AP 1151: The Pandemic Hurt Our Business – What Do We Do?

AP 1151: The Pandemic Hurt Our Business - What Do We Do?

Pat:
What's up, everybody. Pat Flynn here, and welcome to episode 1151 of AskPat 2.0. And also, welcome to 2021. Happy New Year to you. And if you happen to be listening to this episode right at the start of the year here, I wish you all the best for 2021.

And we're going to kick off the show with a brilliant coaching call because that's what we do here. I coach people and you listen in. You're like a fly on a wall during these conversations, and you get to learn alongside those entrepreneurs who are here, who are just like you, who may need some help.

And today we're speaking with Jim from Spanish and Go. This is a very popular YouTube channel. And unfortunately, the pandemic in 2020 did a little number on their business, especially because he and his wife, they manage travel excursions, they teach language and travel, and going to other countries right now isn't really going to happen at least not for a while. And hopefully, things do get back to normal as much as possible here in 2021, but despite that, and at the time of this conversation, things were getting kind of tough. So, I wanted to have a conversation with Jim and help him out, and today you're going to hear exactly what you can do if you've been affected by not just COVID or the pandemic, but by really anything external. How might we pivot? How might we adjust? Let's talk about it. Here's Jim from Spanish and Go.

Hey Jim, welcome to AskPat 2.0. Thanks for coming in today.

Jim:
Thanks for having me, Pat. It's a real honor.

Pat:
I'm really excited. And I just had to thank you here on the air because I know that you guys are always popping into The Income Stream every morning, I see your name, and I see that you have this amazing YouTube channel that's grown pretty well. Congrats on all the success, but also just thanks again for being a part of the community.

Jim:
Oh, thanks a lot.

Pat:
Let's talk about that YouTube channel really quick, Spanish and Go and also SpanishandGo.com. Tell us a little bit about how all that got started and then we'll go from there.

Jim:
Yeah. Well, I used to be a recording engineer in my hometown. I owned a recording studio there and that's my background. In my early 20s, I really wanted to travel, so I thought, "Well, what's the best way to travel to a lot of different countries?" I decided learning a language would make sense, and the language to learn was Spanish because I wasn't going to learn Mandarin, right?

Pat:
It's hard. It's a hard one.

Jim:
Would have been a little bit more difficult. So, I picked Spanish. I had a coworker who recommended this website, and it was a website a little bit like Facebook but for learning languages. And there I met Mai, my wife, and the co-founder of Spanish and Go. So, I had never traveled outside of the country before, and meeting her was a game changer for me, it was a life changer, not only just learning Spanish, but meeting her and getting to know Mexico. And she's a teacher, and so that's her background.

And when we met, we were traveling around Mexico, and it was so cool to learn about each other's cultures that we thought, "Maybe there's a way we can combine forces to provide something for people who are looking to maybe travel to a Spanish speaking country or move to a Spanish speaking country. And so, we decided that we would start a podcast, actually. And early on, we recorded 12 episodes. I don't know why we never released them, but that was our beginning stages of getting to figure out what we really wanted to do.

And so, in our travels in Mexico, I was always following different bloggers, and it fascinated me that people could just work online and travel all the time. So, I reached out to someone, I was reading a lot at the time, and he happened to be in Mexico and we decided to meet up with him. We reached out, and he's like, "Oh yeah, come by." So, we headed out that way. And when we met him, that was a turning point for us. We realized, "Wow, this guy is out here traveling full-time and living completely off of his blog." And not only that, he was with about six other people who were also living from their online businesses. I thought, "Okay, this can be done." That was a huge moment for us.

So, we started talking a little bit more about what we wanted to do. Was it going to be a podcast? Was it going to be a blog? Was it going to be video? And we went to our first conference, and it was there where everyone was like, "No, video is the big thing." Right? Everybody is moving to video because with that, and you've talked about this before too, not only do you have images, but you have audio and you have potentially ... Well, from the audio, you can convert that to text, so it's almost like doing a blog post and a podcast and a video all in one if you wanted to separate that out. So, we started the YouTube channel to show people real world situations, how they could travel the different Spanish speaking countries and show them how to get around and the different things that they're going to need to know, be it culturally or language-wise, to travel around comfortably.

