Archives for April 2014

About 8 years ago I wanted to write a book about the American dreams of Latinos in the US. For some reason or another I never got around to it. But the idea and the passion for someday doing something about this never left me. The good news is that in the next couple of days I am launching the Logra Tu Dream podcast and online platform to help Latinos achieve their American dream. This is my story of how I developed this podcast and platform from scratch being a total newbie to podcasting and online marketing.

The Inspiration

After living for 17 years in the US I have been deeply inspired by the stories, the struggles and triumphs of many Latinos and their children that are pursuing their dreams of a better life for their families in the US. I saw that many times standing in the way of their dreams was a lack of access to inspiration, mentorship, business advice and tools from successful Latino and Latin inspired role models. I have realized that my mission is to do my part in helping other Latinos achieve their dreams of securing a better future for their families and growing their entrepreneurial businesses.

Then I started listening to podcasts in 2012, sometime in 2013 I started listening to John Lee Dumas Entrepreneur on Fire podcast. I was incredibly inspired by John and the stories of his guests- top entrepreneurs that have overcome failures to achieve fantastic success. I couldn’t get enough of the podcasts. At the time I just started Marketealo my consulting company focused on helping companies navigate and win in the Latin influenced market through innovation, brand development and strategic marketing.

The Entrepreneur on Fire podcast became like my daily dose of entrepreneurial inspiration and fuel. Through it I learned about other great podcasts like the Solopreneur Hour by Michael O’Neal, Lewis Howes The School of Greatness, Jaime Tardy’s Eventual Millionaire and Patt Flynn’s Smart Passive income among others. I became a podcast junkie. The more listened the more I wanted to learn about how to become a successful entrepreneur, how to podcast, how to do great online marketing and how to build wealth. It was like getting another mini-MBA but better as podcasting was much more inspiring, engaging, and actionable for today’s world. I also got to know albeit virtually the different podcaster entrepreneurs really well. They were authentic, hard-working, kind and giving people. The world would be a much better place if they ran the business world I thought to myself many times on my commutes, and my runs when I listened to the podcasts.

Slowly but surely my desire to start my own podcast grew, my gut told me that it was something I could do well and after all I had mission just waiting to be fulfilled.

The Idea

After a few months I decided that I would do a podcast and after some soul searching my passion for helping Latinos and Latinas achieve their American dreams resurfaced with a tremendous force. I knew that podcasting was the perfect medium to accomplish the mission. At that point the idea of Logra Tu Dream was born.

Taking Action

Once I had an idea that I was incredibly fired up about I knew that in order to make it happen I had to take massive action. It was time for me to put into practice everything I learned from the podcasts. I also had learned that to be a successful podcasters I could not do it alone. I knew I needed to find a community of podcasters and entrepreneurs that could help me to make my dream a reality. That is when I decided to email John Lee Dumas and applied to The Fire Nation Elite Mastermind group. A fantastic group of highly motivated , talented and passionate entrepreneurs. Many of them have very successful podcasts that you can find on the top slots of New & Noteworthy in iTunes. I got to know many of these entrepreneurs and was inspired by their passion, drive and stories. They pushed me to make my podcast launch a reality and shared advice, encouragement, technical knowledge along the way. Without them I would have been totally lost and would not have known were to start.

But with them on my side I knew I would be able to make it happen, my confidence grew as I went from idea to launch in little more than two months. I still have my other business so could not do this full time so I did this on the side, otherwise I would have launched earlier. I can stress enough how important it is to have a community of support like this one behind you to be able to start any venture. It is not only the technical knowledge and advice that propels you it is knowing that other 99 people have your back believe in your dream, and are showing on a daily basis that it is possible and showing you how it is done. This built tremendous confidence within me without which I would have probably not made it. Let me walk you through how I put all the pieces of the podcast platform puzzle together:

Brand Positioning

My idea was very clear from the start I wanted to help Latinos achieve their dream. My target audience was very clear too it was Latinos and Latinas from college age to mid-career age that had an American dream that they were pursuing or wanted to pursue.

The brand idea and target would be the heart and guiding light for my brand. First I brainstormed for a name that would bring this concept to life in a compelling, relevant way with my target audience . From my extensive work in the Latino market I know my target very well. Not only I am in the target but have worked on many marketing and innovation projects focused on them. I know that Latinos and Latinas are bicultural and live both in the Hispanic and Anglo worlds. Spanglish is a dialect they use and connect with at a deep level as it is their dialect. So I decided to choose a name in Spanglish, I came up with the simplest expression of what I wanted to achieve “Logra Tu Dream” which means achieve your dream in English. I chose it as it is a call to action to Latinas and Latinas to achieve their dream and because the Spanglish would connect very powerfully to. I was deliberate about having the word dream be in English as the dream is an American Dream and the Logra tu (achieve your) in Spanish as this represented our Latino roots and drive.

