Here’s what we’ll cover
Imagine setting an annual revenue goal of several hundreds of thousands of dollars at the start of the year – then blowing that goal out of the water in just ONE month. Well it happened and it happened to Steph Taylor. Want to know the one thing that she couldn’t have done without? The one thing that Steph admits that without, she would NOT be where she is today? Well, I’m for one, excited to say that it was numbers!
Tune into the show as we pull apart the exact numbers that Steph obsesses over each and every week. Find out the numbers that gave her the gut (yes, gut) to drop up to $10k per day in facebook ads. There was no gamble. The risk was slight. Why? Because Steph knew her numbers and what they were telling her gave her the gut to make some huge (but smart) business decisions. And those business decisions? Well, as you now know – they blew her revenue goals out of the water!
Steph Taylor is an ex corporate square peg, launch strategist and host of the Socialette podcast, which has had over 500,000 downloads to date.
Through her free masterclasses, paid programs and consulting, she has helped over 65,000 entrepreneurs launch digital products and podcasts to reach more people, grow their audience and become the go-to in their industry. Steph does what she does so that fellow entrepreneurs can achieve more impact, create more profit and have more freedom.
Links and Resources
- Checkout the Simply Smarter Numbers website HERE
- Checkout the Podcast HERE
- Checkout Steph’s Website HERE
- Checkout Steph’s Instagram HERE
- Checkout Steph’s Podcast HERE
Keep Listening!
Here’s the shownotes
Jen Waterson:
If you’re an ambitious business owner, ready to think big, rewrite your own rules and take action to skyrocket your business know-how, your profit, your cashflow and most importantly your free time, then this is the podcast for you. You’re listening to the Simply Smarter Numbers Podcast, and I’m your host, Jen Waterson. I’m a business profit coach helping business owners just like you make more profit and take back their time. So hit subscribe now, and let’s dive in.
Jen Waterson:
Imagine setting an annual revenue goal of several hundreds of thousands of dollars at the start of the year, and then blowing that goal out of the water in just one month. Well, it happened, and it happened to today’s guest, Steph Taylor. Want to know the one thing that she couldn’t have done without? The one thing that Steph admits that without she would not be where she is today.
Jen Waterson:
Well, I’m for one very excited to say that, that one thing is her numbers. Tune into the show and we will pull apart the exact numbers that Steph obsesses over each and every week. Find out the numbers that gave her the guts, yes, the guts to drop up to $10,000 per day in Facebook ads. There was no gamble, the risk was slight. Why? Because Steph knew her numbers, and what they were telling her gave her the guts to make some huge but smart business decisions.
Jen Waterson:
And those business decisions, well, as you now know, they blew her revenue goals out of the water. Steph Taylor is an ex-corporate square peg, launch strategist and host of The Socialette Podcast, which by the way, has over 500,000 downloads to date. Through her free master classes, her paid programs and consulting, she’s helped over 65,000 entrepreneurs launch digital products and podcasts to reach more people, grow their audience and become the go-to in their industry.
Jen Waterson:
Steph does what she does so that fellow entrepreneurs can achieve more impact, create more profit and have more freedom. Now, before we give Steph a big warm welcome, have you subscribed to the Simply Smarter Numbers Podcast yet? If not, get on over there and hit subscribe for more of what you’re about to hear. Hey, Steph, and a big, huge welcome to the Simply Smart Numbers Podcast, I am super excited to have you on the show.
Jen Waterson:
And I’ve got to say I’m really excited for two reasons in particular. One is because you’re an actual business person with an amazing business brain. And I have worked that out with the conversations that we have had, Steph, over the past couple of months, and I just love these little chats that we’ve been having. And the second reason that I’m really excited is because you are not just another business person with a business brain, you’re an actual action taker.
Jen Waterson:
So you get stuff done, you put in the hard yards and now you’re actually starting to see some results. So I think that this is a really good combination, going to make a great recipe for a good conversation, so welcome Steph.
Steph Taylor:
Thank you so much, Jen. That was such a lovely intro. I mean, no pressure or anything.
Jen Waterson:
Well look, seriously, you have had so much going on over the past few months, and we’re going to touch on that a little bit as we get into it, but before we do, for any of the listeners out there that haven’t come across you before, Steph, just tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.
Steph Taylor:
Yeah. I’m Steph Taylor, I am a digital product launch strategist, I help entrepreneurs to launch and relaunch digital products within their business. And I also help people to launch podcasts because I feel like those go really nicely hand in hand with your digital products. So when I say digital products, I mean things like online courses, membership sites, group programs, e-books, templates, any of those things that can be sold at scale without having to … like without needing inputs, without needing staff. And yeah, I mean as you would know, Jen, they’re a very profitable way to build a business and a very, I like to think a very calm way to build a business.
