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Episode 4 – Jane Copeland on How to Get Quick Success Online

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episode jane copeland on how to get quick success online

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Today’s guest on the Membership Site Success Podcast is Jane Copeland!

Jane Copeland is a business coach for successful female entrepreneurs based mainly in Australia. Jane started her online journey with nothing but a blog and a whole lot of determination. A few years later, Jane is making mutliple 6 figures online by selling tickets to her live events and information products.

jane copeland - Episode 4 - Jane Copeland on How to Get Quick Success Online

Jane’s story is really inspiring because she started her business right around the same time that she had a child, and was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. Did that stop her? Heck no!

Make sure to soak up all of Jane’s wonderful business advice and mindset tips now!

You can connect with Jane at her blog, Coping With Jane. Her trainings include Business Made Beautiful, a full training on how to become a self-made queen online and Web Celeb Formula, a course on cultivating a celebrity like status online.

itunes - Episode 4 - Jane Copeland on How to Get Quick Success Onlinestitcher - Episode 4 - Jane Copeland on How to Get Quick Success Online

Mentioned In This Episode:

1. Coping with Jane – Jane’s blog.

2. Marie Forleo’s B-School – The course that got Jane interested in and switched on to proper online marketing.

3. Boardroom to Baby – Jane’s self-published book, which led to media appearances and a high profile in her native Australia.

4. CreateSpace – Amazon’s self-publishing platform for paperback books.

5. SuperFast Business with James Schramko – James Schramko’s business website and podcast.

6. Nik Toth – The Lean body coach.


Transcript:

Vic: Jane, welcome to The Membership Site Success podcast. It’s a pleasure to have you on.

Jane:  Hi, Vic. It’s so wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation.

Vic: Yeah, it’s my pleasure. You and I have worked together in various capacities and I don’t know why it only just now dawned on me to invite you on, but you’re a very successful marketer and entrepreneur and I think the listeners are going to get a lot of value out of what you have to share. So maybe you could start off just talking a little bit about yourself and how and why you got into online business.

Jane: Yeah, sure, sure. I guess in the last two years, I think we started working together quite a while ago, like maybe it wasn’t even two years ago, but really that my business has really exploded during that time and you’ve really helped me with that, you know, helping me with the tech. So yeah, I guess I got online in 2011, which was four years ago, after the birth of my son Elliott, so when I became a mom. I guess I did that because I kind of wanted — well, a few reasons.

First of all, the typical reason that working a corporate nine to seven role just wasn’t fitting in with my lifestyle. After I had my son, I just didn’t want to go back. The second thing was that I got really, really sick around the time, with an autoimmune disease. I was housebound for a long time. So anyway, I decided to get online and the first thing that I did was to start a blog, if you like.

Vic: Coping with Jane, right?

Jane: Yeah, Coping with Jane, that’s right. You know, I really wanted to start my own business, but I really could not decide what on earth to do it on. So I used to spend hours and hours Googling what are the latest or the hottest businesses for women to start. What’s the latest and greatest next big thing and I just could not decide and so I was going round and round in circles. Then in the end, I just thought, “Right, I’m just going to go out there and do something that I enjoy even though I had no experience with blogging or really any kind of content.” I’ve always liked writing and branding and stuff like that, so I decided to put everything together or to create this blog, but I had no business plan at that point, I should mention.

Vic: What did you start blogging about?

Jane: Well, I started blogging about… Well, what happened was around that time — I live in Australia and there was another really, really massively successful online magazine for women that talked about women’s stuff, right down from having a baby to dating to everything like that. So I really saw that there was a massive market there that women really wanted to talk about stuff online. That’s what I based my, or where I got my idea from. So mine was like a similar kind of topics, but also based around being a mom and also the idea of being able to start your own business and be a mom.

Vic: Okay.

Jane: So that’s what I started my blog off in. I don’t know if you know this, but what happened was it’s a question that I get asked a lot about, all the time, is that I was able to grow really, really quickly and I started my blog with a lot of well-known celebrities and some of Australia’s best writers on my blog as contributors. People say to me, “Well, how did you manage to do that?” The answer is that what I did was, I basically had a few journalist or celebrities that I use to follow and I knew the things that they were passionate about so I reached out to them and I said, “Look, I’m creating this online space where you can talk about those sort of things, would you be interested in being involved?” Every person said yes.

