. Because it is the simplest, fastest, easiest way to have a fully-hosted, well-serviced solution, instead of having to glue together a bunch of different bits and pieces.

If it’s in your calendar, it will get done

And the third step was some time travel secrets. And I revealed some of the things I do that, the way that I look at time, and how you can fit things in, is a bit different to most people. And the reality is, we have a massive amount of time. You’ve got so much time. In fact, I bet if you looked at your phone that you spend at least five hours a day on social media, at least, and probably a lot more in some cases. But the biggest tip I could give in that regard is, block your calendar and absolutely guard it, instead of always being open. Just set up some opening hours on your schedule where you’re happy to talk to other people, where you’re happy to take appointments, where you can do the things that you need to do in your business. If it’s in your calendar, it will get done. If it’s not in the calendar, it doesn’t have to get done. And by having times when you are open, it means you automatically have times when you’re closed. You do some of those things, and you will start to own the racecourse, which is where you’re in control of yourself, your schedule, your business model, you’ve got the right tools to do the job, and you’ve got a team. So that was what I was contributing to this event.

Getting more engagement with your social media vids

Next up, Joyce came along and she spoke about social media video engagement hacks. And Joyce Ong does professional videography for a living, among other things. She also publishes books, and she does music as well. She gave us the perfect outline. She said, use all the real estate on your social media videos, put a heading, subtitles, and use vertical video for most social media platforms, you’re going to get more real estate happening.

She also mentioned that you should come in under eight seconds because at nine seconds, it’s just too long. So short is important to get attention. Otherwise, you’ve lost them. She suggests you use a pattern interrupt to do that. So you want to grab attention straightaway. Then you can do your intro logo. And if you do that, by the way, make sure it’s very short. Then you position yourself, play your message, and then push for action. That was her suggested format.

She talked about having scene changes. If you’re going to have a longer video, flicked from different scenes, you might have heard of B-roll for example, you know. But you want to move angles, you want to change the characters, move around, make it very entertaining and catchy. You can use a progress bar so that impatient people can see how far there is left to go. You can even make the progress bar go faster in the beginning, so it looks like it’s going quicker. And you can use text on the screen, because a lot of people will watch videos with the sound off. And I’m one of those people, especially if you’re doing it with other people around and you don’t want to disturb them. And we try and caption absolutely every piece of video we put on social media.

She then shared where to post your video, and when, giving us a little chart of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and YouTube. And it was really interesting to see which days have worked well for her and which times have worked well for her as well. And so Joyce from New Heights Media was a great contributor with her very short session. It’s super relevant, because as I did a training very recently, for SuperFastBusiness members, on using short social media videos for profits, you can see it’s insanely profitable to use those short videos. And I would do that as the very first step.

How to run an effective virtual team

Kat Jarman shared with us how to run an effective virtual team. She’s from Your Online Team. And she had some really great stories. She thought maybe she’d been unlucky when she started her management experience, because she had a couple of mistakes happen. And at first it seemed like she had bad team members and that was their mistakes. But when she questioned who failed, she really came to the realization that some of the things were the responsibility of the employer. Now her whole presentation was representative of what we see over and over and over again with business owners. In fact, I had a phone call today with someone who said, “Hey, I think I am the worst business owner ever. I don’t look after my team well, I don’t really know how to run them. Can you help me?” So at least some people are even aware of it. The good news Kat suggested is, if you are the problem, you are also the solution.

And then Kat and I went into a virtual team Q&A. And her and I were up on the stage there with the microphone and we answered questions. And I’ve got a lot of experience running a team, and Kat’s also got experience. So we both were able to answer questions from the audience, and I think that was hugely valuable for people there. So Kat did great, from YourOnlineTeam.com. If you need a business manager to look after your team, then that’s what she does.

