Today on the show we have Meg Clarke of Clapping Dog Media. She is an SEO strategist who teaches creative small business owners how to grow their organic traffic and rankings so they can make a great impact and reach more people. She is also a sourdough bread baking genius, so you can look forward to several bread references throughout this episode! In Episode 45, we interviewed Meg where she talked about SEO for newbies, but today we’re taking it a step further by addressing intermediate and advanced issues that are more applicable to listeners who are somewhat experienced in this area. A lot has changed since 2017, so she discusses updated SEO practices, stuff you can do to prep your business and brand for launch and what to do if you are pivoting and need to start tackling different topics on your existing website. She also dishes out resources for finding targeting keywords and hidden SEO within your website and shares what she reckons is worth spending time on.

Before we get into the meat of the episode, it’s worth mentioning the incredible strides we have made with our SEO since a few years ago. But, while we’ve done well, we also desperately need maintenance. Our traffic used to be at a low 5 to 10% from Google despite our volume of content, but now over 50% of our traffic comes straight from search. But, as we said, we also need to brush up on our SEO, so we’re just as eager to hear what Meg’s got for us. So, pull your notebook closer and get ready for some fresh SEO strategy!

Today on the show we have Jessica Rasdall, a motivational speaker, bestselling author, public speaking strategist, and host to the Speak to Scale Podcast to talk to us about crafting your story for the virtual stage. Now that we are homebound and communicating with our audiences online, we can do with some help when it comes to showing up as ourselves and helping people rather than just have a self-serving online presence. You’ve heard the vulnerability piece – that you need to be relatable and reveal your “humanness” to your followers, but what is the right amount of sharing?

Jessica walks us through a formula for breaking your story down into three acts so it is most helpful to people - a structure that outlines the before, middle, and after phases of your story. Each of these three phases is important: from hooking the audience and relating to their experiences to showing them how the significant event changed your life and the difficult decisions you have had to make. For Jessica, the most important aspect is the motivation behind sharing your story, and if its primary purpose is not to help your audience in some way, you might want to reconsider. Be sure to tune in to hear the rest!

Before diving into the show we wanted to let our listeners know the date on which this was recorded – March 18th – because we know the world is in a weird place right now. The strategies discussed here are hyper tailored to this moment and things could be totally different by the time you listen! In any case, from our side, we are trying to create a sense of normalcy in our business and within our friends, so we wanted to go ahead with our chat with Meghan Maydel.

The strategies our guest shares today are highly valuable due to their applicability not only in this time of pandemic and crisis but also to other spikes within the world and the industry of advertising in general that could happen in the future. Meghan talks about how advertising doesn’t just have to happen on Facebook and gives a whole bunch of pro tips about other platforms and what using them can look like for you. We will be brainstorming different ways for you to be really effective in your ads today!

Every single month we add thousands and thousands of people to our email list, which sounds bananas because when we started getting to the first 10,000 subscribers, it felt unbelievable. It was a lot! So, we want to give you guys a little bit of a vision of what it looks like to grow your email list at a rapid rate in today’s episode. Several of the concepts we are going to cover could be 100% organic. You do not have to utilize paid strategies at all.

Now, some of these things we definitely have put dollars behind, but some of the concepts without paid dollars are the same! There are more ways to grow your email list than you’re perhaps aware of, and we are going to cover our top five today! We might come up with a few others too though, and just throw them in! So tune in and join us for the ride as we get into the best ways that you can keep those subscribers on the up and up!

Today on the show we have Tony Rulli, the co-founder, and CEO of Intentional Spark, an amazing paid advertising consultancy which we are proud to have the service of! He is the lead strategist for all their paid marketing campaigns which include Facebook ads, AdWords, web re-targeting, Instagram – the whole nine yards! As we said before, he is our ad guy, so Intentional Spark runs all the things behind-the-scenes for us which you, our listeners, see all the time!

