How To Successfully Create & Launch A Digital Product in 2024!
Discover the Secrets to Crafting a Winning Digital Product in 2024. Get Started Now.
Embark on a journey towards digital product success in 2024 with our informative video guide. Explore proven strategies and best practices that will empower you to navigate the evolving landscape of technology and consumer preferences. Uncover insider secrets from industry experts, learn how to leverage emerging technologies effectively, and propel your digital products toward unprecedented success.
With Special Guest Rachel Miller From Bizzy.AI.
Serial online entrepreneur and mom of six kids, Rachel began as a blogger and went on to build audiences ranging in the millions. Today she is most known for helping over 60,000 small businesses and page owners grow their audiences in her group, Grow Your Audience – 51 of those businesses grow the engagement on their content, allowing them to reach more than 10,000,000 people in a single Facebook post {WHOOP!!}. Rachel is a published author of multiple best-selling books that each sold more than 100,000 copies, and she has had her content featured on Good Morning America (multiple times) and other national magazines and syndicated shows. She will show you how growing engagement on your brand is a formula, a skill that anyone and any product can have.
#1 – Rachel, can you give some background info and some of the critical insights that you learned connected to launching your first online course?
#2 – What are some of the critical changes you have seen over the last couple of years connected to successfully launching a new subscription-focused membership website in 2024?
#3 – What led you to launch PageWheel, and what are some of the key things it does for its users that you are the most proud of?
#4 – What are some of the biggest and most regular mistakes you see people make connected to online marketing with a focus on membership in online communities?
#5—How do you see AI changing online business, including your own, in the next 18 months?
#6—If you had your time machine (H. G. Wells) and could travel back to the beginning of you
This Week Show’s Sponsors
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The Show’s Full Transcript
[00:00:01.100] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 82. I’ve got a fantastic guest. I’ve been looking forward to this interview. We’ve got somebody who’s got loads of knowledge around online marketing, building a very successful memberships website herself and running it. Like I say, she’s got loads of expertise. Also, she’s just started or has launched successfully and is running a successful SaaS-based business that helps people with their online marketing. We’ve got Rachel Miller with us. It should be a great discussion, and I’m looking forward to it. So, Rachel, can you give us a quick 10, 20, 30-second intro about yourself?
[00:01:23.620] – Rachel Miller
Hi, Jonathan. It’s good to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I’m a mom of six crazy kids. I work from home, and I started online and realized pretty quickly that, one, people have a hard time finding an audience, and two, people have a hard time with the tech of their businesses. And so I’m thankful I’ve been able to attract an audience easily, as I learned when I first started my business how to make content go viral and then how to teach other people how to make content go viral. So growing an audience was easy for me, but the tech part was a big struggle because once you have the audience, it doesn’t mean diddly squat. If you can’t convert them, if you can’t convert them with a sales page, all of those things. And what if the sales page doesn’t work? The payment process is not hooked up. The buttons just go nowhere, and I felt so stupid and lost. And I built this audience, but I didn’t have the machine to run that audience and to make that audience into a business.
[00:02:24.710] – Rachel Miller
That’s why we started creating software to solve our problems and ultimately solve a lot of other people’s problems, too.
[00:02:32.980] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, and during the conversation, I’m going to be asking Rachel what some of the critical things she learned about launching her successful membership website, what are some of the changes She’s observed in the last couple of years around launching digital products and membership. Why she started Page Will, her SaaS solution. It should be a great conversation. But before I go into the meat and potatoes of this great show, I’ve got a couple of significant messages from our sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I also want to point out that we’ve got a great course available to you. If you’re looking to build your membership website on WordPress, I think you should do so because of ownership and sovereignty. I still think it gives you the best combination of tech and ownership. We’ve got this course. We usually charge $49, but we’re offering to you, listeners, a 50% discount. You can get this coupon code by going over to Wp-tonic. Com/deals, Wp-tonic. Com/deals, and you’ll be able to get the coupon code; plus, there’s a load of special offers from the sponsors and other people on this page.
[00:04:07.240] – Jonathan Denwood
So let’s go straight into it, Rachel. So maybe you can give some insights, some of the things that surprised you, going back into your memory banks, and what you learned while launching your first and very successful course? Were there some things that you feel that you could share with the audience that surprised you, or you learned that it became more critical in the process?
[00:04:38.710] – Rachel Miller
Oh, I think my first surprise… Well, I have two surprises. My first one is that marketers’ math is a real thing. So I felt with my first launch, I made, I think it was $96,000 in my first opening launch. I had an obscene success rate with my first launch. Basically, that was almost complete profit because I didn’t run very many ads at that time. I didn’t even know, really. I was starting with ads. I had my initial launch. Then I had a second launch, which had fewer sales than my first one. In my third launch, I had a successful launch, as in I made more money revenue-wise, but it was less because I got in the trap of needing to hire an expert. I need to hire expert to run my ads for me. That expert ended up taking 26k, and there was very little that they delivered for it because they were testing, they were testing, and next thing you know, I’m like, Wait, there goes three months of ads cost, and we’ve got nothing to show for it. I wasted money there. I brought on staff that would make my sales funnels for me.
