What I Learned at DCBKK 2016 Day 2

The second official day of the conference (and final day) was action packed again. This whole conference was really like 5 days for me – from Wednesday and Thursday meetups to Friday mastermind to Saturday and Sunday formal conference and parties – my brain is seriously overloaded.

So the second day, Sunday Oct 16, 2016 had the morning sessions as breakout rooms, and the afternoon was how we wrapped up the conference with a couple speakers.

So for my first two morning sessions, I picked email marketing optimization hosted by Nate Smith. Guy is doing a lot of marketing campaigns and had a lot of insights. We first discussed why your website may not be converting to emails, or your emails sent out may not be converting, he shared the reasons as being product / market fit, specifically:

1) The business owner “knows what the visitor wants” without asking them
2) The offer isn’t specific enough
3) The problem isn’t painful enough (how high on the totem pole, as Noah Kagan calls it).

Then he went through specific stats and said you should be getting a 2 to 5% sale rate on your email list. That means 2 to 5 people out of 100 should buy what you are offering in the email. If they are not, then you need to look back at the product market fit list above.

Then he explained some average numbers on webinars. This is something I have been playing around with at EnterChina.co – so I was curious to learn more. He said that you should get 5% to convert. That isn’t 5% of those who attended the webinar, but 5% of those who REGISTERED for the webinar.

I liked hearing industry averages and able to get a good idea of what I should be reaching for. But he said don’t let the industry averages freeze you up. You need a current baseline of where you are and then just keep working towards making improvements from there. Then we dug into website tear downs of clients he has been working with, and comparing it to after. It is important to get big wins early – to stay motivated. Ways to make more urgency. He’s making me consider removing the buy now buttons on the Global From Asia website, as he says higher ticket value items you shouldn’t show on the site, but instead build up trust and a relationship in email first. Yet, many people want to see clearly what the service is offered, and how the process works. Then took a whole bunch of notes of books and blogs I should be reading.

The second session was my buddy Dan Norris, on building a book empire as a side hustle. Wow, he really broke it down. Find a brand people are already talking about – such as one of his books Content Machine. He hears people mentioning that a lot, saying he is a content machine, and others are content machines – so he should make a book about it. He had to buy the domain as it wasn’t available, but he had to have the domain – he makes dedicated websites for each book he writes. He writes a book not to just be a book, but to be a concept, and something that can grow into courses, or membership sites, or programs, etc.

When he is writing, he spends 3 hours a day writing. He needs a change of scenery and makes a self imposed deadline to make sure he gets it done by then. Discussed book design – and stressed design is so important in business. That design is what sells.

After the breakout sessions, to lunch. Then I heard about Tommy Griffith doing a pop-up meetup for online courses. So scarfed down food and rushed to his meetup. Learned about strategies to build up an audience, doing training offline first and then making it online. Using Udemy to get the course started. LMS is a new acronym for me – which stands for Learning Management System. And he has used them all – went through the pros and cons of each. Wistia vs Vimeo. How to price the course, with industry averages, and ways to make bonuses in your course to make new pricing levels.

A similar trend to Dan, he said design is very important. The better designed the course, the higher the price you can sell it for. He even issues certificates to people who want to add it to their Linkedin.

That was a last minute meetup but very valuable, and then we went to the afternoon ballroom sessions. Noah Kagan had a very interactive session working to help all of us make $1000 USD to pay for this conference. We did this with 3 different ways

1. Save Money
2. Make existing money – selling to existing clients.
3. Make new money – sell to new clients.

Noah is very charismatic and he was walking around the room to check up on us. I cancelled my Skype number, hootsuite account, and was working towards switching lastpass credit monitoring to yearly to save on the monthly cost.

Make existing money is to send an email to your subscribers with a discount, asking them for referrals, getting them to add a subscription service. The room was wild, Karsten actually launched a party network business in the session.

And the final speech for the DCBKK conference was Greg Mercer, CEO and founder of Junglescout. He shared his journey from 0 to 800k in MRR in 20 months. Amazing story, amazing dude. He is so calm and strategic but opened up on some of the tough times he went through to get to where he is. Gave some tips on hiring faster than he did, and finding new channels that need tools like Amazon FBA was. Be innovative, and keep an eye out for opportunities where you can sell shovels to people digging for gold. Amazon FBA truly is the gold rush, and he gave a fascinating story on how he made a shovel selling company.

Then of course the closing party, a taxi ride away. Lots of energy and goodbyes. I was doing my video blogging and networking at the same time. One person mentioned that I do a good job networking using that camera, so I can approach all kinds of people and build relationships faster. It felt good to hear that, as making these videos has been truly exhausting.

So, now I’m on an airplane to Hong Kong – life is going so fast. I knew October would be a wild ride and it has been crazier than I thought.