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mbjay40

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Hi Fastlaners.

Time for me to finally start my progress thread.
I’ve been a lurker for too long and it is now time to share my experience and engage this amazing place.

Before I start with a quick intro, I’d like to thank @GuitarManDan , @Fox and @Valier for how inspiring they are. Can’t believe how much work Dan has put over the past few years, how Rob’s course is helping me going forward and for how incredible humble James is.
Here is a short bio:

I’m French who spent 7 years in London working for a VAT consultancy firm. During this time I’ve understood that providing value and showing willingness could get you where you want. Managed to double my salary in the space of 4 years within that company. Unfortunately was made redundant at the beginning of this year. This told me one thing: even a “stable job” won’t provide you with security. At the end of the day, you’re just a cost.

For the past 2 years now, I’ve been dabbling into entrepreneurship and going from one shinny object to the other. I got sucked in the whole Amazon FBA craze in April 2019 and spent probably $600 on various courses which didn’t provide much value, then another $5000 on inventory without knowing much. A year later, my accounts show a loss of around $3.5k. Lesson learned.

Since early September I’m part of Rob’s school and been focusing on getting client for the past month. Not an easy task if you ask me.

The reason why I wanted to start this thread:
- Keep me accountable for my actions.
- We say that sharing is caring and for me it couldn’t truer. I’ve learned so much from going through some of the threads on this forum that I hope someone will find something to learn from my experience.
- I think it will motivate me even more to get sh*t done !

My goals for the year to come –

- Make £60,000 worth of revenue by selling websites and related services (SEO, GMB optimisation etc…), by December 2021

- Create a MRR of £3,000 by December 2021 so that I can finally start looking into buying my own place.

I look forward to sharing this experience with you all and if you have suggestions on what can be improved, please feel free to share them with me as I am sure I’ll need some.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post.
 
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Fox

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Thanks for the tag - I’ll follow along with this thread and will help best I can.

Whats the action plan for the rest of this month?
 

mbjay40

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Hey,

So here we are with the first update.

Let’s start with the goals for this month:
- Sell for £1000 worth of websites.
- Make 3 calls per day every day to gain confidence and refine my approach.
- Create basic system to lead generation: A system that I can follow and not wonder what the next step is and that gets me consistent amount of companies to contact.
- Bring my company’s account up-to-date and get an accountant
- Finish SEMRush SEO Academy and pass all certification exams

The one thing I am currently struggling with is the whole selling part. Unfortunately, I feel like I am only surrounded by Slowlaners who don’t really have Fastlaners around them either.

Asking my network only got me 1 one-page website design for a pub in the UK.

Also, I am currently living in Romania which isn’t a great opportunity for me to sell websites due to the mentality they have about spending money on such things.

For the past week I’ve been cold-emailing companies with an approach where I tell them that there are great opportunities on their website to bring more customers.
Got one response saying that I was 3 months too late as they have just chosen somebody to do the work for them.


I am currently reading “wake up and live” by Dorothea Brande and in there she says “Act as if it were impossible to fail” and this really made me realise I should think this way. The only thing is, every time I’m about to pick up the phone to call a business, I’m taken with some thoughts about how they’ll tell me they are not interested or that they already have someone.
I know very well that this is something that I should expect, and not take personally, but still, it stops me.

This morning I’ve actually decided to think of a way where I can ask the receptionist “what is the common feeling about the website within the company?” This way I avoid the ultimate question and if the response is in the range of “well, it could be better” then I have an “in” to ask to speak to the person in charge.

That is going to be my approach for tomorrow’s cold calls.

I knew sales would be the area I’d struggle the most with but not to that point haha !

So yeah, I am going to persist and keep going.
There must be someone out there who needs a damn website that I can sell him/her on

Jay
 

Raja

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will you update weekly, daily, or monthly?
 
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mbjay40

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will you update weekly, daily, or monthly?
I'd like to update weekly as this is how I "measure" what I do.

