5 Rookie Mistakes Most Businesses Make Online

Learn the mistakes most people make in managing their businesses online. From the mistakes learned, you can create solutions or perhaps strategies that further improve your digital marketing strategies.

You spent so much on digital marketing tools yet you’re not getting the revenue you are expecting.

Invested thousands of dollars on marketing training on how to manage your business online but at the end of the day, you end up with so many on your plate and not understanding the essence of sales funnels, email templates, landing page, and online conversion.

In this interview on How to Sell Digital Content between myself and Jay Rooke, host of from the Know Pain Know Gain podcast, you’ll hear some wisdom nuggets on how business owners should be thinking about digital marketing, and how to adopt practices to get out of your own way so you can scale.

Now, on a more serious note, do you want what you have right now turned into a million dollar business?

The way I see it, you got three choices. One, you continue spending your money on ad campaigns yet no one is buying or getting your services. Second, spend hundreds of dollars by bringing on the wrong help at the wrong time. Third, get The Digital Navigator services and my team will quantify metrics to check which marketing strategy works or not and get our full support on the different stages of your business.

Time is of the essence when it comes to money. Every minute that you think twice of relying on The Digital Navigator, you waste hundreds of dollars. So what’s your decision going to be?

I have a reputation for pointing out several digital marketing mistakes and find solutions to them. I want to share with you a little secret. Most people pay me for this information but I’m giving it to you for FREE.

Here are 5 rookie mistakes most businesses make online.

1. Works with Different Providers

Website owners like you would want more people to check your website out, showcase what you’re offering or even just by sharing content with the widest possible audience. Imagine this, tens or hundreds of thousands have access to your website. That means you have a bigger audience you can cater to.

Traffic vs Relevant Traffic

This is digital marketing gone wrong. You hired someone to the ads campaign. Then you got a different service provider to do the sales funnels. You hired another service provider to create and sell online courses for your business. You paid a writer to do the content on your website. You hired another person to create your business coaching.

Everyone’s doing something but are they complementing each other? Does the service provider who handles the ad campaigns give feedback to the one who creates the online courses? Does your writer collaborate with the person responsible for the sales funnels?

The idea of getting different providers is like a mop being pulled in different directions. Imagine the strands of mop going in different directions. The cleaning doesn’t get done right?

But if you have one head that holds all strands together and pushed in one direction, you got a clean spot. If you got so many providers doing their own thing, might as well get one service provider to do all the technical side of the business. In return, you’re not losing thousands of dollars on service providers that don’t give you ROI.

2. Doing Everything on Your Own

Say, for example, you have a life coach business and want to create online courses or host a webinar. You want to be hands-on when it comes to handling your business.

So what you did is that you buy online training programs to get your business started online. Those online experts give their tips and know-how. But what’s wrong with it is that you get stuck with implementing it.

You end up troubleshooting the technical side of the business and it takes you more than 10 hours to do it. Mind you, those 10 hours could be very valuable if you devoted it to a one on one coaching with your clients. What could have turned to thousands of dollars of revenue goes to waste while you’re stuck with getting your business optimized online.

The solution—We take it off your hands. Stop wasting your time and resources in figuring out how to get a good landing page on your website or make an ad campaign work. The Digital Navigator will make your website work while you do something that’s more revenue-generating.

3. Unrefined Marketing Strategy

Sales funnels are there but there’s typically no optimization or ongoing support included. You created a webinar but there’s a poor show up rate. Ad campaign budget is set to thousands of dollars but there’s no ROI.

You do those Facebook Live streams yet you still end up with the same audience. You even haven’t catered to high-tiered clients.
It seems like you’re stuck in a loop here. And again, thousands of dollars down the drain. Before it’s too late, you need to bring someone like our team. We could create a marketing strategy and map out all assets such as in our Marketing Makeover Intensive. That way, you got a game plan and know where you’re heading next.

But don’t stop there!

Marketing involves predicting how humans will respond to your message and assets you share with them. Marketers that tell you otherwise are looking out for their wallet, not yours!

This means you need to know which data points to monitor to uncover leaks in your system or hire someone that will do this for you. Even if your sales funnel is amazing, platforms and people change. Detecting these changes can be the difference between losing money and double digit growth in your sales.

4. No Quantitative Information

As you focus on growing your business, make sure that no stones’ left unturned. The problem with most business owners is that they focus on achieving the goal to close more sales and overlook quantitative information, metrics, and data.

We could not stress enough that there’s the need to get data on your marketing campaigns. These data are very important when it comes to your business decisions.

You need to measure the success of each campaign. This will help you figure out which ones need adjustments or ones that making you lose money on expenses. You need to know which ad is getting more interaction.

Should you work on your ad copy, landing page, email sequence or post-sale customer service? Without data you’ll be missing the low hanging fruit and work harder for less.

After all, going from a 2% conversion rate to 3% on your sales page means that you doubled your revenue. If you are selling an online course or group coaching program this is most likely pure profit.

