Sometimes, You Just Have to be Patient

I’ve been on complete mute since my latest income report two weeks ago. Since I started working full-time on my sites in July of this year, things are moving quite fast… sometimes too fast. Since the beginning of September, I worked on two major projects. The first one was my first speech at the Canadian Financial Summit. The second one was an important promotion for my membership site. For the very first time, I had a webinar prepared to launch this promotion. I’ve done tons of presentations in my life as it was part of my previous job. However, talking to a red light on top of my computer screen was a lot more intimidating! The whole thing went well and I’ll share more about webinars in the upcoming articles. But today, I wanted to share with you a piece of my entrepreneur’s life. It’s a piece about hard work, frustration and patience. This is another lesson of life that I’ve learned.

I did the webinar on Wednesday September 20^th. The promotion kicked-off during the webinar where 103 people attended (a maximum of 200 participant registered, but only 103 made it on time). I didn’t generate the amount of sales I thought I would at first. In fact, the first thought that crossed my mind after my morning run on Thursday was: man I suck at this. I want to share what I wrote my team on Friday afternoon after the dust settled. Here we go:

First off, I have to tell you, I was a bit upset after the webinar. It went well, but well isn’t enough. I think I was good, but good isn’t enough. I’m used to being the alpha dog. This time, I was just as good as any other member of the pack. Still, no major bad lucks, I got 15 questions for a 25 minute talk after my presentation. This was very good. Still, 4-5 sales after the webinar weren’t incredible either.

I woke-up the next morning, seeing a few sales. I smiled at first and then realised there were all affiliates. Then, I went for my morning run. When I check my phone afterward: nothing (maybe I should have run more than 6 km?). Then, the morning passes and we get 4 sales by noon. FOUR. During that time, our affiliate sales were running fast. Then I was really upset.

I spent about 2 weeks working on the webinar between creating content, writing down emails for our newsletter and our affiliates, learning how Webinar Ninja works, creating the subscription page, doing 101 tests, building my webinar, modifying many things and practicing. During that time, I couldn’t work on writing for other sites or our own blogs.

Then, as yesterday went by, we started making more and more sales. As I’m writing this (Friday 3pm), we have 6 sales coming from the Financial Summit, 30 sales coming from other affiliates and 24 sales from us for a total of roughly $3,234 in sales.

Out of our 24 sales, 12 (so, half) are coming from people who attended the live webinar or the replay. I had a total of 103 attendees + 84 for the replay (187 total). That’s a 6.4% conversion rate. I wanted to have 10 sales coming out of the webinar in order to be “happy”. Well it finally happened; I just had to be more patient! (not my first or second quality, I admit!)

A few months ago, when I was on the beach and wrote my “game plan” for my return, I expected to make a big sale in September. The plan back then was to sell the 1 year at $50. I expected to make $4,000 out of the campaign (60 new DSR members from us and 50 affiliate sales (@$20 each)). Instead, we ran a different plan, but after the first email, I showed 55% of my sales objective (60 on 110) and 80% of my cash objective. I already know that tomorrow, while I’m picking up grapes (helping in a vineyard, what a perfect day!) I will reach my goals in term of $.

My takes from this campaign:

–    People love webinars, I need to find a way to streamline the process and do it once a month

–    Q&A’s are highly appreciated by attendees, and this is something I really enjoy doing

–    I need to write more articles that are selling softly DSR

–    DSR growth will pass by our blogs’ growth. More focus needs to be put on those two

–    Be patient, sales are not coming instantly!

 

Then the weekend passed, 2 more emails were scheduled before the campaign ends on Monday at midnight. By the end of this campaign, I’ve done a lot more than any of my expectations. In fact, the campaign brought in 228 sales total (affiliate + our sales). I thought I was going to make about $4,000 out of this promotion and I will end-up making over $14,000. September will be the best month I ever had in my online history. I just had to be more patient and let my plan works its way.

 

I’m Strong like a Wave

I’m Passionate like a Wildfire

I’m Fast like a Cyclone

But I gotta stay down to earth!