[00:05:52.350] – Rachel Miller
Well, they charged me five grand for these sales funnels. And again, I should have just learned to make that myself. So I got stuck. I had expensive copywriters who would write an email sequence for me. It cost me 1,500. So next thing you know, I thought I needed all of these things, and I added glut to my life and to my business, and frankly, made an albatross instead of freedom for myself, because now I’m having to manage a lot of people to do things. And I thought I needed this all to be successful. And people had told me, experts I’d listened to had told me I needed this as my next step. But the reality is I needed to know what the job was before I hired for that job because I wasn’t going to be successful in hiring that person. And it’s not necessarily their fault because I didn’t communicate what I needed. I didn’t have a way to follow up and make sure that they delivered what I needed. And so market or math prepped into me, which means I looked successful on paper that third, and fourth launch, but I wasn’t as successful as I was.
[00:06:55.580] – Rachel Miller
I could have been because I had this glut in my business where I basically had all these expenses that ballooned on me. And so I wasn’t careful to realize what was coming. As you start getting success, don’t blow it all thinking you’re going to invest in your future business. Stop and take a second and say, do I know what this job entails? Have I done this job successfully? And can I communicate what is success to another person so now they can get paid to do this job? And so I needed to learn that lesson the hard way.
[00:07:31.080] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s really very interesting. I think what you’re describing there is building business procedures. And even if you got an initial success, actually hiring staff and having the internal business structures that you need to really make those individuals successful and is a process in its own right, isn’t it? But why do you think you got, in your own mind, thinking back, why do you think the initial launch was such a success? Had you built up a sizable your own tribe And have you really worked out in your own mind why that initial success? Or was it you were lucky, and you do need luck in business. Was it that the subject you were choosing, it just clicked with the target audience? You got market fit?
[00:08:34.650] – Rachel Miller
No, actually, I think I didn’t have market fit, but I listened to my audience. So I had an audience of about 200 people that had reached out to me for advice over the years, and I put them into a Facebook group. Then I offered to those 200 people in October, like my beta launch, and said, I’m going to create this program with you. And so I started it in October, and that program went for six weeks. We had 49 people sign up for that program of that 200 people. So one-fourth of them signed up and purchased to be part of it. I charged very, very little for it. I think it was just maybe like 100 bucks or something. Mostly, it was just to see what will people pay me and what am I going to create? And so while I thought I was going to teach them profitable blogging. So I named my business actually Moola Marketer, thinking I’m teaching bloggers how to make more money because they’re marketing their blogs and that they’re marketing… But that actually was not what people wanted. So as I was teaching the class, they’re telling me, I don’t want you to teach us how to do affiliate links and set up your website, yada, yada, yada.
[00:09:47.840] – Rachel Miller
I want you to teach me Facebook because you grew this ginormous audience on Facebook. How did you do that? And so by listening to my audience and then being like, Okay, in October, here’s what we did to grow. And they’re like, well, we don’t understand that, or I can’t do that. I’m too small. I can’t do… So then I was like, I had to rework all of the stages so that I could fit to my audience’s needs. Then they got results. Those 49 people got insane, obscene, beautiful, amazing results. And they told everybody else about the program that then I launched in January. So that honestly, because I’ve listened to my people, I think That’s what made the success. I didn’t have a huge audience. I didn’t have a ton of people. I had a small audience in that section. Now, before that, guys, I had four millions. I don’t know. At that time, I think it was only two million. Two million followers on other social media platforms. Hey, I did this success. But the niche of the two million was a different niche. Those were in parenting niches. Those were in lifestyle stuff, DIY home stuff, cats, rockpots.
[00:10:57.900] – Rachel Miller
That had nothing to do with growing your business. And so I had 200 people that were business people following me. Nobody knew who I was. Nobody on the other pages really even knew. My face wasn’t on those websites, the viral websites. Nobody who follows those viral websites know that I’m the person behind them. So I went to those 200 people. Those 200 people, though, they all knew who my perfect people would be. They all knew other businesses. They all knew other people who were trying to grow audiences as well. And so they got the word out without affiliates, without without anything, without having all the things set up. And my launch in January did 96K.
[00:11:35.500] – Jonathan Denwood
This is extremely uncanny, but also I’m very relieved what you’ve just said, because I’ve been hammering I’m going to go away through this podcast about building what I call… I get it from the bootstrap startup world. I’m a personal friend of Rob Rowland, of startups for the rest of us. I don’t know if you I know Rob at all, but he was the joint founder of Drip, the email and marketing optimization company, which he successfully sold for about $30 million. And his podcast is about bootstrapping startups, and in his books, he talks about building a minimum viable product. And I, through this podcast, Rachel, taken a lot of the concepts, the bootstrap startup world. I’ve just blatantly taken Rob’s ideas, but I do say Every time I do it, I do say, go to Rob’s website and podcast. And I’ve constantly hit that you should build a minimum viable course. It’s really important to get that first batch of student students. Your bureau will make educated assumptions. Probably a lot of those assumptions won’t be correct. You’re going to learn a lot from those initial students. You’re probably going to change the model of the course based on the input of the initial students.
[00:13:21.870] – Jonathan Denwood
The course should be at a lower price to get these initial students in. It’s a test of concept. Everything I’ve really pushed in the podcast, I was just amazed, you validated all the things that I’ve tried to push. Do you think I would surmise that you’re going to say yes, but I got to ask you, I think that is the crux of what you’ve just outlined, that bootstrap startup mythology. Would I be correct?