What happened was that these people had really big followings online and when they blogged or when I had an article on my site, their article on my site, and they shared it out on social media, then I had a lot of traffic back to my site. So that’s really how I started off building my business — my blog, I should say, because it wasn’t a business at that point.

Vic: That’s interesting so you basically didn’t have any kind of traffic or anything to speak of, you just reached out to people whom you admired and who already had big audiences and you just invited them to basically guest post on your site.

Jane: Yeah, that’s what I did.

Vic: And you stole their audience. Oh, you didn’t steal it, but you borrowed it.

Jane: Yeah, I did and this was in 2011 and Twitter was really big at that point. I mean, of course, it still is. I don’t use Twitter nearly as much as I did, but Twitter was really integral in building my audience because these people would share the blog post on Twitter and then all their followers would come back. Yeah, that’s exactly what I did. The other thing that I did was I learnt, again from that other blog that was in Australia, that big online magazine, I was watching what they were doing on Twitter and I realized pretty quickly the strength of having a magnetic headline and kind of doing that whole link baiting things. So I became very, very good at writing headlines for the blog post. So then I would just put them out on Twitter a few times a day and I was posting a lot, so I’d have like three posts a day, and then that also got people back to my site as well.

Vic: We’re you building a list right from the beginning?

Jane: You know, I was just about to say that. The biggest mistake that I made was that I really had no idea about internet marketing and at that point, I was interested in the publishing model, so I really had no idea about building a list. Yeah, I had an opt-in on my site, but it wasn’t until I did B-School, Marie Forleo’s B-School, that I learnt the value of capturing leads and a mailing list. So then, although my mailing list was maybe at about 500 — I still don’t have a really big list, I think my list is only at seven or 8,000 at the moment, but it’s very targeted. Yeah, it was only after that that I really realized the whole value of the list which is just so important.

Vic: Okay, so the blogging and the content marketing that just sort of got things moving.

Jane: Yeah, so —

Vic: I know a lot of — I’m sorry, go ahead.

Jane: No, I was just going to say at that point, a lot of people are thinking, “Oh my gosh, like you must be doing so well. You’ve got all this traffic to your blog,” and I think I had like three ads on my blog, and it was just so funny because I really wasn’t making any money at all. I had no idea how I was going to make money. I was making a couple of hundred dollars a month, if that. I was working very, very hard and I did not know what to do at all. But the next thing I did was I wrote a book and that was called Boardroom to Baby, so when I did that, I guess I did two things to kind of monetize. I could have gone down the path of sticking to a publishing model and where one of the most important thing was going to be the number of traffic to my site.

Vic: Right.

Jane: But I just was thinking that that would be really, really hard to do and I really had no one helping me. So I thought there’s going to be easier things to do, but anyway, so I did two things. I wrote a book and that really, really put me on the map. I started getting, from the book that I wrote — I self-published it. I don’t know why, but at the time, they went at many people self-publishing, so it just went crazy: I was in a lot of media, I was doing a lot of public speaking, store opening. So that gave me a lot of profile.

Vic: Nice.

Jane: I still wasn’t really earning that much money and then people started asking me to help them with their own blogs. That was really the start of when I started to earn good money was when I became a blog coach, if you could say. I had the reputation of being the Fairy Blogmother, so yeah.

Vic: Nice, the book that you self-published was that via Amazon’s platform or did you —

Jane: Yeah.

Vic: Okay.

Jane: It was. I did it through CreateSpace, which is a place that has print on-demand and it links to Amazon; therefore, the person can either buy the Kindle version or a hard copy of it. So yeah, I did that and my book was called Boardroom to Baby. It was great, so yeah.

Vic: Now, just a quick aside here, you know Marie Forleo, she’s sort of the Eben Pagan of the female market, I guess you could say?

Jane: Absolutely, yes. Love her.

Vic: Yeah, she’s awesome. She is so smart, she is so professional in her presentation, she’s a very good role model, I think, and not just for women, just for any online marketer.

Jane: Yes.

Vic: But what’s interesting is that you came up with this name Fairy Blogmother and Eben Pagan, you know, he speaks a lot about naming and the power of a sticky name. How did you come up with that and was that intentional or was that just kind of spur of the moment?

Jane: Yeah, I mean that’s a good question. I really, again at this point, I really still did not understand how I was going to turn my blog into a business, but then I started working with a business coach and she actually said to me, “Well, aren’t people asking you about how to create what you have?” And I said, “Yeah.” Anyway, so she actually gave me the name and said, “Well, why don’t you call yourself the Fairy Blogmother?”

