What I'm Currently Working On (A Business And Life Update)

This week, we are doing something different.

I have been neck deep in systems building and I haven't had any time this week to do creative work.

As such, I don't have any good insights for you. I have no advice to give, only experience to share.

Sharing my experience is the best thing I do can for you. I've always loved the idea of you learning from my mistakes instead of having learning from your own.

So this week, I'll share an update with you.

LFG. 🔥

Stodzy Internet Marketing - Building A Sales Team

​Building a sales team has been one of the hardest and most challenging projects I've ever had in business. I've spent months working on this project. I've spent boat loads of money, done dozens of experiments, tried different outreach tactics, and have had little success along the way.

However, I feel this week was a true turning point.

The realization I had was that I wasn't building systems that my reps could depend on. Derek, my current sales rep, has been giving it his absolute best effort. But effort without process is futile. It was difficult for him to build momentum because he wasn't given a direction.

Momentum requires you to go in a straight line. I have been running him in circles.

The success is in the system

For the last two months, I have been trying to think about our messaging, our unique selling proposition, and how we can be creative in our sales process.

All the while, my sales reps were left on an island, trying to figure out what they should be doing next.

I took a sales management course from Automated Revenue, and it was really helpful.

Now, my complete focus is building SOP's, systems, and structure that my reps can follow and depend on. Once we have our processes down, it will make it much easier to truly discover what the best approach is.

This is the difference between strategy and tactics. I was starting with tactics, when I should have started with strategy.

Some key insights I've learned.

• Data management is key. I made the investment into HubSpot. We are documenting everything, creating automations, and paying attention to every little detail. It's paying off.

• Numbers are more important than persuasion. I've always approached sales from a personal standpoint. I would focus on building relationship with my prospects. However, when building a sales team, the place to start is with the numbers of actions taken. You need to figure out your ratios. Meaning, how many outreach attempts do we need to make in order to make a contact? How many contacts do we need to make in order to send a proposal? How many proposals do we send in order to get a contract signed?

• Document everything. One of the mistakes I made was giving my reps the freedom to have natural conversations. I should have been much more strict and systematized with developing talk scripts and creating funnels that the reps would follow. Once they have mastered the scripts, they can have the freedom to spitball. In order to break the rules, you first must know the rules.

• Take the wins. It's easy to get discouraged, but over the course of the last few months, we have been making steady progress. As of now, the sales team is essentially paying for itself. THIS IS PROGRESS! Don't forget to go easy on yourself and give yourself grace.

Copyblogger - Exploding Our Sales With The Value Ladder

I've been very open about my journey with Copyblogger and many of you tell me that you appreciate the transparency. I have failed over and over again in my attempt to create a truly scalable digital product and media outlet.

But, I've been consistent with my improvement and this week, Charles and I went truly next level.

How?

We incorporated a top tier product and established a next step in our value ladder.

https://twitter.com/TimStodz/status/1762117170425712961

Previous Revenue Breakdown

• Copyblogger sends a weekly newsletter. The newsletter sells sponsorships. I typically make $2500 an issue, which is $10,000 a week.

• ​Copyblogger Academy is our digital community. This is an affordable community that costs $199 a year.

• ​Digital Commerce is our SEO agency, and I use Copyblogger to generate leads for the business.

Over the last three years, I've built Copyblogger to about $500,000 in ARR. I've kept a solid 40% profit margin.

New Addition

Since the profit margins for The Academy are so much higher than the other two revenue streams, Charles and I often talked about the idea of creating an upsell to the Academy, which is a premium product.

After weeks and months of brainstorming, Charles took the reigns. He built "The Personal Brand Accelerator." Our product launch was a MASSIVE success. Charles absolutely hit it out of the park.

We wanted to share our knowledge on how to build brands on Twitter and LinkedIn, and the results exceeded both of our expectations.

We went from $10,000 a month to $33,000 a month over the course of two weeks. The best part is that even with the new growth, our churn rate is bare minimum.

Our product is top notch and I feel so good about the fact that we are really delivering to our customers.

Launches are nerve racking. It's scary to put so much work into something and not know if it will work or not. Truthfully, I've never had success with big launches. They scare me. I've always gently introduced minimum viable products into the market place and chipped away at them over time.

But we went all out for The Personal Brand Accelerator, and we crushed it.

Congrats to Charles on such a a triumph. He's an amazing partner and I'm so grateful for him and all the lessons he's taught me.

The Census - Building The Next Big Thing In Behavioral Healthcare

Almost every attempt I've made at building newsletters has failed.

People see the success of Copyblogger and think that I have had home runs with newsletters, but they have almost all been failures.

For instance ...

• The Cheese. This was an esports newsletter that I KNOW would crush it, but I could never find the right writer to help me get it off the ground.

• YourBoulder. I'm officially shutting down YourBoulder. I know the model works because I watched Nathan build From Boise from scratch. There is a demand for local media. But it requires too much time input. I can't make it work.

• Agency Clarity. Although the course I built for Agency Clarity was great, the newsletter was a flop. No matter what I did, I could not get subscribers. So I just put Agency Clarity into the product portfolio inside Copyblogger Academy.

With all that said, I knew if I wanted to make The Census a success, I had to push those failures into the back of my mind and go all in.

For that reason, I hired Shân Osborn to head up the project.

Simply put, Shân rocks.

The product is amazing, I hope you will check out the most recent issue and subscribe.

Our growth has been very encouraging.

My Plan To Make Money

We're already getting a lot of ad requests through the Beehiiv ad network, but they are all very spammy.

Once we get more established, we'll put the site on Wordpress and move everything over to ConvertKit.

The strategy is to use the newsletter as a way to land clients for Stodzy. In addition, we will probably create events, webinars, and ads that we sell through out sales team.

I don't think the Beehiiv ad network is very good and when we get to the point where we are ready to sell ads, we will do so through our sales team and sell the ads ourselves.

The trick for this is patience. We are growing so fast and the money will come.

That's It

Thanks for indulging me this week.

I was stressing this morning because I couldn't think of what to write, and so I decided to share my life with you.

When I relax and stop taking myself so seriously, those are the weekly issues that you seem to enjoy the most.

Love you guys.

Feel free to hit reply and tell me your thoughts.

Tim