How can you make money online while you sleep? Could you even save money, and increase profits, simply by allowing technology to do the hard work for you? Cash Flow Expert Chris Miles talks with Michael Chandler, the CEO of EntreTEk, about these questions, and more. Check it out!
To connect with Michael, click HERE….
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Chris Miles Bio
Chris Miles, the “Cash Flow Expert,” is a leading authority on how to quickly free up and create cash flow for thousands of his clients, entrepreneurs, and others internationally! He’s an author, speaker, and radio host that has been featured in US News, CNN Money, Bankrate, Entrepreneur on Fire, and has spoken to thousands getting them fast financial results.
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Michael Chandler Bio
Michael Chandler has been working in Technology & Business since a young age while focusing on completing high school he was already launching his first computer solutions company that he took full time in 2006. Since then he has completed multiple degrees in college surrounding business and technology and loves to help entrepreneurs succeed. Taking over a 16 year old entrepreneur community and growing an audience to over 15,000 members he has now pioneered EntreTek to serve Entrepreneurs with Technology Solutions to guarantee the success and growth of their business.
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Listen to the podcast here
Creating Residual Income Thru Online Products/Tech With Michael Chandler
Walk me out now for another great episode. Remember, this show is all about you guys that are hardworking, busy entrepreneurs, small business owners, as well as professionals that are looking for life freedom. Not to live the mediocre, crappy life everybody else lives. You want a life of freedom, control, and prosperity now, and that’s what we’re here to teach you.
Here’s a reminder, check out our website MoneyRipples.com. If you want to check out some great tools such as beyond rice and beans, seven secrets to free up cash now ways, I’ve helped my clients free up on average 34,000 a year. Check it out as well as other episodes. By the way, thanks for tuning in. Thanks for sharing. I hear so many great, so much grief feedback from you guys. How you guys have been sharing it, especially if you know other people like you that are looking for that life of freedom, I appreciate you guys sharing and putting it out there for everybody.
As you guys know, I love cashflow and creating streams of income. Especially it can be passive or residual. That’s the thing that we’re talking about now. One aspect I haven’t brought onto the show before, and I get this question a lot from people, is how do I make more money and create money online? I’ll tell you, I was talking to my wife, and we’re talking about how everything evolves. A lot of things evolve for the better.
You think about Roger Bannister when he first broke the four-minute mile. There are people that could have done it, but again, mentally, they didn’t think they could, but now, it’s a pre-requisite. You can be in high school, and there are kids breaking the four-minute mile now. There are so many things happening.
We look at technology and how that’s breaking things, making business completely different and better than it ever used to be. I’ll tell you, as an online entrepreneur myself, it’s never been better to do things online, especially where I’ve had that many years of business. It’s been incredible. That’s why I’m bringing on my friend here, Michael Chandler. He is the guy that grew up wanting to be an entrepreneur. He started as a kid. He had a father who was an entrepreneur.
He was raised to be an entrepreneur. He ended up in high school and graduated with concurrent enrollment. He got two different degrees in college. The guy has done crazy stuff. He even launched his first company in 2006 when he was still pretty young. He’s the guy you imagine. If you imagine this tech genius that is a young kid that’s out there creating it, Michael is the guy here.
He’s taken over a 16-year-old entrepreneurial community and took it to an audience of over 15,000 members that now has his own company, EntreTEK, that serves entrepreneurs with technology solutions that guarantee the success and growth of their business. If you’re looking for ways to create residual income streams online, this is exactly what we’re going to talk about now.
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Michael, welcome to our show.
Thanks, Chris.
We’re all about leverage. That’s why you bring an absolute key essential piece to this because I know there are many entrepreneurs reading right now that are thinking, “I’ve done the belly-to-belly stuff, but I would love to be able to break away from that. I’d love to be able to make money while asleep.” Even some of them that are not entrepreneurs yet maybe want to have that as an additional source of income. Tell us a little bit more about you. What led you down this path? Why did you choose technology?
I’ve been there myself. I used to do that same grind. When I launched my first company, I thought that’s what it was all about. It was this hustle, getting in front of people and getting into that next person, door, sale, and a crowd of people you can get in front of you. I got to tell you, it wore me out or sitting on that much chase. Chase connections, being able to deliver a lot of quality, and make all of those people happy is exhausting. For me, I had to figure out how to get out of the rat race. I had already failed one of my marriages and been gone too often.
