Tied Up Loose Ends

0:00So in the last episode, I talked about tying up loose ends and I want to give you an update on what I've done so far and decisions I've made. If you hear in my voice any sort of hoarseness or calmness, it's because I am sick. It's a very minor chest infection of some kind that I'm hoping will go away by tomorrow, but man, this beginning of this year has really knocked me for a loop. It has been incredibly dry here in Colorado, which is not uncommon, but it's also been 60 degrees and we're in the middle of January. And we haven't really had a decent snow all year and yeah, I also had like a size in my eye from just the dryness. It's just so friggin dry, it's what I'm saying. Anyway, do you hear that in my voice?

1:01That's what it's from. But the show must go on and I need to get my steps in regardless of how I feel because you know, I want to. So I wrote down a bunch of stuff and I'll go through each one. I'll start with listing all of them and I'll go through each one and what I did. We have the webinar, webinar landing page that's coming up some university live. That and the promotion of that shutting down the brew cabin course that I'm using. I've been paying for podium now for like many years and I'm no longer selling this course. So I would like to clear that up my email marketing S O P. I'm updating that. The course video edit setting the tone for future course videos. Also story posting, posting the story every day on social media to promote our products. And then a comment responding system. So let's start with number one.

2:01Number one is the webinar landing page. I did make time for that this week and I did put some effort into it. I didn't have to put effort into it and have to make it great. I decided that you know what I have a feeling that this whole swim university live idea is a is a really killer idea. And the reason I think that is because in the wake of I mean I think for a few reasons but like just in the wake of AI. Anything live, any sort of event has been like doing very well. You're around other people. There are real people answering questions. It's not just AI. I think these are going to become more important. I think you're going to see more webinars popping up like they used like webinars were a big deal. And then they kind of lost favor because you know YouTube got so popular and it's like,

3:05well, instead of just making these webinars, just make a video and like why trade our you know our time for being live. But you know since the pandemic and the rise of AI, I think I think webinars are going to have a comeback if they haven't already. If I'm just not aware of it. And we've spent a long time at swim university basically just not doing any live events. We've never I mean there's I've only done one live event. It was in 2024. It was with the same company swimply and it went really well, but it was for their audience. I've never really done one for my audience. I've I've never I mean maybe way back in the day like 2014 days, but recently no. And so my thought process here is it's I think it's a better like it's obviously like there's a it's time sensitive,

4:06which we don't really have a lot of time sensitive calls to action within our company. So adding this sort of time sensitivity. I think is is is good. I personally like doing it like I am a somebody had asked me today actually like I love that you're doing this news. I love that you're putting out these videos you're putting out this podcast, but like why are you doing it? And my answer is kind of lame. It's just like I kind of I'm doing it because one, I I just want to document. I just want to talk about this stuff, but honestly it's just because I'm a performer. And I need an audience to perform in front of. So I feel like the webinar in that sense is going to be very good for me. We had talked about doing this so much, Stephanie, for the last few years. But her and I doing it together, we weren't really feeling that idea. And we kind of like to work on our own in our own little bubbles and just communicate through us on.

5:11I keeps the marriage happy, you know, and and it doesn't get us all, you know, obviously we talk about business together. But you know, very rarely will we work on stuff together. So that is by design. In this case, I'm not the one doing the work to set up the webinar. I have another company, a third party company, a partnership that's doing it for me. But we are sharing sort of the responsibility of putting on this show. Also, it's a way for us both to collect email addresses. And I do think it might just end up being a better lead magnet. And I don't know how this is going to turn out in the long run. But point is, I feel very good. I feel very bullish on this idea. And so I spent a little extra time crafting what I thought was a pretty decent sales page for this. Like I created custom graphics. I designed the whole page. I did everything in in WordPress and, you know, I hand coded it myself with that, you know, so I don't know.

6:18I thought it was worth a time. Well, I also set up crazy egg again on my website. And added a promotion bar or a CTA bar, they call it across the entire website to promote this. And that's where I'm starting. So we'll see how it goes. That took me a day to make. So it was a big commitment. But it's finished. The second thing was the brew cabin course shut down. So that one, I just, I think it was the night I recorded the episode of like Titan up loose ends. That night I went down and I'm like, you know what, I'm just going to, I'm just going to do this now. Because it's one of those things that like, once it's done, I never have to worry about this again. It's this is like such an easy thing. It's just put on some music, do the work, be done with it, right? So I did that, put on some music, started moving some files, went into podium, set up an email account, wrote, you know, had AI write me three different emails, one to announce that we're shutting it down.

