The Nights & Weekends Podcast

52: Getting the Band Back Together

Craig and Ken are back at it giving updates on their businesses, lives, and the intersection of those two. MastermindJam2 is getting closer to launch, and Ken is excited about the prospects of a much better mastermind platform and the multiple monetization opportunities it presents.  It's been a long road but Ken sees the light at the end of the tunnel where sharing his new version of MMJ with his audience and allow business owners to further their businesses. PodcastMotor continues to thrive and is pretty much on autopilot with Craig's focus shifting much more to Seriously Simple Podcasting.  As SaaS goes Seriously Simple Hosting has gotten off to a good start, and now Craig is managing growing a team and managing the reinvestment of time and money resources.

51: The Lost Episode

Welcome back! Sorry about the extra-long hiatus (blame Ken). It's amazing how hard it is to publish a podcast episode that highlights missed goals. big sigh Anyway... This week Ken and Craig discuss priorities for 2017. Topics include: * Ken is clumsy with hot coffee * Craig's buttery smooth voice courtesy of new headset mic. * Podcastmotor acquired WP plugin [https://www.podcastmotor.com/adding-seriously-simple-podcasting-to-the-podcastmotor-family/]: Seriously Simple Podcasting [https://www.seriouslysimplepodcasting.com/] * Craig likes to ski [https://bigsnowtinyconf.com/], Ken not so much. * Progress on MastermindJam 2.0, and balancing software completion with marketing tasks * Resources to improve at Email Marketing * Invisible Selling Machine [https://invisiblesellingmachine.com/] by Ryan Deiss [http://www.digitalmarketer.com/build-traffic-campaigns/] of Digital Marketer fame * Josh Earl [https://joshuaearl.com/ultimate-list-email-marketing-tools/] * Bryan Harris [https://twitter.com/harris_bryan], of Video Fruit [http://videofruit.com/] * Clickfunnels.com [https://www.clickfunnels.com/] * Drip [http://drip.co] Workflows * Funnel Engine [https://funnelengine.com/templates]: Done For You Sales Funnel Creation by Richard Patey [https://clarity.fm/richardpatey] * MetricDrivenMarketer Funnel ROI Calculator [http://metricdrivenmarketer.com/webinar-funnel-roi-calculator-video-tutorial/] * Thrive University [https://thrivethemes.com/introducing-thrive-university/] inside ThriveThemes * Moving from Services to a Product-First business model * Time Scarcity, vs. Paralyzed and Overwhelmed   ——— If you enjoyed the show: please, right now, head over to iTunes and leave us a 5-star review [https://itunes.apple.com/review?id=967827292&type=Podcast]. Leave your comments on our site at this episode’s show notes [http://nightsandweekendspodcast.com/episode51], or send 140 characters of love our way on twitter [https://twitter.com/weekendspodcast].

50: The Facts of Life

This week is a tribute to Alan Thicke, writer of The Facts of Life theme song, among many others. ---------------------------------------- Today Ken and I are catching up on our businesses, and talking about some next steps for both of us. Craig has his first professional coaching call set up, as he's looking to further refine the operations, independence, and profitability of PodcastMotor.  Looking into 2017 this will be a major focus for him in building out a more diversified, not as dependent on any one person or thing, business that can sustain for the long term. Ken is just weeks away from launching the newest version of MastermindJam, and along with it will come much enhanced user onboarding, meeting scheduling, and hopefully retention. Ken is also looking to build out a small mastermind style trip (similar to the Big Snow Tiny Conf [http://www.bigsnowtinyconf.com] events), but on a sailboat.  If you're interested in meeting other entrepreneurs, talking shop, and working out your businesses in a beautiful setting check out bigsailtinyconf.com [http://www.bigsailtinyconf.com]

49: Traffic Cures All Ills

It all comes down to eyeballs sometimes.  Both Ken and I are finding ourselves in a situation where more traffic (and maybe a lot more traffic) will make business really perform better.  Going through the process of testing, evaluating, and implementing some of these traffic generation techniques will be exciting to follow along with in the coming months. MastermindJam [http://www.mastermindjam.com] is going through a rehaul in the matching algorithm, onboarding, and mastermind automation that it provides.  With this Ken will need to drive a lot more traffic to the site to start getting the engine really purring. Craig has started a new project, a Remote Jobs board that allows businesses with distributed workforces to hire remote designers, developers, marketers, and support team members, anywhere in the world. WorkRemotely.io [http://workremotely.io] is going to be a really fun project, but one that will need to grow it's traffic by 10-20x.  No small feat indeed, but Craig is excited about learning some traffic generation techniques that he's not had to utilize with PodcastMotor.

48: The Importance of Staying Power in Growing Our Businesses

As a business grows and matures it experiences the eventuality of getting some of that "been around for a while" organic juice. Both Ken and I have seen this lately with MastermindJam and PodcastMotor.  More organic search, site traffic, and 'cold' customers coming to our site in the past couple of months, and the only thing to explain it is the slow grind of more content, more chatter in the community, and more reputation for Google to look at. Both Ken and I have been working a lot lately about how to build PodcastMotor and MastermindJam in a way that compliments all of the work we've already done.  It's tempting to look at the shiny object out there that's a totally new field, but it's much more difficult to make an impact in a new field, as opposed to just improving on your current app or market. RESOURCES MENTIONED Business Systems Explored [http://www.businesssystemsexplored.com/] LevelsIO on Twitter [http://www.twitter.com/levelsio] Entrepreneur on Fire Blog [http://www.eofire.com/blog]