I rushed to get the urls and the all of a sudden I was on my way to make Logra Tu Dream happen. Then I also filled a trademark on the brand to protect it.

Design (Logo and Website)

Once I had a name that loved I started thinking about the logo and the design. I love my Marketealo logo as it uses like a colorful wave form that represents the passion, diversity, colors and flavors of Latino culture. So I knew I wanted to use it if only I could find a way to fit my brand idea.
That is when I enlisted Angelina Villanueva a brilliant Latina graphic designer. I gave her the challenge of integrating the Marketealo wave with the Logra Tu Dream concept. She came back with a number of options one of which I fell in love with:

Simple, elegant , powerful and on brand. Just what I wanted, a logo that represents the path that Latinos and Latinas take towards pursuing their dream. A path that is full of passion, life, family, diversity and color.

Website

I knew I wanted a very visual website so I asked my mastermind group for recommendations and did my own research to find a word press theme that would be both visually impactful and customizable. Many people recommended the Genesis framework for its great performance and beautiful themes. I went ahead with Studio Press for Word Press, and picked the parallax theme that runs on the Genesis framework because it was very visual and different from others I have seen before.
The hard part was figuring out what plug-ins to use to create the experience you want, so I spend a lot of time asking knowledgeable people in my mastermind and doing my own research. The process was painful as I am not technically inclined person but I did learn the basics of how to set up a decent, attractive and functioning website. Check it out here:

For the website design I wanted to bring the brand idea to life in an impactful and very visual way. I came up with the idea of doing a collage of different Latinos and Latinas at various stages of pursuing their dream using a filter with the colors of the logo. This would represent all of the dreams that the podcast would help to reach. Norman Batts a talented infographic designer I had worked with before developed the collage.

Email List Building

To be able to build a list of your audience which is the life-blood of any endeavor. I went ahead used AWeber for the email opt-in and to automate the process to send out emails to provide content and value to my audience. It is a great solution that gives you all the email marketing capability you need for a very low monthly cost of about $19. For the actual opt-in boxes/forms that I put on the website I used Hybrid Connect which offers great flexibility to build opt-in forms and slide-ins that look great and are easy to install on WordPress. I fumbled a bit at first trying to create and install the forms but once you get the process it is very easy.

Social Media

I decided to focus on one social media platform as I have limited time. So I choose twitter as it has been proven to be the best platform to build a podcast audience. Michael O’Neal from the Solopreneur Hour has used a twitter strategy which I am emulating very successfully to drive traffic to his podcast. It consists of tweeting your current and past episodes throughout the day with hash tags of relevance for your audience and episode theme with a link to the episode on your website.

The Podcast

I decided to do all the components of the podcast production myself to learn the process well and to keep to my shoestring budget but I ended up spending way too much time and encountered significant frustration. If I were to do it again I would sign up to Podcasters Paradise . It is the best resource out to there to learn how to create, grow and monetize your podcast. It is run by John Lee Dumas the authority on podcasting and the host of Entrepreneur on Fire the #1 business podcast in 2013 and in my opinion one of the best podcasts you can find anywhere on any category. John is a down to earth entrepreneur that invests tremendously in the Podcasters Paradise community so you’ll get much more than your money’s worth here.

Guests: I made a list of the Latino/a and non-Latinos I wanted to get on the program that I either I knew of or heard/read about that had great stories and a ton of value to offer my audience.

I got feedback from fellow podcasters on the best way to craft an email to reach out to these guests and have a higher probability of them accepting. I crafted an email with the invite that laid out the mission of the podcast, the interview guide, a google form to capture their bio, skype ID and picture . Then I made it easy for them to book a time on my calendar. For this I used Schedule me Onc e which is a great service in which people can easily pick a time on your calendar out of pre-determined time slots you give them. It costs a few bucks a months but it is worth, also there is a new service called calendly which is free and it is great too so I might be switching soon.

Interviews: I conducted most of the first interviews over skype using the Pandora call recording software which is only like $30, it records automatically and it is very easy to use. For the format of the interview I made it to fit my personality and the purpose of the show. I made it kind of informal but with important questions that would get at how successful Latinos and Latinas achieve their American dreams.