7:21And then, you know, emailing me back where to find it, all that sort of stuff, a follow up email. But then I had an issue because I set up the DNS wrong for the email address. And so I had to wait till the next day to finish it. So that took me technically two days. But I finished that project. All of the emails are scheduled. I've already sent out one email. It's been a couple days. No one's responded. So I assume, I assume everything worked out. And with that, I have another task on my list to close down podium in February. But once that's one day. So that's done, essentially. Those two tasks, those two loose ends are done. The email marketing SOP. That I've been working on little tiny bits every single day.

8:27Today, I cleaned up every single image in Clavio. So we now have an image library within Clavio, which is the email marketing software that we use. It's an ongoing, growing image library that's very searchable. So I had to create my own naming conventions for images. I had to create all the images. And so my brother, who was putting our emails together, all he has to do is search within the media library and get the images he needs for the upcoming emails. That worked out actually faster than I thought. Then I set up a brand new Clod project to craft these emails in our new templates. I finished that today. And now all I'm doing is literally, I have to create a few emails, start to finish, schedule them, work out all the kinks, fill out the SOP.

9:29I probably got another day, another day is worth of finishing that. And then it'll be complete. The other thing I could do is just wait until my brother jumps in and see how he gets through it. But I think I'll finish that probably either, I'll probably finish it tomorrow, send him an email and go, OK, the SOP is officially done. And then what I'll do from there is I'll send an email to you guys in the newsletter explaining all the things that I did, showing you the entire SOP. And yeah, that'll be fun. So then we have the course video edit. So staff has been feverishly writing scripts for our course remake. We're basically redoing every single video in our pool care course to gear up for next year so that we can start promoting it. And I am not going to be the one editing the videos.

10:33I'm only going to be the one recording them. But I said that I would edit the first one or two videos to get a style that's different from our YouTube videos. And I need space to do this. So this is probably something that I have to table until next week. Excuse me. I have to table that until next week because this week I'm wrapping up all these loose ends, even though that's technically a loose end. But that's going to give me a lot more space next week to focus entirely on just video. And I'm very, very excited about that idea because that's kind of the place I'm trying to get to. And I'm trying to clear up my schedule at the beginning of this year. And it looks like I'm going to be able to do it by the end of this week, which is great. And I'm recording this literally the middle week of January.

11:35And then I'll be able to focus entirely on video. So next week I'm working just on course video edits, set the tone. I'll be passing it off to my brother. And then he'll be editing the videos from there. Steph has written probably six to seven course lessons that I can actually record. But obviously this week I'm sick. And I'm not going to be able to record those videos because I sound weird and I am lethargic. So next week's going to be when I do that. But I have cleared out space to do that. Two more things. Social story posting. I wanted to create a system for this. I wanted to create an SOP and hand it off to my brother to do. The idea here being that we were going to publish a story every single day on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to promote our products and our lead magnets.

12:35I actually have a system. It's fairly easy. And I decided to just not do it at all. Why? So I learned about this tactic from a creator who has like a massive, massive, massive following. Now, she has a massive following, teaching people how to get massive followings on social media. Her main platform is Instagram. To her, like this is her lead, this is her lead generation is how she does it. And her, you know, to me, she's like, okay, well, if you're, if you're posting on social media, then, you know, you want to start doing this, et cetera, et cetera. Here's what I think I'm learning about swimming, university, and social media. The amount of content that we've published in the last three, four years almost, we grow

13:37incredibly slow. When I look at my competitors, they also grow slow, probably slower than us. And what they do is they create a lot of content that is broad appealing, which actually isn't their customer base. And so they're growing slow, even though they're trying to do virally things that really doesn't connect with their, the customers are trying to reach because they just either hire an agency or they got somebody in house who understands the game just doesn't understand the avatar. Whereas we understand the game, we are, we're opting not to play it because the avatar doesn't require it. Our avatar is people who own pools and hot tubs who take care of them themselves. My belief is what they want is help.

