100 pieces of cake, 100 dreams come true, 100 days of vacation, what’s not to love about 100? We are so excited to celebrate our 100th episode with you today and answer some of your burning questions.

Four Questions From the Community

Question from Sabrina Cadini, Life-Work Balance Strategist and Brain Fitness Coach:

Hi Madalyn and Kami. This is Sabrina Cadini. I’m one of your biggest fans and I’d like to congratulate you on your 100 episodes. This is so exciting. My question for you is regarding brand new Facebook groups. I’d like to know what you would suggest doing before inviting new members to join so that the group shows some type of activity and it’s not a ghost town. I’m guessing a pinned post or announcement welcoming them, giving them a feel of what to expect in a sense of the community, but then what else? Posts with links to relevant articles? If so, how many? Five, six? What about a special offer for a service or a product, or is it considered too salesy? Especially at the beginning of the relationship. What about a mini-course? Free of charge, of course, taking advantage of the units feature as a “thank you” showing the added value of being in the group. I look forward to your expert suggestions and congratulations again to both of you for your continued success. 

Answer:

When you’re first starting out, it’s important to get people to come together and get to know each other, lay that foundation and then keep the momentum going. Get people to add a video or photo to introduce themselves. Create a challenge where people need to reach a goal or result and ask them to choose an accountability partner. This helps people to get active and participate. Lay the foundation with some content and resources to help people get a start. Think about the value you can add or start a thread asking people to introduce themselves. Don’t push for sales in the beginning and if you provide value to the community, you’ll be able to present an offer. Build the relationship first. If possible, recruit people you know to be in the group that would be valuable for others. You can begin the launching with them and start the conversation before others come in.

Question from Sandy Mentzel, Founder, Savannah Social Media Breakfast:

Hi Ladies, this is Sandy Mentzel from Savannah. I want to congratulate you guys on reaching 100 episodes. That’s awesome. My question is all about organization. I would love to hear how you guys keep it all straight. You’re involved in so many things, as I am, and I’m sure a lot of people are. So anything that you can help us just keep track of it all would be great. I love all the tips that you’ve given us, like about GetToby and anything regarding organization would be wonderful. Congratulations again, you guys on a hundred episodes and many, many, many more episodes to go.

Answer: 

We thought through our daily processes to come up with the tools we use on a daily basis. For planning, GetToby is a Chrome extension that allows you to group bookmarks. Trello and Asana both helps to organize and track and keep things organized. These are both great options for building systems. Trello and Asana both work well for teams and have similar features whether you prefer lists or an overview. The Full Focus Planner and the Daytimer notebook are both good calendar and planning options if you like to use paper. You can also use a notebook to do a 6-1 system with your attention list and choose 6 items each day and take daily notes to reflect on. Noisili and Focus@Will are noise apps that provide an option of music or background noise to help you focus and work. Email is overwhelming for everyone, but there are a few tools that may help. ActiveInbox is an app that allows you to turn emails into tasks, schedule them on the calendar and pause email to have it come back at another day. Evercontact keeps your address book up to date, creates new contacts and updates existing ones. Slack is a great tool to communicate with your team, has a lot of great features and has a powerful, free version. Bonjoro sends a video through email and it’s a great way to keep in touch and connect with your contacts. Canva is a tool is a tool where you can create all of your graphics, templates and printed materials. Snagit allows you to screen grab to share, highlight, draw arrows, make notes and even make GIFs. If you have employees, you know there’s a lot of things to keep up with. Gusto helps with hiring, tax filings, insurance and payroll. You can use T-Sheets for time tracking, which will automatically go into Gusto and then into Quickbooks.

Question from Todd Giannattasio, The Growth Suite:

Hey Kami and Madalyn, this is Todd from The Growth Suite. Congratulations on your hundred episodes. It’s so awesome. I have listened to everyone and don’t plan on ever missing one that comes out. My question for you guys is that you both do so many amazing things and have so much going on. How do you keep yourself focused and disciplined on things that actually move you towards achieving your goals on a regular basis?

Answer: 

Having a system is really important. Set Annual Goals, Quarterly Goals, your Weekly Big 3 and Daily Big 3, which will help you focus on what can get done and what needs to get done. If you have a large task to complete, having the weekly 3 and daily 3 helps to break the task down and move forward. At the end of the week, do an accountability review or get an accountability partner. If you really need to stay on top of things, hyper focused, there’s no better way than to say it out loud and share it with someone. Use your calendar to plan and delegate time to working towards your goals. If you struggle to get started, open a tab on your browser the night before for whatever you need to work on the next morning. Write out your goals, look at them daily, do at least one thing each day that brings you closer to your goals. Doing a six week sprint helps you to accomplish your goal in 6 weeks by working through your to-do list. If you’re struggling to get things done, this may be a method that works for you.

Question from Kyle Hetrick, Iuby:

Hey guys, my question for you is how much new content should you be creating versus how much evergreen content should you be constantly pushing out? Is there a ratio that you guys know that works best.

Answer: 

The key is to repurpose content, change it up and reuse it. Share new content, other people’s content and repurposed content. Experiment to see what works for you, but keep in mind the 80/20 rule, the idea that you share other people’s content 80 percent of the time and your own content 20 percent of the time. Tim Fargo’s Social Jukebox is great for evergreen content. You should also have a content funnel that takes people to a page where they buy something, take a course or otherwise take the action you want. When you have a funnel set up, always run different content that gets people to the funnel. For more information on building a funnel, we did an episode with Lindsey Morando from HelloBar that you can refer back to. Make sure everything you put out has a purpose behind it from building your thought leadership, to moving towards a sale to helping people. We also came up with 16 ways to reuse, recycle, and repurpose your content in another episode that you can listen to.

Tools, apps and links mentioned: 

• GetToby 
• Trello 
• Asana 
• Full Focus Planner 
• Daytimer 
• Noisili 
• Focus@Will 
• ActiveInbox 
• Evercontact 
• Slack 
• Bonjoro 
• Canva 
• SnagIt 
• Gusto 
• QuickBooks Online 
• T-Sheets
• Inside Our Product Process at Buffer: 6 Week Cycles and How We Run Them
• Productivity 101: A Primer to the Getting Things Done (GTD) Philosophy
• Frixion Pen 
• Onetab 
• Talk to us on Speakpipe 
• How to Promote Your Evergreen Content with Tim Fargo – Ep 46
• How to Build an Evergreen Funnel to Capture Leads – Ep 74
• How to Reuse, Recycle, Repurpose Your Content – Ep 24

How to reach Kami:

If you’d like to learn more about Kami Huyse, visit her website at www.zoeticamedia.com. You can contact her by email at kami@zoeticamedia.com or tweet to @kamichat.

How to reach Madalyn:

If you’d like to learn more about Madalyn Sklar, visit her website at www.madalynsklar.com. You can contact her by email at madalyn@madalynsklar.com or tweet to @MadalynSklar.

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