There’s also the online conversion that you need to look into. Are you getting 2 out of 10 customers that provide complete contact information? What does it look like? Then go to the next metric. Because there’s no point in working on your sales page if most of your audience is dropping out before they reach that step.

5. Putting All Your Money on a Single Campaign

$25,000 dollar sales funnels are pretty popular these days and a lot of people are willing to spend for it. But the problem is that there’s no optimization so you end up with a strategy that doesn’t make good sales.

The best resolution to this is to see where the cash is flowing and making sure that you don’t end up draining your funds on a campaign that doesn’t promise an ROI relative to the risk you are taking.

There are several great steps you can take now to work on your business and success.

First, if you need to build out a step by step inbound lead generating and sales conversion funnel, you should download my free Sales Funnel Templates Pack.

If you feel like you’d like to chat one-on-one about your project or campaign, you can schedule a free and no-obligation 30-minute consultation to build a personalized game-plan for your digital product, online training or coaching services.

We can discuss topics that range from sales campaigns, improving existing campaigns or marketing assets, and/or building out your marketing and learning platform. Schedule your Consultation now.

Finally, if you want to help building out your perfect sales funnel, learn more and apply for our Predictable Sales Funnel Program here.

Read the transcript of How To Sell Your Digital Content with Pol Cousineau (with Jay Rooke and Pol Cousineau)

Access the full podcast at https://jayrooke.com/046-pol-cousineau/.

Jay Rooke: Welcome to Know Pain, Know Gain. I’m your host J Rook. We are here today with Pol Cousineau, the president of The Digital Navigator.com. Super excited that you are here today. Thanks for being our guest.

Pol Cousineau: It’s a pleasure to be here and to serve your audience.

Pol Cousineau: So, uh, let’s dive straight into what’s that funky accent all about.

Pol Cousineau: I’m surprised you detected that.

Jay Rooke: Exactly. It’s so subtle.

Pol Cousineau: And so I’m actually French Canadian originally from Quebec and that’s my self-taught English accent

Jay Rooke: Impressive. And Quebec City proper?

Pol Cousineau: No, actually I live just outside of Ottawa for most of my life and in Quebec, they’re real estate is much cheaper. So that’s where we were.

Jay Rooke: Oh funny. Very interesting. You are no stranger to cold?

Pol Cousineau: No, I’m not. And I have visited Quebec City a few times which is actually icier than the Ottawa region.

Jay Rooke: Oh, interesting. So I had gone up to Quebec City for winter carnival one time and I remember buying a cranberry juice at a convenience store and we were going to walk through a museum that morning. Maybe it was like a 25 minute walk or something like that. Uh, the cranberries started to freeze in the bottle before we got to the museum. You know, it’s one of those crazy cold days and uh, I’m used to cold. I grew up in New England Woods College in Maine, but I was just like, wow, this is a whole new level of cool.

Pol Cousineau: Yeah. You got a free slush.

Jay Rooke: Totally. Yeah, exactly. You didn’t have to pay extra. So Pol, tell us about the digitalnavigator.com.

Pol Cousineau: Well, one of the main things that may interest your listeners is we have a lot of resources on our blog page here and articles and that we focus on businesses that sell digital products, online training, as well as coaching services. And we’re all about bringing tools so that people can leverage their time, automate that and implementing marketing strategy with the tools and software that are available to them.

Jay Rooke: Yeah. So one of the things that I want to comment on straight out of the gate is, especially for anyone that’s in a service or knowledge delivery type of business. There’s like the expertise that we have that we think is the majority of the business. And then there’s the actual running of the business and getting that expertise from your head out into the world and making things work and be profitable. And I think there’s still a boatload of knowledge-based, solopreneurs that are trying to take on the day to day running of the business components to their detriment. And so I’d love for you to chat a little bit about what are the, I’m assuming the executive functioning learning that clients either need to go on to be ready for you or that you probably help them with because I’m assuming this is a a game changer once they start working with you.

Pol Cousineau: Yeah, and I think there’s several elements in that question. What we found is that most of the people that come to us have already started deploying email marketing. It might be social media marketing, could have dabbled in paid advertising. And they’ve been doing a lot of the tech themselves. And then what happens is that they work with a coach, they buy an online training program from one of the Gurus in the field and they just get stuck on being able to implement it. Or their mastermind, right? Gives them a wonderful action plan and then it just becomes too overwhelming. So one way to know if you’re ready or not, is to track your time or data of your team. And say, how much time am I spending on tech and troubleshooting and implementation? And if that’s at least 10 hours, then we should probably talk.

Pol Cousineau: Interesting.

Pol Cousineau: The second element that you may want to take a look at is how refined your marketing strategy is. What we’ve been finding is that a lot of businesses get some results initially by themselves. They might be doing like, let’s say Facebook live streams or setting up a group and it starting to work, but then they realize that they’re continually exposed to the same audience. So what that means is that there are actual gaps in the process of getting new eyeballs and engaging with them, converting them, or escalating them to higher tier clients. And that would be another good conversation point.