Jen Waterson:
Yeah, and I agree. And what I love about what you’ve done, and look, I don’t know if there are other people out there that have done what you’ve done, but you’ve really gone super niche, like niche, niche. There’s a lot of people that show you how to build a course or create these things or do all of this social media stuff that goes along with it or build the funnels that go around these things, but you’ve just gone launch. “I’m going to teach people how to launch. Whatever it is they need to launch, we’re going to launch it.” And I don’t know, are there many people out there doing what you’re doing?
Steph Taylor:
There are a few, but I don’t feel like I have really many direct competitors. We all have our own way of doing things, and I think that’s a really good thing because the way that I teach people to launch is quite a simple, almost laid back way of doing. It’s like the Queensland way of launching something-
Jen Waterson:
Wow, perfect.
Steph Taylor:
… like versus a lot of people out there who might be in the US who are more into like the really sophisticated launches with lots of moving parts. Everyone has like, there’s so many different styles of launching, so I don’t feel like I have any direct competitors, even though there are few people doing similar things.
Jen Waterson:
Yeah, great. Well, again, I should just start off by saying that Steph and I did a little bit of work together a few weeks ago. So a few weeks ago, Steph went through one of my financial sharpshooter sessions. And what we do there is we pull your business apart, we look at your revenue streams and we consider exactly how from an activity level you can reach your financial goals. So one of the very first things we have to do in that session of course is to find out what those financial goals are.
Steph Taylor:
Yes.
Jen Waterson:
So we did that. We went through, worked out Steph’s financial goals for the coming 12 months. And then as timing should have it, now we’re sitting here speaking on my podcast, you have completely and utterly blown those goals out of the water completely.
Steph Taylor:
Yeah.
Jen Waterson:
And I guess what I would love for you to do is tell everybody in your words what happened in your business to blow these goals out of the water so quickly, and then after that we might just dig into a little bit of the how against it.
Steph Taylor:
Yeah. I mean, I’m happy to talk about my numbers here as well. I mean, so for context, my goal for this financial year was 300,000 in revenue, and I hit that just in the month of April alone. Not the entire financial year, just the month. So that was pretty-
Jen Waterson:
I have to say when I saw that was there, I just thought maybe there was a typo or something like that. What happened?
Steph Taylor:
… So it’s actually really funny. I was speaking to my bookkeepers this morning and they were saying like, “Oh, we thought there was an era,” I was like, “No, it’s all right.”
Jen Waterson:
Amazing.
Steph Taylor:
So yeah, so that happened. And what that came from basically was just one product, one $197 product teaching people how to launch a podcast. The magical thing about this product is it doesn’t require any of my time, it’s a pure DIY product that somebody can go through themselves. I don’t have to spend any time delivering the product, and I sell it off the back of a webinar which I run Facebook ads to.
Steph Taylor:
So I guess what happened around, it would have been, yeah, March, mid-March, just before everyone sort of went into lockdown and things got really serious, I started slowly scaling this product and started spending more on Facebook ads. And for every dollar I was putting into Facebook ads at that point, I was getting about $3 back in revenue, which for a product where it’s not costing me anything other than the ads to deliver the product, that’s, as long as I’m making more than a dollar for every dollar I put in, it’s pure profit, right?
Steph Taylor:
So I started gradually spending more and more on my Facebook ads. And obviously as you spend more on Facebook ads, the return on investment does start to decrease because the ads get a bit more expensive, but I was just slowly scaling it up, scaling it up. And then people went into lockdown, COVID hit, and I think what had happened was a lot of people suddenly became really familiar with online learning.
Steph Taylor:
People weren’t suddenly as scared to sign up for webinars, Facebook ads got cheaper. The combination of those two, I mean people being less afraid to sign up for webinars and Facebook ads being cheaper, meant that I was getting people into my webinar for a couple of dollars each, and I was converting a huge percentage of those people into my product. So it was incredibly profitable.
Steph Taylor:
So as soon as I started noticing that I thought, “Hmm, okay, here we go.” I was like, “Let’s just keep pumping money in.” And I mean, it got to … I was spending at one point $10,000 a day on Facebook ads and doubling that in revenue. But then-
Jen Waterson:
And that must have made you feel a little bit sick on the inside, but excited at the same time? Like how does that make you feel?
Steph Taylor:
… It’s terrifying. I mean, with the way that it works, right, is you’re spending that money in advance to get people in for the webinar the next day or in two days time. So there is no guarantee that you’re actually going to make that money back straight away. So I could have spent $10,000 and then nobody showed up for the webinar or nobody purchased the next day or something went wrong in the tech. So there’s a big element of risk there, and it is really scary.
