Okay. I have had a whole bunch of responses. Here are about 25 unread responses. That is not even including, obviously, the ones that I have already read. These are the responses to all the letters I have already written out – the messages I have sent.

That being said, what I am going to do is I am going into my Jobs Posted and I am going to change this up. So, initially I just posted this very basic thing. But, I am going to add a sentence at the bottom of the Job Description “To apply for the job: 1. Send me a message with a few sentences on why you would like this position. Then, 2. Change the subject line to ‘I want to work with you.’” That will eliminate some of the riff raff.
So, let’s go back to the messages. Let’s look at this. As you can see, a bunch of these people have no subject line. I think if they have no subject line, I am probably just going to delete it. They are probably not that good of a candidate. But I have been interviewing people. What I am probably going to do is go through here and see who I should send my Skype message to.
Another thing I thought about and I may implement in the future is instead of saying, “Hey, would one of these times work for you?” is sending them to a link to like a calendar so they could pick which time works best for them because right now, the scheduling has been kind of a pain in the butt. So, that is where I am at right now.
I just want to update you that I should probably change the posting and have some kind of qualifying factors. Make them answer (more…)

All right. So, we started getting some messages for our posting. I am going to look at them. I am going to show you basically what message I usually send and what you need to look for at when trying to hire someone. Just so you know, some of the messages got sent here and some of the messages went to my email. I do not know if this is a bug with Onlinejobs.ph or what. But the people I messaged in the earlier part of this video, they responded to my emails. Anyway, let’s look start with these here.

All of these of the top are new and have not yet been responded to as you can see by the date. So, let’s see what they have to say. Now, I am just going to look at a lot of their profiles.  This person – assistant, writing, data entry  – she would probably be okay. I do not know if she has video editing experience. No, she does not really have any video editing experience. I will still interview her. At this point, I am all about let’s just interview via Skype as many people as possible. So, let’s go to the Reply Message. So, I have this one copy and pasted. It just says, “Hi. I want to interview you tomorrow. Could you do an interview tomorrow sometime between 9 am and 9 pm Pacific time ( PST) via Skype? If so, please let me know what time and send me your Skype ID. My ID is Travis.Marziani.” I just find this the easiest way but I may change it in the future. But that way it gives them an option and also it kind of tests their knowledge of how to figure out what time zone they – what (more…)

In this video, I am going to show you how to get a virtual assistant from Onlinejobs.ph. About two years ago, I hired a virtual assistant (VA) from Onlinejobs.ph but she recently had to quit. She said it had to do with some internet trouble. I am not exactly sure exactly what happened but I know I had to find a second VA. So, two years with the same employee is pretty good. I am pretty happy with it and I used Onlinejobs.ph back then so I am going to go back to them and try to use it again. I am going to document this entire process so you guys can see exactly what I am doing to get a VA from start to finish. In addition to that, I have a link down below in the Show More and there should be a link up here in the corner to Onlinejobs.ph. That is my affiliate link and I make a small bit of commission. If you use it, I will help you – I will give you a quick one on one session helping you find your own virtual assistant. But, I am going to document the entire process so this should be pretty easy. ­­­

So, let’s get started. As you can see, I did have an account about two years ago. If you do not have an account, you will have to sign up for one now. You can sign up for free, but ultimately you will want to pay the $50 per month for an ongoing account. You will only need it for one month. The cool thing about it is 100% satisfaction guaranteed or you will get your money back. So, originally when I signed up for this, I was planning on saying I was not (more…)

This is Day 5 of my 30 Day Challenge to start a successful business. I am going to be using Kickstarter, I am going to put it on Shopify store. I am going to do all of that fun stuff. So, if you have not already watched days 1 through 4, check those out, too. In Day 4, I talked about my marketing idea I have for the Kickstarter of reaching out to Influencers in the health, nutrition, fitness space. So far, I have only been reaching out to people that have podcasts and as of this update, I have actually interviewed a few people which has been great. I have interviewed, I believe, so far three people and I am a little bit nervous about announcing this, but I am extremely excited because the ideal person I could interview on my show just confirmed. He has not come on yet. That will be early to mid-January. Dom D’Agostino who is has been on the Tim Ferriss podcast agreed to come on.