Pat:
That's so cool. That's so cool. And with video, obviously, with your travels, you're showing context to where you're at and the people you're meeting and all these amazing cultural related things. It's just, I think, perfect. And so, where is the channel now? How has it grown? Give us a little bit of insight on where things are today.

Jim:
Sure. Yeah. We just crossed 111,000 subscribers, and I think we're around the six million view mark. And we started the podcast earlier this year, which has been growing really quickly as well. We're already over 60,000 downloads with that, and we started about seven months ago.

Pat:
Incredible. Congratulations to both of you, to you Jim, and to Mai. What a wonderful story. And I'd love to know what we can do to help you now. So, where might there be some, either problems or bottlenecks, or what's going on?

Jim:
Sure thing. Well, at the beginning of this year, we were really excited because this was going to be our big breakout year. We had planned several Spanish immersion retreats that we host in Mexico, and we had done, well, three prior to the pandemic and we thought, "Okay, we're going to see how we can have more of these," because they were really life-changing experiences for people who joined us. I mean, some people decided to, or were planning to move to Mexico, and this helped give them the confidence to be able to do so. And just the in-person interaction is unbeatable. I'm sure you can relate to that, hosting your conference and everything. It's a whole different vibe when you're actually able to talk to the people who have been following you face-to-face and help them out on a more personal level.

Pat:
For sure.

Jim:
And so, we were going to expand that this year, but we all know what happened. We ended up having to cancel several retreats, or actually the retreats we had planned for the rest of the year, and what was going to be a six-figure year for us, ended up being nowhere near that. So, we decided to pivot. On the channel, we do a lot of travel videos. We thought, "Well, no one should be traveling right now. We don't feel comfortable going out." And recording ourselves visiting different places and giving people the wrong idea, that's not what anyone should be doing. So, we decided to start the podcast, which, as I mentioned prior, was something we always wanted to do. And so, we've been doing that now every week since we started. I think we backdated some of the first episodes to April. So, we started in the spring, and now our main focuses are on the podcast and the YouTube channel.

And that's a tricky thing. I mean, I know you have a channel and you have two podcasts, it's a lot of work just with that. So, we've been having trouble just staying consistent on our channel and also making a solid, I don't know how to say ... like an income apart from YouTube, just because it was a real shock this year. Being able to pretty much rely 100 percent on what we were making from YouTube, to that ad revenue going down to like half, and I think it did for a lot of different niches and ours included—

Pat:
Travel, definitely hit really hard, for sure. So, you had the ad revenue go down, you had your retreats being canceled, so you had a six-figure plan, COVID happened, and you've had to make some pivots. And you are pivoting, but it's a little bit of a struggle.

Jim:
Yeah. So, our struggle right now is that we have this membership that goes along with the podcast. We always had the plan that we would have exclusive material available for anybody who listens to the podcast, if they wanted the transcripts, if they wanted a breakdown section. And we think we've made a great program for anybody who's towards the end of their beginning stages with learning Spanish and they're ready for some tougher material that can help take them to the advanced stages. So, we're really therefore, late beginner, intermediate Spanish learners with the podcast because that's all in Spanish. And the membership includes a bunch of different things. We're expanding it, as well. We want to have like a plus membership, as well, where our students can join us every weekend for a class, like a group class, video conference sort of thing.

And so, we're trying to create this on top of being consistent with YouTube and everything, and I think the biggest struggle for us right now is the way we've built this membership, I think it's hard to sell it to people who maybe haven't listened to the podcast or they think the podcast is too difficult for them. But that's also the same people, those are the same people who would probably benefit the most from the podcast. So, it's kind of tricky. It's like, if we all ready have somebody listening to the podcast, they might not understand the benefit of getting the membership. And so, in the world of marketing, I mean, I listen to a lot of the stuff you put out and what other people put out about marketing tips and what should you do, a webinar, Facebook ads, and the whole gamut, and now we're just at a point where we're not sure what to do moving forward.

