The Rebranded Teacher
The Rebranded Teacher
5 Takeaways From Teacher Seller's Summit
I'm sharing some of my top takeaways from the Teacher Seller Summit that could revolutionize your approach to business growth. From the unique vantage points of a co-host, presenter, and attendee, we share invaluable insights from industry leaders like Farrah Henley, who underscores the importance of boosting your domain authority, and Krystal Griffith, who introduces the concept of informal freebie swaps to supercharge your email marketing with less stress.
Ever heard of "forever email sequences"? Learn how they can keep your audience engaged with fresh content endlessly. We also dive into the art of managing seemingly impossible workloads, breaking them down into achievable tasks. Hear about my own experience of a last-minute conference session that turned out surprisingly successful, emphasizing the benefits of flexibility and showing up. Plus, a heartwarming moment of dedication rewarded by Farrah Henley. This episode is packed with actionable tips and real-life stories to inspire your business journey.
I'm going to be sharing today five of my biggest takeaways, five things that I'm going to be remembering, implementing and putting into practice in my business after Teacher Seller Summit. So I obviously experienced Teacher Seller Summit from multiple different angles I was one of the co-hosts, I was one of the presenters and I was also an attendee. So I was enjoying everything myself, and so I kind of have multiple different perspectives that I'm kind of coming at Teacher Seller Summit with and my experience there. But I want to share five of the things that I really walked away with that I am going to make sure that I'm either keeping in mind or I'm implementing in my business moving forward. So let's go ahead and dive in, because three of the big takeaways that I have from other people actually came from the live events. Actually, the very last one came from our conference wrap up, where we weren't even really necessarily sharing business advice or talking about businessy things. We were just wrapping up the conference and having a good time. And one of the things from that is kind of an overarching takeaway, which is that when you have experiences and when you set up experiences for yourself inside of your business, where you are putting yourself where other people are. You are really going to learn and you're really going to grow, even if it's not in the traditional sense of attending a session. Okay, so let's dive in. Let's get started.
Speaker 1:Number one takeaway was from Farrah Henley and one of our panel discussions. She was talking about the importance of sending traffic to your own domain versus, like sending traffic to, say, a landing page and convert kit. So like, if you have an email opt in, like the landing page and you're driving Facebook traffic or you're driving traffic from Pinterest, blah, wherever, to set that up on your own web domain, or other words, on your own website, versus setting the landing page up in ConvertKit or Flowdesk or always heard that and the the reasoning that I've always heard for that is because it's easier. If you ever decided to switch, say, from one email service provider to another or email marketing platform to another email marketing platform, you don't have to like redo all of your landing pages. You can just change out the form and of course that makes sense and that's very reasonable. But her logic behind it was that when you're sending traffic to your domain, it lends authority to your web domain, which kind of helps it rank in Google and in the search engines, and so that is one of the reasons why, especially if you're paying for Facebook ads, that you really want to make sure that you're running that traffic to your domain. So it's giving authority to your domain and you're getting even more bang for your buck, which I thought was really interesting and I hadn't thought of that before. But I'm definitely going to be doing it because I have been putting everything in Kartra because it's so easy. I already have all of my templates. Kartra, by the way, is like an all-in-one platform. It's kind of like Kajabi if you've heard people talk about Kajabi but I'm going to be building those on my domain. That's my goal, okay.
Speaker 1:The next one came from Crystal Griffith, who was talking about setting up informal freebie swaps, and I thought this one was pretty genius, because I think a lot of times when we think about doing these like big email collaborative events, which a lot of things have changed in email marketing over the course of the last several months, since the beginning of the year but you can still run a collaborative email marketing event and I still think that could be really beneficial for your business but she was talking about doing these really small, low stress kind of swap, like hey, I'll share your freebie, or I'll share your opt-in at the end of my email this week, you share my opt-in at the end of your email next week, and just doing like a small swap between two people. So it doesn't have to be anything big. It doesn't have to be these things where you need all these like Google forms and you need all these things for them to turn in and deadlines and due dates, all that kind of stuff. It can be super simple, just like hey, I'll share yours, you share mine, and it's really easy. And yeah, if you are part of teacher seller summit, I think they actually posted inside of the TSS group that Crystal has started a Facebook group specifically for that now for you to connect with people who want to do that kind of freebie swap too.