14:39They want educational content. It's in our name, educational content about pool and hot tub care. It's just never going to go viral. But the people who do watch us, they're the real ones, they are our avatar. So we consistently put up numbers on all of our videos. My suspicion here is that no one needs to follow us. No one really wants to follow us. Now we do have a lot of followers on YouTube, but we've been posting there way longer. And we have been, we do have followers on, on all these platforms on Instagram. We have close to 8,000 followers, which comparatively, I think the top, I think the top pool creator in our space has double that and that they, we've been kind of, we've been catching up.

15:45They haven't been growing faster than we can catch up. But also a lot of their content is ad based, so they're running ads. So they're getting, you know, if we ran ads, we would definitely get more subscribers. We have a 55,000 followers on TikTok and 25,000 followers on Facebook. For a pool education company, I feel like that's pretty good. You know, obviously on YouTube, we have like 300 and 316,000 subscribers, like these are, these are pretty good numbers, but I don't think we're going to have traditional followers, like people who are obsessed with us enough, or want to consume all of our content. And therefore, they're going to look at our stories. I don't think we're that type of company. I think the way we kind of have to look at it is each post that we put up is just a way

16:47for us to reach the right customer and let them know that we exist and tell them about our products. Even if that means sacrificing growth, because that's what we're doing. We're sacrificing growth because, you know, if you think about it, we're incredibly niche. We're never going to go viral. I mean, we could, again, if we want to play that game of going viral, we could play that game. If we're just going to reach the wrong audience and I go, well, why spend the extra effort just to reach the wrong audience, just to get bigger numbers that actually don't convert to customers? One is, for the last few months, I've been running this experiment where I've been publishing a story every day trying to get somebody to, you know, buy one of our products or subscribe to our newsletter. And truth is, it hasn't worked. Now of course, I'm doing this experiment in the off season, but I just don't think it's worth the, it's not, it's not a good bang for your buck.

17:53Could we do it 100% we can do it? Do we already have a system in place? Yes. But the thing is, it doesn't work. So what's the point? Somebody had said to me, after I told them this, the reason it's not working for you is because in order for that to work, you need like a crazy amount of followers. Like this woman who gave this advice, she's got like I think half a million to close to a million followers. And also, you subscribe to her because she talks about one thing over and over again and you're dying to know how to do it. In our case, that's not, that's just not the case. People are not dying to know. People are not, people aren't so like, I've heard this about art in the book, we need your art, which is if you are somebody who makes art, or let's say you're in a hobby based

18:55industry, the people who, the people who are in your audience have an insatiable appetite, like they just can never get enough, like give me so much more. In the case of like, let's say, brew cabin and home brewing, I don't think the market will ever get saturated. If you're a home brewer like myself, the more, like I will, I will consume all of the content there is, like it's a bottomless pit, I will just consume. It's never going to be too much for me because I just love it so much. Forever, but here's the thing, that's not true in pools, it's just not true. With pools, specifically pool care, it's non-insatiable appetite. It is, once I get the information and once my pool is clear, I kind of don't want to

20:00think about it anymore, I'm kind of done. You know, when you think about like cooking or any sort of like, you know, to some people cooking is a chore. To other people, it's a friggin' way of life, like for me, it's a way of life. I'll watch cooking shows, I have an endless appetite for it. I'll watch every single one of them. I'd put on Food Network all damn day. Those is just not like that and that's why I just don't think we're ever going to have a massive social following, but every single time we put out niche content like this and somebody who, somebody sees it, they're like, man, that was super helpful. I need more help. I want to get this done. They may seek us out, which they clearly do because we sell products. They buy our stuff, they download our app, and they move on.

21:04And they just continue to take care of their pool. They're not super fans of us. So all of that was for, so all of that is to say, we're not doing the story posting. We just opted out of it. Now I had mentioned the last thing here of the comment responding system. I actually talked to Kayla this morning and I just kind of told her like, I don't really know what to do here. Now I think she mentioned, this is why a lot of people don't respond to comments. It's kind of hard to do, right? Not to say you can't do it, but especially when you're talking about so many different platforms, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, there is no one thing for everything. There's no centralized point where all of your comments come into one spot and you can respond to them or like them or do whatever. You have to go into each one of these pieces and do it manually.