In this story of entrepreneurs, any of your audience probably knows all about the strain that a business can have on a relationship, but I’d already gone through that. I was sitting in my driveway, trying to figure out how I could get out of work 75 hours a week and still make the money I needed to support my family and spread my message. Technology was the solution, absolutely the answer for me, and ways that I could put things on autopilot. I could reach people, collect money, and deliver my product on autopilot, which was a pivotal moment in my company.
Tell me what’s a common thing you see with entrepreneurs, especially those that maybe have the basic things like a website and a Facebook account. They’re doing some basic things there, but they quite haven’t found traction. What is it you see as the biggest mistake that’s going on with them?
The biggest mistake is that most people aren’t leveraging technology to make their job simpler and easier. They don’t realize they can prerecord messages and schedule them for delivery. They can set up weeks’ worth of announcements and content and have it delivered inside of their business. They can actually take all of their expertise, the real genius that is them and their business, and deliver that to customers in an automated way. There are all sorts of different ways to do that. The online courses and being able to produce an actual course product is one of my favorite ways of doing that.
With the typical people you’ve been working with, do they have an email list, or is this something they have to start setting up? What’s typically required to take those first steps?
People are making the big mistake of not leveraging technology to make their job simpler and easier. Click To TweetThe typical client I work with hasn’t actually even started building an email list yet. A lot of times, they’re the people that are going out face-to-face with people in seminars, different networking events, online webinars, and these sorts of things. They’re delivering value but haven’t yet started to capture those people and automate that process.
These would be the people that I’ve run into. It sounds like they go to a conference, whether it’s for an expo where they have a booth or gone to speak and collected some names, usually on some sheet of paper with phone numbers and whatnot, maybe email addresses, and then they have to go and follow up with each one individually. They’re reaching out to every single one.
If they got multiple business cards or something, they’re going crazy because they’re like, “I spent hours to follow up with my Rolodex of people,” if anybody remembers the Rolodex. They then usually send it out from some Gmail address. They don’t even have a company web address or something like that. It’s something it’s Joni@Gmail.com. It’s totally not professional and very clunky. Is that what you’re talking about here?
Chris, I’ve seen that way too often. Gmail address is one of the key signs that I need to help somebody out.
If you guys have something @Gmail or @Yahoo as your business address, you better read up here.
When it comes to branding, the actual retention of your customers and your ability to sell them with continuity, to be able to get your follow-up and offer them the next thing without you having to pull out your Rolodex and start making phone calls yourself, how do you do that?
We help people collect those lists, automate those marketing sequences, and actually produce the whole sales process in an automated funnel so that they can continually deliver value and continuity to their audience without having to do it themselves.
I’ve worked with clients like this, or I’ve had friends like this. Your time is so valuable. You have a moment to waste. I know you guys are probably like me. It’s because of the systems I have in place already, but people are shocked at how little I work when they actually find out. They don’t realize I’m actually with my family more often than I am working, doing these shows, and coaching people. That’s by design, but I haven’t always been in that place. I’ve been in a place where I was working my tail off, and it was a minimum of 50 to 60 hours a week, especially before social media. It was hard to get things going.
I remember my wife at that time was like, “What are you making per hour? Should you go get a job?” That’s what we’re talking about here because I don’t want you guys working to where you’re getting paid. As Napoleon Dynamite would say, “It’s $1 an hour.” We don’t want that. For the next level beyond that, even if you have some of these things in place, how do you course leverage this? We’ll talk about creating online products in a second. Michael, would you speak to the people here that are working way too hard? Have you seen this happen before and other answers and solutions to create something this way?
For us, It’s a big turning point in our company. Even after we took over the old Power Seller Center community and started to absorb 14,000 clients, keeping track of the 14 instructors and getting shares of 15,000 members was quite a challenge. Not to mention all the follow-up and the things that you have to put in place to make sure that you’re reaching and engaging that audience. We had to figure out how to use a CRM, a Customer Relationship Manager, so that we could have follow-up sequences, automation, a lot of feedback, and interaction about what our people are doing.