Vic: Ah.

Jane: So that’s actually how I got it. Really what happened was that people, whenever anyone wanted anything related to blogging, my name would get recommended as the Fairy Blogmother. It’s quite different now, but that’s how it was at the time and it really served me well. So that’s really right; along with naming, like the importance of naming, is to become known for something.

Vic: Yes.

Jane: So yeah. So in all the groups, my online groups within B-School because B-School has a massive online Facebook group. You know, if anyone had any queries related to blogging, I was the one who was recommended. So that’s how I got my business off the ground.

Vic: Yeah, that’s how I got my business off the ground too, basically.

Jane: Really?

Vic: The membership site go-to guy.

Jane: Yeah. Actually, that’s so true. I think that is how I came across you because I was in SuperFast Business with James Schramko and someone recommended you as the membership guy.

Vic: I bet I know who it was too, I bet it was Jules.

Jane: It was Jules, yeah.

Vic: Yeah, very cool. Small world.

Jane: Yeah.

Vic: Okay, that’s interesting. At this point, that’s when things sort of started to take a turn for the better, I guess. Let me ask you this, did you invest quite a bit of money on the coaching and the courses and everything before you actually saw a return on all that investment?

Jane: Yeah. So what happened was with this particular coach, I met her at this blogging conference in Australia called Problogger and she said to me that she was $3,000 a month. I remember when she told me that, I was almost offended. I was like, “Are you serious? There’s no way I’m going to pay that much money.” I think she was 3,000 or was she 1500 — I can’t remember. All I know is that after one phone call, I really did start making money. I actually only paid her — I think it was 1,500 or 3,000 — no, it was 1,500 a month, so I paid her $3,000. Paid, did it and went with her for two months. So I had probably invested, I worked it out the other day and I invested about 15,000, which actually isn’t that much, in building my blog and coaching before I actually saw a return really, if I’m to be honest. So basically, yeah, that’s how much I probably would have spent before I started seeing a return. So I didn’t really see a return until about 18 months to two years, but then it just started really accelerating. You know, going from six figures to multiple six figures very quickly. So yeah, does that answer the question?

Vic: Yeah, that’s very interesting because there’s a lot of people bootstrapping and they’re probably thinking, “I can’t invest 15,000.” But you probably don’t need to do that necessarily.

Jane: Absolutely not. What I did was, and again — like definitely not and, really, I haven’t really worked with that many coaches since. You know what I mean? I have not really worked with that many coaches, I’m predominantly self-taught. But the ones that I have worked with have had a huge impact, in a positive way, on my business. So where I did invest, was I invested a lot of money into my actual blog.

Now, I wanted to differentiate myself by the design, by the complexity of the functionality. You don’t need to do that these days, things have come a long way. So that’s where a lot of my cost went and also some of the clients that I’m working with now, are making money immediately like. I mean, it’s fact. Some of my clients are making $30-40,000 within the first month. Without any list, with a very small investment. So when you get things right, you can do that. I mean it doesn’t happen with everyone but, yeah, it is possible to have a bit — you don’t need to spend 15,000, I guess is what I’m saying.

Vic: For sure and I want to add…

Jane: Also, I should say that when I started my business, I had savings and I was prepared to spend that money. Like I was prepared to spend 20 to 25,000 on pursuing my dreams, you know what I mean?

Vic: So it was an investment?

Jane: That’s not US, that’s Australian dollars.

Vic: Oh, okay. Sorry about that but the Australian dollar, I know, it’s taking a beating right now.

Jane: It’s so bad, it’s really bad. That’s okay.

Vic: Now okay, one thing I want to ask you about is that when you transitioned to being a blogging coach, your income wasn’t “passive.” It was very much you had to trade your expertise for money.

Jane: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right I did. So I think that everyone thinks… Yeah, I did. Put it this way, it would have been difficult for me to have done anything else without any following or any kind of understanding of online marketing. I often see people doing that, that they will create an online program and be chasing this passive income. It’s kind of like the Holy Grail, what everyone wants. But actually, in order for that to have real passive income, like perhaps there could be some other stepping stones that come first. For example, I like to get people working or selling high-ticket. This is just the nature of the people that I tend to work with, I know it’s different in the internet marketing niche. They might be selling a high-ticket one-on-one mentoring because that might fund them to doing other stuff, like growing their audience or spending time building that product that they can then leverage.

Vic: For sure.