So let me tell you the story about how I got Dom D’Agostino to agree to com on my podcast. He has been on the Tim Ferriss. He has been on a lot of very big podcasts. So for him to come on my podcast is a huge honor. So I am going to be spending hours and hours making sure I have great questions to ask him and making sure we have a good back and forth. My hope is that when I tell him the idea of my product, he likes it. And, obviously, if he likes it, in an ideal world, I could get him, or someone like him, an authority figure to do – it does not have to be a testimonial on the product, but (more…)

This is Day 4 of my 30 Day Challenge to start a new company, start a Kickstarter, start a Shopify store. It is a whole new business that I am starting and I am really excited about it. If you have not already viewed the videos on the first three days, I highly recommend doing that. I am a little behind in filming the videos. I have been very busy. Let me give you some updates on what I have been doing. I have got some good news. A lot of really exciting things are going on.

So, the first thing I want to talk about is the marketing strategy I have. Now, a lot of people, I think, when launching a Kickstarter they reach out to Influencers and they say, “Hey, will you support my product? Will you send a Tweet out about it? Will you do this and do that and this other thing for me?” Now, I am flipping this around. Instead, I am asking people if I can help promote then. And the way I am doing this is kind of interesting. I have a personal podcast on How to do Your 20’s. It is a purely fun thing that I currently do on the side. I do not really make any money from it. I just enjoy good conversations. So, what I have been doing is reaching out to Influencers specifically in the health, fitness, nutrition space and asking them, “Hey, do you want to come on my Podcast.” Now, what this does is we end up having an hour long conversation and hopefully if everything goes well, I will develop a decent relationship with this person. Then, at the end of the episode I just mention to them this idea I have. Then, I judge from (more…)

This is Day 3 of my 30 Day Challenge.  I have a bunch of new updates. Obviously, we are only on day three so I do not know how far along I should be, but I am pretty happy. I am pretty happy with what is going on.

So, the first little tidbit – I whipped up two new batches right here. This is the first one. I changed up the formula. It is a little bit creamier in texture. It is a little bit hard to see with all of the lighting. This second one – you can see the little speckles in there – I tried playing around with chia seeds. The problem is my food processor could not grind them because the chia seeds are too small. ­I wonder if I put them in first if I would be able to do it. I might try out chia powder instead. That is a whole new conversation.

So, what else did I do. I had lunch with a friend that happens to own – it is a company called Barnana which does very well. There are in a lot of Whole Foods stores. It is in a space that is kind of similar to what I am in, a food space. Not only does he own this company but he is someone who is in my target demographic. This is huge. I think a lot of people think a lot of people who own companies do not meet with people who are in their target demographic. He is the type of person who would buy my product. He is very healthy, into the ketogenic diet, into hiking and camping and hunting and doing all of this stuff where my product would work perfectly for him. We had a great conversation and (more…)

This is Day 2 of my 30 Day Challenge. For those of you are just tuning into this video, in 30 days I am trying to see if I can start a successful ecommerce store. I am going to launch it on Shopify but it is actually an ecommerce store and do a Kickstarter. I am giving myself 30 days. One of the things to keep in mind though is that what I am doing is I am only working on it one day a week so it is 30 “working” days. I am going to be doing it every Friday kind of like my fun time. Google has what they call 20% time meaning that Google employees are allowed for 20% of the time work on whatever project they want. This is my 20% time project.

So, in this video I am actually going to explain what my company is going to be. I am not going to give all of the details but I am going to give more details. In the first video, Day 1, I did not give almost any details about what I was doing. Which I think is kind of silly. I think I might as well start telling. Plus, I have a lot of cool things that I want to explain and I need to tell you what the product is to do that. So, I am going to tell you what the product is and I am going to tell you what I did for this second day.

