In this episode, we talk about automation that will help your business take up less of your time.
Automations discussed in this episode
- Email Marketing Follow Up
- Email Templates / Canned Responses
- Divi Design Templates
Episode Sponsor > Divi Foundation Course
Keegan 0:01
What’s up ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the Divi addicts podcast. We’re trying to tweak the formula just a little bit on this. And, you know, in this intro I wanted to, I wanted to break down our Divi Foundation course before we jump into this episode with three simple automations for your web design business. And so you know, if you’re out there and you’re you’re shaky about what’s going to come right, we don’t know what’s ahead of us. The Coronavirus, you know, we’ve got we’ve got vaccines that are coming. But what has the effect the 2020 in the COVID-19 situation really had on the future on our economy on jobs.
Keegan 0:39
There’s one thing about capitalism is that businesses find a way to succeed, right, they find a way to survive. That doesn’t mean that there’s not some sort of wake that’s left behind all of these actions, right. So if you’re interested in pivoting and building websites are building a website to host your own course, I have the Divi Foundation course, which will absolutely lay out an incredible foundation for what you’re going to build either for yourself or for clients, or for your education platform. And so the Divi Foundation course is going to be linked below. And if you’re interested in learning how to build a website foundation that will not crumble under pressure, this is the course for you. So again, you can you can sign up, or you can check out the details of it at the link below, it’ll be linked to Divi Foundation course will take you into our Academy where you can look at all of the modules, the different lessons that are involved. And if it’s something that looks like it’s the right fit for you, sign up, say hi to us, connect with us.
Keegan 1:39
And if you have any questions throughout your journey, guaranteed, we’re right there with you holding you hand in hand through this process. So let us guide you to hopefully a really great either side hustle, or help you lay the foundation for what can be a really really great income and a great life and a great career that will give you hopefully everything it is that you need to survive and thrive. So without any further ado, let’s roll the music and get into this episode and share with you three simple automations for your web design business.
Keegan 2:17
Welcome to the Divi addicts podcast, podcast by Keegan Lanier Media, where we deliver news tips tricks on web design to education hungry entrepreneurs who are looking to change their life by starting full fledged business with web design. What’s up everybody? Welcome back to The Divi addicts podcast look this week. Normally, for these episodes, I’ve got some sort of script I’ve got an outline of some sort. I knew the topic I wanted to talk about, I knew I wanted to really talk about automation. And it’s coming from a place of this course that I’m taking right now. So a good buddy of mine, Josh Hall. He had Jimmy Rose, James Rose, who runs a company called Content Snare on his podcast recently, it really got me thinking more about Zapier, which I’ve tried a couple of times and never really implemented things deeply because I was just fiddling around, you know, I’m just like, throwing things against the wall hoping they stick.
Keegan 3:17
Well, long story short, I took Jimmy Rose’s course, on Zapier automation. And it’s a it’s gotten me into this whole automation mindset, where can I save time? How can I save time? And how can I automate those tasks that are just redundant, right, or at least make them quicker, even if it’s not 100% automated, maybe it gives me to the five yard line through automation. And so in this episode, I wanted to talk about three things that we can do as web designers or just as business people. And we’re gonna get into into three of those things here today.
Keegan 3:58
So the first thing is, it is kind of lead generation it is kind of nurturing those kinds of things is for as your clients and or potential clients. So that’s, that’s email marketing automation. I’ve used a few different platforms for emails, I’ve used MailChimp, I’ve used ConvertKit for a brief minute and actually done that with another client that I was working with. But currently, currently, I use Active Campaign and I really, really love it and I will link up Active Campaign below. It is an affiliate link, but the only reason I’m linking up below is because I’m pretty sure you guys will get a sizable discount if you decide to sign up for ask for Active Campaign, at least in your first month or your first billing cycle. So check it out. And if you you know, if you do save some money, that’s awesome. It doesn’t cost you anything extra for sure. And hopefully it’ll save you a buck or two.