Next year’s billion dollar media market

Charley Valher from Valher Media was talking about podcasts and how you can really do well with podcasts. He mentioned what are the wrong questions, and everyone asked, what sort of microphone? That’s usually the first question. But that’s the wrong question. That’s really, you know, for a hundred dollars and at any kind of Hi-Fi store, electrical store, you can get a decent enough microphone to record a podcast.

So he went on to explain how podcasting is going to be a billion-dollar media market next year. And it’s just on this huge growth curve. He gave a lot of statistics to support how much it’s growing, and how the ad revenue’s growing.

What podcast success looks like

And then he said there’s really a couple of questions you need to ask, like, what does a podcast need to look like to be successful? That’s one question we should ponder. And then the other one is, what are the successful podcasts doing to drive success in business? So he had those questions.

Now when he put those questions out to himself and then he looked at all the data, he came back with a weekly podcast growth system, and he stepped us through it. But in essence, it’s traffic. So driving traffic to your business by going on podcasts, by having your guests promote your podcast, by sponsoring podcasts, by using social media, both organic and paid, and having website SEO. And you drive that to your weekly video podcast, which is usually 30 to 40 minutes, that’s the sweet spot. And then you use list building. And list building is like, capturing that database into a newsletter, a training webinar, frameworks and templates, resources and guides, or a book. And then you nurture an email remarket to your podcast, and then you can get sales from that. So that was the system that he shared.

There was also a lovely Venn diagram graph where he talked about the sweet spot of a podcast, where it’s the intersection of it being in line with your business. So your podcast should be in line with your business. It should be entertaining, you know, how do you make people feel? And it should solve problems and improve the lives of your audience. If you can do that, then you’ll have a great podcast. Charley is from ValherMedia.com, and he really knows his podcasts.

The paid traffic puzzle that blew minds

Next up, we had Ilana Wechsler, and she just blew us away with her paid traffic puzzle and YouTube ads. It was like a bonus session. This one blew minds. It was really good. She’d just come back from Social Media Marketing World. She is a rising star in the paid traffic arena. She has a website called Teach Traffic. And she specializes in looking over your shoulder and showing you how to run the campaigns rather than having to pay an agency or learning how to be an agency. I mean, you can if you want, but if you actually have a business or you want to learn how to do paid traffic, she actually teaches you how to do it at that site.

So what she was talking about, and I’m probably going a bit light on her one because it’s very technical, she talked about how you’ve got your website, but there’s all these different components you can take advantage of, with YouTube, with Google, with Instagram, with Gmail, with Facebook. You’ve got a lot of avenues you can advertise to, and they can all fit together like a puzzle. And she sort of broke it down that Google for search and remarketing, Google for display remarketing, Facebook for Instagram and remarketing, and YouTube and remarketing. So, you’ve got all these remarketing opportunities across these different platforms, Google, Facebook and YouTube, that all fit together when you put them into concert.

Then the entire puzzle is just like, heads were exploding here. When you had all the Google search remarketing, the top of funnel keywords, Google search, search In -Market, that’s like one section. Then the other section was Google placements, Google Display remarketing, Google custom intent, Google In-Market. Then you had another section, Facebook interest targeting, competitors, Facebook Instagram remarketing, Facebook targeting, YouTube keywords, YouTube placements, brand in-market, YouTube remarketing. So you put all that together, you have this massive puzzle. And somehow she navigated us through each of those sections very skillfully, without making it too confusing.

The message is, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, because you don’t have to. And you can match your Facebook competitor targeting to your Google’s custom intent audience, and double down. And she also then went into YouTube in a little more depth, and she said that 68 percent of YouTube users watch a YouTube video to help them make a purchase decision. So that’s a great platform to be advertising on.

Success equals an offer plus targeting plus ad plus bid. That’s her formula for success. She also broke down the perfect YouTube ad, where you put the headline, the display URL, the brand image, and a call to action button.

And with tips for YouTube ads, she said hook people in the first five seconds. So we got the same feedback we had from Joyce. Tell people to skip if they’re not interested before the 32nd mark, because then you won’t pay for it. And the ideal video length is one to two minutes. So again, we’re getting this short video feedback.