Pol Cousineau: And what are some symptoms, uh, that you’ve probably seen with business owners that are ready for this type of a, uh, a service but haven’t made the leap yet

Pol Cousineau: Huh. What dig is, I asked them, are you doing all this tech & software work or website work because you enjoy it? And then they say, “No. I do it because I have to do it.” And then as a result of that. Then I say, “Well, what if we could take it off your hands? And then you could work on something that you like and that is more revenue generating.” So that would be something that they’re saying. Okay. And, and again, it’s a rhetorical question. Most people don’t enjoy it all that tech time, right? But they kind of do it because you feel like you have to at the end.

Jay Rooke: That becomes an energy vampire for them that crushes the rest of their efforts in the day. Uh, as well, and one of the other things that we’ve talked about this as a theme on the show before is that it also corrupts their ability to do their, uh, their stupid human Patrick, you know, their area of giftedness really well. Because they’re wasting time and resources over in this arena.

Pol Cousineau: Yeah. I mean I was talking with a coach last week and he has a $1,000,000 plus business. He charges over a thousand dollars an hour for one on one coaching. And he told me that he’s the one that’s punching and updates and adding buttons on his website. It doesn’t make any sense to be for him to be doing that if his time is worth so much more. And what he does in four hours, we could probably do in 15 minutes.

Jay Rooke: Exactly. Cool. Yeah. So one of the things that I think yes, this tea or service up really well. But I think what we’re talking about at the root here is folks structuring a businesses around their strengths and trying to pay attention to where they spend their time. And, and I think starting to work with, uh, some, uh, uh, a company like yourself that takes over one of the day to day business, operating aspects of the job. And really teach us how to be more effective in the day to day running of our business. And so I’m a huge fan of it and kind of talking to the other side of my mouth, what I notice is a lot of folks that do things similar to what you do, whether that’s social media management or feed a Facebook ads or automating some processes will tout their business services and say, “Hey, we can make you guys lots more money”.

Jay Rooke: But oftentimes, those clients aren’t ready to be partnering with somebody like that. So they start throwing, you know, let’s call it $500 bucks at a social media campaign when they’re six months into their business. And haven’t figured out their avatar yet and there niche offering and things like that. And so it ends up being this massive waste of money and lack of ROI. And it wasn’t that that service was a good or bad thing, is that the timing was off. And so, uh, I would love to hear what advice that you have for small business owners as they’re starting to grow and ramp up, uh, when do they start to take on a service providers such as yourself and, and how did they make those leaps?

Pol Cousineau: Well, what I would say is, let’s say you’re making less than 60 or $70,000 a year. I would be reluctant of bringing on a service provider like us because what’ll happen is that we’ll just take all your margins, right? We’d be doing their work and they will profit from it. And that’s an honest opinion. Yep. Now, it doesn’t mean that you can’t make operational efficiencies. So what you should be doing at that stage is taking screen recordings while you do those repetitive tasks. Let’s say that you’re putting up a blog post or a social media. There’s a lot of screen capture software you can get out there, just Google it and then make mini-recordings. And then that can be used afterwards to hire a less expensive VA, a virtual assistant, and then you’ll have something to give them and they can just walk the wrong and work reduced what you did. And that would be a much lower cost.

Jay Rooke: Yeah. And I just want, I want you to keep talking on that theme, but want to pause here and interject or a listeners for a second, which is that I think you just dropped some serious knowledge around, no matter what stage of the business that you’re at, the thinking a couple steps ahead and getting ready for those transitions. So, you know, don’t say to yourself, “Well no, I’m going to do all the books early and that’s just part of the process.” Like build these pathways in right from the get go. They’re just good business habits and it will make you consistently think about running your business with an eye towards scaling and getting you out of your own way versus doing that. That primary service delivery in front of you. Uh, and then the other thing that, I noticed a ton is that some oftentimes Solopreneurs, we’ll wait until the point of total overwhelm to bring on that support and help and then it’s even harder to make it work then because they have to sit down and write out those standard operating procedures from scratch now. And so it really slows down that baton and transfer it makes it way more inefficient. And so I didn’t mean to interrupt, but I just think what you just said is super, super important and there’s just a lot of wisdom a in starting to do that from the get go. So please continue.

Pol Cousineau: Well, I do appreciate you emphasizing that and that’s definitely one of them mindset shifts from being employed to having your own business. Because if you were in the workplace and you’re taking all these screen captures of routine tasks you’re doing, your boss would be wondering, “Well, what are you doing there?” Right? That’s kind of a waste of time. Because in reality they’re probably going to invest significant amount of time in one on one training with any new employee anyway. But now if it’s your business, you probably don’t have all that extensive time to train someone and it doesn’t take extra effort to click record what you’re doing that screen capture and you’re working through it like you’re not really losing anything out of it. Yep. So I, I think that that’s an important reframing for people.