Equipment, Editing and Music: I decided to totally bootstrap my podcast so I just bought a good headset with a decent microphone for around $30 some dollars which is not ideal but will work for the first couple of months and then I’ll switch to a better microphone. For music it was all about the music that would reinforce the brand and the tone of the podcast so it had to be inspiring, uplifting and motivating. I went ahead and found a great piece for $30 at a website that sells royalty free music so you don’t have to worry about any royalty payment or anything. I highly recommend doing this you don’t want to pay royalties or get a cease and desist letter from some record label. For editing I decided to learn how to do it myself to avoid editing costs. I did some YouTube research on how to use Audible the free editing tool and started dabbling with my podcasts editing for hours until I got a hang of how to do a decent editing job. I managed to edit my first four podcasts and developed the intros and outros myself to where I was happy with the outcome. It took a lot of time so here is where you might use some professional editing help to get better results and do it much faster.

Hosting, tagging and posting to iTunes: This was the hardest part as it is a very confusing , frustrating and time consuming process which I’ll spare you. This is why I recommend to just join Podcasters Paradise and save yourself a ton of frustration and lost time.

The Launch

My launch process was by no means ideal as there are more powerful ways to get out with a bigger bang if you invest some money in facebook ads, take more time to build a larger social media following (had 400 twitter followers at launch) and do promotions to start building your email list before launch. Again I was doing it on a shoestring budget and I was challenging myself to succeed this way.

I prepared show notes and loaded them along with my podcast feed to the website (after submitting feed to itunes) and waited for iTunes to give me the green flag. Once I got the green flag I shared my itunes podcast link with my mastermind group , my friends, family, guests on the show and on twitter. I asked my friends, family, my mastermind group and some guests for ratings, reviews and subscriptions if they enjoyed the podcast. These three factors comprise the secret iTunes sauce that can get you on the New & Noteworthy lists for 80 days. So it is very important that you try to get as many as you can and try get the podcasts in front of as many people as possible.

If your podcasts gets sufficient momentum in terms of downloads, ratings and reviews then you’ll make the New & Noteworthy lists and you’ll have a shot at making your podcast a sustainable platform if you consistently over deliver value to your audience.

The Results

I was approved on iTunes on April 22, 2014 and I am ecstatic to report that by almost the end of day on April 24, 2014 my podcast made it close to the top of the New & Noteworthy list in the careers podcasts category:

It is a great start but only a great start I will need to deliver consistent value to my audience and promote the podcast effectively and consistently to build a big enough audience to develop a successful podcast platform.

Was it fun?, you bet it is one of the most exciting, challenging yet rewarding things I have done in my professional life. If you are passionate about building a podcast platform and have the determination, the time and the patience to do it you should go ahead as the rewards and professional satisfaction that you can get if you become a top podcaster are outstanding.

Happy Podcasting !

This guest post was written by Arturo Nava, Founder of the Logra Tu Dream Podcast.

 Why use use an animated video?

It captures immediate attention! A little humor goes a long way! It makes people feel good. Animation gets the happy endorphins going. When you can put someone in a fun, happy mood they are open to your suggestions and more likely to buy from you! You have 7 seconds to capture someone’s attention! Blogs and emails are skimmed over. A visually appealing story will grab your audience and keep them engaged! A quick powerful video will help you stand out in a crowd! You will dazzle and delight your audience all in less than 90 seconds! Video marketing is mandatory to getting your message out in today’s market. A PowToon is an alternative to the typical talking head video. It can be used in your arsenal for your video branding. It used to cost thousands of dollars to produce an animated video, you would need a lot of equipment, producers and a studio. Now you can do it yourself or hire a PowToonist to save you time to do it for you!

Who uses animated storytelling videos?

Entrepreneurs, authors, store owners, non profits, real estate agents, landscapers, lawyers, media and educators! A great way to add video content for the camera shy individual. Don’t feel like getting all dressed up to go in front of a camera? Hire a PowToonist to get your message out there! Everyone can benefit from this powerful fun marketing strategy!

Where can a PowToon be used?

Everywhere! It can be used on all social media, websites and emails.  It supercharges courses and business presentations. In the classrooms!

What can these awesome video messages be used for?

A great way to keep reminding people of your brand and mission. Ramp up your credibility! Break through the noise and the clutter! They can be used in a Twitter Tweet! (The first one I sent got top tweet with a real estate#) Start the buzz before you launch your new book, website, product or business. An engaging way to use as an amazing tutorial. Send out a call to action, promote your webinar, use as an optin or add to your Squeeze page.Trying to get someones attention with a boring email? Send a PowToon and get a response! Storytelling is a great way to get your message out. Spice up your boring blog. It will boost your SEO, give you a higher conversion rate. When you have a video you are more likely to show up in the first few pages of a Google search!