Ilana actually has some information about the puzzle at TeachTraffic.com/puzzle, check it out.

A surprising marketing agency secret

And next up, we had Will Wang. And Will is what I would call a hot shot in the agency world, and he shared his marketing agency secrets, which were incredible. So the secret, he said – you ready for it? When people start screaming that something is dead, they’re probably just not very good at it anymore. And he gave a few examples. But there’s still plenty of money to be made in things that people have overlooked or that are no longer sexy, right? Like, emails would be one, probably.

And he was just up there delivering his gold. And he gave us a few tips on emails. Longer sequences are better – I’ve heard this from a few people now. If you just lengthen your email sequence, you’ll probably make more sales. Put stories in them. And you’ll probably go through your inbox and the people who you’re still subscribed to probably tell stories. And make them values-based emails. So they’re looking out for the person that you’re sending them to. Case study emails are great, because it’s a demonstration and it’s proof. And scarcity sales-based emails can also work really well. Things like deadlines, limitations of some kind, especially if it’s genuine, of course, are going to work well. And if they’re planned around the story, their flow mirrors what leads feel like when they think about the problem and solution, then that’s a winner.

So he told us what we need to be focusing on. And that is content and creatives. Test creatives rather than audiences. Okay? He said rules and automations for your ads are important in maximizing conversion and what happens next, including retargeting. There we hear it again, retargeting.

So Will then shared another secret. Okay? And that is, the numbers are what matters. Most people aren’t looking at their numbers. They’re not doing the Moneyball thing. They’re just sort of shooting from the hip and running ad hoc. He also shared with us, what things you can test, like the business. What are your goals and KPIs? And are we going after the right goals at all? Is it revenue or profit? He talked about integrated marketing and how we get more leads and increase our revenue and our branding. He talked about channel marketing, like choosing the right channels to hit the goals. Is it online or digital, or offline? He talked about platform marketing. How do I maximize return on Facebook ads, for example? And then campaign marketing, what graphics work for this campaign? So Will’s from GrowthLabz.com. A regular guest on this show, actually, SuperFastBusiness, and for good reason.

What are you afraid of?

Then we heard from Rhonda Britten, directly out from America. And she’s been on Oprah a couple of times. And she was just phenomenal, really phenomenal. She asked, What are you afraid of? She’s from FearlessLiving.org, and she talked about being fearless, and really caused us to think about what it means to be scared.

She asked, what is fear? And she said, it’s both the cause and effect of the feelings, thoughts or actions that prohibit you from accepting yourself and realizing your full potential. And, you know, I’m just summarizing here an entire presentation. But fear doesn’t care about your happiness. It only cares about your survival. That was very powerful. She was more or less saying that fear will always kick in, to take over and try and protect you from having something bad happen to you. Right? So it doesn’t care if you’re happy. It just wants you to be safe.

And people were absolutely captivated. Her storytelling was phenomenal. Fear kills dreams, it kills relationships. It kills careers. It almost killed me, she says. And then she told a story of when she was a girl. And I won’t share that story with you. You really should watch the presentation, because every single person in the whole room went silent. And it was intense, and emotional. And the good news is she came out of this a very strong person, and she came up with her own tool for making this work.

Your dream sits between risking and dying

And she talked about the comfort zone, the stretch zone, the risk zone, and the die zone, and how your dream sits somewhere between the risks and the die zone, which is why your dreams are very hard to get sometimes. But her best quote, I think, was fear loves you. See, fear is trying to protect you and look after you. So once you embrace it, she has some tools to go through it. And she’s got a book called Fearless Living. I recommend you check that out. Get in touch with Rhonda, FearlessLiving.org. Amazing.