Jay Rooke: I agree. How about in your own experience? Because I’ve fluctuated with bringing on the wrong help at the wrong times. We’re buying the wrong services at the wrong times and as somebody is scaling up, so let’s pretend they’re there. They are under that 70 grand a year range and it’s the business argument for bringing someone of your calibre on isn’t fully baked yet, but they also need help and start should start thinking about getting things off their plate and delegate in the. Where do you think the, the lowest hanging fruit is for them? Is that bringing in a social media company? Is that grabbing a virtual assistance? Is it’s a somebody to do the, a bookkeeper to do Quickbooks. What do you see from where you sit?

Pol Cousineau: Well, I’m going to be biased, but then I would say it’s bringing someone like our team because what we can do is one, map out a marketing strategy with you and map out all the assets that you’ll want. Now, we may not necessarily be commissioned to create all of those assets, but at least you’ve got a game plan and you know what you’re working towards in the next year.

Jay Rooke: I love that. And hugely want to over emphasize what you just said. Again, you’re dropping all sorts of knowledge. State law, um, but, but the fact that there’s this one chef in the kitchen that’s quarterbacking the larger strategy. Especially if you are a business owner that has not successfully scaled and brought a business over six figures on your own before. There’s probably a missing technical kind of knowledge gap there. And so what’s going to happen in. I’ve done this myself for sure as well as watch lots of others do it, is when there’s no main uh quarterback of the entire strategy or architect. You get a bunch of chefs in the kitchen and so the social media guy is telling you to do it one way or the virtual assistant team, another way, your branding person that you hired another way and you’re way overpaying. Because there’s no synergies in any of the strategies and they’re not complimenting each other so it. It just turns out to be a total wash, so I love what you’re saying about a one consistent quarterback, mapping it out even if you don’t need to buy those things at that moment. I get commissioned to do at that time.

Pol Cousineau: Exactly, and then from there, what our clients that are at that business level enjoy is having some form of on-going support. So with our team. We can assist with automation, with websites, with paid advertising campaign that we have specialists in our team. And you don’t necessarily have to commit to one area or the other. You can allocate that differently and we’ve got a support line so you can ask a quick question. You don’t have to get stuck. Now, the other thing which is a different direction you can take is working with someone that can bring in mindset tips. Because one thing that is inevitably going to happen is there’s going to be a drop in revenue. You might lose 10 or $20,000 a year client so that you’re not at 70 or down at 50K right? And you’re like, “oh no!”. You’re freaking out and that’s where that person can help pick you up and then make sure that you don’t lose track of the bigger goal and your momentum. Now that’s not something that I’m not a mindset coach, but I still think that that may be valuable to you and that’s something that you have to evaluate, right? Like, how well do you take punches in your life and you know, that’s a sometimes it’s hard to look at.

Jay Rooke: Yeah. So I like what you bring up is there’s this duality to the growth process. There’s learning how to think differently or you know, emotionally process or whatever that is on the one hand, because we’re supposedly, you know, going where we haven’t gone yet before. So it’s new territory for us and then on the other hand, there’s the technical expertise of the knowhow of whether that’s how to put together a successful funnel or Facebook ad campaign or whatever that may be. And I think once a business gets ready to work with somebody like you, I think one of the main business cases for, is you work with lots of other businesses. So it’s like the bee that’s pollinating all the flowers. So you get a better vantage point of what works, what doesn’t, taking tricks from this one, learning from that, when I’m putting it all together. Whereas the solopreneur that’s taking on that quarterbacking typically has had a limited experience in our being, the architect of a larger marketing strategies like that. And so they, they tend to do a “grab bag” approach versus a, a holistic one. Um, thoughts on that?

Pol Cousineau: Well, I agree with you and I think that there’s something important as well, which is the Achilles heel of growing businesses. So at first, you’re just trying to make sales, right? And I, Hey, that whirlpool, you celebrate it, you move onto the next. But eventually, as your developing assets, we already have a marketing funnel, paid campaign, whatever that is, right? You’re building actual assets for your company and you’re hiring providers, you need to have metrics and data and then use that to make decisions. And a lot of online businesses, regardless of this size, do not have that in place. And that’s just similar to running a business without any financial statements, right? You’re like, well you have cash in the bank or don’t you? And what I’ve seen is people can easily lose 10, 20, 30, 50, 100,000 dollars with a service provider. Because there is no reporting uttered in qualitative information.

Pol Cousineau: Oh yeah. People are not resonating to that offer. We got adjusted a little bit. It’ll be better next time. Or things like that. Well, that’s not data. That’s factual information. So you should ask your service providers: how are we going to measure the success and how are we going to know if we need to make adjustments. And I say to all of our clients, we’re not going to get it right the first time because we can’t predict human behaviour. But what we can do is identify the gaps and then make strategies in pivot accordingly. But if we don’t have that, it’s kind of weird, right? We’d be blind-sided and then we could easily lose not only tons of money on expenses, but on lost revenue opportunities.