[00:13:55.740] – Rachel Miller
Would you agree with me? Bootstrap everything. Our software company. So we went from our Our course, and then on the back end of our course, we had a membership. And we went from that into, I took the revenues that that earned, and I saw the other problems that my people in my membership and in my courses were having, which was technology. Setting up the tech of their marketing was so difficult. Making a funnel work, making the products, making the digital product that they’re going to sell, connecting all those dots, that was very, very difficult for my people. And so I loved taking the money from that one business and then using that to build and fuel and fund and grow our next business, which is a software company. And it is a start bootstrap. I truly don’t have a single investor in it. And it’s been tight and it’s been hard because software is pretty expensive to build. So bootstrapping that is definitely, one, is hard, and also two, super rewarding because you did it all by yourself.
[00:14:57.320] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Yeah. I also think I think you got to accept that if you take investment, agile investment, or if it’s a larger software company, VC, too early, you’re going to have to give away so much equity in the company and literally take effective control and ownership away from you. If at some stage you do need it, if you can avoid taking that investment to a later stage, your The ability to keep more of the equity and control of the company is much higher. Because obviously, we can all be frogs in water. We can’t see how things are changing. So over the last couple of years, I don’t know if you thought about this, but I’ve been thinking about it, and because of your success and experience, I thought you were the right person to ask this question. What are some of What are the things you’ve observed changing in the online marketing world over the last couple of years? Have there been some trends that have been on your radar that you’ve been thinking about that you’d like to share with the audience, Rachel?
[00:16:15.420] – Rachel Miller
Automating and AI is the biggest one. It’s actually changed the way courses are made, the way courses are delivered, the way courses are sold, the way we attract an audience. Something that used to take us 8, 10, 15, 20 a month to do, to create, can now be made in minutes. And that means that there’s a lot more content out there. It means we need to connect more because we can automate so much else. So we can take what used to take hours to do and boil it down into minutes. So now That means everyone else is doing that, too. So we need to step our our community game because of all these automation tools that make life easier for us, but means that we have a lot more competition coming.
[00:16:58.400] – Jonathan Denwood
What about the The rise of TikTok and other video-based platforms?
[00:17:05.400] – Rachel Miller
That’s not new. That’s been around. I mean, people have been making video content for forever. Tiktok has been around for five years now. I wouldn’t call that a new thing Frankly, even the social platforms, some of them are moving away from video. So Instagram and Facebook have less video going out on their feeds than previously. So I think video is one type of content, content, but people have always been the same. They’ve always wanted video, they’ve always wanted photos, they’ve always wanted conversation starters. I don’t think that’s changed.
[00:17:38.590] – Jonathan Denwood
Why do you think Facebook and Instagram, why they’re reducing the push on video? What do you think is around that, Rachel?
[00:17:48.730] – Rachel Miller
I think it’s cost-saving, to be honest. They can deliver more content in someone’s feed when it’s not a video. So video takes longer for someone to consume And it takes a longer bandwidth in the back-end. And so their ad costs, their ad profits have gone down. So they cut part of the business that was the most expensive, and that’s organic video, because that takes the most bandwidth and takes the most time of someone to consume it. So that’s gone down in reach. And I think it’s just a cost savings issue.
[00:18:21.750] – Jonathan Denwood
I definitely, obviously, I think Facebook and their ability to use AI, because obviously See, they’re on the ropes a couple of years ago connected to what Apple had done to them. And a lot of people were saying they weren’t getting the results, and there was some truth to that. They’ve I’m not able to use.
[00:18:46.140] – Rachel Miller
Cambridge Analytica issue, because what Congress did, Cambridge Analytica, people were taking Facebook and were doing illicit targeting and breaking people’s privacy with it. And so Cambridge Analytica happened, which then caused Facebook to respond to that by cutting down our ability to do as much targeting, which then Apple then said, Well, you’re going to cut this far. We’re going to cut it even farther. We’re going to make it even more privacy, to which Facebook is like, Well, wait a minute. And so it’s just been a big giant competing over holding the data so marketers can’t ruin it for everybody. But again, while, yes, iPhone 17 and all of those Apple changes affected Facebook, they also affected every different type of marketing, as in- Yeah, true.
[00:19:31.530] – Jonathan Denwood
But what I was going to say to you, Rachel, is that Facebook, through a massive investment, have been able… I might be totally wrong, but they’ve seemed to be able to use AI to recover a lot of that problems and made their advertising more effective. I don’t know. No, you wouldn’t agree with that.
[00:19:53.930] – Rachel Miller
No, I think Facebook’s doing AI all wrong. Facebook’s going in and saying, summarizing people’s… I was on a I read this morning where my friend was like, what do you think about XYZ? Isn’t that crazy? And instead of me seeing the comments from users, Facebook meta decided to have a summary of people’s comments. How is that helpful? The whole purpose of Facebook is that you’re face to face with other people.
[00:20:19.200] – Jonathan Denwood
Oh, yeah, I see. They’re doing AI all wrong. Oh, right. I would agree with you there. If they want to go down that route, that’s going to be all for us. That’s what they’re doing.