Jane: So one of my clients is Nik Toth and she’s a great example of that. So she, like a lot of other female entrepreneurs who are health coaches, she wanted to sell a $40 product and she was adamant that she wanted to do that because that’s what a lot of people, other women in her space are doing, and that was pretty much the only thing that she thought she could do.

So that was her goal, was to release this product, but instead, we got her selling out this six-week program for $2,000 that was the Lean Body Formula. The end result was that she sold it out very quickly and then she was able to have a great lifestyle, have the money coming in and then create the program and then have the leverage. So now she’s got the leverage, she’s got both products. Selling the one-on-one, trading the dollars for hours — which people talk about as being a bad thing — we did do that first, so she could then not have to do it, if you like.

Vic: Okay, I just want to echo two points that you just embedded in what you just said. One is every super-successful client that I work with, you know, six, seven figure marketers, they all have one thing in common, which is that they price their product and their services, of course because their time is even more valuable, at a premium. Okay, so none of them are selling anything less than $200, that’s the very bottom floor of pricing, you know?

Jane: Yes, that’s absolutely right, yeah.

Vic: Right and the other thing is that consulting is sort of the best segue into an information product because you really learn your market’s pain points. You’re interacting with these people, they’re telling you like, “Look, I have X, Y and Z problems” and then you can address those in a course later on.

Jane: Absolutely, that’s so true. That’s very, very, very true. Yeah, that’s true and the thing is that people will pay for a premium product if it’s solving their problem. It’s never really about the money because people, if they want something, they will find a way to buy it or to get it. I really just don’t understand how people make money when they’re selling something less than 200.

With Nick Toff what we did was, and I experimented with different ways, we sent cold traffic from Facebook to her sales page for this $50 product. It was — dollar fifty and I looked at how the sales were going and we manage to make profit, sort of like $50 a day, but she was spending, also spending like a hundred. Overall, the profit was 50. So then we experimented with other ways. So you can do it but it’s just a lot harder, I think.

Vic: Yeah, you just don’t have the margins you know?

Jane: That’s right, yeah.

Vic: Okay. Well, let’s transition then into that talk. You are really good with Facebook advertising. I know that it’s something that you’ve — do you coach people on this as well, I guess?

Jane: Yeah, so. I do, yeah. I use to do it for people, which I didn’t — I didn’t even know, I didn’t really mean to end up doing it. I had a service where I was doing their Facebook ads and kind of setting up their whole funnels and stuff like that and doing their launches for them. Now, I just teach people how to do it. It’s really important. I guess, it really is incredible that we can…

Well, let me say this. I built my business, like I was saying, through social media which is a very — like it worked, but these ways they’re a lot faster and one of those is by paying for your leads through paid traffic like Facebook. I mean when you think about it, you can get a lead from anywhere from between 80 cents to, let’s just say, $4. Which is really cheap when you think that that lead might turn into, like in my case, a $5,000 sale or even if it’s going to be a $200 sale, you know it’s totally worth it. If you know what you’re doing.

So yeah, Facebook advertising is just so important and I wanted to tell the listeners that I am, and you’d know this, Vic, a little bit challenged when it comes to anything technical and I don’t have anyone helping me. I am completely self-taught and I really struggle with it, but I have — and I don’t like numbers, I don’t like looking at analytics and all of that stuff — but I can do it quite well. So if I can do it, anyone can do it. I made a really big mistake in the initial 18 months of my business, where I really didn’t want to get my hands on the tools. Now that I really am quite hands-on or understand it, it’s really quite freeing; it frees you up. So I really recommend that everyone who wants to build their business using online marketing, at least try. You know, give Facebook marketing a shot. Again, you need to know what you’re doing, but it’s not — with the right training, it’s definitely achievable for anyone, I think.

Vic: Okay, so if you’re paying for traffic, I guess the good thing is A) if you know what you’re doing, you can scale pretty much indefinitely. Your campaign might run out eventually because there’s only so many people in a given interest group or in a given however you’re targeting, right? You can find other campaigns, other profitable campaigns, and one thing that you’re really big on, and you talk about this in your marketing materials and pretty much all marketers are big on this, is sales funnels.

Jane: Yes.

Vic: Can you have a go at that one?

Jane: Yes. Look, I think also the whole concept of sales funnels, it’s almost like I think the male online marketers are more familiar with that and the females are just getting on board because it’s kind of like, to us, it doesn’t sound very cool or sexy. But, really, all it means is that there’s a process where that allows you to have — to bring leads into your businesses consistently that ends up in a sale.