Jay Rooke: Yes. All Day. Let’s do this. Let’s, let’s do a quick pause and hear from our commercial sponsors, but I want to continue this theme when we come back and talking about, uh, how to advise small business owners on buying your types of services because I think there’s an art to learning how to buy these things and how to think about them. Uh, and it’ll be a good continuation around this ROI thing. So let’s do a, a quick pause folks. We’re here today with Pol Cousineau. I always mess up the name. Of The Digital Navigator.com. We will be right back after the break.

Jay Rooke: Alrighty folks. Welcome back to Know Pain, Know Gain. Entrepreneurship made real. I’m your host Jay Brook and we are here today with Pol Cousineau president of The Digital navigator.com, Pol, before the break we were talking about purchasing a, you know, some of these digital marketing services and you had made this comment that when you bring on new clients, you tell them, “hey, we’re not going to get this right the first time around”. There’s going to be a little bit of trial and error and it’s an evolutionary process. And when I was first purchasing these types of services, I thought, well man, that that’s bs. I’m not going to just do something so you can play around and experiment and what I now know, and I, I’d love for you to comment on this because you have much more experience than this than I do, but it’s often a multiple thousand dollars.

Jay Rooke: Trial and error. She, he, he type of, you know, it could be a two to three month process at times. Um, and that it’s sloppy and it’s iterative. And you spoke earlier to, hey, how does it work when your mindset of you’ve lost some money or lost a client? And I know on the ascent of my business when there wasn’t a lot of cash flow taking what felt like financial gambling and like throwing money at Facebook ads to see if they work or not was super uncomfortable for me. And so talk about the mindset of how folks should relate to buying these types of services

Pol Cousineau: While you’re bringing up the mindset. So let’s tackle that one first. Yeah, it shouldn’t be about calculated risk. Which is what business is really? You’re saying, how much money do I have on the line? What am I going to gain if it works out? And how would this be hurtful or damaging to my business if it doesn’t pan out? Now, if you conclude that if it fails, your business will be under or you’ll be lacking cash flow, right to meet your commitments. Don’t do it because the risk is much too high in, in that scenario.

Jay Rooke: That is how the, uh, the ROI calculation pans out. I think symptomatically what that sounds like to me, it’s probably a message that, hey, you need to work a little bit more on the infrastructure of your business. Whether that means getting your business model down a little more dialled in, are getting a little bit more client flow yet. Um, to me that symptom then also contains the answer of where that person should look next to fix their business to get ready to, you know what I mean?

Pol Cousineau: Yeah. And if you’re lacking cash flow, nothing prevents you from getting a phone, talking to your network. Maybe seeing if there are people that could use your services, go to old school method rather than going higher risk final and paying $25,000 to provider and then hoping it’s going to pan out.
Jay Rooke: Yup. Yup. Yeah. And uh, I’m sorry to interrupt again and talk a little bit about that. I feel like it’s um, really shady marketing that’s going on in the industry right now around the golden bullet of like, Oh yeah, you know, you just, if you just build the funnel right by the time you wake up in the morning, your bank account’s going to be huge. And uh, I think there’s not a lot of folks talking about the transparency of how these work and there’s a, a disproportionate amount of emphasis put on the victory stories and not about on the tens of thousands second put it into these campaigns that never gets any ROI.

Pol Cousineau: Yeah, I agree. And that was the elephant in the room. And I was actually having a conversation with my wife about this this week because of the surveys we’ve been doing and one of the person told me, “I have absolutely no trust in marketers anymore, but I know that I need them. So I do not know what to do anymore.” And it’s a very tricky situation. And what happened in that particular instance, he worked with three different provider and none of them were able to provide him with quantitative metrics. Yeah. So this goes back to your original question of saying, how do you pick a provider? Well, one of them is, what are the different stages of your strategy? And what are the success points? So if we use a funnel as an example, right? Which could be an ad, collecting a person’s contact information, potentially making an offer follow up, something like that.

Pol Cousineau: Well, the measurement point, the first one is, are people interacting with your ad or not? How is that going? How much is that costing you? And there is a very specific data point that you can look at that and your provider should review that with. Then you would say, now that they go on my website, are they actually providing direct contact information so I can follow up? That would be the option, is that working or not? So then you can look at the conversion metrics. Are you getting one out of 10, two out of 10, three out of 10, what does that look like? Then you go to the next stage, but each of those have a very important metrics. So our approach, and that’s what we recommend to people is, start from the first metric and get that right. There’s no point in us working on your sales page if we can’t even get a person’s contact information.

Pol Cousineau: And I think that’s what happens with that silver bullet that drains. I mean, for whatever reason, I don’t know why, but $25,000 dollar funnels are very popular and I’ve met many people that have paid for that and then there’s no optimization, so when we look at it, let’s say one of the key steps was at the end of the Webinar I’m like, well, everything’s working, but you don’t have a good show up rate. Of course, you’re not going to make good sales because there’s a leak right now. You’re very much diagnostician in many ways, right? Yeah. Well we didn’t say that, but I also have a CPA and auditor license from Quebec, which you know is that process, analysis, metrics and all that, But normally once you look at the data, you can clearly see what the problem is there and I don’t think that you need to put all that money upfront for the whole project.