[00:20:29.730] – Rachel Miller
Facebook, that’s what you thought we wanted today. I don’t think AI is helping Facebook. I think it’s helping businesses on Facebook be more successful. I don’t think Meta is doing Facebook, is doing AI well. Meta has a huge trove of content that they could use to make AI engines, a second AI engine, a natural speaking AI engine. They could do a lot of cool things with that, but I don’t think they’re doing… That would have to a separate company, I’m guessing, because the actual core function or the core purpose of Facebook is people connecting with people. And I think if they continue down the path of adding a lot of AI to that, that will actually dilute their ability to keep the market share.
[00:21:15.040] – Jonathan Denwood
But I was fascinated about your observations about doing this minimum viable course and getting that first audience and really listening to them and developing the course, changing the course based on their inputs. And it is fascinating because… But it shouldn’t be, really, shouldn’t it? Because I think that’s the core thing in bootstrap startups, isn’t it? It’s finding market fit, it’s so difficult, isn’t it? But if you do find it, everything else becomes a lot easier, doesn’t it? And I think it’s the same core message when it comes to membership website. It’s finding that key fit to a small but large enough audience so you can run a successful business, isn’t it?
[00:22:09.700] – Rachel Miller
I don’t know if I did market fit as much as I found my audience. And once I find my audience, I ask them, What do you want? Which is market fit. But I don’t know if I looked at my product and then tried to fit it into somebody.
[00:22:21.800] – Jonathan Denwood
No, it’s different. But I think the core concept has a lot of overlap.
[00:22:26.040] – Rachel Miller
For sure, yes.
[00:22:28.290] – Jonathan Denwood
All right.
[00:22:29.180] – Rachel Miller
So- Market What do you think market fit means? How do you find the market for a product or membership?
[00:22:37.130] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think you can read it. I have a bit of dyslexia, so I like listening to books and podcasts and watching videos, and I do read a bit, but it’s not my greatest strength. But I do like ideas as well, and I’ve always liked business, not just because making money, but the actual game, the intellectual game of working things out. So it’s a bit of a hobby plus a passion, really, Rachel. But I think it changes. I think it’s not… There’s key elements to it, but I don’t think people’s process in finding market fit, you can’t just copy somebody and apply it totally to a different market, because I think each market has slightly different dynamics that makes the path of market fit a bit different from each scenario in each market. Am I waffling, Rachel, or is there any- I know that the type of personality that I am, if I tried to copy somebody who’s snarky, it comes across off-putting. Are you talking How about me, Rachel?
[00:24:00.800] – Rachel Miller
No, just me. I try to be funny, and I can’t be funny. So it’s one of those things where you have to match yourself and your skillset to your audience, and then what your audience is looking for. So there’s a personality dynamic that you… Like a Venn diagram, you got to fit all the Venn pieces together to find that perfect spot.
[00:24:22.830] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think I was waffling a little bit there, but I think the core thing is this is why you got to keep your cost down, which was linked to your second and third courses, where you were saying you were bringing all these experts in, is that you got to keep your cost down because it’s a process. I think a lot of people that utilize the WP tonic platform, Rachel, expect their first course to be a huge success. They’re not going through the process that you went through, even though I try and influence them, is that this should be your minimum viable and you should get this input and you should modify the course depending on what your students tell you. They get disheartened or they spend a ton of money bringing in a load of initial experts in, and they burn the whole budget and they get disheartened. I’ve had people use our platform, and over a year, they still haven’t launched because they’re building out these elaborate marketing optimizations, everything else, getting the logo to go through about 20 different logos, blah, blah, blah. And I keep saying to me, Well, you really just want to launch a minimum viable course and get this input.
[00:25:47.450] – Jonathan Denwood
And I’ve come to the conclusion with some of those people, it’s easier to go through the process because you’re avoiding the day, the day of reckoning, when you’re actually launching the course and they are not listening to your voice. If they don’t get that huge success initially, they just give up.
[00:26:08.480] – Rachel Miller
But that’s only- Part of that’s because they spend a lot of time building it. So if you spend a lot of time, it becomes your baby instead of it being a test. So the reason why a minimum viable product works or get a lead magnet out there just to see what what the world says about this, just get something out there. The reason why that is a better philosophy is because it’s such a small amount of investment with your time, with your energy, with your reputation as in sales that you made. You can test to see if something works with something small. If it doesn’t work, throw it out and make a new one. That’s actually why we made Pagewell, is because people were spending weeks, months, sometimes even… I mean, it was an insane amount of time, building their lead their course, their things without actually putting it out to the world. And it was taking them hours and weeks and months and literally unbelievable amounts of time to do this. Whereas what if they could get it up and running over a lunch break and they could test it. Now, when it fails, you’ll be like, Okay, that failed.
[00:27:19.490] – Rachel Miller
Go spend another half hour and make it a little bit better. Oh, it failed, too. Well, guess what? Believe it or not, out of 10 businesses, seven of them are going to fail. You have to try 10 times to find the three winners. So you’re now, instead of it taking 10 months to make one product a month and figure out what your audience wants, now you can get your products up in two days and say, Okay, I made 10 products in two days. What do people want? And so now you can test really, really quickly. And when you don’t have a lot of time and money invested into it, it’s not your baby. It’s just a test. It’s not like… It’s like a mug. It’s a disposable thing. I drink a lot of coffee, so I have two cups.
[00:28:02.610] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re joined at the hip there. I drink gallons of it.
[00:28:07.500] – Rachel Miller
I know, gallons of it. So here’s my cup of coffee. It’s not something I’m attached to. If this mug broke tomorrow, I mean, I miss it, but I wouldn’t lose anything. Does that make sense? Because it- It does.