We'd like to get 100 members in our membership. We're at about 60 right now, but I know at 100, people who are mostly sticking around, we would be comfortable and not have to rely on YouTube ad revenue and also not have to worry too much about the fact that we can't have retreats right now because we're going to have to wait until we can see when we're able to announce those again. So, in order for us to be comfortable, I just feel like we're running at 110 percent capacity. We have a team right now that we just started this year, thanks to your friend Chris Ducker and his book, Virtual Freedom. I read that last year, and I thought, "This is what we need to do." We're always working and we need time to live, but we also need to be able to make enough to live comfortably.

So, that's where we're at. We're just not sure what the next move would be. What would be the best way to advertise or share the value that the membership has for people who might not even realize that it's exactly for them. They might think the podcast is too difficult, and this is exactly the solution that they're looking for.

Pat:
Awesome. Well, thank you for that background. And number one, we'll eventually get back to those retreats and the ability for us to do that again. Right? So, that's not like, forever gone. It's just on pause for right now. Right? So, hopefully that provides a little bit of encouragement. Like, hey, that's just on hold, but it's still something that we want to do. And of course, when things get back to normal, whenever that might be, that's just going to be another amazing bonus that opens up. And this is cool because now this almost forces you to create something that would then allow for a higher baseline of income. Right? And anything top of that, then, can be added bonus when the retreats come back or when AdSense revenue comes back, and all those sorts of things.

So, I love where this is going, but where I wouldn't be too discouraged is about the retreats, because they'll come back. Right? They're going to come back, and they're going to be awesome. And it's almost like, let's use this time to build this foundational type stuff now so that when we can do that again, it's going to be that much better. We'll be able to do it even better. We'll have more of a budget to do more team-related things, and it'll be even that much better. So, future thinking in that way in a more positive format is step number one. Right?

Number two would be, with relation to your question about, okay, the membership and all the benefits that go along with it, I think there's a few things that we could do from this point. Right? With 60 members, which is amazing, this is proven, people want it, and that's fantastic. I would worry if there were no members yet, and okay, we have to see if this thing is even worth doing so let's micro test it first. You've gone through that all ready. It's proven. Now, I think we need to understand the messaging a little bit more. What about the membership is keeping people in? And that has to come from your members themselves.

When we try to guess what that is or what we think, we're not always going to land on that right answer and we're not going to know the exact language to use. But if you can either survey or ask or even just have conversations with people in the community right now, maybe it's not the center of all the discussions, but just on the side, like, "Hey, by the way, tell me a little bit about what you love about the membership. Or why do you stick around? I'm just curious." And you'll be able to hear, number one, some very encouraging words, I'm sure, that'll get you pumped and excited. But number two, you're going to know what language to use to express to those who are not in the membership yet, and those are the kinds of things that need to be pulled out on the sales page, be put into your emails and also, of course, be put into your podcast episodes.

Better yet, instead of even hearing the middleman, you, tell the audience, what if you had your members tell your audience for you? And this is why it's really cool. I think it's perfectly aligned to this. You have a podcast which is a perfect platform to bring stories, and if you were to feature members of your community and their stories, that immediately makes people who are not in that community feel like, "Oh my gosh, there's a community, and this is the kind of level of membership that people are in there with? And this is the kind of stuff we do in there? Now, I feel left out. Now, I'm going to at least think about it a little bit more, and I could all ready imagine myself being in it."

And so, what I'm saying specifically is like you might use some of your show to put a spotlight on some of your members and pull their stories out and talk about their transformations being in there. Have them essentially sell it for you. And I've done this a few times with some of my programs, not necessarily the membership program that we launched this year, as well, but more specifically some of my courses, and it always does a much better job than I can at selling the thing, because it's coming directly from somebody who represents the listener who is not yet in there. How's that resonating with you?