In this episode, we are diving in and talking about a bit of the mechanics behind how these platforms function regarding sales and building an audience. We’re breaking down and picking Tony’s marketing brain all about the future of Facebook and Instagram, and what the next hot features are that everybody should be paying attention to. We also dabble into a little bit of conspiracy theories and a short clip of some of our favorite shows. So this is a really good smorgasbord but it’s all things nerding out about marketing and it should be really enjoyable. Tony also shares a freebie at the very end all about how you can start getting set up with your Pixel, and a little bit on how to read an ad report, so definitely make sure you’re listening till the end so you can grab that link!

For those of you that do not know, we used to work directly with clients, Emylee as a photographer, Abagail as a graphic designer and then as a branding and marketing company together! When you work with clients in this way, selling packages and presenting offers there are strategic ways to do this that can improve your results and help you sell for higher price points. 

This is where we started before diving fully into the online education space. In today's show we want to help you get better at this selling process and here's the good news, you don't even need a website to do it! Listen to this episode to get going, growing and making more money and make sure to listen to the end when we drop some info on two great tools we have set up for you and your business!

Hey, Friends! Let’s talk about email, opt-ins, lead magnets, freebies, and everything else you worry about in your efforts to grow your email list. While you can move a business forward without an email list, you will hit a point where your growth slows down quite drastically, so leveraging email as a platform to engage your audience and remind them about your awesome product or service is a smart move. 

In this episode of Strategy Hour, we break down exactly what an opt-in is, the resources you need to set it up, and what kind of value they can bring to your business. We dish out opt-in ideas for a variety of business types and give you the best practices for introducing a new audience member to you, your business, and what you can offer to help solve their problems. Knowing the steps newbies typically go through as they convert from an opt-in to buy-in is super important as it will help you to be intentional in designing the sequence that gets them there. We also tackle the common question of what to do with those who have opted-in but who are not purchasing anything and give you plenty of all-round great advice for optimizing your email.

We’ve been getting a lot of questions about our side hustles, the things we work on outside of Boss Project. Since we’re right back at the beginning stages with these projects, we thought it might be a good idea to share things as we implement and test them out. In this episode, we are going to dive into Abagail’s side hustle, sharing with listeners her processes, struggles and everything she’s learning. 

She gives us the inside scoop on why she decided to take on this new endeavor, why she is personally invested in the health and wellness space, and what she hopes to offer other women who are in the same boat. Despite some people’s hesitancy about this type of business, Abagail shares how network marketing has been serving her well and then elaborates about the relevance of blogging, social media, email lists, Facebook ads, and other common strategies in her business. Finally, you will hear some great pointers for creating more consistency in your business! 

As we all know, ’tis the season to set new goals, make resolutions, and ditch those nasty habits that were holding us back in 2019. We’ve already seen a whole range of resolutions from all of you; everything from what you want to learn, what you want to get better at, and what you want to let go of in the new year. Within those we’ve seen one similar theme constantly pop up, and that is removing or scaling down on social media, specifically Facebook and Instagram. 

So, in today’s episode we want to dive into our relationship with social media and offer some reframes that will be truly helpful in redefining this relationship, especially as it pertains to your business. As with all trends, there are always highs and lows and the conversation we are seeing nowadays is painting social media in a bad light. So instead of being bogged down by all that is bad about social media, we want to give you the tools to refocus on your business needs. Stay tuned as we go through our top tips to help you get a head start on your resolutions for 2020!

Today our guest is Jennifer Turner, the founder of Gemini where she helps online business owners improve their copywriting and design to create higher conversion rates. Gemini is an online branding and education platform and Jennifer is the rare combination of a trained copywriter and designer! Their MO is unifying a business' voice in the copy and design to tell a stronger story. We love it! Today we will be focusing solely on the copy side of things and how to get yours up to scratch.