[00:28:18.080] – Jonathan Denwood
I think it is a low investment of money, low investment of time, and low investment of energy.
[00:28:24.100] – Rachel Miller
So that’s the same type of situation where the smaller… If you can make it cost the amount of time it takes to make a cup of coffee and the amount of money it costs to make that cup, now there’s no emotional attachment to it.
[00:28:37.910] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think that was a great observation. Thank you for that. So Pagewheel, before we go for our mid-break, What page will? You built it; you’ve been running it. What are some of the key things it does for your user base that you’re most proud of? What are some of the critical things that still wrap your cage?
[00:29:03.870] – Rachel Miller
I love that question. So whenever you’re doing a podcast episode, or you’re making a YouTube video, or you have a TikTok lesson that you’re teaching, It’s important for us to not just have that audience on a podcast that listens to us and never does anything or on a YouTube video who watched us and never took action, or on TikTok where they… We got into their scroll feed, and now we’re just part of their scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll We need them to convert to become a buyer. But asking them to buy a… I was selling my course for $1,000. Asking them to buy a $1,000 course outright, you just don’t get a sale because it’s too much of an ask to ask someone who has no clue who you are. What helps us to make those sales later is that we have a lead magnet or something that we can give to them as a gift of value that they learn we’re valuable, we love them, we take care of them, we bring results to their life, even when it’s free. And so I wanted a way for me to grow my email list so I can have people know, love, and trust me before I come to them with my, Hey, sign up for my $1,000 course.
[00:30:17.260] – Rachel Miller
I did that by making lead magnets, putting them onto an offer page, then a thank you page, and having a video explaining who I am. Then, I would put them into my launch sequence, where they would find out about my program and purchase from me when the course opens. So that whole sequence, it would take weeks to make each lead magnet. And so I needed a tool. What we do now, is make your workbooks to go along with any type of video, a checklist, cheat sheet, guidebook, framework, whatever it is; you say what it is, it will make that for you in as little as three or four minutes, and then put it onto a sales page with the wording already written because it matches what you created in your book. And now you can say, Hey, guys, you want the cheat sheet that goes along with this TikTok video that I just did on the five ways to have a more productive life? Awesome. Click below the links in my bio. Come sign up. I’ve got my cheat sheet for you.
[00:31:11.140] – Rachel Miller
It’s waiting for you. Now you have them on an email list you can remark on and convert them from a stranger into a buyer.
[00:31:19.780] – Jonathan Denwood
And that’s using AI.
[00:31:21.630] – Rachel Miller
Yeah, it builds it in literally minutes because you just… Ai knows the checklist, the standard checklist, and then you can go in and you can edit it in any way. Chains of colors make it different, yada, yada, make it yours. But AI writes like, what do you need in cheese? Yesterday, I helped a food blogger. She was doing a recipe for jalapeno cheese poppers. So it’s like jalapeno stuff with cream cheese wrapped in bacon, yada, yada.
[00:31:45.950] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s the same It sounds yummy, but it also sounds semi-perverted.
[00:31:51.380] – Rachel Miller
It’s one of those things where they’re super tasty. And the Internet, there are only so many different ways to make them. They’re a really common dish here in Texas.
[00:31:59.650] – Jonathan Denwood
When the mind boggles how many calories, it must be what it is.
[00:32:02.220] – Rachel Miller
Oh, yeah. But that list of what’s in the jalapeno poppers, it’s a very standard list of what’s going to go into it. So you don’t need to remake the wheel to create that recipe, you could just ask ChatGPT to create the list for you. But when you do that, now you still have to put it into Canva, you still have to design it, you still have to put it onto a sales page. Instead of having ChatGPT and AI come up with the list, instead, just be Okay, hey, can you just make me a cheat sheet of different recipe ingredients I could use to create my jalapeno dish?
[00:32:37.940] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, that’s fantastic. You might be hungry, Rachel. There you go. I think it’s time for our middle break. It’s been a fabulous discussion so far. We’ve really covered a lot of material in 30 minutes. We’re going to have a break. I’ve got a few more questions. Rachel seems to be pumped up with her coffee, and she seems to be She seems to take my whoom in her stride. It all looks good. It should be a great second half. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. It’s been a fab first half. We’ve covered a load of stuff. Just want to point out the Membership Machine Show has a great Facebook group page. It’s totally free to join the group. Go to Facebook, put in the Membership Machine Show. We have a mixed bag of people trying to build a great business, membership website with developers and designers. So if you’re looking for any advice or a great community, it’s a great resource. I’m always on there, plus Kurt, my lead success team members on there. We love you to come across and join us on that group page.
[00:33:56.260] – Jonathan Denwood
So on we go. So what are some of the two or three of the biggest mistakes that you’ve seen regular patterns around online marketing, with maybe a focus on membership, but not in community. You felt loads of people. I would have thought there’s some clear patterns that you’ve observed. Maybe you could share them with us.
[00:34:26.340] – Rachel Miller
Patterns for?
[00:34:28.410] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, some of the key mistakes that people make, you see groups of people making most often about launching a digital product or a membership site.