Steph Taylor:
Every day I’d just, I would go in and I’d check and be like, “Are they still working? Are the ads still working? Like, is this still profitable?” And like, it has got to the point now where the ads are significantly much more expensive, so I have started scaling it back a little bit. I’m not spending $10,000 a day anymore, I’m spending I think like seven or eight now. But like I said, as long as it’s still profitable, I’ll be spending that.
Jen Waterson:
So you reached your 12-month goal in a one month period, with a product that you already had there and you had been working on and tweaking and watching over a period of time. Now, I’m going to come to that in a moment, but I want to just take a couple of steps back to something that you said just before, which was kind of around the timing of your launch.
Jen Waterson:
So this is something that I find really interesting is there’s a bit of a … There’s actually a TED Talk out there, and I cannot remember the name of the guy, but I’m going to link, I’ll link it to the show notes because it’s only like a six minute TED Talk. And it’s about the importance of timing when it comes to launching, start up businesses or whatever it might be. And it’s kind of more applies to the really big, huge things, but it’s kind of the concept here that I really love when you talk about your business and what you’ve just achieved.
Jen Waterson:
So it’s all about that sort of … And I’d like to ask you, Steph, how important you felt that timing was for you, but before I do the … Like for example, Airbnb were one of those businesses who were passed over I believe by some really wealthy investors at certain points before they really came into existence, and then all of a sudden somebody took them on, they became hugely successful really quickly.
Jen Waterson:
And they were passed over initially because people sort of said, “Well, who’s going to let strangers come live in the house for short periods of time? Like, seriously, what is the world coming to?” But of course what then happened is the recession hits and it opens our minds.
Jen Waterson:
We change the way we think, and we start to behave differently, and Airbnb came along and all of a sudden we are under pressure as families that need to make more money and all of a sudden renting the place out for short periods of time is a really good option. So I guess that as a bit of a preface there, I’m just wondering if you feel as though the timing around what’s happened in your business is something that’s quite a significant impact.
Steph Taylor:
Yes, and no. I think in terms of like I said before, people becoming more familiar with attending webinars and then Facebook ads getting cheaper because when COVID hit a lot of major companies, especially travel companies, they just pulled all of their Facebook ads, which meant people were spending less on Facebook ads. Facebook kind of works on a bidding system.
Steph Taylor:
So if there are more people bidding to show their ads to the same people that you’re trying to show your ads to, you’re going to pay more for it. It’s like supply and demand of ads basically, because there is only a set amount of newsfeed space that Facebook can show those ads in. So the ads got really cheap, which I mean obviously made it much more profitable for me. I think also combined with the fact that people have more time.
Steph Taylor:
People are at home so they were a bit more flexible as to what times they could attend webinars. People who may have lost their jobs who were thinking, “Oh, I want to upskill now, a podcast would be a really great addition to my resume or maybe a podcast would be a nice way to make some money.” Businesses who previously would have spent money on ads are now having to think about free ways of marketing their business like podcasting.
Steph Taylor:
So I think it’s a combination of all of those factors, but I mean ultimately like this product I had originally launched it a couple of times at the end of last year and then at the start of this year. And each time that I launched it, it was still profitable, so it’s not like it became significantly more profitable because of COVID.
Jen Waterson:
So which came first, was it … Were you going to launch this again at this period of time anyway? So was that always going to happen at that point in time or did sort of COVID come and then you’re just kind of going, “Oh, this could be a good time,” or was it the Facebook ads kind of-
Steph Taylor:
This was a product that I, basically, it takes no effort for me to launch it over and over again, because all I have to do is show up and deliver the webinar. And now I’ve got it on automated, so the webinar delivers itself-
Jen Waterson:
… So now you have to do even less.
Steph Taylor:
… and it tells me. So now all I basically do is manage the Facebook ads, and I have my VA doing customer support and it runs itself.
Jen Waterson:
Okay. So going to that launching, so you said you launch and you relaunch and you relaunch the same product over and over again. Tell me from a numbers perspective, what is it that you’re tracking, that you’re testing? What is it that you’re looking at? Because I know from our previous conversations that you’re a bit of a numbers nerd as well, and you’ve got some spreadsheets that you use in the background. Is that right that you [crosstalk 00:15:26]
Steph Taylor:
Oh, yes.
Jen Waterson:
Tell us a lit bit about [crosstalk 00:15:29]
Steph Taylor:
I have an epic spreadsheet. Let me pull up my spreadsheet because I’ll forget some of the major numbers.