Jim:
Yeah, that sounds great. So, maybe we should ask a few of our members if they would be willing to just have a quick session where we get a testimonial from them, maybe on video, and then we could use that for a sales page and possibly even included in a podcast episode. Is that what you're saying?

Pat:
Potentially. Yeah. I mean, that's level one. I think treating it as a testimonial, level one of, "Okay, let's bring people on the inside and showcase what they feel about it." But I think even deeper than that, let's go level two, let's invite or even have a member of the month. Maybe this is something that you could reward your members with. Every month, we're going to select a member of the month, and as part of this member of the month thing, we're going to highlight you here, we're going to share a little bit more about you with the other community members and have them get to know you a little bit better, and just feature your story here inside the membership community. And you'll also get a 15 minute spot on the podcast in an upcoming episode. So, it doesn't have to take up the entire episode, but maybe they enter their way into the episode on the tail end of one.

And what happens is now there's just a conversation, "Hey, tell us about your experience learning Spanish. Where was your favorite place to travel? What are you looking forward to when we get out of this pandemic?" And then, of course, they might even mention some of the retreats that they're excited to be on that they're already signed up for. They might mention their favorite parts of the community or some of the other people that they're there with. And just naturally, through their before and after, your membership becomes a part of that conversation. It's not like you want to invite them on and go, "All right, tell everybody why you think they should be in the membership." Right? It's more of a, "Where did you get started with this, and what has helped you to get where you're at now?" And naturally, the membership always comes up, and this becomes a very, very cool, organic way for people to go, "Oh, there's a membership?" or, "Oh, that's what the membership is like?" or, "Whoa, this is the caliber of people that's in there? I feel left out now. I want to be involved in that."

Jim:
Yeah. No, I like that a lot. That makes sense. I hadn't really thought about it that way before. I was thinking in terms of like, testimonials or just have a clip of them sharing their experience that we would share on the podcast like we share some of our reviews for the podcast. But I think that's even better, if we could showcase a couple of our students, that would really help. And I like what you mentioned there about community. I think that's something that when we started the membership, we were missing because we were going to have a basic package and a plus package.

And the basic package is basically everything on the platform, where they have the transcripts and the breakdown sections, and that's actually, essentially, an exclusive podcast where we explain in English what we talked about in the podcast and help reinforce some phrases and vocabulary. But the private Facebook group and the classes were for the plus members. So, maybe we should add something more to where it feels a little bit more like a community, even on the basic level, and encourage people to move over to the plus level once they hear about maybe somebody on the podcast that we showcase where they talk about how great the classes are and that could get people excited.

Pat:
Yeah. I think, also, you had mentioned that you were going to do these things on the weekend where you all would come together, and I think that's really special. And maybe once a quarter, or even once a month, you could pull a clip from that actual conversation with those people.

And you can set it up by saying like, "All right, listeners, what's you're about to listen to is just a small clip from our previous workshop that we held for our members this past weekend, and it was one of the most important and impactful parts of it. And I just wanted to share it with you. And just so you know, these are the kinds of things we do every weekend. We come together as a group and a community, and we'd love to invite you in. In fact, because you're listening to the show, if you want to get in now, we're actually doing a special deal before the new year begins, and you can get into the membership at the lowest price it's ever going to be before the price goes up in 2021. And we'd love to invite you in, and you can get access to these workshops, too. But anyway, here is a clip from the workshop."

And then, boom, it's like, you start maybe even saying names in there. It's just like a little clip that's very organic. Maybe it's still you and just saying like, "All right, and yeah, John. Okay, John's question is this. And Janice, yeah, she's here. Okay. Here's my thought about that." And they're hearing you like, mentioning people's names and it feels very good. They're learning some stuff. It's like, "Wow, I want to be there." And then at the end of that clip, you go, "Okay, by the way, again, one more time, if you want to get access to this membership and give it a shot, you get a 30 day money back guarantee if it's not for you. But I promise you, you're going to want to hang around because everybody in the community's awesome. Big shout out to our new members this past month, Joey and Jonathan."