And the first night, we had a networking dinner. This was back when you could have a networking dinner, when you could be in a room with more than two people. And the venue was really great, the food was amazing. We had our own menu, different meals served, beverages, everything. It was top class. We had roundtables, conversation was flowing. We had live music, we had performers with vocals and keyboard and instruments of varying types.

The powerful McDonaldized content system

And then the next morning, we heard from Chris Von Wilpert. Oh my god, you know, he just gets up there in his board shorts and cap and sneakers and just lifted the lid off his Greatest Hits Content System, which was just amazing. I am a huge fan of Chris Von Wilpert’s material. This is a system that is a McDonaldized content marketing system. It takes you through content creation, email conversion, content distribution and sales conversion. I’m just going to give you some of the highlights. But essentially, it solves the five biggest pain points of your target customer. And it’s content you can promote over and over again, it just never dies. Plus, you don’t have to wait for SEO to get results.

He talked about how to find the topics, he gives you a survey template, where you ask the biggest challenges that should be familiar to anyone who’s ever done an ASK survey. But beyond that, it’s very clever. He asks, Who have you bought marketing training from in the past? And that came into play later on in the presentation. And what markers do you let into your inbox? These are great questions.

Then he shared an article template where you put the topic and the outline, where you put the main sections, and he just lists that out. And you know, this is a guy who was bringing in over $100,000 a month to AppSumo when he was doing these types of articles. So he’s got the chops for this. He put the body copy formula, the step-by-step guide for how you put it, you know, the what, the why, the how. He listed it all out. Like, it was very content-rich, you have to look at this presentation. It’s inside SuperFastBusiness membership. He went through the Three Jabs Strategy, which is a system to convert the traffic into leads, and you offer utility content upgrades to get email opt-ins. And the Three Jabs Strategy is essentially where you’re putting a landing page opt-in, you’re getting an in-body opt-in. and then you have an exit intent opt-in.

And then he talked about content distribution. So you can make a list of partners, you can send a compliment on social media, you can send a love letter. He calls this the Red Packet Partnerships funnel. Again, just great stuff, common sense, but the way he does it is amazing. In just the quick time him and I built a relationship, he went from almost a stranger to speaking at my event. So this stuff works.

And then he shared the $5 Hit Record method, which is essentially running ads on Facebook to very targeted followers, targeting the people who his audience already follow. Big hint there. And he spends a very small amount because it’s an amount he can spend without worrying about Ad fatigue or worrying about the budget going out of control. You can set and forget it. And then he went into detail about viral content upgrades, which is where you incentivize people to get a bonus when they share with other people. And that bonus content, basically, can get you a lot more people sharing or opting into a blog post.

You can find Chris at Content Mavericks. He’s a brilliant marketer, I suggest you follow him. Let him know you saw this presentation, by the way.

Members who got their chance to shine

There were 10 extra presentations. Now this was kind of an on-the-fly thing. There was going to be five, I’d allotted five. I’ve always wanted to let our audience present at the event, if possible. We’ve always done some kind of challenge, make a video, we play them, someone will win a prize. This time, I wanted to let people present. Because when I went to my first online event in America, in 2008, I got up there and I won a competition, and I got to present to the whole audience. Five hundred people, complete strangers – I didn’t know a single person. And that really kick-started my online next level. I mean, it was only a few months after that I was able to quit my job through the content, the content that I had learned about through the contacts I made, through the support of Yanik Silver back then. I wanted to pass the baton. So because we had an injury, and we had someone couldn’t make it due to the pandemic, we were able to free up an extra five spots. So I had 10 extra people. I’m just going to give you the quick rundown of who and what.

Erik Anderson showed us how we can have the government pay us to go overseas and market our business and pay us for our ads and pay us for our team. And I can vouch for the fact that it works, because he’s been doing that for me. And it can add up to hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was particularly useful for Australians, but there may be similar schemes in other countries.

Kenneth Yu broke down for us how religions are so compelling with their sales conversion process, and it was fascinating.

Jeannette Jifkins is an online lawyer, and she did Q&A. She answered some of the most important questions that you could have for an online lawyer.