Jen Waterson:
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:15:36]
Steph Taylor:
But basically, I’m tracking every single number along the way. So I start with, okay, how many people have viewed the registration page for the webinar?
Jen Waterson:
So get your pens and paper out people because I’m going to listen back to this and start writing this stuff down myself. So yeah, views on the registration page.
Steph Taylor:
Yes. And actually, I’ve had so many people ask me for the spreadsheet as a template, I should actually really package it up and sell it because it’s epic. But anyway, so total number of people who viewed the webinar registration page. And if you weren’t doing a webinar, if you were offering like a free e-book or something like that instead, you would track how many people viewed that page, how many people then opted in. So how many people registered, how many people handed over their email address, and then the percentage conversion rate there.
Steph Taylor:
So what percentage of people that are viewing the registration page or viewing your freebee opt in page are converting. And on its own it doesn’t mean a whole lot. I mean you want to aim for 50% or higher, but it really depends on what kind of traffic you’re getting onto that page. So when I first … For context here, right? When I first started launching this product, I was doing it mainly to warmer audiences.
Steph Taylor:
So people who had interacted with me on Instagram, people who might already have been on my email list, and it was converting at around 60, 70%. Then when I started just directing people there purely from cold Facebook ads, it dropped to about 35%, because those people aren’t as high quality leads, they don’t know who I am, they don’t know if my master class is going to be any good.
Steph Taylor:
So that number is more just something to track over time really. Obviously if you’ve got a really low conversion rate there, you probably want to look at how you can improve it. And it’s one of those things where you might test and tweak different types of copy, you might test and tweak different images, you might try speeding up the page just to see if you can get that conversion percentage up.
Jen Waterson:
So when you say conversion there, Steph, are you saying the people that are converting to sit through your master class webinar?
Steph Taylor:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jen Waterson:
Yeah, okay. So this is kind of like stage one is you were getting people from the outside world, they’re coming across you on a Facebook ad or thereabouts, they’re landing on your sales page online, they are then clicking through, registering for your webinar, and then from there, I guess they have to … Do you then measure who shows up because-
Steph Taylor:
We’re getting there.
Jen Waterson:
… Oh, yeah. All right, jumping ahead.
Steph Taylor:
We’re getting there. So with the registration and conversion there, a lot of people get very fixated on getting more people onto the registration page. So they might spend more money on Facebook ads to get people onto the registration page, which will get more people registered, but another way to get more people registered is to increase that conversion percentage rather than just focusing on getting more people onto the page.
Steph Taylor:
So once you’ve got the total number, once you’ve got the people who’ve registered, then we want to look at how many people attended your webinar live. So how many people showed up when they said they were going to show up? And this is always lower than you think it’s going to be, it’s usually around 20%. If it’s a warm audience, you might get 35, 40% is really good, but like that’s cool. Because 20% of people who show up, like that’s still really good.
Steph Taylor:
Then we want to look at how many people of those who showed up, how many people purchased while they were in that webinar room. And that’s usually only going to be about 10% of the people who showed up live in a really good webinar. This is where a lot of people think like, “Oh, I only sold two courses out of my webinar,” and it’s like, “Well, but you only had 10 people who showed up live.” That’s a 20% conversion rate, that’s awesome.
Jen Waterson:
So that’s pretty good.
Steph Taylor:
Yeah. So then you know, okay, you need to get more people to show up live, which means you need to get more people registered, which means you need to either improve that registration conversion rate or get more people onto the registration page.
Jen Waterson:
Exactly, but it’s not until you’ve actually got those numbers there in front of you. Because I’m guessing that during that process, I recently did a profit master class myself and went through that exact same process. I didn’t actually sell anything off the back of it, I just wanted to have a go at this sort of thing.
Jen Waterson:
And what I did was … During the time when you’re actually going through it all, it’s kind of really busy, particularly the first time because you’re setting up a sales page for the first time, you’re setting up. Everything is brand new and it’s just like insane and all your work. I mean it’s hard work the first time.
Jen Waterson:
I’m sure that gets easier and easier every time, but what you can then do is if you’ve got those numbers sitting there in front of you, you can have a look at them and say, “Well, hang on a minute, I got … 100 people came to my sales page, but only 10 people registered from that sales page.” So that’s a bad … Right?
Steph Taylor:
Yeah.
Jen Waterson:
So we need to then go, “Okay. Well, how do we rejig the sales page?” And then we just do that each layer down.
Steph Taylor:
Exactly. And so what I always do is if I’m tweaking and testing things, I will usually only change one thing at each layer. So I won’t change 10 different things on my sales page at the same time, I’ll change one thing on my sales page, I might change one thing in my pre-webinar emails to get more people to shop live, and I might change one thing in my sales pitch in the webinar.
