In today’s episode, I’m going to share with you five ways to leverage in your business.
I bet you haven’t even considered some of these things as being leveraging your time, but they absolutely are, and they are super duper sexy.
Let’s dive in!
What do I mean by leverage?
When it comes to leveraging your time, it’s where you put one measure of time in, and it happens multiple times… It’s where you do something once and it works for you over and over again.
Leveraging your time can be done in a bunch of different ways.
You can leverage your time by doing something once, and then:
- Having someone else do it for you
- Automating it
- Having people be able to purchase it over and over again
In this episode, I’m going to break down leverage in your business to the five key ways that you could be leveraging. I want to really open up your eyes to what the possibilities are right now, rather than feeling like you have to wait until you’re able to leverage in delivery (which is the last of the ways that I’m going to talk about).
For a lot of people when I talk about leverage, they think the only way they can get leverage in their business is to have a group program, course, membership, or something along those lines.
But there are other ways to leverage.
The other ways that you can leverage are things that you can do waaayyyy before you’re ready to dive into delivering a group program…
1. Leverage your content
Podcast recording equipment to leverage courses and launching in business
When you create content (ie. a podcast, really amazing captions for your Instagram posts, short videos), those pieces of content can be leveraged. You can do it once, and then it gets reused over and over again.
You can leverage by reposting that content several times.
If I write a really good post and it’s a longer-form post, I will immediately copy and paste that into my content planner to go out again 90 days later and six months after that.
That piece of content isn’t just going to be shared once and have its social media half-life (which tends to get shorter and shorter). It’s actually going to be repurposed or reposted in its original form.
The next way of leveraging your content is to repurpose.
Repurpose means that you make slight changes. For example, recording this podcast, we can take little snippets, quotes and tips out of this podcast and turn them into their own social media posts. Or I could take a snippet of this and make it into an Instagram story.
I’m not reposting the exact same thing again and just resharing it. I’m actually changing it slightly to give it a new purpose. We’re repurposing that content.
The final way that you can leverage your content is to leverage the distribution.
Just because you posted on social media and it gets 200 reach when you post it, doesn’t mean that its job is done.
You can put some money behind that post. Use Facebook ads, Instagram ads, or other forms of advertising to give that same thing more and more reach and growth to leverage that piece of content.
Even when you are being mindful of the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) of your content, you are in essence making it leveraged, because in six months time someone searches a term that you’ve used quite well in that post, and it pops up as the number one result on Google for them.
That is doing its job over and over again.
There are so many people that try to leverage their delivery in their business by having a group program or a course before they’ve ever even leveraged the content they’re already creating.
If you’re not leveraging your content effectively, then it’s not able to do its job of growing your audience, magnetising the right people, warming your audience up and getting them ready to invest in working with you.
In essence, you’re robbing the leverage delivery of the audience that it deserves and could potentially be having if you just leveraged your free content.
2. Leverage your list growth
For most people when they want to work with me to create their group program, the number one thing that we have to fix in their foundations is that they don’t have an adequate mailing list size.
When you’re launching a group program without an adequate mailing list, there’s a lot of extra heavy lifting that needs to be done in your launch process and in the runway before your launch.
When you don’t have an adequate list size when you’re launching a group program, you’re going to likely need to make up for that with a larger investment in advertising for that launch, to not only ensure that you maximise the number of leads for the launch, but also maximise your conversion as well because you don’t have enough leads if you aren’t using high conversion strategies.
Whilst you’re reading this podcast, I want you to think about: Have I leveraged my list growth in my business?
I have a free training that I created about four years ago now called the $0 Facebook Marketing Plan.
That free training has been growing my mailing list ever since I created it.
It’s probably responsible for about 3,000-4,000 people who are on my mailing list over the last few years, and even to this day, it still grows my list.
That one gated piece of one hour content that I created has been leveraged to grow my list for years.
It has taken some time and finessing in relation to how I promote it and the ads that we use for that list growth. I did a lot of organic promotion of that free resource first to test it and make sure that it did its job and that people understood what it was about, and that it delivered on what it promised for my audience. Then I started to experiment with Facebook ads for that particular freebie.
You don’t need to have an online program or a group program or anything going on in order to start leveraging your list growth. In fact, I recommend you leverage your list growth first, because all of that list growth is going to set you up for an epic first launch of your program/membership.
3. Leverage your conversion
This is something that I’m still working on in my business, because I find that I am much more likely to have someone buy from me if they get to have that conversation with me. I still have a good portion of people who come through my launches, my automated funnels, and my sales processes.
They still need to have either an email exchange with me or a one-to-one conversation with me, and I’m really happy to do that. I think it’s a very good use of my time in my business. But more and more, I’m practicing how to leverage my time in creating that conversion.