And this will also help me with being consistent with what I do :)
 

AdrianB

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Hey! Nice to meet you. I am also living in Romania, was part of pro group of @Fox. I learnt a lot from his course and got a lot of insights on the websites design, but the marketing and people's mentality in our country is a lot different of others. I'm also doing cold emailing and cold calls as the persons we tried to find to help with sales are not motivated. If you pay these persons with an average salary, they are not anymore motivated to work together with you as a team, if you don't pay only on refferal/comission percent of contracts they also not try their best to find customers and then give up, if you use a mixed combination of salary and comission the results are pretty much the same. So, me and my partner started to call by ourselfs instead of working with sales persons (we had 12 sales agents working for/with us by now and we barely got 3 contracts). Quite difficult from the sales perspective. We are thinking to try reaching businesses from abroad and see how things are working.
Good luck!
 

harlansjobs

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Hey! Nice to meet you. I am also living in Romania, was part of pro group of @Fox. I learnt a lot from his course and got a lot of insights on the websites design, but the marketing and people's mentality in our country is a lot different of others. I'm also doing cold emailing and cold calls as the persons we tried to find to help with sales are not motivated. If you pay these persons with an average salary, they are not anymore motivated to work together with you as a team, if you don't pay only on refferal/comission percent of contracts they also not try their best to find customers and then give up, if you use a mixed combination of salary and comission the results are pretty much the same. So, me and my partner started to call by ourselfs instead of working with sales persons (we had 12 sales agents working for/with us by now and we barely got 3 contracts). Quite difficult from the sales perspective. We are thinking to try reaching businesses from abroad and see how things are working.
Good luck!
Since you two are in Romania, maybe you could team up? They say there is strength in numbers.
 
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mbjay40

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Hey! Nice to meet you. I am also living in Romania, was part of pro group of @Fox. I learnt a lot from his course and got a lot of insights on the websites design, but the marketing and people's mentality in our country is a lot different of others. I'm also doing cold emailing and cold calls as the persons we tried to find to help with sales are not motivated. If you pay these persons with an average salary, they are not anymore motivated to work together with you as a team, if you don't pay only on refferal/comission percent of contracts they also not try their best to find customers and then give up, if you use a mixed combination of salary and comission the results are pretty much the same. So, me and my partner started to call by ourselfs instead of working with sales persons (we had 12 sales agents working for/with us by now and we barely got 3 contracts). Quite difficult from the sales perspective. We are thinking to try reaching businesses from abroad and see how things are working.
Good luck!

Yeah, knowing the mindset of people here kinda makes me want to not even try. But ... I just watched the latest video of Fox on Youtube and I didn't even think of my partner's dad who knows many people in different business so I'm gonna try this route too.
I'm mostly focusing on the UK as this is where I spent a few years of my life and hope to get back to, as soon as this virus is somewhat gone.

Try to build trust with companies by offering more affordable projects first and then either get referrals from those or use those projects as a reference when contacting potential clients.
I'm going to start applying this method tomorrow with my emails and calls and see where that leads
 

mbjay40

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Sunday evening post

I want to update this thread with my progress on Sunday as this is when I prepare my week ahead.

Reflection on last week:

I can't say it was a great one or that I've made progress. I felt a little bit down as I couldn't get myself to pick up the phone and cold call some businesses. This is mainly because of some stupid beliefs that I'll get rejected.
Since my post on Wednesday, I've contacted businesses but only through emails. Nothing came out of this but I'm not surprised.

On the education side, I'm going through SEMRush Academy SEO courses as I want to be able to display the certification logo on my own website and Linkedin Profile - build some trust there.

Next week's goal:

1- Contact an accountant I got in touch with last week and ask if I can "interview" him. I had a good chat with him over the phone so I'm thinking he'd be happy to answer a few questions. I just want to try to understand what a website means in that industry and also, what made him choose the web designer he just hired.