Pol Cousineau: Why don’t we get a first victory? And you could look at your business and say, what will help me the most right now? Getting new eyeballs?the items. So that would be the awareness stage or is it getting some of those eyeballs to give me their contact information, right? Which would be the convert stage or am I looking at engaging more with them to build that relationship. That’s another objective. And then the last one would be the ascend. Am I looking at increasing the quality of service that I’m providing to my existing customers and maximizing lifetime customer value? Once you pick one of those four areas of your business, then you can have a very limited scope project, a limited budget. It says the risks for that and then set up metrics for that stage and know how successful or not that’s going and pivot or eliminate it if the providers really doing a bad job so that you’re not going to bleed to death.

Jay Rooke: Very sage advice there. Uh, and I think one of the things that’s interesting is as you talk about those, uh, testing the waters and seeing if those initial ads convert or whatever that might look like. I love when you said it’s a calculated bet and I think about how folks, let’s call it 20 plus years ago, uh, would not think all too much about buying an ad in a newspaper or something like that or a magazine and what a huge spin that is relative to you don’t really know your feedback. It’s tough to track metrics, etc. And now we can dial it in and do little test cases for, you know, literally dollars at a time or you know tens of dollars and get some feedback and incrementally build an ad versus choosing one thing and then trying to throw it in the newspaper.

Pol Cousineau: Yeah, and a good example of that is we were running an ad for ourselves. We spent about $225 was a few different ad sets that’s on Facebook. And then I looked at the data, I wanted to wait a week, you know, just so I would have something meaningful. And then I realized $75 going to specific audience, did not enjoy the content at all. So then I killed it. Okay, well burned $75. They’re now 150, the rest of the budget is doing quite well and those are the types of ads that I’m continuing to run. I’m using that similar audience and what I found is, they much more enjoy my blogs within depth information and how to’s and then having the ability there to provide their contact information rather than leading them straight to a landing page, which I’m asking them for the information and like further contact and exchange for research. So I just killed landing page and that’s all I did.

Jay Rooke: Smart. I know one of the things I want to call out is just the fact that these conversations are occurring. So when you were saying, hey, is the breakdown at an initial interest, is that conversion? You know, what’s going on? And then looking at the ROI of the metrics and everything that goes into that. That exercise onto itself is an exercise that most solopreneurs never take the time to do abuse. They’re just so many plates are spinning and they’re so busy on the primary running of the business and that they don’t ever get these metric insights. And strategies that come from the data, somebody like you is pouring over. And so, uh, there, there’s also value in starting to learn those triggers of the business as indicators of where to work on next.

Pol Cousineau: Yeah. And there’s another area that we don’t deal with directly, which is the sales conversion. A lot of businesses have to talk to their prospects to actually present their offering. And that could be the hole in your system. So I had a client where he said, “Pol you’re bringing us tons of traffic, tons of leads, but I can’t close them right now. I’m having a deep. So where I’m the one helping them or not. In which case, this is not me . We need to address that because that’s no hole in their business. And if that’s you listening, I really want you to think, how is my sales conversations going? Because that’s where the mindset and that aspect of your person plays into it. Because if you’re not confident, if you’re not sure the energy you’re putting out that will be perceptible by the other person that you’re talking to and I’m telling you, it will decrease your chances of closing a sale.

Jay Rooke: Yep. Yeah. It’s interesting to me as well,

Jay Brook: Just taking the time to kind of reflect on these types of matters to for business owners to say, okay, like where is the hole in the business? and I guess if we’re going to keep her or play off of a water analogy here. What I like about a business like yours that can open the faucet so that we started to get some water flowing. Now once the water’s flowing, we can figure out where it’s draining and which spots and act accordingly. But when we’re not getting that water flowing, it’s a lot more of a crap shoot. And so I, I see people spending their money, let’s call it a anachronistically, you know, like non sequentially in the right areas on their business because they don’t have the water flowing yet. So they don’t know where the leaks are. So it’s this hodgepodge of buying business services or business providers or coaching programs or you know, whatever the this week, um, get rich overnight, a program, the jurors. And so, uh, having that, that flow going I think is super important.

Pol Cousineau: Having good communication with your service providers, being able to be honest and laid the gauntlet and say it as it is. It’s really good because most people that do a good job at selling but focus on the benefits and the end goal rather than the features. But that can also mean that they could trick you in a way because they’re seeing, you know, everything you want to hear about your goals, but then they may not actually be able to deliver them. So by being able to have that communication, feeling comfortable asking questions, and if you ask what’s going on right, or you have concerns and they’re brushing you off, that’s an alarm signal. Immediately. You could be wondering why are they brushing me off here and there? Just telling me to focus on the price, which I’ve seen numerous times.