For me, what that looks like is I like to setup my sales funnels through Facebook, so that we might do… it could be whatever it might be to, it could be for a webinar, for a free giveaway, for whatever. You put an ad out there, get a person on to your list and therefore you put them through a poses that results in a sale, whether that’s doing a launch or whether it’s just an email sequence, whatever it is. That essentially is a sales funnel. I guess the beauty is that you can automate these things.

Vic: Yes.

Jane: It works really, really well. Say, with me, Vic, whenever I have my sales funnel going for Web Celeb Formula, I get sales in — and I need to get that working because I generally don’t even have that working because I’m focusing on more high-end programs — they’re really, really effective. Yeah, it’s all automated; it’s fantastic.

Vic: Yeah, the nice part about sales funnels too is because it really tangibly breaks down each component of your sales process. So you have your ad, right? You can optimize your ad and increase the click-throughs and the conversion and decreased the cost you’re paying per lead and then in the next process, which is people coming on to your opt-in page, on to your squeeze page, you can look at your conversion rates there and say, “Okay. I’m at 10%, let’s get it up to 12%” and all of these little minor details, they all add up to a lot more money in your pocket basically.

Jane: Yeah, that’s right. When I first started, I wasn’t looking at those conversion rates nearly as much as what I do now. I think that’s important to say because it might scare people. I know that if I was hearing this conversation when I was starting out and hearing conversion rates, opt-in page, all this stuff, that would completely freak me out. Now, it’s completely normal. Yeah, I look at those things, but probably because I’m not that technical or mathematically minded, I probably should be looking at that even closer. I mean, I do look at it and I just say that because you don’t have to be an expert at it or have an expert understanding at that to have some really great results. You know?

Vic: For sure, like looking at that stuff isn’t sexy, but I’ll say too —

Jane: Yeah.

Vic: If people are scared off from that, when you see thousands of dollars in your PayPal account or whatever it is and then you realize that if you increase your conversion rate by 2%, you’re going to be making an extra thousand dollar a month, you will get really interested, real quick.

Jane: Yeah, that’s true.

Vic: You know what I mean?

Jane: Yeah, absolutely, certainly. I should probably do that a bit more.

Vic: Okay, let’s talk about just a quick, sort of, aside. Your market is women.

Jane: Yeah.

Vic: I’m just curious if there are any kind of unique challenges or even advantages to doing business specifically with women, teaching women, that maybe the women listening to or even the men listening can learn from that particular segment of the market.

Jane: Yeah. Well, I guess it’s that… This is such a generalization, but just with the technology — I guess I’ll answer that question by saying being a female entrepreneur, one of the struggles that I’ve had is around the technology. Which is why I have you helping me. But that’s sort of something that I think all the female entrepreneurs might have had issues with, do you know what I mean?

Vic: Yeah.

Jane: Although that really wasn’t your question was it?

Vic: No, that’s a good point.

Jane: Yeah, what did you want to know, what is unique to this… One thing that I’m seeing is that there are a lot of coaches in the space. A lot. Especially a lot of health coaches and it’s such a growing industry. Really what’s happening is that there’s all these people, or women, who are becoming coaches, but that they really don’t have much of an understanding in online marketing. Yeah, I think there’s a big opportunity there for training in that space as well.

Also, women because women are now realizing that this whole world of online marketing and online businesses is opening up to them, we’re all quite hungry for services that are related to that space, such as like yours around membership sites because we kind of do want to do it ourselves as well. Lots of products in that space are also appealing to the market itself.

Vic: Yeah, for sure. Kind of the beauty of the age that we live in is that the Internet makes success available to everybody. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, if you’re a felon, if you are a degenerate gambler, if you’re a womanizer, whatever your private life or your background is, it doesn’t matter because you can put all that aside and put some value out into the world and get value back, which I think is absolutely beautiful because it’s like a second start for a lot of people.

Jane: I know and what you’ve just said, that is so exciting. It’s really incredible because it used to be that you had to be a multinational company or have hundreds of thousands of dollars to be able to afford, to advertise on TV or on billboards and now, anyone has that same power that we can reach our customers directly. That’s also why I’m a massive fan of Facebook marketing, and also now there’s YouTube and other ones, but you can really find or be directly in contact or find that your ideal customer.

Vic: Yeah.

Jane: Because of the level of targeting that you can get down to with the likes of Facebook and we can market them, we can be showing that we’re relevant to them and get in front of them you know? It’s amazing.