Steph Taylor:
Because we’ve got different metrics for all three of those things, so you can see what’s affecting what. Whereas if I went and changed 10 things on my registration page at the same time, I wouldn’t know whether it was the new image or the new copy or the fact that the button was green and not red.
Jen Waterson:
What’s impacting.
Steph Taylor:
Yeah, exactly. So yeah, only doing a few things at a time. And then I guess the other number that we would look at is total number of sales overall. So just because people didn’t show up to your webinar doesn’t mean they’re not interested in what you have to sell them. So you still want to keep marketing to people after that webinar has happened and-
Jen Waterson:
Like just follow-up emails or whatever. Whatever it is that you suggest, I’m sure you’ll have some sort of watch guide there for people that …
Steph Taylor:
… Yeah. Usually like five days of follow-up emails and people are like, “Oh.” So I emailed them twice in the five days, I’m like, “Oh.” You email them like almost twice a day for five days, because those people are really hot leads, they’ve told you they are interested. And if you’re selling-
Jen Waterson:
They’re already pretty going the hard yards, so yeah, you need to make the most of that.
Steph Taylor:
… And if you’re selling them something that solves a problem for them, you’re actually doing them a favor by emailing them twice a day, because they’re not going to see two emails a day from you, they’re going to see like that one email on day five after you’ve already closed the cart, after you’ve closed the doors, and then they’re going to be like, “Oh my God, I missed this. Is it too late? Can I enroll now?”
Jen Waterson:
Yeah, that’s right.
Steph Taylor:
It always happens.
Jen Waterson:
And it’s such-
Steph Taylor:
And it’s like, “Oh.”
Jen Waterson:
… Yeah, it’s such a-
Steph Taylor:
You just got 10 emails.
Jen Waterson:
… Yeah, but they don’t see that.
Steph Taylor:
So you’re actually doing them a favor. You’re doing them a massive favor by telling them about it. And I think a lot of people get really scared, they’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to be salesy, and I don’t want to annoy people.” If you’re annoying somebody it’s very easy for them to hit unsubscribe, and if they’re interested in what you do and what you sell, they’re not going to unsubscribe. And if they do, don’t take it personally because it wasn’t you. So then I guess, yeah, the main number we want to look at then is how many sales did you make overall and what percentage of all the people who registered was that? Sorry.
Jen Waterson:
You get all of this information together per launch. So you class one launch as I’m putting up a sales page day or I’m putting out some Facebook ads today, right through to that sort of five days after or whenever it is you kind of. Do you open, close your cart sort of thing or is it …
Steph Taylor:
I used to, not for this product anymore. This one now is ongoing, so now I just track these numbers every week.
Jen Waterson:
Yeah, okay. So these numbers, all of these numbers that you’re talking about now, you obviously just … It would be second nature to you now to have these numbers. Was it harder to get into it to start with or were you interested?
Steph Taylor:
I find it very interesting because the numbers, yes, the numbers itself don’t mean much by themselves. And like, you would know this Jen, it’s about what you do with those numbers and how you use them to guide your decisions. So when I jump in and review it every week, I’m like, “Okay, so what’s working well? What’s not working well? What am I going to tweak this week? What did I tweak last week? What were the results from tweaking that?” And it actually, it becomes like a game, it’s like, “Oh, let’s try this new headline and see if that gets us a better result than the previous headline.”
Jen Waterson:
And so by sorting then when you can see the numbers that fall out the other side and you go, “Oh, that worked. That was a bit of fun.” And so you would then say like … Could you see yourself being in the position that you are today if for not recording these numbers and being quite so thorough, could you see yourself … Yeah, you couldn’t see yourself being in the position-
Steph Taylor:
No way. Your listeners can’t see me shaking my head.
Jen Waterson:
… No, I need to remember that. No, she’s doing a big shake of the head.
Steph Taylor:
Definitely not because I mean without knowing … If I wasn’t sure like for every … If I didn’t know that for every dollar I was putting into ads I was making $2 back, no way would I want to put $10,000 a day into ads, because then you’re just winging it, right? It was only once I knew that consistently these ads were delivering me the right people, my webinar was converting, my sales page was converting, people were buying and it was profitable. It was only once I had tested that many, many times that I had that confidence to support spending that much money on ads.
Jen Waterson:
Yeah. No, it’s a really interesting story. And there’s a lot of people out there who I guess when you’re in the world of launching and webinars and all of those sorts of good things, if you’re in that world then it’s sort of like you can see them everywhere, but if you’re not in that world, and a lot of my listeners would not be in that world yet, and I think it’s really interesting to just break it right down just to really get a feel and an understanding of what is available out there and what you can do, what you can launch and those little products or ideas, different things, whether they’re digital or otherwise.