Jay Rooke: Yeah, totally. Well, let’s do this while I want. I want to hear, you know, we talked a lot about digital marketing and how our listeners can leverage this and better yet engaged with it and learn how to consume the services properly. What I love to say a quick commercial break when we come back. Let’s hear about your own entrepreneurial journey coming from Quebec and founding the digital navigator.com. Uh, and what some of your challenges along the way have been. How’s that? How’s that sound?

Pol Cousineau: That sounds awesome.

Jay Rooke: Awesome folks. Let’s do this right after the break. I’m here. Jay Rooke, Know Pain, Know Gain here today with Pol Cousineau. We will be right back after our commercial sponsors. Welcome back to you and Know Pain, Know Gain. We’re here in our final segment today with Pol Cousineau ,president of the digital navigator.com. So Pol, we talked a lot today about a lot of business building tips, uh, mainly around digital marketing as a discipline and service providers, et cetera. Uh, tell us about your sense and, and how you founded this business and what kind of your path was like a along the way.

Pol Cousineau: Sure. I’d love to. And then it’s an interesting journey because initially when I started off in business, I had a lot more spiritual services and I was catering to a completely different audience then I learned a lot of good tools for online marketing because I found it was very critical for my business. Now the reason why I’m bringing this up is I was actually working on five figure sales right out of the gate and I was successful in that, but I realized that I was extremely anxious and stressful, like it was so hard because if I didn’t make a sale then it meant I wouldn’t have money for the next few months. And I had to really look at my business model and my health and see what do I want to do and what flows with my personality. So today, I don’t actually push five figure sales. I thought it was a completely different business model and business area. For that reason alone because it was too stressful. Now I have to take a pause in my business journey and due to immigration in the United States was joyful event. I got married, but then there was some challenges with upturning, the rights to work and I had to wind down my previous business.

Pol Cousineau: It turned out to be a blessing actually. So this goes to the start-up, the digital navigator. I joined the mastermind and when I was there I was explaining a system that I was using in my previous business. Automations and membership tagging, the marketing everyday get. I’m like, I’m ready for my relaunch. And the Mastermind members said, “Can you help me do that for my business?” So I agreed to it and then I had multiple new clients, so I never relaunched this spiritual business. And that was the start of the digital navigator. And it was that one of the clients that says, “Hey Pol! You’re kind of like this online navigator like a digital navigator of some sort. You’re like, oh, that’s the perfect name.

Jay Rooke: Interesting.

Jay Rooke: So. So. All right, so a lot of your work is very tactical. Talk to me about this transition from, uh, the initial spiritual business to what you’re doing now. It sounds to me like for the average bear that would have been almost like a step backward. And what I mean by this, I’m curious where the passion connects in your current work and how you, um, how you bring that into alignment with that desire for the spiritual growth of your other job.

Pol Cousineau: Yeah, so my spiritual growth, I’ve decided to keep that in my personal sphere. I travelled to Peru usually multiple times a year, but my wife, we do spiritual pilgrimage there and I have my spiritual mentor that helps me guide me through my practice and I just don’t feel like I need to do that as a business function or in that capacity. And I have to really evaluate that. I mean, we had a podcast and it’s still available, this spiritual voice and there, if you tuned in to this spiritual voice, you’ll get kind of like a flavour of the spiritual Pol. But that moved to my personal sphere. Now with the business aspect, I realized that I have deep enjoyment in strategy. That’s what brought me to getting my CPA license. I’m very analytical and calculated, hence all the data that we were talking about earlier. I’m system and process driven. So I’m the kind of kid that I would play video games all night with Sim City or aerobic supersonic jet managing an airline company and I’m like 60 years old, you know, like crazy.

Pol Cousineau: And what I have found is that a lot of the marketing strategy and the tactical stuff of creating memberships and online courses and automation is like a version of that video game. And I made that direct analogy. So this is just like aerobic supersonic, jet, different industry and now instead of adding currency through this weird video game, mechanics actually making money in my physical bank account. And it’s coming in and the reports are the same as they would be in that game and even had a board of advisors in that airplane management game and they would have different functions. So that’s by advisors. They buy real business. It’s really bizarre how I’ve been able to transfer that gamer aspect to my business. And I don’t know if this is important to say, but I also made a personal decision to no longer play video games because it was such a massive time suck. And it was like an addiction and now I’ve transferred it to my business, but I still have to put limits to buy hours because the addiction Is still is a bit there.

Interesting. So, so for those of us out there, that might be workaholics, that may be listening a how you get awareness so that you can self-regulate and kind of know when you’re starting to come up around that addictive level. Like I, I guess, uh, probably consistent question for you or challenge for you is something around like when enough is and being able to shut it off and go and feel satisfied to be president?

Pol Cousineau: well, for me I would say that my wife helps me with that. When she leaves for the weekend, did workaholic mode kicks in. I’m like, this is amazing. I could pack in an extra week of work at that weekend is that hall was so dead. She says all lot of spend evenings with you was spend weekends with you. And I do ask for lead time if we’re going to go on trips or we have activities and I regulate myself with my calendar. So even in my calendar it says fault, you should go meditate now following the calendar we’re going to go and I need that self-regulation because I can’t myself, if I don’t have that warning, it’ll be like 9:00 PM and I’ll still be working and I wouldn’t have eaten.