And Arabella MacPherson pretty much hypnotized everyone, showed them how hypnosis works and how you can get what you want through hypnosis. That was an interesting one, and I’ll share why in a moment.

David Smit is a fairly reserved and humble programmer, and he showed us how we can buy an existing software business, fix it up and make it into a really passive cash machine. It was a great presentation.

Scott Bywater broke down a whole bunch of analysis and shared with us the one word that you must have in a headline, if you want to increase the open rates.

Bernadette Janson had a fantastic story of how she’d started a podcast as a rookie, into being a podcaster, and how it brought her tremendous success. She even took people through, on a podcast, how to renovate a bathroom, if you can believe that. So imagine trying to do that on an audio podcast. But she managed to crack the formula.

Orest Zub shared with us how he basically had to start from scratch. His family grew up in Eastern Europe, and then they basically didn’t own anything and had to start from scratch. And he came up in this weird world and wanted to bust out and travel to a lot of places. And he talked about how he runs a leveraged online business.

Then we heard from Laura. And Laura was sharing with us an empowered way of living where you could look at not just money, but other aspects of your life. And she told us how we could cheat. It’s a formula. And it was really interesting as well.

And we heard from Perry Papast, about selling over the telephone, and how the conversion rates are so much better and why people are generally scared of it and how not to be. And he shared some of his corporate sales knowledge there.

They were the 10 presenters. The prize winner was actually Arabella, and maybe she hypnotized everyone into making her the winner. But she’s also a professional communicator, so I wasn’t completely surprised. And she did do a great performance. And a close second was Bernadette. So Bernadette really rocked the stage for someone who’d never presented about podcasting.

In fact, that’s something about our event. We often have presenters who don’t present. We just want the content. Chris Von Wilpert only ever presented once to a small mastermind, but he rocked the room. Kat Jarman, that was her first presentation. And a few others are still sort of early days.

How content marketing works

Tim Soulo came and spoke about content marketing, how content marketing works. It was just a brilliant, fantastic presentation. Ahrefs also sponsored the event. And I’m not being biased here, but his presentation was really good quality, and that was one of the themes that came through in his presentation. He essentially gave us what used to be a paid product in his presentation, in the same way that Chris Von Wilpert pretty much delivered a thousand-dollar product in his presentation, and the best thing is we got some differing points of view. And I love that, where we can see, you know, one guy saying VHS and another saying beta, and we get to decide which one we prefer. So in Tim’s presentation, he was really saying, looking back over all of this history, make sure you invest in educating your employees. Explain to them the impact of the work, right? The great content code is unique value, authority, and format. He said, there are no hacks to creating great content if you’ve got nothing great to say. I like that – basically do good content, or do nothing.

And he shared Matthew Woodward’s thing, how to sell via blog content: introduce a problem, explain the common hard way to solve it, explain an easy way to solve it with your product, show your proof, some kind of case study or numbers, screenshots, and then put a bonus and tie that into the bottom line. Great formula.

Your articles equals your sales page. I agree with this. My podcasts, transcriptions and content upgrades at SuperFastBusiness, each one of those is a little sales page like a many-armed octopus out there on the internet, dragging in traffic and listeners and turning them into customers. So Tim was very entertaining, a brilliant presenter, had the audience enthralled. He talked about the beauty of a free email course, this is essentially the next sort of version of the content upgrade. It’s exclusive, people look forward to the next email, and it keeps your audience warm for bonus lessons.

And importantly, he talked about how articles start ranking in Google and bring you passive search traffic when they’re done well, versus just having a flat line of hope. So you do get a bit of traffic at the beginning. So the first part there could be akin to what Chris was talking about. And then the last part, the passive traffic, starts to kick in if you do your SEO right, because he pointed out the fact that 90.8 percent of pages get no traffic from Google. Like, that’s a lot of wasted pages. And I know this to be true, because recently, I had Gert Mellak, from SEO Leverage, and go through my website, and we pruned back the content. And we let the site actually start to blossom with the site pages that are getting traffic, and we got a better result. So there you go. You’re unlikely to get the front page of Google unless you get as many links as the pages that already ranked there. So keep that in mind.