Jen Waterson:
The things that you think you might want to tack onto your business to help perhaps at some point make your business a little bit more, get a little bit more of a, I’m going to say passive income, that type of thing, then it’s really good to know that these sort of things are out there. And I should say as well when it comes to … No, actually I’m going to save that question to the end about the whole passive income thing.
Jen Waterson:
I want to jump into your evergreen funnel now and just have a bit of a talk about your evergreen funnel, what is that, just a really … In a couple of words, what is an evergreen funnel and how that has changed now what you’re doing in your business?
Steph Taylor:
Yeah. So the evergreen funnel is this ongoing selling of the podcast launch plan, so the automated webinar. I’ve run ads to the registration page, people registered for the automated webinar and then they purchase off that. So that’s what the evergreen funnel is. And I mean that is, it’s just running itself in the background. So I’m not required to be there live, launching it each time because I love doing live webinars, but if I was to do one or two a day, every day, I would never get any other work done. I’m an introvert, so if I do a webinar in the morning, I’m exhausted for the rest of the day and-
Jen Waterson:
Yeah. It does, it can take it out of you, can’t you?
Steph Taylor:
… It can.
Jen Waterson:
I mean you’ve brought into it, and it doesn’t come necessarily naturally. I’m an introvert myself so I get what you mean by that. It does, it can be quite mentally draining at the end.
Steph Taylor:
Yeah. And then throw in time zones, there’s a limit of how many people can show up in the room live. And it kind of, it really limits the amount of people that you can teach.
Jen Waterson:
Yeah, okay.
Steph Taylor:
And whereas if it’s automated, you can … I’ve taught over 65,000 people in my automated webinars, and I would not-
Jen Waterson:
That’s amazing.
Steph Taylor:
… Yeah, but I would not be able to teach 65,000 people in live webinars.
Jen Waterson:
Yeah, it’s really [crosstalk 00:28:21]
Steph Taylor:
I mean, my webinar room … Yeah, my webinar room is capped at 500 people, so I’d have to do 130, I think. 130 live webinars to teach that many people.
Jen Waterson:
Yeah, and it’s just not doable.
Steph Taylor:
It’s not.
Jen Waterson:
This is where I guess it starts, we start to then talk about so what impact does this really have on your lifestyle. So for people out there that are thinking about, “Okay, this sounds really exciting,” the idea of putting something in place that does allow that little bit more of passive income to sort of come into the business, maybe it will compliment something that you’re doing in a one to one capacity, whatever your purpose is, what is it that … How do you think that affects your lifestyle? Like, is it really as passive as we make it sound, as we kind of think it is?
Steph Taylor:
Hmm. That’s a really good question. It is and it isn’t. It’s passive because I’m not having to show up and sell every day, but so-
Jen Waterson:
But that’s only now that you’ve gone onto this evergreen funnel?
Steph Taylor:
… Yeah, exactly. Like I live launched it many, many times first as well. So this is the thing, right? A lot of people think like, “Oh, I’m just going to create this product and set it up automated from the beginning,” but you need to live launch it before you can do that because live launching it, you learn the questions that your audience has, you learn what’s converting, what’s not converting.
Steph Taylor:
You show up with a lot more energy than if it’s prerecorded. So you don’t want to ever just go straight into selling an automated evergreen product. But so the selling part is yes, passive, but then there’s all of the other stuff in the backend that’s not. And I was, prior to going evergreen, I was doing all of my customer service myself, and then it was only once I started selling it at scale where I realized, “Oh my God, I don’t have the bandwidth to be spending two hours a day replying to people’s emails.”
Jen Waterson:
Yeah. I actually just listened to your podcast. At the time of recording, you had a … Was it the podcast that came out today or yesterday? I’m not really sure. But I was-
Steph Taylor:
Yesterday, yeah.
Jen Waterson:
… just listening to that one, and you said this about the customer service and the whole scaling thing. So perhaps it might be just interesting to touch on that just slightly, that whole. We know when you scale up the good, you also scale up the bad.
Steph Taylor:
Oh yes.
Jen Waterson:
That is an interesting point. So if there’s anybody out there that’s listening that doesn’t listen to Steph’s podcast at this point, Steph, just tell everybody in case they don’t actually hang around to the end, the name of your podcast and where they can find it.
Steph Taylor:
Yeah, it’s called Socialette, and you can find it in all the podcast apps, but you can also find at stephtaylor.co/podcast.