One of the first things I did, one of the most important things, is I called a bunch of co-packers. When you are creating a business, a lot of times you do not want to do the manufacturing yourself, especially if you are going to scale or (more…)

In this video I am going to share seven ideas for your content marketing strategy. All seven of these ideas are ideas you could implement in article form, in video form, or whatever you want to do. After I have shared all seven with you, we are going to dive into each one individually and talk about them at length on how you can implement them. Number 1 is a Buyer’s Guide. I think this is one of the best ones because basically you are telling your potential visitors, “This is the thing that you should be buying on my website.” Number 2 is a Roundup Post. This is very powerful, has a very high likelihood of going viral. Number 3 is a How to & DIY Guide. This is great stuff as well. I use this a lot on B Dancewear. This could be used on YouTube or a lot of different platforms very well. Next up is Behind the Scenes. This is something that I do not use a lot but it is another idea that could be implemented very well. Number five is Entertainment & Humor. This is classic. It is one of the most common marketing ideas. Number 6 is Checklist & Tools. We will get into detail as to why this is so powerful later on. Number 7 is Spotlight Marketing. This is absolutely my favorite one. It works just miracles. I will explain why later.

1. Buyer’s Guide
So, number one is the Buyer’s Guide. This can be used I a lot of different ways. But, basically you can get people who are searching for a certain product. For instance, searching for what headphones they should purchase. This is an example right here, actually. “What headphones should I buy?” Well, you could write an article about that. (more…)

Announcements

We have some big announcements and one of the first things we are going to talk about is YouTube inscreens. So, on YouTube, they now allow you to put a little box that says – like right down in here maybe, where at the end of your video you can – actually I think you can do it at anytime during your video, it would have a link to your video and it would show a little segment of the video, all that kind of stuff. It is really cool. I really excited about this because this makes it a lot easier to link to other videos. I am going to try to do an example of that right in here. I am going to hang it right around here. I will do a sample right over there. You will probably see me doing this in a lot of the videos that I do.

Why this is such a big deal is if you do not already have a YouTube channel for your ecommerce business, you should probably get one. I am very bullish on YouTube videos and YouTube channels. I think it is going to be, I mean there already is. It is already been proven to be the future of what people want. Our attention is going away from written text and into videos. Google is really pushing YouTube very hard. There are so many benefits to it. Plus it is a lot easier it is really easy to link to content. It is easy to capture people’s attention and it creates a connection with the viewer. I always talk about this but right now you are watching me, you are hearing me talk. That is way more impactful than if you write an article. Am I right? You probably (more…)

In this video, we are going to talk about how your online business should pay its sales tax. Now, sales tax is a state by state thing. It is not a federal government thing. So, what sales tax you pay in California is going to be different and the process is going to be different than, say, in Illinois, or actually any other state.  So, I am going to tell you how we pay sales tax and then, once again, I am not an account or a CPA. I am not anything like that. So, definitely talk to your tax person before you completely take my advice. But this can be a jumping off point. This is how I understand it and this is what we have done in the past.

So, you only pay sales tax in the place that you are located. So, my business is located in Los Angeles, California, so if someone else in California buys something from us, we have to pay California sales tax. Now, if somebody buys something from us and they live in New York and we ship it to New York, we do not have to pay any sales tax on that purchase. So, let’s make the numbers easy, hypothetically we do $1,000,000 in revenue in 2017, for instance. And, of that revenue, $100,000 comes from people in California buying stuff. We would have to pay sales tax on that $100,000.  So we would say – and once again just to make the numbers easy, let’s say there is a 10% sales tax in California. So, we would give the California government $10,000 and say, “Hey, we had $100,000 in sales. Here is $10,000.” Now, your ecommerce store platform should be able to do this for you. Ours does. So, if you have (more…)