I don't know why they're all J names, but that's what came to mind. It's just like, "This thing is happening, and I'm not a part of it. I need to know." And now I'm almost forced to make a decision to either get in or not. And if I don't, I miss out on this discount or this bonus opportunity or whatever.

Jim:
Sure. Yeah. That makes sense. I like that. Yeah. I like that a lot. You're giving me all kinds of ideas that I hadn't really thought of before. I guess I was thinking like, "Oh, do we need to do a webinar? Do we need to do this or that?" But there's a lot we could do just by adding a few things to some of our podcast episodes.

Pat:
Yeah. You have content already. You don't need to make another content thing like a webinar. You could bring a lot of that stuff that you would put into the webinar to your podcast, or even some of your videos as well. Maybe there's a, I don't know how you would do these workshops, but maybe it's more like a Zoom thing and maybe organically in the middle of an instructional video you go, "Hey, and to help you, we actually talked about this in our membership last week, and here's a five minute clip that actually answers this question." And then you play that clip, and it feels different, it's a Zoom call, and then there's people there. You see the chat going.

And at the end, same kind of pitch, "And by the way, if you want to check out this membership, you can join me and several other community members, and we chat every week. This is how you can focus on your Spanish and get fluent. And also, when we can travel again, we're going to travel together, and we'd love for you to be a part of it. Here's the landing page, a link in the description below. Okay. Let's move on to the next point." And you don't make a huge deal of it, but now people hear it on the podcast once and like, "Oh cool." And they hear it on the YouTube channel, "Oh, okay. Awesome."

And then, maybe eventually you might get to a point where you run some retargeting ads, which you can actually do on YouTube and on your website, and what the cool thing is, is if you get a Google AdWords account, you can, in fact, put a little tracking code onto your YouTube channel so that people who watch certain YouTube videos, you can actually retarget them with ads. And the cool thing is maybe you know that they've watched four of your videos where you mentioned membership. Now, you can have a little bit more targeted of an ad down the road. You don't have to do that, but there's just so many things to unlock with things you already have and I'm just trying to piece all these things that you all ready have available to you together. I hope it's making sense.

Jim:
Absolutely. Yeah, no, that's great. Because the thing we were afraid of is thinking, "Oh, okay, we're going to have to do a webinar. We've never done that before. And that's going to take this much time, which is time away from the YouTube channel." And we just don't want to abuse the channel or the podcast. Being consistent is so important and showing up for your audience, and we want to be there for everyone in our audience. But if it means we have to take a week away because we're focusing on a webinar, I don't know if that would work well for us. So, I like these ideas. This is good stuff.

Pat:
Good. And then in terms of production, where do you think you might need some help to stay on top of things? Is there anything that's taking way too much time than it should? Or what's the bottleneck, do you think?

Jim:
Well, you've probably seen with the last couple of questions I've had, on The Income Stream have had to do with delegating email. I'm fascinated by that idea because anytime anyone has a question for us, we try to give them a good answer, but you can't even really spend five minutes on an email when there's 20 emails every day.

Pat:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jim:
And so, it just gets to be a lot. It's time-consuming, and it can be a little draining. It's not that we don't want to help, it's just that it takes away from other things that are the reason why people are reaching out, and they're reaching out because of the channel. And we're able to help them through the podcast. And we want to be there for everybody, but I think the biggest thing right now is delegating email. We did just get a new assistant. We have a small team. Our assistant is, I guess, close to ready to be able to take over email, but we've never done this before so I guess it's just a little bit of figuring things out as we go.

Pat:
Cool. Well, if you go to the website, SmartPassiveIncome.com, you can look up Jess in the search bar, who is my executive assistant, and both of those episodes, she was on, 115 and 409, we talk about how we work together in the email and how that saves us a ton of time.