Jen Waterson:
Yeah, it’s a really great one to get onto. So scaling, and I hadn’t really ever considered exactly that. Do you need to-
Steph Taylor:
Well, no, it’s just the postie. He can leave my parcel outside. No, so when you scale, you are, yeah, you are scaling the problems as well. So if you think about it, if you have a checkout page that maybe once every, or maybe one in every hundred times somebody lands on it, the page breaks or the page comes up with an error-
Jen Waterson:
… [inaudible 00:31:40]
Steph Taylor:
… that’s fine. Yeah. You’ve got a hundred people and it’s just one person who’s getting that error, that’s only one person’s customer support question you’re going to have to deal with. If you’ve got a thousand people, that’s tens the customer support queries. If you’ve got a hundred thousand people, that’s a thousand customer support queries? I don’t know if I’ve done the numbers right there.
Jen Waterson:
Yeah, it’s a lot.
Steph Taylor:
It’s a lot. So it’s really like, you need to get those things ironed out when you’re still just launching to small audiences because it’s a lot easier to fix it when it’s a small problem than when it becomes a big problem and when you have other things, other priorities. So yeah, iron out the kinks as early on as you can.
Steph Taylor:
Get your customer support delegated to somebody else before it starts scaling, before it becomes a monster. Other things like comments on Facebook ads, like I wish I’d come up with some … This is something I still haven’t delegated to my VA because I just haven’t thought of a smart way to do it, but it’s all these little things that you don’t think about that end up becoming big problems down the track.
Jen Waterson:
And I guess that just comes with that scaling at such speed as well, isn’t it?
Steph Taylor:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jen Waterson:
I guess you just didn’t … Even though you know those things are there, when you do scale at speed, that’s just one of the things that comes along with it. There is no hiding from the fact that you can’t have everything perfect. I guess you’re working so hard to get that scaling or to scale that business to get that growth that you can … It’s easy to just ignore those things, not ignore them necessarily, but just know that you’ll get to it one day.
Steph Taylor:
Yeah. Like, they’re not particularly glamorous things to fix. And you also, like I think when you’re at the smaller numbers, you might be a bit averse to outsourcing the customer service because you’re like, “Well, why do I want to lose some of my profit to somebody else who’s going to do it for me?”
Steph Taylor:
But it’s so much easier getting somebody trained up to do it for when you do scale, so that you don’t have to train them up when you’ve already got 300 emails waiting in your customer support inbox and you’re stressed about that, and then you’re stressed about having to train somebody to deal with them as well.
Jen Waterson:
Yeah. It just becomes a bit too much all of a sudden, doesn’t it?
Steph Taylor:
Yeah. So get onto that stuff early.
Jen Waterson:
Right. Great advice. So stepping back to the evergreen funnel, do you track the same numbers there? Is there any kind of difference in what you’re doing with that one?
Steph Taylor:
So instead of tracking it per launch, I track it on a weekly basis, is the only difference. I track the same numbers, I tweak things each week now rather than like on a per launch basis. So every Monday morning I look at my numbers and I think, “Okay, what am I going to tweak this week?” And then I schedule that in with my tasks for the week and get that done, and then look at it again the next Monday. So that’s really the only difference. Yeah.
Jen Waterson:
Okay, every Monday thing. So it’s about being regular and committing a certain time of your week, like a part of your week, whatever is going to suit you. It’s about committing that time to finding out what those numbers are. So I guess the first step is knowing which important numbers, sorry, which numbers are important to you and whatever it is that you’re doing as a business owner.
Jen Waterson:
So the numbers that we spoke about today, they’re just like a handful of numbers in a big, huge pool of numbers, so without finding which numbers are really important to you and which numbers that if you monitor them and if you change the activity at a base level of what you’re doing in your business on a day-to-day basis, if you can impact them and change them and increase them, knowing that then gives you a particular result at the end of the day.
Jen Waterson:
So if you’re not launching digital products via webinars or whatever, these numbers are still super important, but they just go with whatever it is you’re doing in your business, in your daily life.
Steph Taylor:
Exactly.
Jen Waterson:
And it’s that regular.
Steph Taylor:
Yeah. I could then go and test, I could say, “Well, let me see if I put the product price up $25, is that going to impact my conversion rate or is that going to be beneficial to the overall profit that I’m making?” I know I couldn’t tell you that off the top of my head, but with the numbers that I’ve got, I can say, “Okay. I’ve got something I can actually compare it to from last week and previous weeks versus this week onwards,” and then I know.
Jen Waterson:
… And all of a sudden you’re making really smart business decisions based on those numbers, just like that. So it all comes back to number of people.
Steph Taylor:
Yes. Even if they aren’t exciting, I mean I know you make them a lot more fun than some people do, that’s for sure. But I know a lot of people are really scared of the numbers, and I think once you start to get familiar with them and get comfortable with them, they’re not that bad.