What they’re doing on our websites, when they buy our products, when they don’t buy our products, and why did they leave that page? All of this data and everything else became available to us at the same time that we started to automate a lot of our stuff. It was an incredible move to be able to reach more people have more impact, and free up a ton of time, which opens up other avenues in business.
When I hear you say this, all the thing that goes through my head is, “This sounds like it could be hard. How hard is this stuff?” If you’re not that tech-savvy, and you’re like, I” didn’t even understand half the things available out there.” How easy is this?
It’s usually not that challenging, but we do oftentimes recommend getting somebody to help you set it up initially. After it’s set up, it is, by nature, automated. Import with things and data that you already have. That’s where anybody might run into a challenge. Setting up a brand new system from scratch is relatively easy. The most challenging part you would have is aligning all of that with your brand and message.
Let’s take this to the next level. I know people are wondering how I create residual income. This is literally the million-dollar-plus question that people have. How do I create that? How do we create that mailbox money, or even that online steady flow of money coming in? I hate hearing people talk about the laptop lifestyle because it’s a turnoff to me to hear that. I would definitely be defined in that category, but I think it sounds cheesy or lame to me. For people that are looking to create those kinds of streams of income, what do you recommend? How do you create that product?
Setting up a brand-new system from scratch is easy. The challenging part is aligning all of that with your brand and message. Click To TweetWe recommend taking a model that’s working for you and figuring out how to automate that. If we took a specific example of a speaker, who stands on a stage and speaks to 40, 50, or 100 people at a time, and at the end, they get them to buy that $2,000 one-on-one coaching program. We can help with the signup, delivery, and automation of that content so that you don’t have to keep standing in front of 30, 40, 50, or 100 people at a time. You can reach those same groups of people through the internet in an evergreen format. It’s an evergreen automated webinar that runs up your 10 or 15 minutes, three days a week, these sorts of things that can deliver your message and brand while you’re sleeping.
It’s cool to do a webinar. That’s always a great way to leverage tech, but you’re saying the next level is, “What if you could be doing a webinar and not have to be there?”
If you didn’t have to be there, you could still facilitate the countdown, timer, clothes, sale, the collection of the money, and the delivery of the email addresses, usernames, and passwords. All that stuff so that your people could literally sign up at 2:00 in the morning and be in your content consuming your product immediately.
For everybody reading right now, I’m going to emphasize this. That’s definitely the idea you want. It’s funny because I started going down this path almost haphazardly. I didn’t have the guidance when I did this initially. Michael, when I was doing this, it was 2008, for example. I remember starting my very first episode. I started this show because I was trying to create what I would call talking head content, which is like, “What are the frequently asked questions that people ask me all the time, like my own clients?” Frequently asked or even the should be asked like, what should they be asking, but they’re not. It’s going to blow their minds. I started doing a podcast so I could produce something.
When someone says, “I got a question about this. I got a question about paying off debt.” “I got the perfect link right here.” I assembled links, and then they could watch it. It would save my time of having to teach it over and over to each person. I could be like, “Here we go.” They are even a small little email list at that time, very rough. I didn’t have half the tools that I have now.
That’s a perfect model of how it all starts. You find yourself doing over and over again to provide value to your customer, and then you record it, and you systemize what it is that you’re doing. The root of what we’re talking about here is systems. You have a step 1, 2, and 3. You know that you’re doing these things and you’re spending 20 minutes on step 1, 40 minutes on step 2, and an hour on step 3. What can you do to automate steps 1 through 3? That’s what we do. As far as podcasts and the content that goes out, you’re solving people’s problems automatically. People can download that content while you’re on a beach or wherever you’re at doing whatever you’re doing.
That’s the beauty of it. That’s where somebody starts them and say, “Let’s find the content of what people are asking for over and over. Even the task sounds like you’re doing it over and over. It doesn’t sound like you necessarily have to hire people, although you might have to, depending on the situation. It sounds like, instead of hiring a human, you might be able to use some technology to do it for you.
Technology can be leveraged to do a lot of what most people are doing in the way of tasks. Lead generation is a huge one. We do talk about in our systems and what we teach how you can leverage, outsourcing VA’s to do some of the asks for you. We would use some form of technology to delegate those things, manage those sorts of projects, and keep track of those things. It always boils down to technology and simplifying the things that you have to do.