Speaker 1:So you can go and find that the next thing was setting up forever email sequences, and this was actually came from multiple people. Crystal Griffith talked about it, and then the original idea actually came from somebody who was not a panelist. This was in a roundtable discussion. I cannot remember her name and I wish I could, but it was a really genius idea. I'm still trying to figure out exactly how this would work with my email marketing platform.
Speaker 1:But the idea was to create like a never ending email sequence where you put someone into the beginning of the email sequence and then, as you write new emails, you add them to the bottom of the sequence and they just get your emails for now, from now to like forever, and you could then sit down and batch out the lady who was talking about it. She batches out like three months of emails at a time and so every quarter she sits down, or maybe she does it every four months. It's every three to four months. She does this and she runs them through this funnel and then she puts them into the next funnel and that way she's not having to like schedule out each individual email. She can do it one time and then, when they join her email list, they automatically get dropped into that sequence, and so she's able to do it that way. Now can you do this without? Yeah, yeah, you can still schedule and say, like, anybody who joins my list can get this and they should still get it. But the way that Crystal Griffith was talking about doing it was that it was just like a never ending sequence and she could go down at the bottom and she could just kind of add to it over time. So if at any point in time she wanted to put like a segment of if they do this, then make this happen or whatever, she could put automations in there as well. And I thought that was really interesting, um, and definitely inspirational the fact that they were backing up that many emails super inspirational.
Speaker 1:The next thing I learned was more from, like, the hosting side, and that is that even impossible workloads can be manageable. So, like we, we were running our summer math summit in tandem with teacher seller summit, and so we had two summits going at the same time. We did have a project manager this year, which she was incredible and she has helped so so much with a lot of our summer workload, which has been great. But we had a lot of crazy things happen. My main virtual assistant is on maternity leave and so she's working very, very, very part time.
Speaker 1:And then we had a presenter who dropped out at the very, very last minute I'm talking about like just a couple of days before the conference started and we had advertised to attendees that you're going to have 40 sessions and we are people of our word and if we say you're going to have 40 sessions, then 40 sessions you will have. And we were kind of panicked because we were like, well, what are we going to do? Because how do you ask and how do you find somebody to create another session just a couple of days before the conference starts? And so I was like you know what? I'm just going to make a quick session. I can do this. This is very doable. I have to also update my Selling 101 course because of the new updates and changes that have happened on TPT. So I will update Selling 101. I'll record that video and I can use it at the same time as a video for updating your storefront inside of Teacher Seller Summit. And so I did that and it was just, it was a lot of, it was a lot of work, you guys, and it was a lot of last minute things happening and coming together at the very last minute.
Speaker 1:And there were so many moments where I was like is this going to get done? Are all of these things going to actually happen? Are we going to be down to the wire? Am I going to be up until like four o'clock in the morning every night leading up to the event and the answer was no, we weren't.
Speaker 1:And this is a lesson that I've had to learn many times over, because, no matter how prepared you are for whatever it is you're doing, there comes a point in a project that's big. When you're doing something that's big, there comes a point where you're like, is this even possible? Is this even going to be manageable? And the truth is like, yeah, it's absolutely possible. You just kind of have to get over that hump. You know what I mean. You just have to get over that one little hurdle and then it's smooth sailing from there.
Speaker 1:And I have to constantly remind myself like, one bite at a time, I'm going to eat this elephant, one bite at a time. I definitely had that lesson taught to me several times again over the summer so far and TSS was one of them, because I honestly thought I don't have time to record another session, I don't have time to update my course, I don't have time to make these changes and do these things that I'm having to do just in, just to keep my other businesses afloat. But the truth is that if you really just if you have a big project that you really want to do and you think I'm not going to have the time to do it, but now is the time to do it. Set yourself some deadlines and then start looking at the deadlines and say, okay, what's due first, I'm going to do that first. Then take the next bite of the elephant and keep taking the bite until it's gone.