Keegan 4:55
But email marketing is a way you can nurture your client so When a client signs up for either a web design project or a care plan that we do, they get added into our email marketing list. And we send out tips that come up in our blog, we send them different tips on ways to get a more higher conversion on their website, you know, homepage structure, tons of different things, how to get organic content out there and build organic traffic. And those are all automated. So when someone signs up, they become they get tagged with client, and it automatically puts them into this email sequence. Same thing for someone, when you go to our YouTube channel, and you watch your video, you know, like, if you’re part of our you’re part of of our list, you’re going to get tagged as YouTube, if you sign up through things that we place in the show notes. So essentially, you have show notes and a link to a forum, someone could sign up, if they use that form, they get tagged with YouTube.
Keegan 6:00
And then there’s certain sequences that we send to them, because they’re a different type of client. Usually the people watching our YouTube shows, or YouTube episodes or videos or whatever world you want to call them, the stuff we put on YouTube. You know, those are mostly young developers, or people who are trying to build a side hustle. And that’s that side of our audience that we want to speak to. So we tagged them with YouTube, and we give them content that is hopefully going to help propel them down the road and that side hustle or building that freelance business.
Keegan 6:32
So that’s the first part is is automating that communication and that nurture sequence. If you have questions, connect with us on any of the socials, really, Instagram DM’s are a great place to, to come and contact those Facebook as well. Or just go to our website at Keegan Lanier media.com, send us a message and a contact forms and we’re good or it’s Keegan at Keegan Lanier media.com you can email me anytime. We’re an open book. And again, you know, the whole purpose of this podcast has always been about education, and how we can share the information I have to get you down the road and skip the hurdles that we have tripped over a few times. So this is you know, we’re an open book. And we just we truly, truly want to help. So that’s the first one. It’s it’s email marketing.
Keegan 7:18
And then the second one is email templates. And Gmail used to call them canned responses, I think. But anytime you have something that you do often or or type up often or you know, if you’re I’m looking at notion right now, I use notion and I’ve got templates for setup for YouTube videos that has scripts and places for titles and different things like that. Anything you do repetitively, you should build a template for and Gmail is one of those, you get a lot of inquiries for people who may have questions about your business, questions about the services you have. And you can type up a template that says thanks so much for reaching out, we have all of our potential client information is listed here and build that page on your site, where it gives a rough estimate of your pricing, what you do, how you deliver it, what makes you different, why they would want to choose you, and just link that up in that template that way with two clicks, you know, you hit the templates, you pick the template, and it populates your email, you change a couple things, maybe their name, and you know, call it a day, send it off to them. And you don’t have to type up that email every single time.
Keegan 8:27
Sure, you’ve heard that from from other people out there, but it’s one of those that I heard probably a dozen times before I actually implemented it and I kicked myself in the ass for not implemented sooner. So go out there, think about the things that you truly, truly do often. And create a Gmail template or an email response template, whatever platform you use, put that in place that is something that’s going to save you a tremendous amount of time that may not seem like much, two to three minutes here and there for a couple 1000 emails throughout the year adds up you know, it definitely becomes a whole lot more than the individual savings per time you do it. So that’s the second one email templates and specifically for those responses.
Keegan 9:11
So the third one is going to be website design templates. And page builders are huge right now it doesn’t matter if you’re using Beaver Builder, Elementor or Divi, or really any of them Oxygen as well. You can create these reusable templates, and we actually sell some over in our academy. So Academy. Keegan Lanier Media.com you’ve heard us talk about it before. There’s some full page like landing page templates, there’s blocks, we’re going to be doing child themes and taking some of the best parts of projects that we do. And we’re going to package them up and we’ll sell them for just a couple bucks. So you know if you want a landing page template, like what we have on our academy for our courses, it’s super easy to do. It’s super easy to get and I think it’s no more than five bucks. So I mean, that’s a great investment for a landing page, especially if you’re going to be doing a lot of different landing pages to do very specific conversions.
Keegan 10:09
Goes back to number one, those email marketing’s if you’re doing different forms in different signups and you have different automations or drip sequences, you can have a lot of different landing pages. And if you don’t have to let to design that landing page the first time, just be by it, drop it in there, and then duplicate it and change the content is going to save you a whole lot of time and you don’t have to build from scratch. That’s why Child Themes are so popular. That’s why there’s a big massive market out there for layout templates. So Divi makes it unbelievably easy. And yeah, it’s a huge, huge part of automation.