Vic: Okay, one thing about this podcast, and just about business in general, is that you get the one-off sales which are nice, it’s nice to get a pop of cash, but the real name of the game is recurring revenue because you want to be able to sort of look at your stats and know that next month, give or take, you’re going to earn X amount thousands of dollars, hopefully.

Jane: So true. Yeah. Very, very true.

Vic: On that note, can you sort of talk about how you segued from trading time for money to creating these business assets, these courses and how you incorporate a recurring, a subscription model into your products.

Jane: I’ve only been really a true multi-six figure business owner for the last two years, so it’s all kind of new to me as well. What you’re saying is my ultimate goal and I’m in the process of making that happen. So how I’m making that happen is that I guess I’ve got multiple income streams where, at the moment, I’ve got a high-end program right? That runs for three months. Now, next year I may turn that in to a yearlong program where I would have that annuity income coming in every 12 months. Now, currently how it works is at the end of that program, then people have the option of continuing on, on a sort of a subscription basis.

Vic: This is Business Made Beautiful, right?

Jane: Yeah, that’s right. My idea was that I wanted to have some kind of long-term membership annuity income, like exactly what you’re saying, so that’s really the start of that. So I’m starting to do that. The other thing that I want to do is to be having multiple products being released regularly and have them on evergreen funnels. That’s sort of happening now but not really. It’s only just starting to happen. So what I’m finding is that, and probably what other people would find if they do start going from six figures to multiple six figures is that there’s all these other issues that come up. Like now that I’m trying to grow my business and it’s really just — well, I’ve got about a team of five part-time people, but really it’s just me. It’s that yes, I know that I should be doing all these things, but putting them all in place and making it work like a well-oiled machine is that next phase for me. While I know that the annuity income is ideally where I want to go, I’m sort of figuring that out for myself now.

Vic: I hear you. Definitely I found with any kind of subscription model, if you want to scale it, like MemberFix for example, you have to put all these processes into place that if you hand this off to your team and you go on vacation or you just disappear for the weekend or whatever, things don’t fall apart in your absence and that is really freaking hard to get that down.

Jane: I’m so glad that you’ve said that because I’ve really just been through that myself for I’m currently in the process of launching my program Business Made Beautiful and it really is, I have spent like the last month putting in place all the solid processes and the systems so that program can scale. It’s a high-end program, so it’s $5,000. It’s been like, you’re right, it’s been a real effort to put them all in place. Frustrating at times, but the good thing is that it’s done now and my business can scale. Yeah, that whole idea of the system’s processes in order to scale is just something that I’ve really had to get my head around, that is, I guess that new level of thinking for me. I find that when you’re growing to this kind of level, it’s not enough just to be good at what you do. Then you kind of start having all these other business issues like this, what we’re talking about, the processes, systems, scale the team, all this sort of thing. Actually, to be honest, when I started my blog and even when I was a coach, the Fairy Blogmother, I really didn’t have an understanding that this is what it would end up like, that there would be this constant learning and up-leveling of your knowledge.

Vic: Yeah, you wanted that 4-hour workweek, I know I did.

Jane: I did. I’m still waiting for that to happen.

Vic: Yup, me too.

Jane: Well, I’ve got to learn something new or you got to keep going. If I wanted to just stay at six figures then that would be fine. I wouldn’t be needing to deal with these other stuff and the challenges but that’s the thing, you just want to keep going further and further. Keep empire building.

Vic: For sure. I mean, why not, right? You only get one life, you want to be able to drink nice wine, travel to nice locations. Why the heck not?

Jane: I know, well that’s the goal isn’t it? That’s the goal.

Vic: One thing I want to ask you about is do you still do live events, speaking of wine drinking?

Jane: Yes. I have done a few and they’ve all been really successful. I’m thinking about what I should do in that space if I keep going along with it. I think that it’s a massive opportunity. In Australia, they’re not as big as they are in, say, other countries, in maybe London or definitely the States. Yeah, I think that I’m going to keep doing them. Definitely, yeah. I really enjoyed doing the last one that I did. Yes, I do think it has been instrumental in growing my business because it creates a lot of hype, people get to meet you in person, it really looks good branding-wise.