2- Do Local SEO and Technical SEO courses on SEMRush
3- Make 2 cold calls a day - This way I'm taking a step at the time and don't scare myself with something like "Make 10 phone calls".
4- Join networking group on Meetup and participate in Zoom call.
5- Participate in Facebook group to build trust and establish myself as the person to go to for Web design
6- Optmise Linkedin Profile + post 1 article
7- Create "self-personae" - Create ideal me with the traits and positive aspect I'd like to have or want people to see/think of me
(he knows his stuff when it comes to Wordpress /SEO/ Javascript ..., reliable, keeps his promises etc...). Read in Indistractable that people tend to align their behaviours with how they see themselves.

I'm actually giving myself until December 20th to sell my first project. I really need this so I'm going to go full on and reap the results at the end of this. If by the end of this 30 odd days, I don't sign anybody, I should be a few steps away from doing so, have increased my network by a lot and understood much better what I need to do to close that sale !

Jay
 
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mbjay40

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1- Contact an accountant I got in touch with last week and ask if I can "interview" him. I had a good chat with him over the phone so I'm thinking he'd be happy to answer a few questions. I just want to try to understand what a website means in that industry and also, what made him choose the web designer he just hired. ✔

2- Do Local SEO and Technical SEO courses on SEMRush
3- Make 2 cold calls a day - This way I'm taking a step at the time and don't scare myself with something like "Make 10 phone calls". ✔✔
4- Join networking group on Meetup and participate in Zoom call. ✔
5- Participate in Facebook group to build trust and establish myself as the person to go to for Web design ✔
6- Optmise Linkedin Profile + post 1 article ✔
7- Create "self-personae" - Create ideal me with the traits and positive aspect I'd like to have or want people to see/think of me ✔

Sunday evening post


Reflection on last week:


It has been a challenging week for me as I kinda had a melt down on Tuesday. I felt so overwhelmed that I started having fever and being hot like a pan on the fire.
I got better the next morning but boy, I thought I had a COVID :)

That scare aside, I still had trouble facing my fear of cold calling. I did 5 cold calls which isn't much, just half of what I had set for myself.

Someone recommended me to read Fanatical Prospecting and I realised that I just have to do it. If I cannot find clients through my network, then I'm going to have to go the cold calling route.

Realised that knowing how to write well is a major plus so I'm going to buy a few copywriting books and study them. I want to know and understand what makes my target tick so I know what I can tell them.

A quick note on that. I had a call with an accountant which was referred to me as a good person to do my business accounts and I got to ask him a few questions. One of them was to understand how these firms get new clients. When he told me that they get them mostly through referrals then I understood that some businesses might have a crap website but a very full client base.

This led me to change my approach when prospecting. Understand how your potential client work, how they get businesses and then you can sell them what you have to offer.

Next week's goals:

1- Finsih free website job for a friend of mine
2- Create a prospect list of around 50 companies that could use my services and call them all.
3- Create schedule and content for posting on Social Media - LinkedIn and Facebook page.
4- Do Mobile SEO and Technical SEO course on SemRush
5- Create a small Calendar with Javascript where I can drag and drop tasks for the day - I'm a very visual guy so this can help me stay on track with my daily tasks and not just carry on doing something when I should be spending my time on something more important.
6- Join 10 more groups on Facebook & LinkedIn (20 in total) and be active.
7- Upgrade my partner's website on Friday and create an Etsy store + optmise the all shop for SEO.


This week I wrote a little personae for who I want to be and what I want to be known for. I have to admit that this is very motivating. Imagining myself being that person, successful and more relaxed, comfortable, makes me get out of bed each morning even if I am tired or want to lay in.

Let's make this week count !!!
 

mbjay40

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Hi everyone,

Quick update for this week:

Have kinda given up on the whole cold calling thing. It is really something I'm not comfortable doing and the idea of calling somebody that might not need what I have to offer doesn't please me.

So I put this aside for now. Until I find a way to approach those people with something meaningful than just telling them I can help with their websites.