[00:34:40.780] – Rachel Miller
So one of the major problems is when they hire too soon, hire too many staff. I see that with pretty much every business that I ever coach. I also see them talking too much about themselves instead of their audience. If you make your audience to focus, you’re going to grow. But if you make it all about what you solve for someone, people don’t really want to know that they have a problem over and over and again. So marketers tend to really just hound in on, Here’s your problem, and I have the solution. Frankly, people don’t know who you are enough to trust you when you want to talk to them about their problems. So that would be the biggest branding issue I see. Business one is they hire too soon. And then with memberships, I think a lot of times is we build our membership in such a way. For me, I’ve noticed this in my life, and And in my membership is I built my membership, but I didn’t consider my own personality. And so my membership is not growing. I grew my membership to a thousand members, and then I’ve let my membership die, not die.
[00:35:44.400] – Rachel Miller
It’s still active. We’re still there. But I let it drop down to 650 members, and I’m okay with it dropping down to 650. And I don’t mind even if it goes a little lower with my training program because I didn’t build it with my personality in mind. It’s still there to help people, but I I got bored. And I didn’t build it with enough flexibility. I built it with time freedom, as in I only have to show up a couple hours a month to keep it going. But I didn’t build it with how do I keep Rachel, myself, involved in loving this and thinking about it and building it and growing it. So I didn’t build it with my personality in mind.
[00:36:24.530] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think that’s been very honest. I forgot which Greek philosopher said, The real challenge in the human condition is to know yourself. Something I’ve struggled with because I think how others observe you isn’t the way that you feel, think people observe you, is it? That’s so true.
[00:36:49.840] – Rachel Miller
That is actually very, very true. That’s so, so true, yes. Your image of yourself and what other people think of you is two completely different things for sure.
[00:37:00.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s quite shocking, actually, because I actually can’t listen to my podcast. I can’t listen to them. I can only listen to the beginning and maybe a couple of minutes. I cannot listen. I think I’m a useless interviewer. Oh, that’s not true. I think I’m absolutely hopeless. But my friends say that I’m quite entertaining, and most of my people that I’ve interviewed have agreed to come back on the show, so it can’t that terrible. But I just can’t listen to it. I can hardly watch a video that I make. I just find it horrendous. But that’s just me. I think What I love, though, is you still show up. Well, I think that’s the other key thing. I have improved over the eight years. It would be very sad if I hadn’t, wouldn’t it, Rachel? The other thing is I was brought up on radio for an English radio. I love podcasting, and I love communicating, so I don’t find this Too much light work. But I think the other thing I’ve noticed, and before we go on to the next question, I just wanted to see if you’ve observed this. I think with a lot of people, and it’s linked to what your comments about the baby, is that people think business success will come by making things as complicated as possible.
[00:38:41.500] – Jonathan Denwood
And I’ve learnt the hard way, the real skill of business is making things as simple as possible, and there’s an art to it. I think any fool can make things complicated. The real genius of real natural entrepreneurs and successful business people in, is to make things that are complicated easy. And it’s the same with copywriting. I’ve learned this the hard way, is that there’s a lot of copywriters out there that got English majors and MAs, and they can write lovely material, but they write reams of it. But there’s few real sales copywriters that can really take a business concept and really give you a great tagline or give you a paragraph. And on my home page, I’ve worked on it, worked on it, worked on it, and I’ve got it to a stage where I think the essence of what WP tonic is in the tagline and in the bottom, the paragraph of text below the tagline. I’m still not 100 % happy with it, but I never will be, but I don’t think it’s in a bad spot. But this is a skill, and most people don’t have it, do they?
[00:40:06.890] – Rachel Miller
No, I don’t think they do, no.
[00:40:09.240] – Jonathan Denwood
And why do you think most people dilute themselves that complicating things will make the offering better rather than realize it’s a process of sympathizing? Is there a word? Because I tend to make words that I feel that it should be there. Is there a word Is that a simplification?
[00:40:31.490] – Rachel Miller
I don’t know about a simplization, but I call it a simple scale complicated fails. And I don’t know where I first heard that, but the more complicated you make a system, the more it’s prone to break. And the more it’s prone to break, the more you’re not going to see success happen. And so I’ve seen so many fancy funnels that have an upsell, a downsell, a cross-sell, and guess what? It was all break because they’ve got too much crap on them. Actually, I actually just had this yesterday. We made a sales… No, not yesterday. It was the day before yesterday. We made a lead magnet, and we promoted it. And when we send it out to our audience, it was complicated enough that my audience, when they got to it, they were like, Okay, I get this and this and this, and here’s that, and what do I do? And it actually converted less than the ones where we are like, Hey, we got one thing for you, and this is what it is, and here’s why you want it. Sometimes, and even the experts, the experts like myself, we add more friction to our life, as in we’re going to add this layer of complexity, and this layer of complexity, and this layer of complexity.
[00:41:37.500] – Rachel Miller
And when we do all of those things, we actually set ourselves up for failure because we’ve made it too complicated. We’re simple, simple can scale, and complicated fails.
[00:41:45.640] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m not an active consultant now or website developer, but I remember it was about six years ago, seven years ago, and I had a lady, and she had built out She was quite a successful, membership-focused business in the niche. I’m not going to go into any more detail than that. And she had built out a load of marketing optimizations in active campaign, and she was looking for advice, and we opened, we had a Zoom, and she opened the Active Campaign, Campaign Builder, and I’ve never seen anything like it, Rachel. I’m not the sharpest tool, but I don’t think I’m the bluntest either, Rachel. And I’ve never seen… She had no idea what half this stuff did anyway, because she had left it about six months ago, before she And I’ve never seen such complicated sales funnels. And you know what active campaign is like, don’t you, Rachel? You can go beserking it, can’t you? And she had gone beserking it.