Can you show off your product in your content? And he talked about, don’t worry about top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. Just show off your product and your content.

Do you know your business potential score?

He said this is the business potential score. You get a three if your product is an almost irreplaceable solution to the problem, two if your product is helpful but the problem can be solved without it, and one if your product is barely relevant to the problem, right? So you want threes.

How to increase your content output. He said, repurpose what you already have to other formats, and teach everything you know and share your story. That was a really good point.

He said six out of 10 of his most linked articles are actually data-driven. So that was a big theme. And I sat there watching his presentation with my team members, and we made an agreement right then and there. We’re not going to put out episodes unless we data-drive and make sure we research and check, if there’s interest in this topic, what would be the right phrases that people are looking for? We want to take advantage of this SEO. Tim is from Ahrefs. They just call it ”H-refs” for some reason. Ahrefs.com. But it’s spelled Ahrefs.com. He was great.

Then we had some roundtables. Because when you go to these events, right, you get a lot of ideas and you’ve filled your notebook out. What I wanted to do is have some decompression time in the room, while you’re there with your notebook and people who have relevant context to what you’ve just been exposed to. And at the tables, we got to discuss our top ideas, and to circle just a couple that we’re going to move the needle on and have a huge impact with.

And then we had, of course, lots of question time throughout the event. We had time where people could ask questions, they could get better understanding of the things the speakers had been talking about. And I think, because we have a fairly intermediate audience to an advanced audience, we got great questions. There was no question bandits who were hogging the mic or doing a big pitch for their own business. We got really intelligent questions. And the answers helped everybody to get the result they wanted.

And we also had lots of nice breaks with barista coffee and time to chat.

The preso that stole the show

The most valued presentation, when I surveyed the audience, came back as the traffic puzzle from Ilana. It was the leader of the pack. We had some pretty close ones. Rhonda was an equal second, with also Tim’s content presentation. And then we had Charley with the podcast presentation. And then the Greatest Hits Content. That sort of rounded out the top five presentations. And I didn’t put mine in the running by the way, because I didn’t think that would be fair. And also I didn’t think I’d win it. So congratulations, Ilana, at TeachTraffic.com, the best presentation. It was really fine-tuned, super polished, it would appeal to someone who’s wanting to absolutely crush paid traffic, like really master it.

Of course, enjoy the recordings – they’re all being loaded into SuperFastBusiness.com for members, and we transcribe every single video into a full word-for-word transcription with the slides as illustration. So every single slide is illustrated in the transcription. We also strip out the audio so you can listen to it, wherever you happen to be. You’re probably not commuting, but maybe you’re exercising or something, and you want to listen to the audio. And if you want to rewatch the video over and over again, or if you want to ask questions near the video to get more understanding, other members can share in the discussion right where the videos appear.

So I hope you enjoyed this rundown of the SuperFastBusiness Live 2020 event. Some people in the survey said that it was, again, a fabulous event, that it was the best event, etc. I was really pleased to get good feedback on it. I will say, as an event organizer, it was an incredibly stressful week, the week prior, as I could see things starting to shift in the landscape, and I recognized that the shutter door was coming down. And by the end of the last day, it was only a two-day event, I was extremely relieved that we made it. And it was only the next week that they started to limit events to 500. And then they limited it to, basically, two. It was lucky we made it. And I hope we get to experience that kind of event in the future, because they’ll just be more special. I don’t think live events are going anywhere. They’re just on pause for now. But it was a magical event and an incredible moment in history. And the content we got at the event is still as relevant today as it was last month when the event was run.

And I’m certainly going through with my team and improving how we do our business, based on the training we got at that event.

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