Jen Waterson:
I think so. And I think there’s like … A little bit of people get a bit frightened because they don’t really know what it is that they need to be looking at because there is so many numbers out there. And you don’t need to know everything in your business, you don’t need to know every last detail, every last number, you just need to know what’s important for you in your business at the time with whatever you’re doing in your business for that month, that quarter, that year.
Jen Waterson:
Whatever those numbers are that you need to be focusing on, once you know them, then it becomes really easy to just start recording them and looking at them on a regular basis. So yeah, all of a sudden things start to change where we sell more or we can make more profit or life gets a little bit easier because we’re tweaking and changing the things that we do.
Jen Waterson:
Steph, I have to say that I am really … Thank you so much for sharing all of that with us today. I’ve been really excited to sort of watched this journey that you’ve gone on over the past short period of time. And I would probably just … My next question to you would be, where to next for Steph Taylor? Like what happens now?
Steph Taylor:
Oh, I love this question because I have been very much. I mean like literally like this product that I’ve created, right, it was an accident. Not an accident, but it was like a, “Oh, let me just throw this together and see if people buy it,” kind of product, and that’s … It’s kind of funny because I feel like that’s how I’ve built most of my business. I mean, what’s happening next?
Steph Taylor:
What I’ve planned to do next, which could still change, is I’m launching a digital product creation product. So teaching people how to create a digital product is my next thing. And then in a couple of months time, I’m launching a membership for people who have a digital product that want to launch it and relaunch it, and relaunch it and test it and tweak it and get good at-
Jen Waterson:
And turning to that evergreen thing, is that what you’re saying?
Steph Taylor:
… these numbers and these strategy and then … Well, no, so not the evergreen, that’s going to be another product further in the future. One thing at a time. Because I think I really do believe that you have to live launch and relaunch, and relaunch over and over again before you can put it into evergreen, because you really need to get those things ironed out, work out your strategy.
Jen Waterson:
I guess it also comes back to what you just said. You said that you have not necessarily, you haven’t come into the business world with your podcast course saying, “I’m going to teach people how to build a podcast from scratch, and this is what I’m going to sell to the world,” you have done other things previously. And the podcast, this thing that you have come up with now that has given you the success that you’ve got, this is the thing that has come because people have wanted it. Rather than only you wanting to push it out there, it’s people saying, “I want it.” Is that fair to assume? Yeah.
Steph Taylor:
100%. For like four years before launching this product, I created things that I thought people wanted and then wondered why they wouldn’t sell. And then with this product, I created what people asked me for and it sold and I was like, “Oh, it’s that easy?”
Jen Waterson:
And I guess that’s something that you do going forward in the other digital courses that you’re doing, and you’re saying you need to do these live launches over and over again, or you need to do them so you do get that feedback, so you can make things a bit better, so you can tweak and change, and in the end you’re selling an amazing product that you can then some point down the track evergreen, so yeah.
Steph Taylor:
Exactly.
Jen Waterson:
Love it. Love it, Steph. Thank you so much. I will ask you to just tell people where they can find you. I know you said earlier, but just if you could just let us know. If there’s anything that they can download perhaps, that they might be able to sort of take what you’re talking about a little bit further then, yeah, let us know.
Steph Taylor:
Yeah, sure. So you can find me over at stephtaylor.co, that’s my website. I’m also Stephtaylor.co on Instagram. You can find my podcast, Socialette, in all of the podcast apps and stephtaylor.co/podcast. And I have a free digital product kickstart kit, so if you’re thinking of starting to create some sort of digital product in your business, whether that’s going to be an online course or even just a little e-book or something like that, that will help to get those ideas out of your head and onto paper so you can actually start creating it. So you can grab that from stephtaylor.co/kit.
Jen Waterson:
Perfect. I’m looking forward to it. And I’ll have to go and download that myself.
Steph Taylor:
Yeah.
Jen Waterson:
Thank you, Steph, for being such a wonderful guest. It was great to have you here, and yeah, I look forward to seeing what happens with Steph Taylor next.
Steph Taylor:
Thank you so much, Jen. This has been fun.
Jen Waterson:
Thanks. Bye. Thank you for joining me for this episode of Simply Smarter Numbers. If you enjoyed the show, make sure you subscribe so you automatically get new shows every week. And I’d love to hear from you, come and join the conversation online. You’ll find Simply Smarter Numbers on Instagram, Facebook and more. Just head to simplysmarternumbers.com and you’ll find all that you need there. Simply Smarter Numbers is dedicated to you getting the results that you deserve in your business. And I’m honored that you tuned in.