[00:43:02.840] – Rachel Miller
Well, when it’s complicated, it tends to fail. And so for our businesses, ask yourself, what can I take friction out of my day? So as I’m making my membership, as I’m making my business, as I’m creating, what friction can I remove? So for me, I had a complicated system. No, I didn’t. That’s not true. I hired a girl to help me create video content. And so her idea was she’s going to make this huge bank of all these videos with all these things, and then we can cut and chop and put them all together. That’s a complicated system. Simple system is you take up your phone, you turn it on, you film yourself, you turn it off, and you post it. That’s simple. Simple scales, complicated fails. Now I have this girl who I paid her hundreds of dollars, and she made this bank of videos for me that I will never do anything with because now I have to edit them, I have to open it, I have to resize them, I have to… I have to create the storyboard for it. No, no, no, I don’t know. That’s not simple. Simple scales, complicated, it fails.
[00:44:05.060] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think I wouldn’t over-emphasize this, but I’m a great believer in the 2080 principle.
[00:44:12.830] – Rachel Miller
28? What’s that?
[00:44:13.990] – Jonathan Denwood
2080.
[00:44:15.390] – Rachel Miller
2080? Oh, I know. Yeah. Okay, for Eto.
[00:44:17.000] – Jonathan Denwood
That 20 % of your activity, 20 % of your clients, 20 % of your products, really generates 80 % of your income. And it’s like It’s also like my attention. I’m quite happy. There’s a certain amount of activity and focus that will get you the maximum return, and then it’s a bell curve. If you want to become a true expert on it, fair enough. You got to really push it, this famous 10,000-hour concept.
[00:44:56.970] – Rachel Miller
That’s Malcolm Gladwell. Yeah, I remember that.
[00:44:59.690] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Well, Well, I think at the beginning of this conversation, you were talking about you got to know things before you bring the expert in. Well, I don’t think to get enough knowledge so you can judge an expert so they’re not ripping you off. You don’t have to do the 10,000 hours, but you just got to do enough so you get that maximum sweep point in that Bell curve. So I’m a great believer, use a tool, use something where you’re getting that maximum return, and then bring somebody in or don’t bother, because I don’t need to become an expert. I’m just trying to get to this level where I’ll get the maximum return. Is that making any sense, Rachel?
[00:45:45.730] – Rachel Miller
Yeah, I just have been burned by it. I like the idea of you don’t need to be an expert in everything, but at the same time, as a business owner, you care about your business more than anybody else does. And hiring without a system that they can implement and use- Oh, yeah.
[00:46:06.980] – Jonathan Denwood
I still.
[00:46:08.320] – Rachel Miller
You have to do enough of the work. You have to do enough of the social media work so you can hire somebody to do your social for you. If you’re not a social person, why would you expect to hire somebody who’s a social person? You’re probably not going to… You need to actually become that person a little bit so then you can know who you need to hire. If you don’t know what a good sales funnel is and you’ve never made one, you’ve never made a good lead magna before, if you’re going to hire someone to build one for you, you’re not going to recognize it and you’re definitely not going to be able to afford it. I just lost the most money. Most of the money I’ve lost was by poor hires.
[00:46:44.380] – Jonathan Denwood
There we go.
[00:46:50.440] – Rachel Miller
Sorry.
[00:46:51.410] – Jonathan Denwood
No, there’s no problem. Question five. Obviously, you built a whole product on AI, I use a lot of AI myself, and I found it. It’s helped me enormously. I also feel that in corporate America, I think it’s the total bubble in some ways as well. I think it has a similar taste to 2000 around the internet. Obviously, the internet, Web 2.0, I went through that, through the of JavaScript. And obviously, at the core of the internet, it has changed business and the way that we communicate and everything. But in those early years of the 2000s, it was a bubble, and there was a lot of people who were drifters. And I see the same thing with AI is, at its essence, it will change business, it will change things. But I also see a lot of drifters, a lot of speculators, a lot of nonsense being spoken about AI. First of all, would you agree with that or not? And what’s your own sense about where AI is and where it might go in the next 18 months?
[00:48:25.610] – Rachel Miller
Well, I love AI because I love it so much. I built business that’s on it. That said, I do find it interesting. A lot of the AI experts are really just prompt experts. And I think prompt engineering is a bubble that’s going to pop because AI is only as good as the information you give it. So AI prompt engineering is important, but everyone will become… That will just become the norm is that everyone should be a prompt engineer. So everyone will become, how can I create better prompts for my business for where I am right now? The issue, though, is not, can I write a better prompt to get more better data, like better responses? Like, yeah, I can write better prompts to get me a sales page. The problem is, I still have to have a human right now copy that into my sales pages. That’s, I think, the game changer that AI will be. And that’s who I think the real AI experts are, are the people who are automating the AI responses so humans don’t have to just know what to do with this digital hoard. Basically, what AI is doing right now is giving us thousands and thousands of pieces of content that we don’t have anything to do with them.