Speaker 1:And you'll be surprised that if you really just take one thing at a time and not try to think weeks ahead or months ahead or days ahead or even just steps ahead, and you just think about, okay, what am I needing to do right now, and let me get that done, and then I'll think about the next thing, you would be surprised at how much you can get done if you kind of approach things that way inside of your business, probably inside of your life in general, but for sure, inside of your business. Because I'll tell you, the thing about this is, whenever you take on a big project is that, yeah, it's out of your business. Because I'll tell you, the thing about this is, whenever you take on a big project is that, yeah, it's a lot of work and, yes, there are going to be times where you're going to feel really overwhelmed and a little bit stressed out, but whenever your intentional reason, as long as you're not just like piling shiny objects on your plate. If you've been very intentional with the things that you want to accomplish over a certain period of time and you intentionally knock those out, even though it may be stressful, the payoff is going to be really great. And it is those things in your business that are hard that stop other people from doing them that less, that lower the competition, that make it so that you can be more successful when you actually complete them, because they're hard to complete. And it's kind of like a part B to that takeaway is that sometimes the things that look like seem like hurdles and seem like they're obstacles and seem like, oh my gosh, I can't believe that this is happening right now. I do not need.
Speaker 1:This can actually be like a real blessing in disguise, because I spent a lot of time prepping for my original session for TSS. I was really proud of it. I'm still proud of it. I think it's a good session, but it was not nearly as popular as the session that I had to throw together at the very last second. It was like that one blew it out of the water, like that session was way more popular. People got so much more out of that because it was timely and it was needed.
Speaker 1:And so sometimes those little things that you're like, why is this happening right now? It can actually end up being a really big blessing for you If you just go ahead and embrace it and say like, okay, this is what's, this is what's come my way. I'm going to take this obstacle and I'm going to make the best of it and I'm going to do the best that I can. A lot of times those are going. And then finally, number five, another one that I learned from Farrah. That I thought was just like a really neat takeaway and it's a really sweet way to end our conference is showing up gets you places In the business world. This is where you're going to learn things. This is where you're going to have opportunities that are going to be handed to you kind of struggle with, because if I have to choose between, like, do I want to work by myself or do I want to show up and do I want to go and work with this group of people Nine and a half times out of 10, I'm going to choose working by myself because I just naturally would rather do that.
Speaker 1:But when we had our last session for the conference, our kind of wrap up session that was live. Very Henley showed up and she sent me a private message. We were giving away some of the final giveaways and she said I want to give somebody who showed up to this live tonight and there weren't a lot of people because who's going to come to a conference wrap up Do you know what I mean? There's not a whole lot happening. We're giving away a couple of like final prizes, but you don't have to be present to win those. It's just kind of like thanks so much for being here. You guys, we love you so much. You know, come back again next year, kind of a thing.
Speaker 1:And Farrah sent me a private message. She said I want to give somebody who is here at this live tonight. I want to give someone a membership or I want to give them an enrollment to my six week coaching program, which is massive. And so somebody who showed up and Farrah said, when we, when we gave that prize away, she said I'm wanting to give this away to somebody who's here because you showed up tonight and you didn't have to be here.
Speaker 1:You could have been anywhere else, but you showed up for your business, and the fact that you showed up to this thing tells me that you are very serious about wanting to grow your business, and I thought that that was that that was really neat about wanting to grow your business, and I thought that that was really neat and I thought that was just a really great example and a great reminder.
Speaker 1:For if you're feeling a little low or you're feeling like you don't really want to show up for your business, you don't really want to go join a mastermind, you don't really want to seek out private coaching, or you don't want to go to a coworking call, or you don't want to meet up with other TPT sellers and I'm not talking about paid things, I mean, you could do this, a lot of these things for free. If you're not wanting to show up, then pushing yourself can actually be the thing that's going to change trajectory of your business. All right, you guys, thanks so much for being here. I'll see you guys right back here next week on the podcast.