Jay Rooke: Right. And you felt like you have a very good self-awareness and self-navigation as well as the digital part. Can you talk at all about some of the work that you’ve done on the personal side in parallel with your business journey?

Pol Cousineau: Yeah. Meditation is an important part of that. I have done at like an eight week program with mindfulness based practices and that is all about noticing like when you’re eating, when you’re walking, when your moods are changing, what’s one thing you didn’t like today? What’s one thing you liked today? All about those shifts in those movements. Now I have also done the passing 10 days silent meditation retreats. I’ve done those trips to Peru and just versatile pilgrimage. We normally go for two or three weeks. And

Jay Rooke: Could I interrupt you for a second again? We wouldn’t. Having themes on the podcast a lot recently around self-care and Medicaid meditation and interesting Freudian slip there, meditate medication in meditation, a going deep and, and a lot of these topics which historically have been reserved to, you know, what’s going on with the yogis and meditators of the world and like a, almost like a whole subculture of people that were deemed as non-workers are not entrepreneurs. And now what we’re starting to see is the opposite of, uh, folks looking for higher performance and starting to bring some of these things in. Can you talk at all for the listeners out there who are saying, no, I need to work harder? I need to work on the business. We’re in the business more. I don’t have time to either meditate or take those trips. Um, I’m curious if your experience was that in doing those, it made you a better businessperson or made you have better decisions. And if so, what? Um, your, your tail has been like from those experiences.

Pol Cousineau: Very good. Practical example is when I go to Peru or in the mountain, there is no internet, just not available. So I have to rely 100 percent on my team while I’m gone and this leads me to prepare it, the document to use project management tools, standard procedures, and then when I come back I’m like, what went well? What didn’t go well? And then those are areas of improvement in the business. Now for you, it may not mean going into the amazon for three weeks, right? As a first test, but let’s say you’re working seven days a week. What would happen if you didn’t work one of those days or two of those days? How can you make the business continue without you and that might just mean getting a virtual assistant for an extra five hours and then building that trust. But I do think that you need that time away from the business to desk the business, and this is going to come from my cv event.

Pol Cousineau: If you’re not able to leave the business and the business function, what you have honestly is worth nothing because no one will ever buy it because it means that it’s not a business. It’s just the job and that’s the real test to what you’re building. So if you’re really building a business, then it is your duty to do that and it is working on the business and if you’re afraid of doing the tests that I would say that’s where we go back to that mindset angle. Right. Why are you so afraid of doing the tests and then working through that? I think it is imperative that you’re able to have the business function without you for at least a small period of time.

Jay Rooke: Yes. Uh, I am loving every single word that you’re saying right now. And listeners, I would probably rewind the last like 45 seconds to two minutes or so. I think Pol dropped a lot of really good nuggets there that are just really dialed in and insightful. Pol, unfortunately our time is wrapping up. Tell us about what you’re working on next.

Pol Cousineau: Yeah, so we’re working on scaling more of our services for building on online training courses, memberships and platforms that you can own as a business owner. So we’re not talking good job. We’re not talking you to me. There’s a lot of problems with those platforms when it would come time to sell your business and that would impact negatively or palliation, right? I don’t want to go into all the details of what those problems are. You can reach out, you know, if you want more details, but that’s what we’re working on is being able to create assets in your business that are repeatable. Whether it’s on the marketing side, on the fulfilment side, having the proper metrics that any investor would want so that we can help scale your business. We’re targeting right now about 300 to 500 k annual revenue with that new Service to bring them to that million dollar platform. Although we do work with entry level at businesses which are they 60, 70 k and we talked about that earlier in the interview and that’s really our focus right now on those platforms.

Jay Rooke: And so, uh, to that end, how can listeners follow you?

Pol Cousineau: And you can find me at https://thedigitalnavigator.com. You’ll see a live chat in the corner you can use to reach out. If it’s someone from my team, say hi and say I want to talk to Pol. They have a contact form there as well. We’ve got blogs and great resources and that would really be the best way to reach out.

Jay Rooke: Awesome. Well, on behalf of myself and all of our listeners, I want to thank you for your time today as you can sure appreciate. All of these episodes are organic, indifferent, and uh, I just want to say I particularly enjoyed how the conversation unfolds it today and I think brought up a lot of a bright and shiny truths or entrepreneurs out there.

Pol Cousineau: I appreciate the opportunity and you’ve been a wonderful host to me. Has been a great time, jay and I also want to thank your listeners because they’re the reason that we’re able to actually do this. And if you do have any questions to jay or myself, please feel more comfortable to reach out to us.

Jay Rooke: Awesome. Well thanks so much. We’ll have all of your, uh, your, uh, website urls now. Good stuff in the show notes, listeners out there. Thank you so much for being here.