Keegan 10:44
And the other part of this kind of be a second part and number two, a 1.2 or whatever you want to call it. But a sub bullet point of this one is that excuse me Got to get a little coffee. It’s, it’s that you want to do this for WordPress as well. You need to you want to have your own WordPress setup, with all your favorite plugins, your theme set up your your WordPress settings, all of those things in place, and have that as your template that way, whenever you go to start a new website, you fire it up from that blueprint.
Keegan 11:23
You’re not building it from scratch and adding plugins every time and installing your theme and putting in the API keys and all of those steps. And no, they don’t take long. You think an honest 20 minutes? Well, I mean, you we can pull out the old calculator. And you if you figure it’s 20 minutes, and you do 40 websites in a year, it’s 800 minutes divided by six is 13 hours a year, you know, across all those projects, if you multiply that by an hourly rate of $75, as an average, you know, an average price for a freelancer. I mean, that’s $1,000 worth of time that could be spent elsewhere on client work, taking you up the number of websites that you can do by not having to do that repetition every time.
Keegan 12:11
So this is these things are some something that I’m diving into headfirst and something that I’m really, really passionate about time is very important. And if you were to ask me this two years ago, when I first started the podcast, it was hustle, it was keep working, load it up, move fast, let’s go. And today, my mindset is a little bit different. I am I am working to live not living to work. And there’s nothing wrong with the hustle I want to hustle but also realize that I don’t need to make a million dollars a year, you know if I can make enough to be happy and be comfortable and, and help spread the knowledge and teach people I’m going to be a really happy human being so 2020 it’s in all of its chaos has really brought brought some clarity, to me to my life to my mind. And yeah, that’s just kind of where I am.
Keegan 13:02
So I hope that these three things you know, recap them real quick before we call this episode done. The first one is email marketing, and building those drip sequences, make them specialize, but automated email response templates for things that are recurring. If you get the same email question all the time, build a template to where you can click twice, drop it in, change the name, maybe a couple of details and send it they’ll save you a tremendous amount of time. And the third one is WordPress design templates or WordPress installation templates. All of these are going to save you so much time in your life in your business to where you can either earn more, or you can enjoy the free time that you work your butt off to get so I appreciate each and every one of you who listen, it looks like our core audience is growing a whole lot. Everyone who’s coming here is seems to be coming back.
Keegan 13:58
So if that’s you if you’ve been listening, you’re a diehard Divi Addicts fan? I mean, I can’t say anything but thank you, if you would mind or would not mind, whatever platform you’re listening to, if you have the ability to leave a review, we’ll go a long way, especially on Apple this were over 50% of you all are at or at least listening to this podcast on, you know, right behind it. Spotify is up there pocket cast is pretty high. I don’t think pocket cast has the ability to do reviews. That’s where I use for podcasts myself. But if you’re on Apple podcast, you have the ability to leave a review. It would mean so much to me and it would help other people find the podcast as well so that we can continue to build this kick ass community and help people down the road and help them supercharge your business.
Keegan 14:49
So again, I mentioned it earlier, complete open book here. Absolutely wide open. So if you have questions, just know that the inbox is always Open, feel free to reach out on Instagram or Facebook or drop a line in the comments of a YouTube video. Any of those things contact form on the website, Keegan, at Keegan Lanier Media.com The options are up to you. I do appreciate you. And I know I’m kind of rambling here. But I, I can’t say thank you enough. I truly appreciate you all being here and listening to the podcast here in my voice 22 or 25,000 times. It’s just crazy to me. And I know that’s not a lot when it comes to you know, a lot of the podcasts are out there, but we are a very niche market. We’re Divi is not I mean, although it’s a huge WordPress theme. It’s not a massive, massive community of millions upon millions of people.
Keegan 15:46
So the fact that you all are here and you’re listening, you’re loyal, really does mean the world to me, I appreciate you. I hope that you have an amazing week. And we’ll see you back here in a couple of weeks with another episode of Divi addicts. We’re going to be talking about more website business tips about more things that you can expect. We’re going to talk about the year as a whole, what a year it’s been we’re going to talk about the ups and the downs. And we’re gonna say farewell to 2020 and hopefully we can jump into 2021 just steamroll in the competition. So Have an awesome day. Appreciate you all and we’ll see you in the next episode.