So with the last event that I did with Business Made Beautiful, people got that and also I sold a few tickets to the public. I think there was about 50 people there and the good thing was that I got so much leverage out of it because I filmed it, which I then sold as a product, but I had a photographer there, which was just brilliant and now I’m using them for my current launch and to sell the next round of it. It kind of has all these multi-faceted advantages. What I did was, I had someone helping me with the organization. So I had an event coordinator who was very reasonable as well, surprising, and it went really, really well. The thing is also that I actually had as the speakers, my previous clients. So I think that’s also really good at creating that community of collaboration as well. It’s almost like you’re creating a movement, as well, by having this event.

Vic: Yeah, that’s a huge way to legitimize your expertise. If you had clients or you had members of your programs who use the information that you taught them, became successful with it, and then are so successful that they’re coming back to share what they’ve learned in their journey, that speaks volumes about you and what the work you’re doing.

Jane: Yeah, that’s true. I also think that it’s important because when you’ve got an online business, you spend a lot of time at home or by yourself, behind a laptop, and I think that people just wanted to come out from behind their laptops and actually interact with other like-minded people, you know? It was great. Even though my market is women, I had some men there as well and, actually, one of the men that did my program is actually now — I’ve taken him on as an employee. Yeah, anyway. So there were a few guys at the event as well.

Vic: Really?

Jane: — being with all these women, but yeah.

Vic: Yeah, why didn’t I get an invite?

Jane: I know. Oh my gosh, yes. You can come to the next one and speak.

Vic: Okay, just one more question about the live events before we move on. I’m curious for selfish reasons because I’ve been considering putting on some live events and speaking about membership sites and consulting topics.

Jane: Yes.

Vic: How do you sort of get into that space and how do you get people to your events and charge for it, etc.

Jane: Well, one tip that someone told me a while ago, which really does work is, it’s always good if you can have an event, or when you’re running event, with something that’s topical, date-wise. For example, the first event that I did, I did it for to celebrate International Women’s Day. That completely sold out, I think I had 100 people there. I only sold the ticket for $65 but it was just… I made it out to be like a big celebration and I put what I was talking about, which was turning your idea into a business, into that whole women’s theme.

I don’t know if there’s anything coming up that you can tie your event into that’s topical, I think that’s good. You really need to do a whole launch campaign for it and you need to start selling it minimum six weeks out. I’ve done it different ways. I’ve just done an event, like I’ve done an event and sold it separately, or the last one I’ve had it as part of another program. I think you can do it either way, but the main thing is that I don’t really think that unless you’ve got a massive following and people know you that you can kind of put an event out there and advertise it and get funds on seats. I think that you really need to have a following or a list or people who know you and then advertise to them. I think it would be a lot easier to do it that way than going out there on Facebook ads with an event, that sort of thing.

Also, my feeling is that depending on what part of the world you live in, that events are more popular or even like smaller events are popular and also how much you can price. So I think, again, in Europe and in the States that having VIP Days and also doing different events is a lot more popular than say around Australia. You can still do them though but yeah.

Vic: Okay, very interesting. That might be a good info product to create, how to do live events, how to profit with live events?

Jane: Yes, exactly. In Australia there seems to be a few players that are really kind of… who hold most of the market like there’s about three of them and that’s really its sort of thing. Yeah.

Vic: I see. Okay, I guess we’re kind of over the hill here, we’ve talked about most of the kind of important things about your business and one thing I always like to ask is what tools and or services have you found to be really instrumental in your business. I know you recently switched to Infusionsoft, maybe you could talk about your experience with that?

Jane: Yeah. So basically, I think that’s an absolutely fantastic question. First of all, I’d have to say LeadPages. Number one, it’s been my favorite tool. I really don’t know what I would have done without that. Also Facebook, I don’t know if you’d call that… Yeah, also my membership site and having you to support me, that’s integral to my business. So I’m using OptimizePress 2.0 with Digital Access Pass and you, to manage all of that. So that’s really, really important. Also, I’ve only recently got onto a more complex email system like Infusionsoft. I had run my whole business from MailChimp, successfully for the last four years.

Vic: Yeah.

Jane: I don’t really… I can’t really comment too much on Infusionsoft because I’ve only just got on there, but I really wanted to say that you really don’t necessarily have to be paying an arm and a leg for your email system to have a successful business. At some point, you will be getting a more sophisticated email system, but when you’re starting out or even when you’re… unless you want to do really complex things, I don’t really think that you necessarily need it. I don’t know, what do you think?

Vic: MailChimp is pretty good for automation. It has pretty complex automation stuff, doesn’t it?

Jane: Yeah, to be honest, I went on Infusionsoft because I’d reached a certain income level and I thought it was almost like The Thing To Do.