You sparked something for me too. Obviously, we’re talking about how to create residual income online. That’s a big part of it. It’s being able to create the content or the product for that. Another thing you’re already dancing around is the fact that when we talk about hiring people, you go back to the old-school methods of how we hired people. You hire somebody full-time, sit at a desk, answer phones, and all that stuff.
Now, we have VA’s or virtual assistants where you don’t have to have them sit at a desk. They can work from home. You can pay them as contractors, saving you all the payroll effort of dealing with taxes and things like that. On top of that, too, the one thing that’s awesome, as you said, even if you delegate some of these things or you’re leveraging first and foremost the technology, and then you delegate somebody else, the technology actually saves you a little bit of money on the fulfillment side.
I’m thinking when I used to record a lot of audio CDs. I remember one of my audio CD sets would cost me $11.40 per set, and I’d sell it for $100. Good profit. Eventually, people stopped asking me for CDs. They’re like, “I don’t want CDs. Send me the downloads,” which costs me nothing. It gives me more options and profitability.
It’s a 10% or 1,000% increase in profit, I guess.
If I spend zero and get any money, that’s an infinite rate of return on my money. What you’re saying too is also with VAs, if you hire somebody, that’s cool. If you already have these tech systems in place and maybe you have them manage it, you’re still paying them for less time than they’d have to do if they’re using crappy old systems. You see money in two places. Now you save them money in the sense of the fulfillment of the product that you’re trying to create, and you’re saving on additional fulfillment or on the labor that’s around it. In essence, you can actually create something. You could create low cost or keep it even relatively high costs that have a high profit. That right there is key. It is what creates the biggest amount of cashflow possible with the least amount of cash out of pocket.
Chris, you sparked two things for me. One thing is that when it comes to Vas, and this is probably a whole other discussion, the most common mistake that people make is not overseeing them, managing them, and facilitating the VAs. There’s a huge misnomer about how reliable VAs are and whether you can trust them.
The most common mistake people make with virtual assistants is that they don’t oversee, manage, or facilitate them. Click To TweetYou have a conception about whether somebody should ever use a VA. It almost always boils down to the fact that people hire VAs and give them a one-liner and then leave them and give them systems. They don’t give them steps, edge, and oversee, and then those projects fall apart. That’s a whole other discussion for another day, but that is one of those things. With technology, you can usually save time and do more in an automated fashion.
CRMs and those sorts of things can do an incredible amount of stuff like lead scoring that people don’t even realize is possible. Imagine if you went to an event and you collected a bunch of names and emails, but when you loaded those into your system, it automatically identified the people that were following you on Facebook, opened one of your emails, and clicked on one of your links.
The people that did all of that are worth more to you than the people that never saw you on Facebook, opened one of your emails, and clicked on one of your links. Imagine how much more effective you could be with your sales if you could target the people that already wanted you. The CRM automatically pinpoint those people and reaches them with messaging that you dictate in advance. That’s huge.
The fact that you do it in advance, it’s not you have to be proactive and say, “Who’s following me? Who’s opening stuff?” The system does it for you. You don’t even know what’s even happening.
On a weekly basis, our CRM will send us a list of people that have interacted with our content on social media. It shows a number in one of the columns that go up. It’s lead scoring. Every time they interact with me, their lead score goes higher. I could automatically reach out to those people, send them direct messages, ask them to book appointments, do consultations, and all sorts of things pretty much instantly and automatically without me even having to think about it.
That’s key from a sales standpoint too. Even if they don’t buy something, that’s an online product. Even if you’re trying to work with someone that you might be working with live, face-to-face, or one-on-one in whatever shape or form. Think about this. Often, for someone to trust you before they even want to hire you met the minimum. They’re probably going to want to interact with you in some way, shape, or form at least 4 to 8 times before they decided they want to work with you. If you think about it from that standpoint and how much there has to be or you were having to deal with those people one-to-one, that would be you reaching out by phone, having to talk to these people, or send an email like, “How are things going? Tell me about yourself.”
Instead, you could create the systems in place where it’s already doing it for you. You’re already interacting with them, whether you’re doing it or not because you set the thing in motion upfront. There are some automated sequences in place that says, “We’re going to reach out to them seven times over the course of this much time or on these certain days. If they do this certain action, they’re going to get this email, gift, or whatever it might be.”