This week I got very excited as a guy I used to work with and who now has his owm consulting firm, got in touch with me as he has a project and wanted to talk to someone he can trust.

I ended up sending him a proposal where I'd help him with his website + some SEO as he doesn't have any of this going at the moment and maybe some Google Ads.
I have never done Google ads management or SEO before but I think it could be a good learning experience.

Next week, I'll try to launch a few ads for my own business and see what sort of results I can get.
Ultimately, I want to be able to have people contacting me instead of the other way around.

I had a close friend coming to me with a website project he wants to have. It would be a kinda big project so we have to work on the details. I am hoping this will grow my confidence in building good and converting sites. Still a free one but hey ! I like to keep busy.

That's it for this week. I hope next week I'll be able to bring some exciting news and hopefully some money in da bank :D
 

mbjay40

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And I'm back ...

3 weeks during which I have been working on 2 different projects.

Both are still free projects but from which i hope to get good results and publicity from.

One of them is for a guy who recently good his diploma in Permaculture and who is crawling under requests for work and need a place to send those people to. I am in the process of building him a website which will inform those people and then also, for those who want to take it further, book a call with that guy.
With this project I am trying to implement some of the knowledge I'm getting from reading books. I suggested to the guy to have a paying consulting call so he can make some money off this too.
Also, I am going to use this permaculture project as a case study so I can approach other similar people and business with this and maybe get more work.

During those 3 weeks I've gone through Dotcom Secrets by Russel Brunson and I'm interested in creating a whole system around web development. I don't really want to just create websites but also want to create a whole system for a company to increase sales, inbound leads and email optin.

One of the thing that's been torturing my head is to try to define the niche in which I'd like to work in so I don't just say " I create website for anybody who needs one". This is also because I want to be able to narrow down my target audience in order to try to understand better who I am talking to, what problems I can solve for them and the type of solutions I need to create so I can create offers that are appealing to them.

This is the one thing I want to work on during this holiday season. At the moment, the UK being on a stricter lockdown, I am going to give myself the next 2 weeks to define and refine my approach to get clarity and start 2021 strong.
The other day I listened to an episode from the podcast of Tommy Baker (Resist Average Academy) called"Business is simple".
This episode was kind of an epiphany to me as it showed me a clear approach of what I should be doing. So I'm going to tailor my niching and audience based on this and go out there next year to kick some a$$.

Quick update on my actions:

- sent some cold emails to some pubs which have the same "design" agency. They get charged a crazy ton of money per year for shitty websites. Should not even call them websites as they are just 1-2 pages with the same templates. Got a good response from one of those emails where the lady was actually going to redo hers. Problem is that now they are again in lockdown so not sure whether she'll go ahead. I'll email her this week to follow up and well, say sorry for the current situation.
- Didn't get anywhere further with cold calling. I am just not appealed by the idea of cold calling someone. I am going to switch this to cold emailing and then calling. I feel like if I send an email first then I have something to call about and can use this as an excuse to talk to the decision making person.

To help me getting better for 2021, I'm currently reading:
- The 1-page marketing plan (wish I had read that book 3 months ago now so I could have come up with a plan from the start)
- The One thing - I am always looking for something new to read, do, work on etc... so I am looking for ways to direct my focus to one thing until I finish it.

I'm actually giving myself until December 20th to sell my first project. I really need this so I'm going to go full on and reap the results at the end of this. If by the end of this 30 odd days, I don't sign anybody, I should be a few steps away from doing so, have increased my network by a lot and understood much better what I need to do to close that sale !

Haven't succeeded with this ! Not surprised as I really didn't put too much effort in this to be honest. I know I am capable of doing way more than I am doing at the moment. I think limiting self beliefs are a bitch !

I'm gonna take the next 2 weeks to reflect and work on this and I'll see you guys in the New year !

In the meantime, I hope you're all keeping safe and rocking it !

Happy holidays

Jay
 
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