Vic: Yeah.

Jane: I kind of blindly did it because everyone was on there, but actually I’m not really sure that that was the right decision. It might be, I’m just not sure yet.

Vic: Okay. In my experience, just to sort of give my perspective on Infusionsoft, is that is the thing to do, and some people do it a little bit earlier than they should because Infusionsoft is a huge system. If you go to Barnes & Noble or a book store and you buy an Infusionsoft book, the thing is, half a foot thick.

Jane: Really? Oh my gosh. See, the thing is that I promised myself that because I have been hands-on in my business and like you were talking about before about the whole concept of scaling and things like that, I really did not want to be as hands-on with Infusionsoft and as I have been, of course, every other aspect of my business. Yeah, I’m just not sure that it’s needed and the other thing is that there are other systems, comparable systems that are cheaper and potentially easier to use, things like ActiveCampaign and just other things, that I’m really not sure. Everything is becoming easier to use, like membership sites and everything, so I’m just not sure. The jury is still out on that one because it is expensive, Infusionsoft.

Vic: What I found with my clients who use Infusionsoft and really feel like they’re justified in their expense is they’re using a lot of the offline marketing features: they’re collecting phone numbers, they’re collecting addresses, they’re sending out mailers, and they’re tracking all of that kind of stuff.

Jane: Yeah.

Vic: That’s pretty next level stuff.

Jane: Yeah, that’s right. It’s good for marketing automation, isn’t it? I thought I would be doing a lot of automation and I’m doing a little bit, but potentially not as much as could be done.

Vic: Right. Your email deliverability has suffered a little bit as well, hasn’t it?

Jane: Yes it has. I actually tested that out just last night. I sent out an email using MailChimp and the deliverability was a lot better.

Vic: Man.

Jane: Yeah, I don’t want to bag them out too much because I don’t have enough information to comment, but I really don’t understand how an email company can have issues with deliverability. I also found out that they don’t do mobile responsive emails. You have to do a fix for that and I’m just dumbfounded that that is the case. I should have done more research, really.

Vic: Yeah.

Jane: Yeah. Shouldn’t say too many bad things.

Vic: We’ll get it worked out.

Jane: I hope so.

Vic: Okay, I guess the last kind of question I want to ask or I just want to give you the mic, so to speak, and say, I don’t know, say what you want to say to folks listening, advice, one profound piece of advice from Jane that they could take away, you know?

Jane: Yeah. Well, I guess it’s that it is possible to build the business and lifestyle of your dreams. It really is possible, if you know what you’re doing and that the tools are there. Just to keep going, one thing that I see is it’s not about how technical a person is or if they’ve got a marketing background or anything like that. Although, it does help if you’ve got an understanding of those things, but it’s really about the sense of urgency that they have and their determination. For me, when I see people breaking through, that is more than ever the qualities that they have. I believe also, in my case, that that’s what happens; if you really want it to happen, it will. I know that sounds a bit woo-woo.

Vic: No, not at all. That’s not woo-woo at all because you had a child, a new child, you had this health issue, you either had to make it happen or you were screwed.

Jane: That’s it. I just thought, this is it, otherwise I may as well be dead. I was like, this has to work, I have to make this work, otherwise I will not be able to continue on in my life. That’s how I thought about it. I think also that the fact that I’m really not technically minded at all and was used to having everything done for me, before I had to do everything myself online and everything. If I can do it, anyone can, really. I’m not particularly gifted or smart or anything like that, I just have determination.

Vic: Wow, that’s awesome, that’s a great message.

Jane: Thanks, Vic. Thank you for all your wonderful help. That’s the thing, if you come across people who can help you on your entrepreneurial journey, you kind of grab on to them, you don’t let go because they’re the ones that will really help you and elevate you up, you know?

Vic: Yeah, absolutely, the whole cliché of you’re the five people, or however many people are in your little tribe that you surround yourself with, that you’re the average of those people. That’s cliché for a good reason, there’s a lot of truth to that.

Jane: Yeah, exactly. I think so, yeah. Part of that is mind-set.

Vic: All right, well is there anything else that you wanted to add to wrap up?

Jane: No, I think that’s it. Thank you so much for all your wonderful questions, I really appreciate it.

Vic: It’s my pleasure. Thanks so much — this is, I think one of the most fun interviews I’ve ever done. It’s really organic, good vibes. It was really fun.

Jane: Awesome, I’m so happy to hear that.

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