We are super excited for Jennifer to dive into her four-step formula for high converting copy and it is honestly one of the best formulas we have found in a long time! These kinds of frameworks can sometimes put you in a box or make you sound a bit robotic and this one is a really cool way to insert your story and your audience's story while coming up with something that gets your conversion rate all the way up! This can be used for freebies, opt-ins or paid services and programs. Tt can be applied in all of those areas just as effectively, that's how versatile it is, so get your notes ready and let's get into some strategy!

Joining us for Strategy Hour today is networking ninja, Cassandra Thompson, who helps businesses extend their network through LinkedIn! But before you think that LinkedIn is only for professional or corporate folks and therefore not applicable to creative entrepreneurs like us, think again. Illustrators, jewelry designers, and service-based providers can all benefit greatly from a LinkedIn presence, and in this episode, Cassandra gives us the step-by-step of setting up a profile, an explanation of how exactly it works and she shares loads of strategies for getting the absolute maximum out of this platform. 

We have to be honest, we too neglected LinkedIn because we thought that it wasn’t really a space for creatives to connect, but after a debate with Cassandra, we have done a 180 — and we’re pretty sure you will too after listening to what she has to say. Be sure to stay tuned in until the end because we are going to give you a 30-day LinkedIn challenge that we’d love for you to participate in! 

Our guest on the show today is Abbey Ashley, the founder of The Virtual Savvy! After running her own successful VA business for a few years, she has gone on to help other aspiring virtual assistants launch and grow their own at-home businesses from scratch. We get to pick her brain today, and the reason we’re so excited is that she has an amazing business philosophy which involves keeping things simple while still making a major impact! She has perfected the art of doubling down on the areas that work and remaining laser-focused on those rather than getting distracted. 

In this episode, you’ll learn about her launch game plans as well as how she deals with Black Fridays, teaching us how to set ourselves up for a booming year ahead. You’ll be thrilled to know that Abbey will also be a speaker at our upcoming Boss Project Summit, another great reason to sign up and get your pass! 

Do you want to increase your sales? Of course, you do, we all do! There are so many strategies out there on how to do this and today we are picking out four that we use and that have been highly effective for us! We hope that sharing this with you will help you decide which strategies are best for you and your hustle. When we speak about our work we are referring to Boss Project, our main thing and then each of our own side gigs. Some of the strategies have worked better in different places but we will be unpacking all of that, do not worry!

The cool thing is you get to try these out for yourself and see which suits you. We want you to think about which fits with your goals and lifestyle, as well as its conversion efficacy. These are the most important metrics for you to keep an eye on while testing things out. Don't forget to keep the conversation going over on Instagram, you know we love to hear from you, so hit us up with any thoughts or questions!

Today we are so lucky to host Joelle Elizabeth on the show! Joelle is a boudoir photographer and marketing strategist for other ambitious photographers and she is here to talk about growing a following and creating engagement on Instagram! 

Remember when we almost deleted out Instagram account? Well, Joelle was one of the amazing people who reached out to us and offered some great alternative ideas and we are eternally thankful to Joelle for the great value she has provided to us! Join us today as we get into how to double down on what you have going on and boost your status on the 'gram to get that business pumping!

Welcome to the Strategy Hour, everybody! Today's show is all about our upcoming summit! Yup, it is our fourth summit, can you believe it? This time we are focused on helping you make the most of the end of the year and soaring into the new year like a rockstar! It is going to be so awesome and we can hardly contain our excitement about it! There is so much potential for the last part of the year and we probably do not need to tell you that Q4 is a really big one for small business owners. 

Our summit is going to set you up to tie a big, beautiful bow around 2019 and kickstart the new year on the right foot with the best energy. It can also be used as a great way to take stock and move into the next phase based on the lessons available. We wanted to bring you a complete package that offers a selection of things you need for now, the end of the year and the new year too! These time-sensitive strategies and ideas will cover Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the holiday season, planning, questions and setting goals. We want to help you commit to the right things and give you the right stuff to implement in your business for the better. Join us as we give a preview of what to expect!