You can leverage your time in conversion by doing things like:
- Having automated email sequences
- Running live webinars
- Running live events such as five-day challenges, week-long events, conferences or summits
- Having ads that go straight to your products
There are a bunch of ways that you can leverage your conversion in your client attraction process that’s going to help your business income grow without you having to put time into every single individual who is interested in buying.
4. Leverage your customer service
This is a very underrated but very sexy way that you can leverage in your business. I wish that I had done it much sooner in my business.
When I talk about leveraging customer service, this is where you’re outsourcing that customer service part to someone else – hiring someone who answers all of your support emails.
You are going to need to do some work upfront (that’s why it’s leveraged, it’s not completely passive).
You will need to do some work upfront in helping them with:
- Some copy-paste words that they can use
- Understanding the types of questions that people will be asking
- Making good decisions about how they respond to customers
- Mentoring and coaching them through that customer service and coming on board in your business
But once they start to learn that, and once they start to get really good at that, you get to take time out and not be in that space all of the time.
I have found that from leveraging my customer service, it has actually created leverage in other areas.
The people who’ve done customer service for me are well positioned to then help me with my content, because they know the types of questions that my audience are asking.
They know the types of content that I’ve been sharing, they read through the emails that I’ve been sending, and they know the types of questions that people ask about that, what people are liking, what people aren’t liking, and they’re seeing a lot of the client interactions that happen in my business.
Then they become perfectly positioned to help me with content, list growth, and even conversion.
There are times where people send an email through to my customer service inbox, they ask a question about a program, my customer service person answers the question, then they buy the program.
Now that’s another way of leveraging my conversion as well!
Again, I would say customer service is something that I wish I had actually started leveraging and outsourcing earlier in my business. You can start outsourcing that really early on, because it’s something where you can just pay for tiny, miniscule bits and pieces of time.
My customer service person probably does under an hour a day, even now. When they first started, maybe it was two to three hours a day until they really got up to speed.
The longer that that person was in the role, the more proactive we could be about addressing issues that were being asked in customer service emails, so then we could proactively address them so there are less customer service inquiries coming in, and more hot leads coming in.
In terms of the ratio, there are more people asking about buying something from me than there are people who’ve already bought asking for help with something or unable to find the link to something or looking to get their login details re-sent or whatever it might be.
That leveraged customer service has created some really amazing shifts and changes in my business.
5. Leverage in your delivery
This is the final way you can leverage in your business (well at least the final way that I’m sharing with you today… there are so many other ways that you can leverage in your business and we can dive into those in subsequent podcast episodes).
Leverage in your delivery is where you create a course or program ONCE, and then multiple people can go through that program.
You’re leveraging if you deliver it live as well.
If you have a group program where twelve people come through, you run a masterclass, all twelve of them are there, it’s recorded, they can catch the recording if they missed it live, and you’re doing a great mentoring session and people are asking questions… that’s all still leveraged.
That leveraged delivery is a very, very powerful way for you to be able to reduce your hours and increase the income that you’re bringing into your business, so long as it’s done the smart way.
When I first leveraged delivery in my business, I completely sabotaged my business income.
I went from selling $2,500 packages, to selling a $400 program, and I therefore needed to sell six times as many programs as I was packages in order to make the exact same amount of money.
I hadn’t leveraged up my list growth, content, conversion or customer service at that point in time.
Even with my first launch having thirteen sales, I took the income from my business from averaging over $20,000 a month to under $5,000 a month by leveraging my delivery and not doing it the smart way.
That brings me to the free resources that I have for you to follow up this podcast episode.
The big one that I want to share with you is my launching training.
This is a workshop that you can watch on how to launch a group program, membership, or course. Gain access to this free training here: tashcorbin.com/launching
I’m also going to share links to a couple of podcast episodes for you as well…
One podcast in particular is answering the question: Can you skip selling one-to-one services and go straight into selling group programs? In that podcast, I share the seven things you want to make sure that you’ve taken care of first.
If you still haven’t got that leveraged content, leveraged list growth, or one-to-one clients coming in consistently (so you’re not really confident in your capacity to attract and convert clients from online channels), then I would recommend you go and watch that podcast episode. Read, watch or listen at tashcorbin.com/149
Another episode that I recommend you go check out is Episode 209: Can launching ruin your business? Here’s how to tell.
In this episode, I talk about how launching can ruin your business, and how best to prepare for your launch and leverage your business. Read, watch or listen at tashcorbin.com/209
As always, if you’ve had an aha moment from this podcast episode, or have a follow-up question, come on into the Heart-Centred Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group using #podcastaha, let me know you’ve been reading episode number 294 and share your lightbulb moments and questions, and we can continue the conversation there.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