I will say though, have you thought about, with these questions that come in, especially ones that are more popular that you see from multiple people, creating a YouTube video to answer that question? Because a couple of things can happen there. Number one, now your emails are actually, in fact, informing the content that you say you need help creating and staying consistent with. And number two, you know they're in alignment with what your audience needs help with, which likely will also be helping you in terms of findability with people who are like them who are also looking for similar answers to that question.

And number three, you go back to those people and say, "Hey, by the way, you inspired us to create a YouTube video to answer this question for you. Thank you again. Here's that video. And then they feel very much like, "Wow, you did this for me?" when in fact, yeah, but also other people had the same question. And number four, any other person, this is where your assistant can come into play: "Hey, assistant, anybody who asks us a question about this, here's their answer. It's a YouTube video. Send them this YouTube video."

Jim:
Sure. Yeah. That makes sense. That's a good idea. Yeah. Some of that I hadn't really thought of before. I like that idea of using people's questions to feed maybe like a weekly Q&A where we can just say, "Thanks for your question, so-and-so. We wanted to share this with everybody because it's such a good question, so here you go."

Pat:
I mean, I would make it its own YouTube video. I would make the hook of the video not about like, "Hey, thanks for the question. Here it is." I would make the video just like you know how to do, very much about that topic, and after the hook of the video, which is like, "Hey, have you ever been wondering how to travel in Mexico and what words are most important when you're getting around? Well, stick around, because in this video we want to teach you all that you need to know to get around safely when you're traveling in Mexico using Spanish. This was, in fact, inspired by a question from one of our members, or from one of you. If you ever have a question, send us an email here. We'll answer these questions for you. Be a part of the community, yada, yada, yada."

And now you've hooked them. You've now shared that this is coming from somebody just like them. Now, they're like, "Oh, community? Okay. Oh, membership? Cool." Maybe you take these questions from your members first, and then you can insert now another touch point about your membership. I mean, there's so many things you can do. Again, you have all the tools necessary, and now you're building a team to go with it. I think 2021, whether or not we can go back to travel or not, is going to be an epic year for you.

Jim:
Awesome. Well, thanks a lot, Pat. I appreciate that. Yeah, you've given me tons of different ideas, and I'm going to have to talk this over with Mai and see what we can start implementing. We're really excited to grow the membership and get back into being consistent on YouTube. It's been a little while since we started the podcast, but I'm confident that with our team and with these ideas, we can keep moving forward.

Pat:
Awesome. If you don't mind, do you mind if we reach out to you in six months to check up on you, maybe get you back on the show, and see how things are going?

Jim:
Absolutely. Yeah, that'd be great.

Pat:
Okay. We'll hold you accountable to it then.

Jim:
Okay. Sounds good. Sounds good.

Pat:
Thanks, man. I appreciate it. Where can people go to learn more from you and Mai?

Jim:
Thanks a lot, Pat. You can find on SpanishandGo.com and all of our social media is the same. We're on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. Everything is @SpanishandGo.

Pat:
Thanks, man. Appreciate it. Good luck and we'll chat soon.

Jim:
Thanks for your help, Pat. Take care.

Pat:
All right. I hope you enjoyed that coaching call with Jim from Spanish and Go. You can find him on YouTube at Spanish and Go. All the social media channels, @SpanishandGo, and head on over to SpanishandGo.com. I'm sure that if you are interested in starting to learn Spanish, that would be a very good resource for you to drop by to.

So, Jim, thank you so much for coming on the episode, and like I said, we're definitely going to be holding you accountable. And I'm looking forward to how you're going to take what has happened and turn those lemons into lemonade and make things happen. So, really excited for you.

And for you, the listener, thank you so much for subscribing. If you haven't already, please go ahead and do that now. And I appreciate all the reviews that many of you have made over the past few months. I read them all. I appreciate them all. And they just mean so much to me. And wow, what a way to start the year. Let's crush it this year no matter what happens. Obviously, if we can get through 2020, we can get through anything, right? So, let's get through it together, and I look forward to serving you here continually in 2021. Thank you so much for all of your support, and I appreciate you. Cheers, take care, and I'll see you in the next one. Peace out. Team Flynn for the win.