22:05I think a big reason why you see a lot of big creators or brands, they have a hard time with this is because this system doesn't exist. A lot of times it's just comments, like a lot of times it's just one word, it's an emoji, is it really worth responding to everybody. Now if you are, now I want to caveat this because let's say you're trying to grow a personal brand on TikTok, right, and it's all you and this is what you see a lot on TikTok is like individuals growing personal brands and a lot of them use comments as a way to engage with their audience and create more content. I think if you are a solopreneur and you are focused on one platform, this makes a ton

23:07of sense. It makes a ton of sense to do it this way. But if you're not, if you're like us, we're getting questions all the time, we can't respond to all of them. That's like literally too many, but also like I can't even get my team to log into these accounts because they won't even give us access to it, specifically TikTok. Pinterest is another one. And then what are they going to do just in there, looking at a few comments, what do you do with it? Like, what's the move? Now I have some ideas, one idea being that like, all right, let's say Kayla goes in and somebody comments on an old video and just like an email that we get, we just point them in the right direction, right, everybody wants to be heard, let's point them in the right direction. Hey, we've actually updated our thinking on this or hey, we've updated this article, go check it out here or hey, if you're looking for this, you know, we actually post in a

24:11new video. Or we say, hey, that's a great idea, we're going to try to answer that in an upcoming video, something like that or just giving a thumbs up or a heart or whatever. In order to do this, it requires somebody to go into each and every system and knock that out. I think this is still worth doing. The problem is is that we don't have a one-size-fits-all for all of these. I wish there were. I wish there was one tool. In the case that like, when we publish on social media, we have one tool, we use buffer and it publishes on YouTube Pinterest, it publishes everywhere. The only problem is you can't respond everywhere. They have a comment-respondent system, but it doesn't work for TikTok, it doesn't work for YouTube, you know. So I told Caleb this one, it's kind of up in the air. I don't know what to do with it.

25:15I think it is a matter of creating an SOP and then just kind of like tweaking as we go. But the bigger thing was, and I'm trying to get to this place right now where I say, how do I hit record more often? We tend to use comments, social media comments specifically. We tend to use them a lot to come up with new pieces of content, answer questions, things like that. To just go in there and mine every once in a while, literally dig for comments, that might just be enough. It may not be a daily thing or a weekly thing, it may just be a monthly thing. Or you just go in and you mine. But having figured that one out yet, and it's honestly not right now, it is not a priority. We're not missing anything.

26:17Another thing I want to bring up too, as I thought, well, you know, responding to comments could be a great way to let people know that we have a product for sale. It could be a good sales tool, because if someone's like, oh, I need help with this, and it's like, hey, we have this article over here, brings them away from social media and into our ecosystem by sending them to YouTube videos or sending them to articles. Or literally just letting them know that we have a book, and it's like, hey, if you're looking for a book, you know, here's a link. You can't do that all the time, because I think people will catch on to that, and, you know, it'll be a little spammy, but the rest of it sounds like a good idea. But I think sometimes people just want answers to comments, but here's another thing too. How many people, and this is, and this thing is important, how many people read responses? Like if you're out there, if you're, if you're someone who comments on social media, right?

27:20My guess, and this is, this is a, this is a hot take. My guess is that you're probably not a serious person. I'm trying to, I'm trying to say it nicely. Are you someone who comments? If you are, and you're not doing it for business purposes, and you're just like, oh, I have a comment, what do you think the chances are of that person responding to you? You know what I mean? It's probably zero. If you just went on some random YouTube video, and the video was maybe three weeks old, are you going to write a comment? And if so, what do you expect? Do you expect a response? My guess is that you don't, because when does that happen, or how would you even be notified that you got one?

28:20And this is sort of, this is sort of my way of saying like, I just don't think anyone responds to comments, and it may not be a good place for sales. And so that's why it doesn't feel like an urgent thing we need to solve. Because we're not even getting that many comments to begin with now. And when we do get a lot of comments, they're kind of mostly bullshit. And again, the people who are commenting, do they even have a pool? How serious are they? That's, I don't know, that's where I'm, that's where my head is with that one. So, after the next two days, I'm recording this on the Thursday. I have the rest of today, and I have tomorrow to finish up this email SOP, and then after that, I get to course video edits, which I have all week to do. Get that up and running, and then after that, which is what the next episode is going

29:21to be about, is me just figuring out how to hit record more often. So, if you have any questions, do me a favor, sign up for my email list. It's new. You can go to jivenec.com, it's g-i-o-v-a-n-i-s-c-i.com. It's free, and I send out emails once or twice a week. Some of them include videos. And you can respond to those emails, and I'll be there to answer them. All right, I'll talk to you next time.