[00:49:37.010] – Rachel Miller
Now we need to take those random blurps and now implement something on the back end of it. If AI goes through and goes through your tax statements and tells you where there’s a red flag in your bookkeeping, AI can actually do that. But now somebody has to go into the bookkeeping and be like, Here’s the red flag, how do I fix it? Well, if you’re like me, I don’t know how to fix that. That’s where a human who can do AI is more important, a human who can automate the AI or a tool that can go in and say, Okay, AI, give us this data. Now implement the change based off of that data. That’s going to be the game changer. The people who are doing that, who are making the tools that actually work, those are the real true AI experts, not the prompt engineers.
[00:50:25.820] – Jonathan Denwood
I think that’s a great insight. Thanks for that, Rachel. Let’s go on to our last question, one of my favorite. If you had your own time machine like HD Wells, or if you watched Doctor Who, the TARDIS, and you’re a time Lord, and you could go back to your early days where you were starting your online journey of success, Rachel. What would be a couple of things that you would love to be able to advise your younger self that you maybe can share with our audience?
[00:51:02.110] – Rachel Miller
I would tell her that she’s doing okay, and that every step is a step in the right direction. Because I think back to the myself right after I had, I think was my first or second child, and I had them back to back. And one of them had where they were allergic to milk and soy and eggs and everything you could imagine they were allergic to. They break out these horrific hives. And I would go back to that self who could not afford the fancy formula that my little girl needed to eat. And I’d be like, every step you take is in the right direction. Because at the time, I didn’t have money. I was sitting in my house, looking like, what is going on? I can’t even afford to feed my kid. And I did the first thing that was right in front of me, and that was getting a job online and writing copy for manuals for a company that was creating home appliances, and they were a Japanese company. And so I was writing the manuals for them. Nobody really reads the manuals on how to work your blender. If you buy a blender, you don’t care what your blender does.
[00:52:04.030] – Rachel Miller
You don’t care. It was these things, a button that would take your blinds up and down. You don’t really care how the blinds work. You don’t need the manual for it. Nobody reads that manual. But at the same time, so I didn’t feel like it was filling a purpose, but it was a step in the right direction. And that step taught me how to write quickly. That step taught me how to break down information into steps, into instructions. That information taught me how to negotiate with… Work on remote, work with my kids. So there’s a lot of everything was a step in the right direction. And if you keep taking the next step, you don’t need to have a five-year plan. You just need to have a plan to get out of the hole where you’re in with one step up. And if you can do that one thing, you’re good. So I’d go back and tell my person, You’re okay, just take that next step.
[00:52:49.860] – Jonathan Denwood
I think that’s very insightful, and it’s linked to a couple of resources that have come to my mind. Yesterday, I did a lot of walking in the morning and in the late evening, and I was listening to a podcast, the Tropical MBA podcast, in yesterday morning, and they were talking about how you get real change in one’s life or how do you promote real change in other people that you are mentoring or trying to help? And this is this idea of this conversion on the road to the masters. Sometimes it happens, but they were saying they think real change happens in microsteps. And I think that’s what you were outlining there. But they also said that a lot of people follow microsteps and then convert back to their old ways. You learned and moved on. They said that one of the things that can help prevent that from happening is mentorship, having a community, and having a group of individuals. And that brought me to a book that highly influenced me. And it’s a book called Change or Die. And I can’t remember. I think it’s Alan, somebody. I can’t remember his name.
[00:54:24.120] – Jonathan Denwood
And I’ve read it three times. I’m going to share something with you. About three years ago, I was £330. I’m 6 foot, and I’m a pretty big guy in bone structure. But I was £330, now I’m £200. Way to go. And that’s through diet and walking, and the diet becomes more than a diet; it becomes the norm. This book, it describes four different areas in which tremendous change has happened for various groups of people. One of them, and one of the first chapters is about why people who have major heart attacks, and their surgeon and doctor say, you’re grossly overweight. And if you don’t lose a load of weight, you’re going to have another heart attack. You’ve had a massive bypass operation. This book describes that the majority of people, after six months, lose weight, and then they go exactly back or gain even more weight than before their major operation. It goes through the mental process of that. And like I say, it goes through other examples of why people have patterns of behavior that don’t serve them well. And then they go, and even though they try and fight it, they go back to that pattern of behavior.
[00:56:17.080] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s quite fascinating, really, isn’t it, Rachel?
[00:56:19.330] – Rachel Miller
Oh, I just looked it up. It looks like a great book. I can’t wait to read it.
[00:56:22.880] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s quite a mind-changer, actually. It’s not very big, so I don’t read big books. Well, the only big books I’ve read are from Russian authors. They seem to write very large books, the classics. They’re the only ones I’ve ever… Rachel, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. We have covered a lot of stuff in an hour, haven’t we?
[00:56:48.690] – Rachel Miller
We have. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:56:51.490] – Jonathan Denwood
So, Rachael, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and some of your ideas?
[00:56:57.850] – Rachel Miller
They can find me as Rachael Miller on Facebook or pagewheel. Com. That’s my new project.
[00:57:04.330] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. We will be back next week with either a guest or my regular co-host, Harun, to talk more about WordPress technology. But we’ve got some great guests coming up in July, like Rachel. I’ve rustled up some really interesting and influential people like Rachel. We will be back next week, folks. We’ll see you soon. Bye..
[00:57:33.010] – Rachel Miller
Jonathan, thank you so much.
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