This guest post was written by Maureen Murphy, founder of toprealtorproducts.com.

Managing Your Virtual Staff

When you begin in the online business world, you do it all yourself.
Then you hire some help with the notion that you possibly might not have enough work for them to do. Then business snowballs and suddenly you have a general VA, writers, web designers, accounts and tax, SEO teams, eBooks, affiliate programs… It can all become a big mess very quickly if you are not on top of it all! The key element is to have a system in place. This is your virtual machine and you can only achieve true virtual freedom if your machine ticks over just fine. Most of the work can be handed over to your general VA, but you still have to be involved. It is your money after all.

How to Manage Various Types of Virtual Assistants

When you have made the decision to hire multiple virtual assistants, they will most likely have a specific set of tasks related to their roles. These roles and tasks may overlap or be entirely independent of one another. The important thing is to delegate their tasks according to their strengths. Having multiple virtual assistants can make your business run very efficiently, provided your time is not spent micro managing your virtual staff. It is advisable that the most qualified, experienced or longest member of virtual staff assumes the role of manager or supervisor. Rather than spending your personal time delegating tasks, assign this task to one VA. This VA will delegate assignments and ensure that each person is performing to high standards and meeting deadlines.

Utilize project management software (such as Google Calendar, Snag It or Dropbox) to eliminate confusions and miscommunications: the information will always be available online.  Project management is necessary, but can be complicated by an army of staff. It doesn’t matter how big or small your projects are, handling every aspect of it can be tricky and time consuming. When you have multiple people working with you to complete your projects, it can be challenging making sure everyone knows what to do and how to do it along with reaching deadlines, which is why this role should be assumed by a VA.

Provide Work in Increments

Many business owners make the common mistake of micro-managing staff. This can be detrimental to the business as your focus is distracted by the small details your staff should be taking care of. Provided the overall assignment is completed to a high standard and on time, your virtual staff should not consult you regarding every detail of the project. Schedule a meeting with your head VA ahead of any important project where any issues can be straightened out in advance. Encourage them to ask questions ahead of time so they have an understanding of what is expected.  For ongoing assignments, promote the idea of saving any non-emergency or non-priority issues until your next scheduled teleconference or Skype call. With practice, this process will become more and more effectual.

Utilize Efficient Communication

Thanks to the various modes of communication now, we can stay in contact with people very easily. In addition to e-mail and Skype, we have texting and instant messenger as efficient and fast facets of corresponding. This is a great way for virtual assistants to ask a quick question or bounce an idea off of you. This also helps maintain a working relationship and keeps you accessible. Although this constant stream of communication is great, it can also have adverse effects as you find yourself being constantly bombarded with questions. Limit checking e-mails to twice per day, or have a certain period during the day when you will be available to answer any questions which are not urgent. Obviously, if there is a pressing problem, this should be resolved as quickly as possible. Otherwise, a short team meeting once a day should suffice for any queries and updates on the progression of assignments.

What is “Cloud” Technology?

Gone are the days where there were hard copy files of projects. We now have “clouds” thanks to information technology geniuses where we can retrieve a file from a virtual file cabinet for easy access. This allows file sharing easy and creates efficiency among virtual assistants and employees. Each employee should have a unique login and password for security purposes. Utilize the latest technology and embrace it as an essential tool for your business.

Treat your VA like an in-person employee by providing them with a detailed job description.  There are ways to set guidelines while at the same time allowing your virtual assistant the liberty to work in their own way. Ensure that VA’s understand the importance of meeting deadlines, and outline repercussions for repeated poor performance.

If you recognize consistent poor performance or mistakes being made repeatedly explain that this behavior is unacceptable and outline the repercussions for recurring failure to perform. It is also very important to praise your VA for outstanding performance, particularly if they are meeting targets. Employees who feel they are not rewarded for their efforts may become disillusioned with their position, and their performance will suffer as a result.

Final Thoughts

When you first hire a VA, it may be beneficial to do random spot checks on their work, and check over their progress on a daily basis. If they are aware of your expectations of them, they should meet them during the initial period of employment. Once you get the ball rolling and begin to hire more additions to your team, make sure you are training your general VA along the way. This will mean you can pass over your tasks and achieve virtual freedom with you team. As  your business develops, so will the numbers required to manage and run it. Have systems and processes in place to ensure that from hiring through to completion of a project, your staff know what is expected of them and how they will be rewarded. Things can be a little hectic when you manage a big team but the job title of every true entrepreneur is really just ‘project manager’!

This guest post was written by Chris Ducker, founder and CEO of Virtual Staff Finder and Location63.

Coming soon to the Internet Business Handbook is a book review on Chris’s book.