There are so many ways to interact without you having to be interactive. I’ve been a part of funnel systems where I’m a guy who sent out a daily email for 60 days leading up to his event. I’ll tell you, by the 60th day, 1) I was opening up his emails, almost nobody else’s, but 2) I was sold on that guy that actually was very skeptical about. I went from skeptic to all of a sudden, the raving fan of his. He didn’t have to do crap or a thing. It was all his email sequences. I knew it, but still, it was enough for me to feel like I knew him and understood him. He was the guy I like.
Autoresponders are a huge thing that makes a big difference in companies, especially companies with a significant audience. If you’re out working with lots of people and you’re not connecting with them, chances are they will have forgotten about you before you ever even follow up to them. You have to remember to follow up with them because you don’t have a system.
I went to my first networking event in about a year, and they required us to pass out business cards. I ended up getting twenty of them, including one of your partners. It’s funny because I reached out to several of them. Only a few replies back, but I can guarantee I’m not going to pursue all this like, “It’s better yet to say great. Get them in the system and warm up some other way.”
Our CRM allows us to snap photos of business cards. It automatically adds them to leads and then fits them into an autoresponder sequence that introduces them to our company, history, who we are, and what we do over the course of five days or so. Automatically, you can warm them up.
Give us a good example of somebody who is using systems, even created online products, who have created some residual income. Can you give us a good case study of that?
The first one that comes to mind, and there are many to choose from, is one of my clients that’s got me pretty excited right now because he came from where he was making nothing. He was retired and a painter. He wanted to be able to sell his art. That’s how he originally came to me. We talked about a follow-up sequence, sales funnels, a web store, and all of these different places for him to put his art. What he invariably created with us was a way for him to not only sell his art but for people to upload their art to his website, sell their art, and then join an email list, which gives follow-up emails to him to those clients and notify those clients about how he teaches art.
He has art classes that he does through the internet, but he was able to go from that to where he now does these art classes all over the world. He was doing a workshop in Italy all based on his email lists that have automatic follow-ups to a sales page where people pay $2,500 to come to Italy with him for three days to paint some lighthouse thing by a green cower lake or something. It all happens automatically for him off of his email lists and his website where he sells a product. It’s all tied together succinctly with these email follow-ups and capturing the right audience with the right offers.
People love to follow people that are doing what they love and what they're passionate about. Click To TweetIs he still basically retired as well, even though he’s got all this stuff going on?
He’s retired, but he gets to do what he wants, which is painting. It pays for him to go to places that he always wanted to go to and could never afford to go to.
That’s incredible. I was raised by an artist, so this pings for me as well. She’s a professional oil painter, learned from some of the best, had galleries, and everything else. What you gave alone is a pretty cool idea right there. Mom, if you’re reading, that’s awesome.
That was beautiful. We fell backwards into that because when he first started, he thought that he was going to be having a dropship web store. He connected with his passion about painting, and he kept putting off his web store stuff to paint. We then approached him like, “Why don’t you do what you love? There are ways that you can build that list.” People follow people that are doing what they love and what they’re passionate about. Connect with that. Everyone wants to follow that, see that story, watch that unfold, and get as close as they can to it. Anytime we can help an entrepreneur follow their passion, we see a huge boost in energy and success.
Michael, this has been incredible. Thank you so much. I know you’ve got me starving for more, and I’m sure everybody else too. if someone’s got individual questions, they want to figure out how it applies to their business because I know there are multiple ways you can take this. How would they get ahold of you guys?
The easiest thing is go to MeetWithET.com and where these 15-minute consults so that we can see if there’s any way that we’re a match to serve.
I appreciate it, Michael. Again, this is incredible. I want people to take this to heart. For you guys, if this is something that you feel like you’re missing, I know a lot of you, and I’ve talked to many of you, you feel the online space is your missing piece, especially with how the online space works with social media and everything else. Make it all work together so that you’re not working your tail off. Guys, this is the thing to look for. Reach out to Michael. Go to MeetWithET.com. Michael, thank you so much for your time.
It’s our pleasure. I love what you’re doing, Chris, and hope to be on again soon.
Thank you for joining us. I hope you have a wonderful and prosperous week. We’ll see you later.