Becoming High Performance and Building A Sales Machine

by Scott

Below you’ll find the first ever “guest re-post” on Life-LongLearner as well as a new podcast with my buddy Ryan Denehy. The post + podcast combo effectively  makes this a Denehy centerfold.

Ryan is a close friend who most recently co-founded Swarm Mobile which was acquired by Groupon. In the podcast episode, we riff on the mental and emotion journey of getting there. In the post, you’ll see all the things he learned building the local sales machine that fueled their growth.

Enter Sensai Denehy….

Listen On Itunes

“Building A Startup Sales Machine: 64 Things I Wish I Knew”

Newsflash: I had no idea what I was doing when I first started running sales and distribution teams almost 10 years ago. Some would argue that I still don’t. But the …
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The Most Important Document You Probably Aren’t Keeping

by Scott

Today I want to share a shockingly simply practice that has made me 10’s of thousands of dollars, allowed me to perform better at work, and created more time to do the things I love.

This practice is the secret to communicating better and how I develop online products that are allowing me to live my dream life right now.

Where We Worked Out On Friday

The practice…

Keep a document of every question people ask you.

Yep. It’s that simple.

Anytime someone asks me a question (especially over email), I file it away into a massive google docs spreadsheet that I call my “demand understanding document.”

Actually, now I forward it to my virtual assistant Josiah and he does it.

Why You Should Do This

Your …
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How I Increased Email Subscribers 98% for 30 Bucks

by Scott

In this post, I’ll show you how I nearly doubled the number of email subscribers for this blog and give you the exact code to do it.

BUT FIRST I want to shed light on the method to my madness….

The most valuable piece of currency content creators can accrue is someone’s email address (aside from loot).

Why? Because content broadcasted to social media is ephemeral. Email delivery on the other hand, exponentially increases the odds that someone will see something you created.

So if I’m going to create content, I want to maximize the fruits of my labor.

Before conducting this experiment, the only way people could subscribe to my mailing list was via the opulent widget on my sidebar.

On January 30th I added …
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Unforeseen Benefits and Why I’m So Happy I Started A Newsletter

by Scott

When I set out to start a newsletter, I had absolutely no idea about many of the benefits I’m now receiving. I wanted to share some of the less obvious perks of starting a newsletter.

A Reason to Email People You Want to Meet

I try to feature the best articles I’ve read each month that relate to business development. Many times, these articles are written by badasses I want to meet (crazy coincidence).

Something that David Siteman Garland taught me is that this scenario provides a great reason for me to email the authors. Specifically, I’ll shoot them a note to let them know that I featured them. I sent the following email and got a great response:

Hey X,

Happy new year!

Just wanted …
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How to Maximize the Sharing of a Blog Post: Part 2

by Scott

In the first part of this post, I discussed ways to encourage sharing once someone has read a post.

But before anyone shares your content from the highest hill in the twitterverse, you must convince people to read your content. This is a whole different challenge. This post will discuss best practices to put your content in play.

Reading

Again, in order for a post to be shared it must be read. There are certain things producers can do to increase the chances of visitor staying to read it:

1. Write a compelling first sentence.

Bloggers compete in the attention economy. Readers have no shortage of content to consume, but a fixed amount of time. Within this environment, you need to capture someone’s attention quickly …
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How to Maximize the Sharing of a Blog Post: Part 1

by Scott

If you’ve ever spent 2+ hours slaving over a blog post only to have 1/2 a spam bot be the sole person to share it you may want to read this post.

Improving the odds of getting people to share your post starts with creating compelling content (or having a lot of money to give entrepreneurs). Assuming you can achieve this, there are certain considerations and practices that maximize the exposure available through social media.

The Sharing Funnel

You can visualize the content sharing funnel by working backwords.

For content to be shared, it needs to be read (unless you have a posse retweet jockeys).

For it to be read, a visitor must perceive that it’s worthy of their attention upon arriving at the post.

For …
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Building A Minimum Viable Audience

by Scott

I’ve soft-launched two startups in the past year…and I’m the only one that knows about it.

 

Many aspiring founders build a minimum viable product without a minimum viable audience. This is bad.

In order to truly understand market demand, there needs to be a feedback loop. For consumer web products, that feedback loop is people or an audience. Without one, it’s nearly impossible to test a product in the market…maybe that’s why we see people spend months building before they realize no one wants their product. There’s probably a group of lean startup disciples doing a golf clap somewhere.

The audience I used to test one of my “MVPs” was my blog’s readership.

For people that have read this blog over the past year, …
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How to Drive 100+ Pageviews With 20 Seconds of Work

by Scott

It’s no secret that including a link within your email signature is a simple way to promote your blog. But almost all people who do this still miss out on optimal traffic generation.

 

Few people realize that Google hides content that you’ve already seen in your inbox. For example, I just sent an email from my personal gmail to work one.

Pre-Send Compose View:

 

Default view from my work inbox:

 

 

The default Google view does not display the signature from my personal email. Why? Because I’ve forwarded messages to my work one already this week. Due to the fact I’ve already seen all the content within my email signature, Google’s default view hides it.

The only way to view my signature is by clicking the small …
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